all he had to do was deny it, she would have believed him. At least
she thought she would have believed him. Why hadn't he spoken up?
She replayed their last meeting, trying to remember exactly how it had
gone. Had he ever actually said he'd 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?
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 chain link 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
