David Weber - Honor17 - Shadow of Saganami

by Shadow of Saganami(lit)

  "Yes, Sir," Hegedusic replied, his eyes clinging to the second battlecruiser as she nuzzled into her own space dock. "Yes sir, I am."

  * * *

  Agnes Nordbrandt sat in the safe-house's kitchen, sipping hot tea, and waited.

  She liked kitchens, she reflected. Even small, cramped ones like this. It was something about the soothing, sustaining ritual of preparing food. The smells and tastes and textures that wrapped a comforting cocoon around the cook. She got up and crossed to the lower of the two stacked ovens, bending over to peer in through the glass window in its door, and smiled. The Kornatian "turkey" really did rather resemble the Terran species which had given it its name, and the one in the roasting bag had turned a rich, golden brown. It would be ready for the celebratory dinner soon.

  She turned away and walked out of the kitchen. The one-sun's narrow hall was dark, even though it was only midafternoon, because her apartment was located at the very back of the building. The lack of sunlight bothered her sometimes, but there were advantages to her apartment's location. Among other things, it had permitted her to cut an emergency escape hatch from her bedroom to an old sewer tunnel which connected with the Karlovac storm drains she and the Movement had used so often and to such good effect. Sooner or later, they were going to lose that mobility advantage-or, at least, have it significantly reduced. But for the moment, they still knew their way around the capital city's underbelly far better than the KNP did.

  She climbed the steep, narrow stair at the back of the one-sun. It was supposed to serve as an emergency stair to be used only if the elevators were out. Given that the elevators hadn't worked once in the entire time she'd been in the building, the stairs saw a lot more use than they were supposed to. She grimaced wryly at the thought as she made her steady way upward.

  I wonder how Rajkovic and Basaricek are going to feel when they find out I'm alive after all? I'd love to see their faces. Then again, I'd love to see their reaction to the knowledge that I've been hiding right under their noses from the very beginning. They just don't seem to get it. Maybe they figure I have to have some big, elaborate command post to be effective? But that would be stupid. I can handle everything I need to handle with nothing more than one personal com and a couple of trustworthy runners. And that lets me disappear tracelessly into the capital's population-just one more poor, anonymous young widow, struggling to keep a roof over her head on the miserable social support payments the government makes available. And I actually collect the credit drafts, too. She grinned at the thought. Setting that up before I went underground wasn't easy, but it's paid off big time.

  She shook her head, still bemused by the opposition's myopia. Maybe it was the fact that the people looking for her knew she'd always been relatively affluent. Her adoptive parents had been well enough off to send her to private schools and pay most of her tuition when she went off to college. Her parliamentary career had paid pretty well, too, not to mention the noneconomic perks that had gone with it. So maybe it simply never occurred to the people looking for her that she would quite cheerfully hide in plain sight simply by becoming poor.

  It had been one of her better ideas, she decided yet again as she crossed the one-sun's flat roof to the clothesline. Drawing a regular social support stipend turned her into the purloined letter so far as government agencies were concerned. She was right there, in plain sight, yet hidden and anonymous behind an absolutely legitimate social support account number and case file. They knew exactly who she was, and that she was harmless, so they ignored her completely.

  And the same principle applied to her choice of safe-houses. When a woman was poor enough, she became effectively invisible, and the densely populated tenements of the Karlovac slums became an infinitely better hiding place than some camouflaged bunker tucked away in the mountains.

  Not to mention the fact that the tenements are much more convenient to my work.

  She walked along the clothesline, blinking against the bright sunlight, her short hair-auburn now, not black-blowing on the brisk breeze that flapped the sheets and towels pinned to the line. The vanes of the mushroom-headed ventilators whirred, and she enjoyed the warmth on her skin. She tested each sheet, each towel, for dampness with her hand, thus explaining to anyone who happened to glance in her direction what routine, harmless task had brought her to the roof at this particular moment.

  She glanced at her chrono. That was one of her few concessions to her role of terrorist commander. It was a very good chrono, worth more than a full year of her one-sun apartment's rent. But she'd had that expensive timepiece remounted in a cheap, battered case suited to the sort of chrono a poverty-stricken widow might reasonably possess. She didn't care what it looked like; only that it kept perfect time.

  Which it did.

  The first explosion thundered across the capital precisely on schedule. A thick cloud of debris, flame, and smoke shot up near the city's center, and Nordbrandt ran to the front edge of the one-sun's roof. There was no risk of giving herself away now-everyone who could was moving, craning her neck, trying to see what was happening. Indeed, she'd have aroused suspicion if she hadn't rushed to stare off towards the plume of smoke rising out of the swelling mushroom of dust.

  Then the second explosion bellowed.

  The first had been a delivery truck, parked-in the same parking space in which it had been parked every day for the last three weeks-outside the main city post office. Had anybody examined that truck on any day except today, they would have found it loaded with legitimate parcels and packages being delivered to the post office by the courier service whose name was painted on its sides. But last night the courier service employee, who belonged to one of Nordbrandt's cells, had loaded his vehicle with something else before he parked it, set the timer, locked it, and walked away. And the truck had simply sat there, waiting until mid-afternoon, when the post office would be most crowded.

