Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,65

My dad is going to get the guy. It’ll be all right.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. I do.”

She gave him a little smile, and he felt better himself. He took another sip from the Coke. He hoped his dad would kick the guy’s ass.

Monday, June 13th

Gakona, Alaska

Howard was still peeved. The marshals were supposed to meet him at the airport, but his plane had been delayed an hour coming out of SeaTac, and they hadn’t waited for him. He hated being late, but there had been no help for it. He couldn’t really bitch about it officially; Net Force didn’t have any jurisdiction in the matter per se, even though they had gotten the warrants and the marshals would be delivering Morrison to HQ in Quantico. And as the commander of Net Force’s military arm, he shouldn’t be out in the field on this kind of errand anyhow, no job for a general, but it pissed him off being left behind just the same. It was no more than professional courtesy—he’d have waited for them.

Howard rented a car and burned the speed limits trying to catch up, but by the time he got to Gakona, he still hadn’t seen any sign of the marshals. He couldn’t believe he had gotten ahead of them, so they must have already reached the HAARP compound. Probably had already collected Morrison and were on the way back. Well, if they passed him going the other way, he’d spot them, there wasn’t that much traffic. He’d seen only a few cars and trucks in the last hour of travel, and nobody in the last fifteen minutes. Of course, it was almost two in the morning, and in the middle of the great northwest woods, too, not exactly the Harbor Freeway in downtown L.A.

The narrow road he was on ran parallel to a tall chainlink fence topped with razor wire and hung with government warning signs. HAARP would be on the other side of the fence, somewhere past the thick forest of evergreens.

The call of nature that had been nagging at him for miles finally couldn’t be denied any longer. If he didn’t stop and take a whiz, he was going to drown.

He pulled the car over, shut off the engine, and killed the headlamps. He waited for a moment for his night vision to clear, then stepped out of the car.

He watered the plants nearest the shoulder, felt a lot better, and zipped up.

It was really dark out here, nothing offering relief save for a clear sky thick with glittery stars and the glowing face of his watch. It was cool, but not cold, and the scent of evergreen, car exhaust, and even urine blended into a not-unpleasant odor. It was also quiet, save for a few mosquitoes buzzing about. There was something very relaxing about being out in the middle of nowhere, nobody else around.

From the last road sign he’d seen, he judged that he was almost to the compound’s gate. He started back toward the car when he saw a bright flash of light over the treetops, almost like distant heat lightning, a brief strobe against the night. What was that?

But the light was gone, and once again the fierce darkness claimed the night. And that was odd, because this close, he expected some kind of glow from the HAARP compound bleeding into the sky. He had been on night patrols in the outback where you could see the light from a campfire or a propane lantern for miles. They must keep some lights on, right?

Almost immediately after the light faded, he heard three shots, a stacatto pap! pap! pap! followed by two more that resonated with a louder, sharper crack! crack! The shots echoed, and it was hard to pinpoint the direction, but it sounded as if they were to his right and behind him. Inside the fence, and not too far off. There was no question in Howard’s mind that the reports came from weapons, and they sounded like handguns. Two shooters, close together, using different calibers. The second of them, he was almost certain, was a .357 Magnum, a round with which he was very familiar, having fired tens of thousands of them himself. Two shooters firing at the same target? Or at each other?

Almost reflexively, he reached down to where the new revolver rode back of his right hip, to touch the gun’s butt and reassure himself it was still there.

It could have been a lot of things—spotlighters doing some illegal