Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,29

if she had done it because she had made a mistake—it was a very big fucking mistake. If she had been that wrong, then what did that say about her?

She had to know. One way or another. And if she had to swim across an ocean and then walk the rest of the way when she got to dry land, then that was what she was going to do.

The doorbell chimed.

A deliveryman dressed in blue shorts and a matching shirt and cap stood there, holding a small package. She signed for it, then went back inside. What could this be?

Inside the box, enveloped in fat green plastic bubble-wrap, was an eight-inch-tall, dark blue glass bottle, about as big around as a cardboard toilet tissue tube.There was a small sheet of print rubber-banded to the cylinder, and a note in the box. The note said, “Toni—I thought you might be able to use this. It won’t do anything for your ego or your soul, but it might help with external aches and pains. Cheers, Carl.”

The sheet of print turned out to be instructions for using what was inside the blue bottle: Balur Silat, also called Tjimande Silat, or if you liked the newer spelling, Cimande, where the “C” was pronounced the same way as the “Tj.”

Toni grinned. Balur Silat was a training aid, coupled with conditioning devices like padded punching and kicking targets. Toni didn’t use it much anymore, but she still had a striking ball that Guru had made for her years ago. It was an old athletic sock with about three pounds of copper-coated steel BBs in it, the kind used by air guns. The BBs were tied off in the toe of the sock, which was then clipped to make a globe about the size of a baseball. This was then wrapped tightly with layers of duct tape. What you did with this was to punch it, or hold it in one hand to bang it against your forearms or elbows or shins, to help get them used to being hit.

Balur Silat was a blend of coconut oil and different roots and herbs, a concoction that took about a month to make. You ground the herbs up, cooked and mixed them together, put the resulting goop into a dark glass bottle, and stored it in a dark cool place for months, or even years, to age.

After a bruising session of bone-to-bone contact during a workout, battered shins and forearms were common. Like the Chinese herbal remedy Dit da jow, or “iron hit wine,” the classic Indonesian preparation was said to be a great help. Literally, balur means “to crystallize” or “to harden.” The stuff was solid at room temperature and had to be heated slightly to liquefy. The liniment thus created was used to help speed healing of bruises, and to help to condition and toughen the skin. There were practitioners of some fighting arts who had shins so hard and impervious to impact they could break baseball bats over them without apparent harm or pain. Toni had seen a picture of an old Serak stylist who could do that once, and she had no desire to have her shins scar and knot and wind up looking like his; still, a certain amount of conditioning was a good idea, and Balur Silat was a help, though finding the authentic stuff wasn’t easy—every other guru out there had his or her own recipe, and some were better than others. She was pretty sure that Carl Stewart’s stuff would be decent.

She hefted the bottle. If it would work on bruised egos, the maker could name his price and retire rich in a few days. She smiled again, and went back to her packing.

10

Thursday, June 9th

Gakona, Alaska

Morrison had given Ventura the tour of the facility, but the man hadn’t seemed too awed or even interested by anything, other than the main power generators. Those were fairly impressive. The power building, more than twenty thousand square feet of it, was constructed originally to house a huge coal-fired steam generator that was to run an Air Force Over the Horizon Backscatter Radar installation originally sited here. At the termination of the OTH-B program and the shift to HAARP, the steam generation gear was hauled off, and the backup diesel generators were used instead. They had plenty of power to operate the transmitter and the ISR. Originally, HAARP had been tapped into the local power grid for lights and heating and like that, but