SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Sam’s corridor file back at Langley pegged him negatively as a risk taker, a cowboy who too often pushed the edge of the operational envelope. Still, he had a reputation for success in the field. In Langley’s op-resistant culture, which had persisted even after the 9/11 intelligence debacle, the loss of agents through carelessness, neglect, or simple inattention to detail all seemed to be grounds for promotion instead of termination. But Sam Phillips could say — and did, with considerable pride — that over his decade plus of street work, he’d never lost a single one of his agents.

That kind of rep carried some weight. If not with the present crop of technocrat panjandrums occupying the seventh-floor executive suites, at least with the small remaining cadre of streetwise geezers who, like Sam, believed that satellites capable of reading a license plate from two hundred miles up were the solution to intelligence gathering only if you were prone to being attacked by license plates. Uncovering your adversary’s capabilities and intentions, Sam Phillips was unshakably convinced, required human-sourced intelligence. That meant putting your body on the line.

But Sam had also realized early in his career that risk taking did not mean the same as foolishness. A history and language major at Berkeley, he’d first read about Alexander Suvorov, the eighteenth-century Russian military tactician and philosopher, as a sophomore. Later, as a greenhorn case officer in his late twenties, he’d reread Suvorov, so as to better understand the intricacies of the Russian military mind.

Sam’s reading may have begun as an intellectual exercise to help him in making recruitments. It ended, however, with his enthusiastic acceptance of Suvorov’s strategic doctrine as the basis for his own intelligence-gathering operations. He took many of the field marshal’s dictums (“Speed is essential; haste harmful” and “Train hard, fight easy” were two of his favorites) to heart, and consciously employed them in the field. And so, what his deskbound superiors often thought to be impetuous, seat-of-the-pants decisions were in point of fact meticulously designed, boldly executed operations that resulted in the obtaining of valuable intelligence for the United States.

Sam’s capacity for audaciousness coupled with careful planning was a critical factor in his current role as team leader — at least so far as the three volunteers traveling with him were concerned. That was because SIE-1, which was Langley’s bureaucratic acronym for the four-man Sino Insertion Element No. 1 Sam led, was composed of NOCs.{Non-Official Cover intelligence officers.}

That meant Sam and his team entered China using real but nonetheless bogus British, Irish, and Canadian passports issued under aliases. They’d posed as a four-man independent TV crew shooting an “Outward Bound Trekking along the Silk Road” video for a London-based travel company that wanted to expand its “extreme sports” tour packages. Yes, their travel documents had survived the scrutiny of Turkish, Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Chinese border guards and other officials. And yes, if anyone had called the accommodation addresses and telephone numbers in London, Dublin, or Toronto that were printed on their business cards, drivers’ licenses, credit cards, and other miscellaneous wallet detritus and pocket litter, all of which had been provided by Langley’s document wizards, the team’s bona fides would have been authenticated beyond a doubt. But all of that didn’t lessen the knowledge that in plain English, nonofficial cover meant they were working without a net.

Their objective, precisely expressed in National Security Directive 16226, which had been signed by the president of the United States nine weeks previously, was, quote: “For officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and/or other officials of the United States government to covertly insert and position at a specific location inside the People’s Republic of China a technical means for ensuring that all the conditions of the current-draft nuclear weapons agreement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China will be met.”

The word covertly meant that for Sam Phillips and his team there was no diplomatic immunity. There was no Geneva convention. If they got caught, it was prison or summary execution. Full stop. End of story. Like the characters in the Mission: Impossible movies, the administration would deny any responsibility, etc., etc. Except what Sam and his crew were doing wasn’t Hollywood. It was real — and the consequences could prove fatal.