Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Steve Perry
Breaking Point
“The issue before us is one of no ordinary character. We are not engaged in a conflict for conquest, or for aggrandizement, or for the settlement of a point of international law. The question for you to decide is, Will you be slaves or will you be independent?”
PART ONE
The Lines Are Down
PROLOGUE
Cameron Barnes jabbed one finger at the phone’s keyboard, hitting the “O” button over and over.
“Dammit, what the hell’s wrong! C’mon, C’mon—!”
From the kitchen, Victoria said, “What?”
“I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to the stupid phone!”
Victoria stuck her head through the doorway. “Excuse me?”
“The phone, the
“Use your digital.”
“I already tried that. Same thing.”
“Maybe your battery is—”
“No, the battery is
“Well, don’t take my head off! It’s not my fault!”
“I’m sorry. But, look, I
“Use my cell.”
He started to ask, but she beat him to it. “In my purse.”
Cam found her purse, pulled the little folding phone out, opened it. He tried voxax first, telling it the name to call, but that didn’t work. Neither did the buttons.
He was going to lose his commission. Eight hundred bucks. Shit!
Rocko Jackson stared at his computer screen and cursed. “Son of a
In the cubicle next to his, Tim Bonifazio stood and peeped over the short divider.
“ ’S’up, white boy?”
“The damned system must be locked up again. I can’t get it to access the net.”
“Hold on a second, lemme check. It’s probably just your station, you know how the mainframe hates you.”
Tim disappeared from sight. After a second, Rocko heard, “Uh-oh!”
“Aha, so the mainframe hates you, too, don’t it?”
“No, man, it hates everybody. My
“So what are you saying, the net is down?” He laughed.
“That’s what it looks like from here.”
“I don’t even want to hear that.”
Rachel Todd arrived at the conference room at the same time as Dal Ellner and Narin Brown.
Rachel said, “What is going on, guys?”
Both Dal and Narin shook their heads. “Got me,” Narin said. “All I know is nobody can get on the web. Not with hardwired, laptops, digital phones, nothing. Even old man Johns’s virgil isn’t working. It’s like the net just… died, or something.”
“Can’t be,” Dal said.
“Maybe not, but I know of at least fifteen major ISPs — from local to New York to London to Hong Kong — that are flat out inaccessible.”
“This is bad,” Rachel said.
“Bad? It’s catastrophic! Every hour we’re off-line costs us half a million bucks! In a couple of days, we’ll be in the toilet!”
“Us and everybody for as far as the eye can see,” Narin said.
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Lieutenant, you want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Unknown, General Harmon, sir. All network operations are snafued.”
“You mean we are deaf and blind here?”
“No, sir, we have landlines that still work, we can call in launch codes manually if we have to.”
“And how do we open the silo doors?”
“Hand cranks, sir.”
“Not acceptable, Lieutenant. I want the situation rectified.”
“Sir, according to landline reports, the problem is nationwide — we can’t fix it from here.”
“God dammit!”
“Yes, sir.”
Chief of Police Steve Cotten stared through his window at the icy morning outside. The new power grid had just up and shut down. With the temperature at minus fourteen and the windchill factor pushing minus
The citizens of North Dakota knew how to deal with cold, and usually had enough wood stockpiled for such emergencies. The chief himself had six split cords under a tarp next to his garage, but there were people old enough so that splitting and then hauling in firewood would be a hard chore. Four men had already had fatal heart attacks; two others injured themselves badly enough to require hospitalization. Chief Cotten knew there would be another group unable to heat their homes who were likely to die from hypothermia.
The chief sighed. It was turning out to be an all around, in the toilet, crappy morning here, oh, yeah.
Alone in his cabin, Jackson Keller slipped the headset up, pulled the earplugs loose, shucked his haptic gloves, and grinned at the holoproj’s test pattern. “Way to go, team,” he said. “Let’s see how they like
They weren’t gonna like it at all. Jay Gridley especially wasn’t gonna like it.
He laughed. Ah, this was going to be so much fun!
