This note contains spoilers for the book.

This is the first of the Mike Harmon books; not truly an origin story, since it doesn't go into his activities in Class 201, but it's how he becomes rich and gets his connections after retiring from the Seals. I found a used paperback, which was good enough to get me to go back and fill in the backstory to the two later books I had read.

Baen calls it a techno-thriller on the spine, which is fair enough; it fits right into Tom Clancy territory for example. The main character is an operator rather than an executive, but it has the same devotion to right-thinking people taking risks and breaking the law to do what is right.

It's internally divided into three books, sequential and mostly-independent stories about Mark Harmon. He does crazy things like hide in the wheel well of a 727 (and he does black out, but he recovers pretty quickly; can you really survive that extreme anoxia for that long?). And take on dozens of jihadists, and mostly win.

There's one story that's mostly about his developing BDSM relationships with two college girls he meets in a bar, which contains much of what any decent primer to safe BDSM relationships should contain, so that's probably useful and productive. (Then, at the end, he goes off and forces some terrorists to detonate their nuclear bomb early, on an uninhabited island.)