SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

The photos and headlines Ritzik could understand. But it had always baffled him to see the cruel caricatures so willingly displayed by the very butts of the cartoonists’ derision. It was, he thought, kind of like walking down the street wearing a huge sign that said KICK ME! Go figure.

From there, Ritzik was led down a short, private corridor to the holy of holies. Actually, he found the secretary’s hideaway office to be comfortable, even inviting. There were no VIP pictures or ego-boosting tributes on the walls. Instead, the cherrywood bookshelves bore framed family snapshots of the secretary’s wife, children, and grandkids. A fire crackled in the fireplace. An afghan, which bore the huge likeness of a black Labrador retriever, had been flung over the arm of a well-used leather wing chair, in front of which sat an equally well-used leather footstool.

“Sit, Major,” the four-striped major domo instructed, pointing schoolmarmlike toward a rail-backed wooden armchair placed at an oblique angle to a small, burlwood writing desk.

He complied. The colonel’s nose actually twitched as Ritzik passed downwind to drop into the chair, and the man’s face momentarily betrayed the fact that he’d caught a whiff of the detested eau de mothball. But he wasn’t a Pentagon staff puke military assistant for nothing. This guy was a pro. His expression quickly returned to neutral. Then he turned on his mirror-shined heel. “The secretary will be with you shortly,” he said to the hideaway office door, and left without waiting for a response.

Ritzik sat where he’d been ordered, his eyes scanning the small office. He played with his ID badge and was still looking at it when the thick wood door eased open and Secretary of Defense Robert W. Rockman, carrying a well-worn brown document folder tucked under his arm like a football, entered the room.

Ritzik snapped to his feet and turned toward the doorway. “Mr. Secretary.”

“Major Ritzik. How good to see you again.” Rockman gave him such a genuine, wide smile Ritzik could make out the gold crowns in the back of the man’s mouth. “Let me just toss—” He dropped the folder onto the wing-chair cushion, advanced to Ritzik, and pumped the younger man’s hand. “Thank you so much for coming on such short notice.”

As if he’d had a choice. “Good to see you again, too, sir.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d met. Back in 2001, Ritzik — then a captain — had been a part of Task Force 555, a joint Special Operations unit that had put Delta operators, CIA paramilitary personnel, and British SAS shooters inside Afghanistan weeks before the announced start of the ground and air campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Triple Five’s mission had been both clandestine and critical. First, to organize and synchronize the ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks who formed the core of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Second, to serve as “force multipliers,” providing weapons and training for the indigenous Pashtuns in the south. And third, once the campaign started in earnest, to use their SpecOps abilities for sneaking and peeking — getting close to the enemy without being seen — to provide real-time targeting information for American pilots and “light up” al-Qaeda and Taliban troops and equipment with their self-contained, handheld, state-of-the-art laser target designators.

Ritzik’s twelve-man First SFOD-D Troop Hotel — four three-man squads — had been inserted into northern Afghanistan by Task Force 160 chopper on September 21, ten days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By chance, Ritzik and two of his Delta troopers had been ten miles outside Almaty, the Kazakh capital, on September 11, assigned to a JCET — Joint Combined Exchange Training — mission, schooling the Kazakh Special Forces in counterterrorist tactics to be used against the IMU and other extremist groups. Within twenty-four hours, they’d been joined by nine of their colleagues, and just over a week after that, they’d fast-roped out of an MH-53E Pave Low Special Operations chopper onto the lunar landscape of the Panjshir Valley.

Ritzik and his group had finally been extracted — under protest, let the record show — in March 2002. Twelve days later, after he’d been cleaned up and allowed to decompress a little, Ritzik was flown to Washington, where Rockman, the no-nonsense SECDEF, had offered him a newly created position on his staff: special assistant to the secretary for counterterrorism.