New Novel Progress: The deep element.

I'm making fine progress on writing the new novel and nearly back to on-schedule. This week wraps up the draft of Chapter 12 and the actual mission is underway. I have several good choices of excerpts from the writing so far that I'll post here, but I wanted to get the names of the main characters all out for you in one place so you can see the (yeah, slightly confusing) reveal of their operational names.

In Dean Conway's operational work-up, he started by referencing the mission tasking slots by number. As personnel were assigned to them, their names in each tier of their identities appears. Here's a list:

1 slot: HUMINT specialist.
Intermediate identity name: Joe Geigel.
Operational cover: Carlos "Charlie" Duarte.

2 slot: the Operational Analyst and Trained Observer.
called "Amy's Husband" when referenced in his base identity.
Intermediate identity name: Gary Keith.
Operational cover: Alan Drake.

3 slot: Support specialist.
Intermediate identity name: Diana Mickiewicz.
Operational cover: Anna Holmgren.

4 slot: Communications specialist.
Intermediate identity name: Max Faustino.
Operational cover: Mateus "Matty" Santos Oliveira.


and, for your reading pleasure, an excerpt from Chapter 6, after all four were under their operational covers and in Europe prior to routing to the operations area:

Oliveira and Drake spent some time together after the pub drink and there was a similar get-to-know-you between Charlie Duarte and Anna Holmgren in Copenhagen. Away from anyone who might overhear, those were the first times that they could begin to coordinate the few elements of the mission package that they possessed. Baby steps toward having the real OpPlan ready to go when they were on the ground in Bissau. Drake decided he could work with Matty and kind of liked the guy, even though he was prone to overemphasizing things that probably weren’t important. Oliveira thought Alan Drake was some sort of escapee from a movie about rednecks, but that he sure seemed to know his stuff about operational activities. The knew-his-shit part settled well with Oliveira. Fortunately for all of them, it was also true.

Enjoy!