Blink: Interdiction (Book 4)

18

The infiltration of a criminal syndicate was not as thrilling as it sounded.

The info packet directed them well beyond the hamlet's perimeter and true to their informant's word, Hjaltar was there. A gangly blond man with a scrubby unwashed beard, he didn't look particularly threatening. However, the retinue of bodyguards scattered through the crags with high-powered rifles more than proved his credentials.

He inspected the crates, gave a seal of approval on the merchandise, and just like that the transfer was complete, a vast some of Ravine credits being swallowed up into the dummy account the colonial spooks had provided them with. Their first sale was done. They dutifully paid off the woman who'd put them in contact with Hjaltar, and then the waiting began.

For the better part of a month Darien orchestrated the Blink efforts to drag themselves closer to their quarry, inch by painstaking inch, while on the far side of the Haze, Vanna and Rigel Squad spearheaded the drive into the local narcotics rings.

A week after their first drop Hjaltar was back in touch. More weapons; more explosives. They needed it all.

Keeping to the script, they didn't ask any questions. Another clean drop along with another credit transfer and Hjaltar was gone again. The operatives – particularly those who were not directly involved in the action were getting restless. Darien toyed with the idea of cutting a detachment loose and sending them back to Merlynn to be used for something else, but a faint premonition on the back of his mind told him not to. With the slow burn of the mission so far it was easy to forget that they were standing on a knife edge. One false move could blow their cover, and if that happened they would need every capable gun-hand they could get.

So they carried on. More Blink operatives were gradually rotated into their entourage from the other squad, creating the impression that Darien had a fairly sizeable criminal force to draw upon, but also keeping him and Amber as the main faces of their group. And two more drops with Hjaltar brought them a step up the food chain.

A new drop point was supplied, deeper into the Haze, which they eventually discovered to be a supposedly broken-down and abandoned geothermal plant. As it turned out the plant was neither broken-down, nor abandoned. A raven-haired woman named Gazi waited for them there, and it became quickly apparent that things had moved up a gear. She was cold, distant, carrying the kind of repressed anger that only came from someone with an axe to grind. That, and the men and woman accompanying her bore little resemblance to the ragged hired guns that infested the towns of the Haze. Gone were the baggy, shredded cloaks and makeshift air-filter masks. These guards had proper protective gear: sin-dark fireproof cloaks, gleaming blast goggles and a daunting array of weaponry.

The checks were far more invasive now as well. Gazi's people subjected them to a full range of scans, looking for tracers, concealed weapons and communicators. They found two out of three, and they had expected to. Any self-respecting criminal enterprise travelled armed, and with the means to contact their companions, but Darien had specifically avoided any kind of direct tracking devices or bio tracers. Since the prototype that had been used to help them capture Theodore Logan and the Blink ship, the bio-trace agents had been rolled out into more general usage, and inevitability some had slithered into black market trades.

It was a complication he didn't want to have rocking their boat on this delicate venture.

Eventually Gazi and her troops were satisfied by the group's appearance, and the story that Darien fed them. He convinced her that for the right price they could keep up a steady, dependable stream of military hardware for, through a fabricated contact in the military hierarchy of Ravine's defenders.

And then the floodgates broke open.

Demand for weapons, armour, munitions, communication equipment and surveillance gear hit them like a ton of bricks and on more than one occasion Darien had to bring his foot down hard, flatly refusing some of the more outlandish demands. He and the others were forced to walk a thin line, supplying what they could to keep Gazi's mysterious buyer sated, while at the same time not making it seem like they had too ready a supply.