SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

So Sam chose to ignore the dig. Instead, he untied the blue-and-white kerchief from around his neck, exhaled loudly, and wiped at his face with the salty wet cotton triangle. He’d always considered himself in pretty good physical shape. But five kliks of packed sand and scrub had just proved otherwise, hadn’t it? God, he was bushed. He reached around and dug into his rucksack for one of the three half-liter bottles of water he carried, took a long, welcome pull of the warm liquid, and consoled himself with the fact that he was so wiped because he was the Team Elder. The official CIA geezer.

The communicator, Dick Campbell, a sheep-dipped Marine captain who’d been TDY’d {Military acronym for temporary duty.} from Langley’s paramilitary division (looking far too Semper Fi, which gave Sam some anxiety), had just turned thirty-one. Sam liked to tell him he couldn’t remember being thirty-one. At least the lanky, team security officer — his name was Chris Wyman but he liked to be called X-Man — was approaching adulthood: Wyman was thirty-five — three years Sam’s junior. He had the low-key approach to life you’d expect from a kid who’d grown up in Aspen, spending more time on the slopes than in the classroom. But Wyman was sharp, and thorough, and didn’t miss much. He’d done time in enough hardship posts — a countersurveillance assignment against the Iranians in Baku and a black program against al-Qaeda in Pakistan among them — for Sam to know he was good at his job.

Of course, it didn’t help Sam’s mental state to see X-Man wasn’t even breathing hard as he paused to scan the dunes for surveillance, then lifted his field glasses to make sure they weren’t being tracked by a UAV.{Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. A pilotless drone surveillance aircraft.} He finally caught Wyman’s eye, which was hard to do given the Oakleys. “I hate people like you, y’know.”

The security officer’s long, tanned face cracked a smile. “When we get home, I’ll wangle you an AARP membership at my gym, Sam.”

“When we get home,” said Sam, double-checking to make sure the screw top was tight then dropping the water bottle back into the rucksack, “I’m hanging up my spurs. Gonna put in for a desk job. I’m getting way too old for this crap.”

Kaz snorted derisively. “You, Pops? Never. You’re a gumshoe. You just ain’t the desk-jockey type.”

The kid was correct. At thirty-eight, Sam had been a CIA case officer for just over thirteen years — and served overseas for all but twenty months of that time. He’d begun his career with sixteen months of Pashto language training followed by a two-year posting under consular cover in Islamabad. From there, he’d volunteered for an eight-month immersion course in Kazakh, after which he’d taken on a three-year assignment no other case officer wanted: running the one-man station in Almaty.

Later, there had been tours in Paris, where he’d worked as the Central Asia branch chief, followed by two and a half years in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. There, he’d managed to pick up some Dari, as well as conversational Russian, bits of Uighur, and enough of what he called kitchen Mandarin to listen to Radio Beijing and understand about a quarter of it. He’d also recruited a productive network of Tajiks and a rare Russian — a lieutenant colonel assigned to the 201^st Mechanized Infantry Division.

Sam Phillips had natural people skills and learned and retained languages the way others quickly absorb music or art. His low-key approach to life, wry sense of humor, and the instinctive ability to read nuance and adapt to culturally unfamiliar surroundings made him a shrewd, capable operative. Indeed, Sam preferred working alone in back alleys from Bishkek to Berlin regardless of the potential for risk. It was preferable to what he knew from experience to be a more hostile environment than any denied area overseas: the political minefield at the George Bush Center for Intelligence at Langley, Virginia.

Which is why it was absolutely true he’d never willingly leave the streets for a desk. Not that he’d ever be asked to. In fact, if you looked at the situation coldly, at the relatively young age of thirty-eight Sam Phillips was considered something of a dinosaur at the digitized, computerized, techno-dependent Central Intelligence Agency of the early twenty-first century. He was seen as a throwback, a foot soldier slogging willingly through the Wilderness of Mirrors. In the flexi-time culture of latte drinkers and retirement-portfolio builders, Sam was the odd man out: the sort of old-fashioned case officer who was professionally indifferent to creature comforts, identifiable food, and other niceties. Sam Phillips existed completely, entirely, totally, to spot, assess, and recruit spies. And if it required that his living conditions be less than no-star, and his backup nonexistent, well then, so be it. He’d get the job done anyway.