The Black Operation (or Black Ops for short) is a terrorist military unit mentioned in the first game and its expansion packs. They are elite female operatives that are rumoured to work independently from the HECU. The soldiers are mostly uniformed in black sometimes with red night vision goggles. They are often very silent, fast, and can become invisible. They too as well as the HECU have come to infiltrate the Black Mesa facility and solve the situation and assassinate the hostile creatures and the human witnesses.
It isn't until the closing stages of Half-Life: Opposing Force that they reveal 'the package', a nuclear explosive device that will contaminate the entire Black Mesa base. HECU corporal Adrian Shepard locates the bomb and disarms it not long before the G-man appears and rearms it after Shepard is gone.
Although they are rarely featured in Half-Life, their main appearance is in Half-Life: Opposing Force. Gordon Freeman first encounters them en route to the Lambda complex and faces them just as he finally arrives there.
Black Operation can again be seen in Decay bonus mission Xen Attacks where the two vortigaunts try to retrieve the Xen crystals deep in the basement of Black Mesa.
Read more about this topic: Creatures In The Half-Life Series
Famous quotes containing the words black and/or operation:
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences.... It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)