Mike Garin is an agent with American Military Intelligence.
That is as close to a description of a couple of words as I can come. Actually, he is not really an agent so much as a soldier, part of an especially elite small group of special operations personnel incredibly trained for one key mission type. The unnamed group was first established during the Reagan Administration by his command to form "a quick-reaction force ... designed to interdict, recover, and/or destroy any loose or rogue weapons of mass destruction - regardless of the source".
Its leader, Lt.Col Laws, "handpicked a diverse team of some of the best tier-one special operators in the US military, putting them through an ungodly eighteen-month training program at a four-thousand-acre southern Nevada compound affectionately called the Ranch, a tongue-in-cheek takeoff on the CIA's own training facility in Camp Peary, Virginia, the Farm". Laws ran the operation for a dozen years before retiring, hand-picking his successor. When several years later that leader died in combat, Laws was asked to find the next leader. He chose Mike Garin.
To say that Garin was an intense man of action would be to understate the matter tremendously. As one of his subordinates put it watching Garin spend his downtime on the computer reviewing a just completed operation, to Garin, "sleep's a nuisance". More telling, though, is that the man admitted Garin "scared" him, to which a colleague agrees, "I've known him for going on six years. Still gives me the yips". Garin, for his part, is a stickler for details and that recent op left with some questions that were bothering him, concerns that will be proven far too valid shortly after the plane bringing the operatives back to the States lands.
Garin is also known, outside of his work, under the covername of Tom Lofton. He is described as "built like an NFL running back or mixed martial arts competitor: six feet two inches, approximately 210 pounds, sprinter's lefts, broad shoulders tapered to a narrow waist, and powerful arms. His appearance was enough to cause many of the woman who frequented the same gym as he in Dale City, Virginia, to switch from sweat pants to day-glo spandex to hopefully catch his eye - but then to leave disappointed for Lofton was always all business about his workouts. Garin/Lofton "wasn't the most approachable person. Not only did he have the demeanor of an executioner-albeit a handsome one-but when he spoke, his unnervingly deep voice tended to intimidate everyone within earshot".
Back on that troubles about to happen Garin mentioned above, the reason a spec-ops expert like Garin gains membership into a compendium dealing with spies and covert operatives is that he will discover the hard way that someone is out to eliminate all those like him, crippling America's fast response capabilities and he will have to switch from being a warrior carrying out orders to working undercover with cloak-and-dagger types to ferret out some very nasty and dangerous individuals.
Good Lines:
- One adage that Garin lived by was "if a threat is possible, it is certain".