The Protector

Acknowledgments

Much of the tradecraft in The Protector has not appeared in fiction before. I learned it from a great many people who have firsthand experience in the high-risk activities depicted here and who were kind enough to teach me. The tactical uses of duct tape, lead fishing sinkers, chamois car-washing cloths, and partially serrated shotgun shells are only a few of the things I was taught. My thanks to the following:

Linton Jordahl, former U.S. marshal. The U.S. Marshals Service ranks with the Secret Service and the Diplomatic Security Service as one of the premier protective units of the United States government.

Don Rosche and Bruce Reichel of the Bill Scott Raceway's Executive Security Driver Training course. Various U.S. government agencies, including the Diplomatic Security Service, send their personnel to BSR to learn defensive and offensive antiterrorist driving techniques. Rather than provide a recipe for committing felonies, I left out a small but important step in hot-wiring vehicles.

Lt. Dave Spaulding of Ohio 's Montgomery County Sheriff's Department. Lieutenant Spaulding's department contributed to the high-level security for the 1995 Dayton (Bosnian) Peace Accords. He is one of America 's foremost firearms instructors. See his Handgun Combatives and Defensive Living, the latter cowritten with retired CIA operations officer Ed Lovette.

Karl Sokol, master gunsmith. Many military and law-enforcement personnel credit their lives to the dependability of a Sokol-modified firearm. The refinements made to "the protector's" Sig Sauer 225 are typical of his craft.

Ernest Emerson. In addition to being one of the best manufacturers of tactical knives (his CQC-7 is featured in this novel), Mr. Emerson is also a top-level blade instructor who works with various elite military and law-enforcement units.

Marcus Wynne, former paratrooper with the Eighty-Second Airborne, former federal air marshal, and first-rate thriller novelist. See his No Other Option and Warrior in the Shadows. As a young man, Marcus was one of my literature students when I was a professor at the University of Iowa. Years later, he returned the favor and taught me many aspects of the world of high-risk operators.

Dan "Rock" Myers, former member of U.S. Special Operations/military intelligence and former contract officer for the Diplomatic Security Service.

The Protector also features nonlethal tradecraft, and for that, I am grateful to Jake Eagle and the staff of NLP Santa Fe, practitioner trainers in neuro-linguistic programming. Years ago, when I learned that the CIA and other intelligence services, as well as some elite military units, require NLP as part of their training, I took certification classes in it.

In all these matters, if I got the details right, it's because of my teachers. If the details are wrong (always remembering what I said about not supplying recipes for felonies), I'm the one to blame.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. -Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful

David Morrell, Santa Fe, New Mexico