Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,16

kept their gun hands clear—the woman was dexter, the man a sinister, so the man walked on the left, the woman the right.

Ventura tucked the phone away and surreptitiously adjusted the hidden pistol on his hip as he stood. The leather was a custom pancake holster from Ted Blocker, the gun a Coonan Cadet, a stainless .357 Magnum. The pistol had been attended to by Ventura himself, the feed ramp throated and polished, the action slicked, custom springs installed, with the magazines hand-tuned so there would be no failures to feed..357s and .40s had the best record of one-shot stops in street shootings. A one-shot stop meant that one round to the body put a man out of the play. The Coonan held seven cartridges, six in the magazine and one in the chamber, and he carried it in condition one—cocked and locked. All he had to do was draw, wipe the safety, and fire. Using handloads he built himself, Ventura’s one-shot stops should be right at 97 percent. Practically speaking, you couldn’t get any better than that with a handgun. A subgun was better, a shotgun more so, and a good rifle best of all, but such things were hard to carry around in public settings, so one made do with what was available.

He had three other pistols identical to it. If he had to shoot somebody, the gun had to go away, and since he liked the design and action, he had bought several, through a dummy dealer. Three years ago, he’d had eight of the pistols. They were good hardware.

Of course, the mark of a good bodyguard was not having to use the hardware. He allowed himself a small smile as he headed for the exit. Like a perfect crime, the best bodyguard was one you never knew about.

He might not be the best yet, but there was still time for improvement.

Quantico, Virginia

“Sir? Somebody to see you. A Dr. Morrison, from Washington State?”

Michaels looked up from his computer, blinking away the reading trance he’d been in. Morrison, Morrison ... ? Ah, yes, he remembered. Morrison had called yesterday, said he was in town, and needed to speak to somebody at Net Force about a problem with something called HAARP. Michaels had done a fast scan of the archives to find out that this was short for High Altitude Auroral Research Project, a joint endeavor that involved the Air Force, Navy, and several universities. Something to do with microwaves or some such. Sounded like a snorer to him.

“Show him in.”

The man who followed Michaels’s secretary into the office was tall, thin, nearly bald, and looked to be about fifty. He wore a plain black business suit and a dark tie, and carried a battered aluminum briefcase. He could have passed for a professor just about anywhere.

“Dr. Morrison. I’m Alex Michaels.”

“Commander. I didn’t expect to be meeting with the head of the organization.”

Michaels considered telling him that his assistant had quit and that his best computer guy was tromping around in the woods somewhere with his new girlfriend, but decided it wasn’t any of the man’s business, and he probably wouldn’t care anyhow.

He smiled. “Have a seat. What can I do for you, sir?” Morrison sat, awkward in his movement. Not a jock, this one.

“As you may recall, I am one of the project managers on the HAARP project.”

“You’re a long way from Gakona, Alaska,” Michaels said.

Morrison raised an eyebrow. “You know about the project?”

“Only where it is located, and that it has to do with the ionosphere.”

Morrison seemed to relax a little. He opened his briefcase and produced a mini-DVD disc. “Here is a rundown on HAARP-I know you have a higher security clearance than do I, but this is all pretty much public background material.”

Michaels took the disc.

“HAARP went on-line in the early nineties, has been operating on and off since. We are in summer hiatus just now, for repairs to equipment. Essentially, HAARP is the world’s most powerful shortwave transmitter. It was designed to beam high-energy radio waves into the ionosphere, and thereby to perform various experiments to learn about space weather—for our purposes, that’s basically the flow of particles from the sun and other sources into the Earth’s atmosphere. These things affect communications, satellites, like that.”

Michaels nodded. Yep. A snorer. He tried to look interested.

“The array, called the FIRI, consists of one hundred eighty antenna towers on a grid of fifteen columns and twelve rows, on a gravel pad of some thirty-three acres. Each tower