"We're coming up on the outer orbital beacon," De Chabrol announced, and Duan nodded in acknowledgment.
"Go ahead and insert us."
"Okay," De Chabrol acknowledged, and Duan chuckled. His ship might be armed, but no one would ever mistake her bridge routine for something a man-of-war would have tolerated for an instant!
Agnes Nordbrandt sat in the passenger seat of the battered freight copter as it whirred noisily through the night. Counter-grav air lorries would have been more efficient, and they were common enough on Kornati these days that she probably could have rented one or two without arousing suspicion. But helicopters were cheaper, and so ubiquitous no one could possibly stop all of them for random searches.
This particular helicopter was operating under a perfectly legitimate transponder, although the freight company which owned it wasn't aware of tonight's trip. The pilot, whose mother had been hospitalized for the last eight T-years, was one of the freight company's senior pilots... and also a member of Drazen Divkovic's FAK cell. He'd been with the company for twelve T-years, and part of his arrangement with his employer was that he could use company vehicles to moonlight to supplement the regular salary which somehow had to pay for his mother's hospitalization as well as feed his own wife and children.
Knowing all of that, unfortunately, didn't make Nordbrandt noticeably happier.
The problem was the helicopter's maximum cargo capacity of only twenty-five tons. She had five more, similar helicopters, although two of them couldn't be used long, since they'd been stolen for this operation. Still, even with all six of them, she could transport only a hundred and fifty tons in a single flight. Which meant it would require twenty-six round trips by all six to move her arriving bounty of destruction.
In some ways, that wasn't entirely bad. She'd made arrangements to spread the weapons between several dispersed locations, and that would've required her to break the entire consignment down into smaller increments, anyway. But it was going to take at least a couple of days to move everything, and that much exposure was dangerous.
She didn't like coming out into the open this way herself, either. Not out of any sense of cowardice, although she was honest enough to admit she was afraid on a personal level, but because if the graybacks managed to capture or kill her, the effect on the FAK would be devastating. Indeed, the fact that she'd supposedly been killed once would probably make the psychological effect even worse if she actually was arrested or killed. Yet she didn't have much choice, at least for this first stage of the delivery operation. She had to be on hand, had to be confident her arrangements were working, and had to be available to resolve any last-minute complications which reared their ugly heads.
She'd chosen the delivery site with care, because landing the shuttle was the most hazardous single element of the operation. "Firebrand" had assured her his agents would be well versed in clandestine deliveries, and that they'd be capable of flying a nape-of-the-earth course. She'd taken him at his word and selected a site in the rugged Komazec Hills. It was only three hundred kilometers from Karlovac, but the rough terrain provided plenty of concealed spots. And the hills were close enough to the capital that a cargo shuttle making dispersed deliveries to legitimate customers could duck into their valleys and ridgelines for cover against standard air traffic and police radars without arousing undue suspicion.
There was still a major degree of risk, and most of it was the fault of her own operations. What she thought of as her "I'm Back" strike in the capital lay almost seven T-weeks in the past, but the entire planet was still reeling from its effects. The thought gave her a great deal of satisfaction, but the wildly successful attacks had bloodied the graybacks' nose badly enough to ensure a high degree of alertness. The biggest danger was that some spaceport security officer would doublecheck the cargo shuttle's delivery manifests and discover that the legitimate businesses to which the shuttle was supposedly making direct deliveries weren't expecting anything of the sort. But Firebrand's contacts had managed to find a customs agent willing to look the other way for a price. He was the one who'd certify the shuttle's cargo as whatever innocuous civilian machine tools or spare parts its manifest showed, and he was also the one responsible for confirming the delivery orders. So as long as he stayed bought, the shuttle should be able to lift out from the port without challenge, disappear into the hills, and meet with Nordbrandt's helicopters.
She really wished she could take delivery directly from the spaceport. She and Firebrand had considered the possibility, and it had been attractive in many ways. But the decisive point had been her inability to transport that much cargo in a single flight. She couldn't risk moving her own people in and out through the spaceport security perimeter that often. If anyone saw them meeting out here in the middle of the night, it would sound every security alarm on the planet, of course. But she had a far better chance of not being seen here at all than she would have had of entering and leaving a public spaceport that many times.
Her own helicopter flew along openly enough, trusting in its legitimate transponder code, until it reached the Black River. The Black flowed out of the Komazec Hills to join the larger Liku River which flowed through the heart of Karlovac. The Black was far smaller than the Liku, but it was big enough to have chewed a deep gorge through the Komazecs, and Nordbrandt's pilot abruptly cut his transponder, dipped down into the gorge, and throttled back to a forward speed of no more than fifty kilometers per hour. Twenty-three minutes later, he lifted up over the edge of the gorge, crossed a ridgeline, slid down the further side to an altitude of thirty meters, traveled another twelve kilometers, and then set neatly down in an overgrown, bone-dry wheat field. The farm to which the wheat field belonged had been abandoned when its owner had the misfortune to be walking across the Mall on the day of the Nemanja bombing.
Nordbrandt wasn't immune to the harsh irony which made this particular landing site available. She hadn't had anything in particular against the farm's owner. He'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time and become a martyr to Kornatian independence. And now his death was making a second contribution, she thought, as she swung down through the passenger door into the tall wheat.
Two of the other helicopters were already present, and as she walked across the field, two more came clattering in to land. Unless the police had redeployed their ground surveillance satellites since she went underground, she had a window of almost five hours before the next overhead pass. If she'd been in charge of the graybacks, those satellites would have been redeployed. According to the sources she still had inside the government, however, they hadn't. Apparently no one realized she'd managed to obtain full information on the recon network while she was still a member of Parliament.
Of course, it's always possible that they've turned my sources. In which case, they probably have redeployed the birds. In which case the KNP and SDF will come screaming in on us sometime in the next, oh, half-hour or so. Another of those little uncertainties that make life so... interesting.
She checked her disguised, expensive chrono. The cargo shuttle was late, but that was fair enough, because so was the sixth and final freight copter. Timing on something like this never worked out exactly to schedule, and she'd allowed for slippage when she and Drazen devised the plan.
She sat on an abandoned piece of farm equipment, gazing up at the stars. A heavy overcast was coming up from the south, gradually devouring the stars in that direction, and her thoughts silently urged the cloud pack on. If it moved in, covered their operation, it would be that much less likely that any chance -overflight-or even one of the grays' recon satellites-would notice this peculiar congregation of freight vehicles.
She was still sending encouraging thoughts in the clouds' direction when the cargo shuttle swept almost silently up and over the tree-covered ridge north of the farm. Its air-breathing turbines were much quieter than Nordbrandt's clattering helicopters had been, and it moved with the peculiar grace of a counter-grav vehicle which had slipped the trammeling bounds first formally described by Sir Isaac Newton, so many weary centuries before.
The shuttle had full rough-field capability, and its pilot obviously knew his business. It swept once around the field, perhaps ten meters up, then ghosted in to land. A personnel hatch opened, and a single man in civilian clothing climbed out of the cockpit. Nordbrandt pushed up from her improvised seat and walked across the field to meet him.
"You have something for me," she said calmly.