Страница 126 из 186
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 perso
"You have something for me," she said calmly.
"Yes, I do," he confirmed, equally casually. "As you requested, we've made the load up in twenty-ton lots, loaded on standard helo freight pallets. And just as a bonus, we used counter-grav pallets."
"That's good." It was hard to keep a combination of thankfulness and irritation out of her matter-of-fact voice. Thankfulness, because the counter-grav units would let them move the cargo so much more rapidly and easily. Irritation, because she and Drazen should have thought to ask for them at the outset.
"Yeah," the pilot agreed. "You told us you wanted twelve -pallets-that's two hundred and forty tons, total-but I only see five choppers."
His tone made the statement a question, and Nordbrandt nodded. It wasn't really any of his business, but there was no point in rudeness. The Central Liberation Committee had just demonstrated how valuable it could be, so she supposed she'd better cut its representatives some slack rather than risk irritating them.
"Our sixth copter's on its way in now. It ought to be here in the next fifteen minutes. It'll take them about an hour, on average, to reach their destinations. Say another hour and a half on the ground to unload-and we can probably cut that even further, with the counter-grav, because we won't need the forklifts after all-and another hour to get back here. That's four hours, which leaves us another hour to load the second group of pallets and clear out before any of the graybacks'-the police's, I mean-surveillance satellites get a good look at this field."
The pilot looked at her just a bit dubiously, then shrugged.
"Once I kick it out the hatch, it's your responsibility. The schedule sounds a little tight to me, but I'm out of here in forty minutes, whatever happens."
With that, he walked back to the shuttle and opened the exterior cargo controls' access door. The dim light of the instrument panel gilded his face in a wash of red and green, and he began entering commands.
The shuttle's computers obediently opened the huge after hatch. The two hundred-plus tons of military equipment occupied only a fraction of the cargo hold, and more commands fired up the pallets' built-in counter-grav units. An overhead tractor grab picked up the first pallet, moved it smoothly down the cargo ramp, and held it motionless, hovering a meter above the ground, until half a dozen eager hands grabbed the handholds and towed it out of the way.
The trio of FAK members guided the floating munitions across to one of the waiting helicopters while the tractor grab went back for a second load. Three more Kornatians were waiting, and quickly turned it towards a second copter. The third pallet was on its way out of the hold almost before they had number two clear, and Nordbrandt nodded in profound satisfaction.
She stood to one side, staying out of the way, while her people guided the pallets into the helicopters' cargo compartments. They loaded the copter which had farthest to go first, and it lifted away into the night, its movements slower and more ponderous than when it arrived, even before the second was fully loaded.
She stood quietly, watching as five of the freight copters headed out. By then, the cargo shuttle was completely empty. The additional pallets were moved into the concealment of a convenient barn, and the shuttle closed its hatches, fired up its turbines, and disappeared the way it had come. Nordbrandt gave the landing site one more look, noting the trampled tracks in the wheat field, then climbed up into the sixth and final helicopter. It would drop her off where other secure transportation was waiting to return her to her tenement safe-house before it returned for its second load.
"Make sure you set the timers before you lift out with your final load," she told the pilot, raising her voice over the clatter of the rotors.
He nodded hard, his expression serious, and she sat back in satisfaction. She'd anticipated that using the wheat field as the transfer point would leave the dry, ripe wheat trampled and beaten down. Most probably, no one would have noticed anything this far out in the boonies, but she intended to take no chances. Sometime early the next morning, well before sunrise, a fire would break out in one of the derelict farm's abandoned buildings. It would spread to the wheat field, and probably to the orchards beyond. By the time the local rural fire department responded, all signs that anyone had visited the farm would be erased.
All very sad, she thought. The abandoned farm, its owner dead at terrorist hands, totally destroyed by fire. Tragic. But at least there wouldn't be anyone still living there to be threatened by the flames, and it wasn't as if the farm still represented a livelihood for anyone. That was about all anyone would think about it. It certainly wouldn't occur to them that the FAK would waste its time burning down a single, isolated, abandoned farm in the middle of nowhere.
She sat back in her seat, thinking of all the expanded potential the helicopter's cargo represented, and smiled thinly.