Captain Shariak and his co-pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Jared Betz, were flying their third combat mission over Karbala when a rocket-propelled grenade struck their Apache, sending their helicopter slicing sideways through the hot desert air. Somehow Captain Shariak was able to aim the plunging airship between two buildings, tearing off the rotors while funneling the crash into a semi-controlled landing, avoiding thousands of Iraqi civilians.
The impact collapsed the cockpit like a steel accordion, shattering Adam’s left femur. Pinned beneath the wreckage, the captain ordered his co-pilot to abandon him in order to evade capture. By the time Betz returned with help, Captain Shariak was gone; eyewitnesses claiming the American pilot had been taken prisoner by Saddam’s forces.
Gravity recaptured the spinning top, slowing its inertia. Adam allowed it to die on the magnetic pad, checking the time on his vintage Three Stooges desk clock, a graduation gift from his stepbrother, Randy.
Five-twenty. Dinner reservations are at seven-thirty. If we leave here by six we should get to the restaurant with about ten minutes to spare.
Timing was everything in D.C. On normal days the traffic was merely horrendous; with the inauguration it would be impossible. For someone who considered himself a shut-in, downtown was the last place you’d find Adam Shariak on a night like tonight… but tonight was “special.”
Considering all he had been through, he was amazed to find himself blessed to even have the opportunity to plan such a momentous occasion.
The Iraqis that had captured Captain Adam Shariak were members of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, led by a sadistic commander named Abu Anas al-Baghdadi. Adam’s injuries were serious — his broken femur became infected and swelled to twice its size, gangrene quickly setting in. Al-Baghdadi needed his injured American prisoner kept alive, so he assigned the pilot’s health to one of the young girls who he had kidnapped and turned into a sex slave.
Nadia Kalaf was fourteen. Her mother had been a nurse before the Fedayeen had gunned her down; therefore Al-Baghdadi assumed her daughter had to know something about first aid. The commander made it clear — if the American died before the Fedayeen could acquire Intel from the pilot then the girl would join him, only her death would be far more gruesome.
What the Iraqi sociopath didn’t know was that the girl wanted to die. And so she allowed gangrene to set into Adam’s wounds… only to reverse course days later once she got to know the American pilot.
By week’s end, she had decided to help him escape.
Captain Shariak awoke in a hospital bed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The infection that had nearly killed him was gone; so too was his left leg, amputated above the knee.
Losing a limb had a devastating impact on Adam’s psyche. Flying helicopters was far more than his occupation; it had become everything to him.
Without a left leg, he was permanently grounded.
Two months later he found himself back in the states at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland suffering from extreme depression.
Eight months of physical therapy enabled him to get along with a prosthetic leg; but it would take several years of counseling before Adam finally accepted his fate and could move on.
By now the two wars had produced more than six hundred amputees. Adam had been fitted with a prosthetic, but the change in his gait caused horrible back and sciatic nerve pain which ran down his buttocks.
As an engineer, Adam believed he could improve the design of these artificial limbs. Pulling some strings, the colonel managed to get his son a civilian appointment at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in their RE-NET lab. Reliable Neuro-Interface Technology was a new science which focused on thought to control an artificial limb using the signals sent from the body’s existing muscles and nerves.
One of the problems amputees experienced with RE-NET prototypes was pain caused by the tight-fitting socket joints needed to initiate osseointegration — the direct connection between living bone and the electrodes within the artificial limb. Adam’s solution was to incorporate metal foam in the design; a porous bone-like material used in smart satellites which he believed would allow signals to pass from the brain into the prosthetic device.
Believing the prototype would find a better home in the private sector, Adam’s supervisor arranged a meeting with Dr. Michael Kemp, a former NASA rocket scientist and the founding partner of Kemp Aerospace Industries. Kemp Aerospace was a private D.C. firm whose expertise in satellites enabled them to feed off the scraps of defense contracts awarded to “Beltway Bandits” like Lockheed Martin, Northrop, SAIC, E-Systems, EG&G and MITRE Corporation.
Adam Shariak’s “K Street” connections (Randy was now a Senator and sat on the Senate Appropriations Committee) enticed Dr. Kemp, who had been looking to hire a new managing director.
Adam passed on the offer, until the CEO agreed to fund a new subdivision that would specialize in the design and manufacture of smart prosthetic limbs.
During his first six months on the job, Kemp Aerospace’s new general manager cut costs and increased the company’s profit margin by thirteen percent. Unfortunately, the security clearances on the large defense contracting projects were often above top-secret, meaning Adam had to exclude himself from participating in project meetings, reducing his role in the eyes of some of his employees to that of a glorified secretary.
Thankfully, he had Jessica to get him over the hurdles.
Dr. Jessica “Juice” Marulli was a five-foot, four-inch blonde dynamo with an athletic figure and sharp tongue. Her father, Captain Al Marulli, was an F-16 test pilot; her mother, Dr. Barbara Jean Singleton was an engineer at Lockheed-Martin. Like Adam, Jessica had grown up a military brat, her tutors and private coaches serving as surrogate parents. Short, but packing a lot of power, Juice Marulli was an all-state gymnast, but it was her grades and lineage that earned her a full scholarship at Cal Tech.
Eight years and three degrees later, the aerospace engineer and magna cum laude was being recruited by Lockheed-Martin. Unfortunately, there were too many security issues to overcome with mother and daughter working at the same facility in such varying capacities, so Jessica was sent to work at one of Lockheed’s subcontractors… Kemp Aerospace.
A workaholic with no time for a social life, Jessica found herself very attracted to the company’s new managing director. Staking out her claim before any of the other single (or married) women at the company made their move, Dr. Marulli invited the former Apache pilot over for dinner.
Adam rarely lost his cool, but the blonde bombshell intimidated the hell out of him. It wasn’t just her looks, her high I.Q., or her security clearance — it was the way in which she had looked at him after she had texted him her address, as if her brown eyes were undressing him right there in her lab.
With the exception of one particularly horrible blind date set up by his sister-in-law, Melinda, Adam’s social life had been non-existent since he had lost his leg. When asked, he offered the usual excuses about focusing on his work or not meeting the right person, and yes, he’d definitely try out those Internet dating sites. But the reality was that it was the awkwardness of having to deal with his prosthetic leg during sex that kept him from asking women out.