Age: 37 (born Monterey, CA August 1963)
Rank: Senior Chief Bosun’s Mate (BMCS), United States Navy (Senior Chief Petty Officer, E8)
Callsign: Bravo Delta One




Languages spoken:
English (Native speaker)
Ukrainian (Incompetent)
Spanish (Even more incompetent – enough to get a beer and maybe get laid)
Russian (Basic – my name is Dan, which way to Moscow please?)

Primary Weapon: AK103 Assault Rifle
Secondary Weapon: HK Mk23 Automatic Pistol
Tertiary Weapon: TBA

Description:
Dan Ryan is five feet eleven inches tall, with the lean, muscular frame of a man who is physically fit. Taking full advantage of the leeway generally afforded to SOF Operators, his black hair is worn longer than military regulations would normally permit and his jaw is frequently covered by a short layer of stubble.

Dan is usually attired in Soviet TTsKO woodland camo fatigues, over which he’ll wear a woodland camo US PASGT vest and an OD US MOLLE load bearing vest, although the fatigue jacket will frequently be replaced by a t shirt and a well worn black fleece. In non combat situations his headgear – if he’s wearing any - is likely to rotate between a black woollen watch cap or a khaki baseball cap with a lo viz Gadsen flag morale patch, while in more kinetic situations he’ll wear a Modular Integrated Communications Helmet, a type of helmet that was rushed into service in early 1997 and was only ever issued to special operations forces. Originally tan in color it has had streaks of green and black paint applied to it to give it an improvised camo finish. He wears a Soviet made Vostok watch on his left wrist, and his most prized possession is a pair of Oakley sunglasses with ruby iridium lenses.

Biography

So, I’m Daniel Ryan. My buddies call me Dan, a few people call me Danny but they know who they are. I was born in Monterey, California in August 1963. I grew up with the Ocean, surfed, took my sailboat out into the Bay. Good times.

I joined the Navy in 1982 aged nineteen. I wanted to be a SEAL. Why? Good question. Maybe I wanted to prove something to myself. And maybe it ran in the family. Sort of. My dad was an accountant but my uncle Jerry had won a Silver Star serving with SEAL Team One in Vietnam in the late ‘60’s. Anyway, I made it through the BUD/S course, got my Trident. I’ve done a lot of stuff since then, a lot of it I’m not supposed to talk about. I mean, I guess it’s not like they can send me to the brig for ninety nine years any more, but the rules are the rules, yeah?

I met Alison in 1991, right after Desert Storm. I was based at Coronado, across the bay from San Diego, had taken my Harley up the Pacific Coast Highway to Monterey for the 04th of July holiday to see my parents and my brother. My folks threw a party, Ali was there, we hit it off, got married fourteen months later, September ’92. She knew the job I did, knew that there would be times that I’d be away for a while, knew that every time I left there was always a chance that I wouldn’t come back, went into it with her eyes wide open.

By late ’96 I was with Team Two, at Little Creek Virginia. Ali and I were getting on great, we had our own beachfront place, I’d bought a little fishing boat that the guys and I used to go out in, have a few beers, try and catch some marlins. The Russians and the Chinese were knocking the crap out of each other but after an initial flurry of alerts Uncle Sam had reached the conclusion that that wasn’t really his problem. I'd even managed to get myself a Bachelor's Degree in International Relations from North Carolina State University at Raleigh via distance learning, was thinking about going for my Masters. All in all I guess life was pretty good. And then the shit hit the fan.

I said goodbye to Ali in December ’96, got on a plane headed for an undisclosed location in the Persian Gulf. Yeah, you heard right, the Persian Gulf. So you’re going to ask what I’m doing in Ukraine, aren’t you? Well, mid 1999 it turns out that DIA need a team to go into Rostov on Don, Russia. Pick something up they said. You don’t need to know what they said. Opsec. And my team was the closest one with the resources to do the job. By resources I mean CENTCOM was able to lay on a USAF C130. So man, I don't know what this package was but I figure it must be something important if they're tapping Sam McLean for an airplane and a SEAL team.

We staged to Trabzon, Turkey, from there HALO’d into Rostov in September ’99. The plan was to jump in, retrieve the ‘package’, get picked up by boat, which would take us back to Turkey. From there we’d fly back to the KSA, be back before our tans had had time to fade. Simple. Yeah, right. I don’t know what went wrong man, but the whole thing was a clusterfuck of the highest order. We lost Devereaux and Anderson, ended up with no package and no boat and Ivan hunting us. Four of us, me, MacIntyre, Kroll, and Prentice. Maybe the boat got sunk, maybe something else happened, I don't know. We waited for as long as we could but Ivan was closing in so we had to make a decision. East was Russia. North took us into pro Russian eastern Ukraine. South was the Black Sea. That really kinda only left one direction.

We headed west. We lost Mac in a firefight on the Russian / Ukrainian border. We skirted around Zhdanov, tried to stay away from the Crimea as we’d heard that there were a lot of Russians down there. We came across Lidiya about ten klicks west of a place called Polohy. I guess you could say we were just in time. Some bandits were about to have themselves some fun if you know what I mean. They never knew what hit them. Turned out Lidiya was from Donetsk, a refugee, had nowhere to go. So we took her with us. It was the right thing to do, ya know?

We wintered in a place called Salvhorod, just east of the Dniepr. Man, that winter was brutal. Did I mention that we’d been in Saudi six months ago? We earned our keep helping to train the town militia and Lidiya taught us some Ukrainian and Russian. While we were there some guy mentioned that there were boats going in and out of Odessa. Scuttlebutt was they were going as far as Romania, even Turkey. Well, we figured that was better than trying to walk to Germany. We crossed the Dniepr at Dnipropetrovsk in February, managed to get ourselves signed on as guards with a merchant caravan heading for Odessa. By now we were sort of guns for hire. Prentice got killed when some bandits attacked the caravan outside Kazanka so it was only me and Kroll that actually made it. And Lidiya.