  She shaded her eyes with her hand, staring towards the post office. Or, rather, towards the flaming, tumbled heap of rubble which had been the post office. She could see one or two people staggering around, clutching broken limbs or bleeding wounds. More lay writhing-or motionless-on the sidewalks, and half a dozen ground vehicles added their own smoke and flame to the hellish scene. Kornati's tech base was sufficiently primitive that most vehicles still used petrochemical fuels, and tendrils of liquid fire flowed across the pavement, seeking the storm drains, as bleeding fuel tanks gushed flame. And she could see other people already beginning to rip and tear at the wreckage in frantic efforts to rescue anyone who might be trapped under it.

  Gutsy of them, a cold, thoughtful corner of her brain acknowledged. Especially after the way we set up the Nemanja bombing. Maybe it's time we started setting follow-up charges again.

  She turned her attention towards the second explosion, but it was farther away. She could see the smoke, hear sirens, but she couldn't actually see anything. Not that she needed to. Another truck, from the same courier service, had been parked in a basement garage under the city's largest department store. Judging from the smoke and dust cloud, the bomb must have been even more successful than she'd hoped.

  Then the third bomb detonated-the one in the stolen ambulance parked under the marquee of the Sadik Kozarcanic Army Hospital. She'd had her doubts about that one. There'd been a far higher chance that the team charged with placing the ambulance would be detected and intercepted, which would have alerted the authorities to the fact that an operation was underway. And even if they weren't, security remained too tight, despite the growing certainty she and the Movement had both been killed, for them to get the ambulance close enough to do the kind of structural damage they'd managed at the post office and department store. But she'd decided it was still worth the risk as a psychological blow. They hadn't attacked hospitals before. And, in fact, she had no intention of adding hospitals to the list. Not civilian hospitals, anyway. But there was no way for the government or the general public to know that, now was there?


  The fourth bomb went off, but it was clear across the city, too far away for her to see it from here. Not that she needed to. The neat operational planning file in her head checked it off as sharp, harsh thunder rattled the one-sun's windows.

  First Planetary Bank, she thought cheerfully. Again, they hadn't been able to get the bomb actually inside the building perimeter, and the Bank building itself was built more like a bunker than a commercial establishment. But, knowing they wouldn't be able to place the bomb as close as they wanted, she and Drazen Divkovic, Juras' brother, had put the bomb under a tanker truck. In theory, it contained fuel oil; in fact, Drazen had sealed the tank and filled it with natural gas, creating what was in effect a primitive fuel-air bomb.

  Then Drazen himself had driven the truck into position, stopped it, gotten out, and opened the hood to bend over the turbine, obviously checking for malfunction. He'd tinkered with it until he heard the first explosion. Then he'd smashed the fuel line with a single, carefully placed blow from a wrench, to make sure no one else could drive it away, and vanished into a subway station. By the time anyone realized the "driver" had abandoned his truck, Drazen had been kilometers away. And by then it was much too late for anyone to move the deadly vehicle before it exploded like a tactical nuclear warhead.

  The vaults may survive. I don't think any of the rest of the building will, though.

  She looked out at the plumes of smoke one more time, then, shaking her head in obvious disbelief and horror, turned and headed back towards the stairwell. She wanted to get back to her apartment and its cheap, tiny HD in time to see if the news channels played her prerecorded message claiming responsibility for the bombing attack in the name of the FAK. And, just incidentally, informing the Kornatian public that she wasn't dead, after all.

  She was halfway down the stairs when the fifth and final bomb of this attack exploded in yet a third delivery truck. That one was parked outside the Karlovac Metropolitan Museum, and she spared a moment to hope the museum's fire suppression systems would save most of its artworks. It was probably a little schizophrenic to hope one of her own attacks would be less than totally successful, but she couldn't help it.

  She shook her head at her own perversity as she reached the bottom of the stairs and checked her chrono again. Assuming her delivery arrangements worked, the news outlets wouldn't have her recorded message for another few minutes. It would be interesting to see how long it took the first news service to get it on the air.

  And while she waited, she just had time to check the turkey again and put the bread into the other oven.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  "So much for the demise of the Freedom Alliance," Baroness Medusa said bitterly.

  Gregor O'Shaughnessy simply nodded. There wasn't much else to do as he and the Provisional Governor watched the news clips which Colonel Basaricek had appended to her official report.

  It was bad, he thought. Worse even than the Nemanja bombing. The casualty count was higher, the damage was spread across a wider area of the city and-especially in the area of that tank truck bomb-far more severe, and the sheer psychological shock effect after the extended false calm was equally severe. The commentary on the news clips Basaricek had included carried a new, harsher flavor than the reportage before Nordbrandt's assumed death had. Much of that anger was directed at the FAK, but a disturbing amount of it was aimed squarely at the Kornatian government this time.

