Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,32

the army, Willie Kohler, had scored some two hundred buck tickets to a boxing match out on the coast. Not the best seats, but pretty good, only about fifty or sixty feet from the ring. It was in one of those Indian casinos that the local tribes had put up. Chinook something? Chinook Winds, that was it. In Lincoln City.

He remembered the event better now that he thought about it. They had given it some silly name, like the Rumble in the Jungle or the Thrill in Mantilla, it was ... ah, yes, Commotion at the Ocean. He and Willie had gotten some funny mileage out of that one.

He wasn’t the world’s biggest boxing fan, but he’d done a little in the service when he’d been younger, fighting camp matches as a light-heavyweight and giving about as good as he got. No future there for him, getting bashed in the face, but he didn’t mind watching somebody with real skill demonstrate it. As he remembered, there had been six or eight matches at the casino, all fairly low weight classes, and a couple of them were championship bouts. The most interesting fights had been on the under card. Some black kid from Washington, D.C., with sweet moves had put his man down in the second round. And there had been a couple of female fighters, one a little girl in red, a featherweight, all of a hundred and twenty-two or -three pounds, who had great hands—and great legs, too. Only her third pro fight, but she had real boxing skills. Of course, this was back when boxing wasn’t considered a brutal crime against humanity, and women were just getting into it. And when it still wasn’t too politically incorrect to admire a woman’s legs ...

What he remembered most of all was that they played bad rap music—if that wasn’t redundant—between each fight, and it was way, way too loud. Earmuffs should have been mandatory; it was noisier than a shooting range, and probably less musical. After the second or third fight, he and Willie were ready to go and kick out the damned speakers to kill the noise. But like at gun shows, you needed to be polite at a big boxing match—you never knew but that guy you just sloshed your beer on might have been the number one contender for the cruiserweight title a few years back, and no matter what self-defense system you knew, a good pro boxer was going to get at least a couple of shots in if he smited—and then threw the first punch.

Howard smiled as they climbed into the waterfall mist. There was a lot of green on the hillside now—moss, ferns, all kinds of water-loving plants.

Julio was right, he needed to relax and enjoy his vacation. His son was growing up, and pretty soon he’d be a lot more interested in girls and cars than boomerangs and family trips. Might as well enjoy it while he could. He was out in the Wild West, nothing of any major military importance was apt to happen here, certainly nothing he needed to worry about.

Nadine looked back at him and smiled. “Isn’t this fun?”

“Yep,” he said, “it is.”

11

Thursday, June 9th

Quantico, Virginia

Jay Gridley wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to go back to work. Yeah, sure, it was what he did, and yeah, sure, he loved it, but rolling around with Soji, even in a drafty tent in the rainy woods? Well, that had work beat all hollow.

He never thought he’d hear himself think that, but there it was.

Truth was, even though he was dropping by the Net Force compound late Thursday afternoon, he didn’t really have to be back until Monday. But Soji had clients she had to counsel, and she refused to take a laptop or net-phone with her into the woods, so they had packed up the camping gear and came back to civilization. In her net persona of the old Tibetan priest Sojan Rinpoche, Soji taught basic Buddhism and also offered a kind of psycho-spiritual first aid to people who had suffered various forms of brain damage, usually secondary to drugs or stroke. That was how they’d met, on-line, when Jay had been zapped while chasing the guy with the quantum computer.

Soji had an apartment in Los Angeles, but she was going to be working out of Jay’s place, at least for now. And he hoped he could convince her to make it permanent, though he hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to