Breaking Point

Breaking Point

Net Force 04

Tom Clancy

Part One

All Politics Are Local

PROLOGUE:

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Daru, China

The sun rose from the gray sea and cast a fitful light upon the wrinkled features of Old Zang where he sat on the weathered bench outside the house, leaning forward slightly on his cane. He was often up with the sun these days to enjoy the dawn, knowing he would not have so many more he could afford to waste them. But instead of making him sad, the thought made him angry.

This day seemed somehow sharper than normal. His clouded sight was clearer, his hearing keener, and even the wan rays upon his skin felt somehow more intense than usual.

Old Zang had but recently moved to the village of Daru. A mere dozen years or so ago, a blink of an eye for a man his age, he had been forced to leave his real home, which was flooded by the monstrous dam project that forever altered the face of China's rivers. At ninety-four, he had outlived his wife, several of his children, and even a few of his grandchildren, and he did not like it here, staying with one of the grandchildren he had not outlived. Oh, his room was comfortable enough, the bed soft--not an inconsequential thing when one's bones were as old as his--but the village was a mud hole of a place and not where one wished to depart from the Earth to join one's ancestors.

On the mainland across the stormy Formosa Strait from Taiwan, on the coast just north of Quanzhou, Daru was peopled with many elderly residents, some victims of the cursed dam, such as himself, some who had actually lived and grown old here. Save for a few younger souls, fishermen mostly, it was a place of old men and women waiting to die.

Thinking about his forced relocation brought Zang to anger again, and this time, the rage seemed to fill him with a hot glow, from his feet to his face, staining red even his thoughts. How
dare
they do such a thing? The foolish communists who saw everything in terms of their immoral philosophy had ruined the country in but half a lifetime. He had hoped to live long enough to see the children of Mao plowed under, but he was beginning to realize it was not to be. And this angered him even more. He was old, old! He had worked hard all his long life, and what was his reward? To be shunted to a half-wit grandson's home in a mud hole village unfit for pigs? It was not right.

Zang gripped the heavy cane tightly, and the veins in his hands stood out to join the tendons and gnarled arthritic joints under paper-thin and brown-spotted skin. His rage enveloped him like a silkworm's cocoon, warming his chilly flesh. No, it was not right!

His sow of a granddaughter, only thirty-four and already so fat she could hardly waddle, lumbered up the graveled path to stand in front of him, her doughy hands on her massive hips, blocking the sun. She said, "Why are you out here again, Grandfather Zang You will catch pneumonia! I would be happy if you did and died, but Ming-Yang would be distressed, and I will not have it! Get up and come inside, right now!"

The sow seemed fairly angry herself, which was unlike her. Usually she was merely torpid. Dense as a post and twice as stupid, Zang reflected, and the best his idiot grandson Ming could do for himself. A shame.

"You are blocking the sun," Zang said. "Stand aside."

"Are you grown deaf as well as stupid, you ancient fart-maker? I said, 'Get up!' " And with that, she reached out, as if to grab him and physically drag him into the house.

This was a mistake. With a speed and strength that surprised him, Zang snapped the cane up and jabbed it into the sow's belly.

"Oof!" she said, as she leaned forward, grabbing at her stomach.

Zang stood, pulled the cane back as if it were an axe, and delivered a mighty blow to the side of her head. The bone made a wet, but satisfying
crack!
and the sow went down in a heap.

Ha-ha!

Zang leaned over and smashed the cane into the sow's body with all the strength he possessed. Ah, this was good. He hit her again. Better. And again. Better still!

He was not the man he had been, but there were still a few moves left in him, and the sense of rage he felt continued to burn as he beat upon the prostrate and unresponsive sow. Block his sun, would she? He would show her!

He grew tired after a while, and decided to rest before resuming his chore. As he stood there contemplating the sow, he chanced to look up, and thus saw his idiot grandson charging toward him, a three-tined pitchfork in hand.

Amazing, since his grandson was the meekest of men, who would step around a beetle to avoid crushing it, who let others prepare his chum for him because he could not stand to hurt the bait fish, and who had never in Zang's memory uttered even a harsh word in anger at another human being.

"Old fool! I will kill you!" Ming-Yang screamed.

Old Zang smiled wolfishly. "Yes? Come and try, wiper of asses!" He raised his cane to meet the charge.

Zang was paying attention to how he planned to dance around the fork's tines to strike Ming, but even so, with his heightened senses, he was aware of his great-grandson Cheng, aged thirteen, rushing up behind his father, a gleaming fish gaff lifted over his head.

Now, who was Cheng planning to skewer?

Well. It did not matter, did it? Zang would deal with him in due course, just as he would deal with every other person in this mud hole of a village.

He would kill them all.

Finally, a happy thought. He laughed aloud.

Chapter
1.

Thursday, June 2nd

Quantico, Virginia

Alex Michaels pedaled his recumbent trike along the wide bike path between Net Force HQ and the Chinese restaurant where he sometimes had lunch, pumping hard. The day was hot and muggy, despite a cloudy overcast, and sweat had already drenched his T-shirt and spandex shorts. He shifted up another gear as he zipped past a trio of Marine officers from the base, jogging along at a pretty good clip themselves. Ordinarily, he enjoyed riding the trike, feeling the burn in his legs and lungs, knowing he was working his muscles and cooking off that half carton of Haagen-Dazs he'd eaten the night before. Ordinarily, the commander of Net Force enjoyed a lot of things, but like his feet toe-clipped into the pedals, a lot of what he had been doing lately had been no more than going through the motions.

