SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Sam was frozen by the sudden intensity of the violence. He regained his senses barely in time to see a heavy jackboot coming at his face. He rolled away but still took a steel-toed kick that sent a shock wave of pain up his spine. The butt of a rifle glanced off his shoulder. He tried to tuck into a fetal position and got a breath-stopping kick in the balls for it.

There was a lot of noise — yelling, cursing, and shouting — in a language Sam didn’t understand. There was shooting: quick, deafening bursts of automatic weapons fire and the raw smell of cordite mixed with dust. He thought he heard Kaz scream and then the kid’s voice cut off, abruptly.

Sam tried to crawl away from the barrage of boots and gun butts. But his attempts grew pitifully futile and he finally collapsed in a bloody heap, mercifully unconscious.

3

Room 3E880-D, the Pentagon.

0712 Hours Local Time.

Mike Ritzik never felt completely comfortable in business attire. And so, the normal anxiety over where he was right now — the cozy hideaway office of the secretary of defense — was compounded by the fact that he was wearing his only dress suit: ten years old, navy-blue worsted, and very seldom worn. Oh, you didn’t have to look very hard to see the hanger marks imprinted just above the trouser knees, or get up close and personal before you caught the faint yet unmistakable cedar-tinged perfume of mothballs issuing from the jacket.

The suit still fit him well enough. That was to be expected. At the age of thirty-nine Mike Ritzik hadn’t put more than six pounds on his five-foot eight-inch frame since he’d graduated sixth in his class at West Point eighteen years before. He worked out daily: a constant but varying routine of distance running, weight-pile sessions, and the once-a-week torture of the obstacle course. He knew that sooner or later his body would betray him — lose the agility and elasticity that allowed him to trounce men half his age on the basketball court they’d built behind the razor wire of the CAG.

CAG, which stood for Combat Applications Group, was the Army’s neutral-sounding designator for the never-acknowledged First Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, otherwise known as Delta Force. Delta’s compound was buried well inside Fort Bragg, the huge, sprawling post that was home to the 82^nd Airborne Division, as well as the Joint Special Forces Command, and which sat a dozen or so miles northwest of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

But his body hadn’t betrayed him yet. And it wouldn’t — not for a while, anyway.

Ritzik unclipped the yellow plastic ID with its bold blue V for visitor from the lapel of his suit and examined the fine print. It told him that the badge — number 120342—was the property of the United States government, and its return was guaranteed if it was dropped into any postal box. If he’d been in uniform, he wouldn’t have had to wear it. His Special Forces photo ID with its smart chip would have gotten him through the thumbprint card readers and into the building. But at nine-twenty last night, the secretary’s chief of staff had called the Old Man, who passed the word down the chain of command. SECDEF himself wanted Major Michael Anton Ritzik in Washington. Posthaste. Forthwith. Chop-chop. Zero seven hundred in SECDEF’s office. And in mufti, please.

They’d sent a plane — a C-12—that had him on the ground at Andrews Air Force Base one hour and six minutes after departing Pope. From there it had been a twenty-six-minute ride in an anonymous black Chevy with red and blue flashing lights, driven by an anonymous driver who wore an anonymous Sig Sauer 228 in a shoulder holster under his blue blazer. The ride was followed by a six-minute walk escorted by a pair of DOD rent-a-cops that entailed jogging up one escalator, marching through four separate metal detectors, and showing his North Carolina driver’s license to three huge Marines and a prissy Air Force colonel, the secretary’s deputy military assistant.

The colonel, relatively satisfied about Ritzik’s identity, had ushered him reverentially into SECDEF’s ceremonial office, which was (Ritzik knew this because he’d seen it once before) about the size of a soccer field. There, the four-striper recounted, as if speaking from a TelePrompTer, the history of the secretary’s desk: “Made from the wood and hardware of a twin-masted British privateer bravely captured during the Revolutionary War.” He dragged a manicured finger languidly across the “Four Top” table, where, he said, SECDEF and his deputy had a twice-weekly lunch with the chairman and vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, in an unctuous tone, he pointed out his personal favorites from the secretary’s Me Wall — that unvarying Washington political custom of displaying political relics, warmly inscribed photographs, editorial cartoons, and newspaper headlines relating to the VIP — for all to see.