  "I don't like how critical they're being of Rajkovic and Basaricek," Dame Estelle said, as if she'd been reading his mind, and he nodded again.

  "Hard to blame them, really, Milady. Oh, the newsies ought to know better. Probably do, really. But after the sense of euphoria, the belief the storm was over, this had to have a major psychological effect."

  "Well, now we know why she didn't bother to disabuse us of the fond assumption that we'd actually managed to kill her. And while you're being so understanding about their reporters, Gregor, you might bear in mind that one reason those same reporters are hammering the government right now is to keep from admitting they were the ones-not Vice President Rajkovic or Colonel Basaricek-who announced that the lack of activity meant she had to be dead. Rajkovic was always careful to keep cautioning people that there was no proof of that."

  "Granted, Milady. But it would be unrealistic to expect anything else out of them, really. And at least it proves Kornati really does have a free press, doesn't it?"

  The baroness gave a sharp crack of laughter and shook her head.

  "You're not usually the one looking for the silver lining, Gregor. Do I really sound like I need cheering up that badly?"

  "I wouldn't put it quite that way, Milady." He smiled crookedly at her. "In fact, I think I may be the one who needs the cheering up this time."

  They turned their attention back to the grim sights and sounds from the wounded city. It didn't take much longer to get to the end, and Dame Estelle turned off the HD with an almost vicious jab at the remote. She sat for a moment longer, still glowering at the blank unit, and then shook herself and turned back to O'Shaughnessy.

  "The timing on this could have been better," she said with massive understatement. Twelve days had passed since Hexapuma had departed for Montana. Probably the cruiser was already in-system and decelerating towards the planet in the continued blissful belief that the situation in Split was under control.

  "Yes, Milady," he agreed, "the timing could indeed be better. But however inconvenient it may be, my immediate impression is that this-" he gestured vaguely in the direction of the silent HD "-fundamentally changes our analysis of which flashpoint is the more dangerous. And the more deserving of our most effective intervention."

  "No argument," Dame Estelle said. "Although there is the interesting question of exactly how well inclined towards Aleksandra Tonkovic I am at this particular moment. And, assuming we do put Split at the head of our list, there's also the question of whether or not we can afford to spend the time to hand it to Terekhov and Bernardus. It may be time for us to stop worrying about our 'storm trooper' image or whether or not we'll be seen as supporting suppression and just drop Colonel Gray's Marines in on Nordbrandt's head. Crush her as quickly as possible and then hope we can repair any damage once the shooting's stopped. And if we do that, we can send someone else-like Captain Anders and Warlock-like Khumalo wanted in the first place."

  "Part of me's inclined to think it is time to reach for a hammer, Milady," O'Shaughnessy agreed. "But remember what Colonel Basaricek had to say about how well hidden Nordbrandt's cells are. We can't use a hammer unless we know where the nail is, and we don't. Without proper intelligence backup to tell him where to find the enemy, Colonel Gray can't really accomplish much more than the KNP. It's not a case of the Kornatians not having enough manpower or firepower; it's a case of their not being able to aim it properly."

  "I know." Dame Estelle scrubbed her face with the palms of her hands, and grimaced. "It's probably as much sheer frustration as anything else," she admitted. "But I want these people, Gregor. I want them badly."

  "We all do, Milady."

  O'Shaughnessy thought for a moment, scratching one eyebrow as he pondered. Then he shrugged.

  "The bottom line, I think, Milady, is still that the Kornatians do need the technical support Tonkovic has been requesting. I think it's probable they also need advice and a small, fast response strike force they can use as a precision instrument against identified targets. I know Ms. Tonkovic hasn't asked for those, but I think her planet needs both of them far more than they need us to simply dump modern weapons on their own security forces. And if we decide to intervene in support of the local government at all, the political equation still calls for us to make the strongest possible statement about the quality of the assistance we're prepared to offer our friends in the area. And for that, Hexapuma, especially with Mr. Van Dort on board, is still our biggest counter. Besides, Warlock isn't in Spindle any longer."

  The Provisional Governor nodded. Warlock was on her wa
y to Tillerman, at the far end of Rear Admiral Khumalo's southern patrol line. It would take almost three weeks just to get word to Captain Anders to take his ship to Split, and another twenty-six days for him to actually do it.

  Too many fires and not enough ships to put them out with, she thought.

  "Who is still available here in Spindle?" she asked after a moment.

  "I'd have to screen Captain Shoupe to be certain, but I believe that aside from Hercules, there's only a destroyer or two and the service squadron ships."

  "And a destroyer's too small to make the kind of statement we want to make, while a superdreadnought's too big, however ancient and decrepit she might be," Dame Estelle said gloomily.

  "Probably, yes. The fact is, Milady, that if we immediately send orders to Hexapuma, she can be in Split in roughly twenty-eight days. And that's probably about as quickly as we could get anything else bigger than a destroyer there. Not to mention the fact that they'd have Mr. Van Dort along, as well."