SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Ritzik barked, “Hey, can it for a couple of seconds, will you?” He continued moving counterclockwise. “The slightly built guy standing next to Doc — the one who thinks that’s a mustache on his upper lip — is Curtis Hansen. Next to him is Shep — Gene Shepard. The two people on the floor loading magazines — Ty Weaver, one of our snipers on the left; and Alex Guzman — we call him Goose — on the right.” Ritzik frowned momentarily when he spied a young, red-haired Soldier peeking over the top of a flight navigation chart. “The surfer hiding from me in the corner is Michael Dunne — Mickey D. He’s a chopper jockey from the SOAR. I think he’s lost.”

Dunne self-consciously wiggled his fingers in Wei-Liu’s direction and ducked behind his map.

Ritzik continued: “The squinty-eyed fella working on the computer over there, he’s William Sandman,” Ritzik paused. “Know what we call him?”

“Sand Man?”

“Close but no cigar, Miss Assistant Secretary,” Ritzik said. “We call him Bill.” His index finger kept moving. “That’s Roger Brian next to Bill — Roger the Dodger — and Todd Sweeney next to Brian. Todd’s our other sniperman, call sign Barber—”

“Like Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street?”

“You got it.” Ritzik peered at the far side of the warehouse. “Finally, back in the corner there, working on the explosives, are Joey Tuzzolino — the Tuzz — and Mark Owen, call sign Marko.” He paused. “Say hi, guys — and be nice. She outranks all of us put together.”

0444. “Okay,” Wei-Liu said, “I’ve been introduced. If you don’t mind, I’m going to do some homework.” Ritzik shrugged. “Be my guest.”

Wei-Liu slipped the canvas briefcase off her shoulder, unzipped it, extracted a sheaf of handwritten wiring diagrams, and flipped through them until she found the one she wanted. She paused, then looked up at Ritzik. “What’s going on in here?”

“We’re setting up a TOC — a tactical operations center.”

“Which is?”

He raised his voice to carry over the whine of the C-5’s engine, then decreased his intensity as the sound grew fainter. “Something like a command post. We’ll coordinate the mission from here. All the real-time intelligence — satellite imagery, signals intercepts, target intelligence, weather conditions, everything — will funnel into this building from the U.S. The crew manning the TOC will be in constant touch with Bragg, with Washington — and with us, too — all on a secure basis. They’ll pass us what we need as we need it.”

Wei-Liu peered at the racks of electronics. “This looks like one of my research labs, Major. But when you say ‘command post’ all I can think about is sandbags and crank telephones.”

“That was The Dirty Dozen.” Ritzik grinned. “Welcome to Net-Centric warfare{Net-Centric warfare makes real-time data and information available on demand across the entire battlefield spectrum, both horizontally and vertically.} and the twenty-first century.”

“Touché.” She settled onto a crate and focused on her diagram. When she looked up some minutes later, he’d disappeared into the night.

0512. The satellite images were finally feeding in. Ritzik looked at the streaming infrared video of the IMU’s six trucks and three 4x4s as they made their way across the desert. On another screen, he saw overhead imagery of the single runway at the Changii military airfield, forty-five kilometers northwest of Ürümqi. The fact that there was no activity was reassuring. A third screen showed a two-hundred-square-mile picture of the Tarim Basin. The terrorist convoy, displayed as a flashing star, was right in the middle of the screen. Two other screens displayed weather patterns for the region.

Tracy Wei-Liu tapped Ritzik on the shoulder. “Pretty incredible stuff.”

“It’s helpful.”

“That seems like an understatement. How did anybody deal with warfare before this kind of information was available? It must have made things awfully difficult.”

Ritzik said, “It may have been harder in the old days, sure. But not impossible.”

* * *

As a cadet at West Point, Ritzik had read several studies of Ranger operations during World War II. The one that had stuck most deeply in his mind was Colonel Henry A. Mucci’s January 30, 1945, rescue of the Bataan Death March survivors from the Pangatian Japanese POW camp, five miles east of the Philippine city of Cabanatuan.

In 1944, Mucci was a thirty-three-year-old West Point graduate who, through force of character, motivation, training, and example, had transformed the 98^th Field Artillery Battalion, a moribund rear-echelon unit that had never seen any combat, into the Sixth Ranger Battalion, one of the finest fighting machines of World War II.