Work was pretty good. Aside from the ten thousand usual small fish Net Force had to school and round up, there weren't any major problems in the world of computer crime just at the moment. Nothing like the mad Russian who'd wanted to take over the planet, or the senator's aide who wanted to buy up the world bit by bit, or even the dotty English lord who'd wanted to bring back the glory days of the Empire. Congress hadn't cut him off at the knees lately, and his boss, the new FBI director, was sometimes hardheaded, but basically not too bad, and she mostly left him alone.

Work was fine. It was his personal life that was an absolute wreck.

He guided the trike to the right, to make sure the two bicyclers coming from the other direction side-by-side had plenty of room to get by. The couple, an older man and woman, waved as he went by. He gave them a quick lift of his hand in return.

His ex-wife, Megan, had gotten engaged, and was petitioning the courts in Idaho for sole custody of their daughter, Susie. Her new love wanted to adopt the girl. Susie liked her mom's new friend, which was more than Michaels could say. That he had decked the man at a family Christmas gathering had not helped the situation any--even though it had felt pretty good at the time.

Michaels could fight it. His lawyer said he had a pretty good chance of winning in court, and Michaels's knee-jerk reaction at first had been to do just that, fight it until his last breath, if need be. But he loved his daughter, and she was at a tender age, still years away from being a teenager. What would a nasty court battle do to her? The last thing he wanted to do was traumatize his only child.

Would it be better for her to have a mother and father-- even a stepfather--there with her all the time? Washington, D.C., was a long way from Boise, and Michaels didn't see his daughter as much as he wished. Had shuffling out to see him in the summers done some kind of irreparable harm to Susie? Would it make her life worse in the long run?

The big banked curve on the bike trail was just ahead, and rather than slow down, Michaels decided he was going to power his way through it. He upshifted and pumped even harder. But as he started into the curve, he saw a group of walkers ahead, residents of a local nursing home. They were spread almost all the way across the path. He didn't have a warning horn on the trike, and he had a sudden fear that if he yelled for them to get out of the way, one of the old folks might well keel over from a heart attack.

He stopped pedaling and squeezed the handbrakes. The heavy-duty disk brakes on all three wheels squeaked from the sudden pressure, and there came the smell of burning circuit boards as the trike slowed dramatically. On a two-wheeler, he'd probably be going sideways now, but the trike just wobbled the rear end back and forth a little as it came almost to a stop.

None of the geriatric crowd, most of whom looked to be in their eighties, even noticed him until he crept around them at walking speed.

That would have been all he needed, to plow into Grandma and Granddaddy on his trike at full tilt. One more brick on the load.

And, of course, there was the big problem in his life: Toni.

She was still in England, practicing
pentjak silat,
the Indonesian martial art in which she was an adept, studying with that Carl somebody. There hadn't been anything personal between Carl and Toni when Michaels had left the U.K., but--who knew about now? It had been more than a month. A lot could happen in a month.

Toni Fiorella was smart, beautiful, and could kill you with her hands if she felt so inclined. She'd been his deputy commander until she'd quit. And she'd been his lover--until she'd found out about his indiscretion with the blond MI-6 agent Angela Cooper.

Near indiscretion, Alex,
his little voice said.
We didn't actually do anything, remember?

Yeah, we did. It never should have gotten to the point where I even
thought
about
it.

We were tired, half-drunk, and Cooper was working at it
--
the massage and all
--

No excuse.

It was an argument he'd had with himself a thousand times in the last six weeks. With a thousand variations. If only Toni hadn't gone under the channel to France. If only he hadn't agreed to a beer and fish and chips with Angela. If only he hadn't agreed to go to her place to let her massage his back. If, if, if.

It was all pointless speculation now. And he couldn't lie to himself about it, no matter how much he wished it.

He thought about bringing the trike back up to speed, but it suddenly didn't seem worth the effort. The Chinese place was not that far away. It wasn't as if he was in any kind of hurry now, was it? Or was hungry. Or gave a rat's ass about getting back to work on time.

Even the thought of getting a new project car hadn't given him any great joy. He'd done a Plymouth Prowler and a Mazda MX-5, a Miata, but the garage at his condo sat empty now. The Miata had been the car in which he'd first kissed Toni. He couldn't keep it after she'd quit on him and stayed in England.

He blew out a sigh.

You sure are a sorry, self-pitying bastard, aren't you? Snap out of it! Suck it up! Be a man!

"Fuck you," he told his inner voice. But that part of him was right. He wasn't a sensitive New Age kinda guy who got all weepy in sad movies. In his world, men took care of business and soldiered on. That was the way his father had taught him, and that was how he'd lived his life. Wailing and wringing your hands was not what a man did. You screwed up, then you took the heat, and you got on with your life, period, end of story. What was that old saying: You can't do the time, don't do the crime? That was pretty much it.

In theory, anyway.

Thursday

Sperryville, Virginia

"Ow," Jay Gridley said. He slapped at his bare arm, and when he pulled his hand away, there was a splotch of liquid red surrounding the crushed body of a mosquito. At least he thought it was a mosquito--it was hard to tell.

"Murderer," Soji said. She smiled.

"Self-defense," he said. "If I'd known I was gonna be attacked by all these itty-bitty vampires, I'd have thought twice about going for a walk in the woods with you. Or maybe brought a bunch of matches I could carve into wooden stakes. This would be so much more pleasant in VR."

"My father used to say that God made two mistakes," she said. "Mosquitoes and politicians. Of course, he was an alderman, so he could say that. But he was wrong--both mosquitoes and politicians have their places."

Jay shook his head. "Sounds like more Buddhistic smoke and mirrors to me. You got to go some to justify mosquitoes."

"Really? Tell that to the bats who eat them."

"They could eat something else. Plenty of bugs that don't bite people. They could double up on gnats or something."

"Come on, Jay. If you take away everything that causes you discomfort, there's no way to measure your pleasure."