Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,24

been with Cooper?

No...

Well, shit! What the hell was wrong with him! Why had he let her think he’d done it!

Abruptly, Toni felt the emotions well, and tears spill. Dammit, Alex!

She was angry all over again, but this time for an entirely different reason. What on Earth could he have been thinking ?

8

Wednesday, June 8th

Gakona, Alaska

“Is that where we’re going?” Ventura had to raise his voice for Morrison to hear him. Normally, a plane like the Cessna Stationair was not that noisy while cruising, but this one had a slightly warped door edge on the passenger side that added a loud almost-whistle.

“That’s the place,” Morrison said.

Ventura looked down from what he guessed was about eight thousand feet. Most of what he saw looked like virgin evergreen forest. In the distance was a snowcapped mountain range with a few very tall peaks. The HAARP site itself was cut out of the forest—it was as if somebody had cleared a large area in woods in the rough shape of a skeleton key. Several buildings and a parking lot in a ragged circular area were connected by a straight road to the array itself—which looked as if somebody had planted seeds that grew up to be giant 1950s-style television antennas. Beyond that was a second rectangular array, as large as the first. Behind the control buildings and just coming into view was a long, straight paved strip a couple of thousand feet long.

The pilot banked the plane slightly, then throttled back as he straightened the Cessna out.

“We’ve got our own landing strip now,” Morrison said. “Better security. It wasn’t a problem when they built the place—anybody could just walk up to the front gate, they even had open house every now and then—but there was some ugly vandalism by eco-terrorists, so now there’s a big chainlink fence and armed military guards. The nearest town, such that it is, Gakona, is over that way. There’s a post office, a gas station, a motel and a couple of bed-and-breakfast places, a restaurant, a bar, like that. They get a lot of tourists, hunters, and fishermen up here. If you want, you can get a dogsled custom-made for you here, too, but if you are looking for nightlife, this isn’t the place. Forty-nine permanent residents.”

Ventura nodded. He had been in backcountry towns so small and isolated that a big topic of conversation on a Sunday morning was the size of a particularly large icicle hanging from a bar awning. “Gets a little chilly for street dancing,” Ventura said.

It was not a question, though Morrison treated it as such. “Yes, it drops to forty or fifty below in the dark of winter, and usually there are a couple feet of white fluffy powder on the flats, piled higher against the buildings. Sometimes the wind blows hard enough to scour the ground clean in places, though. Plays hell with the runners on your snow machine when you hit one of those.”

Ventura smiled politely. He had done some background research before they’d flown into Anchorage. He probably knew more about the terrain and local country than Morrison did, but he didn’t let on. In almost every situation, knowledge was power, and because you worked for a man didn’t mean that you trusted him.

From what he had learned, the HAARP site was a hundred and some odd miles northeast of Anchorage, almost to the Wrangell Mountains, the high range that divided Alaska from the Canadian Yukon.

He already knew that the nearest town was Gakona, and that it was about fifteen miles north and west of the town of Glennallen, which wasn’t exactly a major metropolis itself. Up here, people gave directions differently than in a city—the Sourdough Motel, for instance, was at Milepost 147.5—you didn’t need to say which road, there weren’t so many you’d get confused. Gakona was on the Glenn Highway, though the locals called it the Tok CutOff, a couple of miles from the Richardson Highway intersection. The town, what there was of it, was near the confluence of the Copper and Gakona rivers. The original inhabitants were Ahtna Indians, though few of them lived here now. Few of anybody lived here now. During the busy season, there were more people working at the HAARP site than lived in town. People who chose to be up here enjoyed the great outdoors, and they were either hardy or they didn’t stay.

The landing strip at the site was new, and according to his research, there wasn’t a commercial airport closer