Drake: From Black Ops Legend to Most Wanted

Edmund "Dragon" Drake is the main supporting character in my noir cyberpunk thriller, A.I. Capone: The Digital Don.

By Paul Ponce

Edmund Drake had a knack for figuring out what made something tick. How to fix it, too. Give the guy a V8 with a misfire, a carbine that kept jamming, or an espresso machine with a bad gasket, and he’d keep at it until he found the culprit and got the damn thing working right.

No machine was too big for old Drake. Not even government machinery.

Problem was, a lot of folks with a lot to lose swore the big machine was running just fine, even while smoke poured out the back. And no, they weren’t interested in a second opinion. Not that it would make Drake go away.

By the time the FBI came looking for him, Drake was already a black ops legend. So sure, he knew how to disappear if he had to. What he didn’t know was whether his fix would work before they nabbed him.

Youngstown Taught Him to Look Under the Hood

Youngstown, Ohio, in the late seventies was rich with learning opportunities. One was how fast a decision made upstairs could land on the shop floor.

The masterclass came in 1977. One of the big steel mills announced it was closing up shop. Five thousand or so steelworkers were about to watch the furnaces go cold for good. Yeah, along with their paychecks. No wonder they called it Black Monday.

Drake’s dad was among them. The shame got to him. So did the bottle. Eventually he skipped town, leaving his wife with three boys to feed. Edmund was the oldest, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave her to handle it alone.

In high school, folks saw a future for Edmund Drake in football. He was one hell of a quarterback. Edmund saw the bills piling up at home, and his paper route wasn’t going to put much of a dent in them. So he quit the team before his senior year and went to work as a mechanic. It’s not like he hadn’t taken apart his dad’s old Buick a few times.

Turns out he could handle the work and get other people moving, too. By nineteen, he was shop foreman. Then the roll-up steel door came down for good. Youngstown had plenty of bad news left to hand out. Drake played his last card.

He walked into the nearest Army recruiting office and signed up. He figured he could keep turning wrenches for Uncle Sam and send money home.

That plan held until he worked on a few vehicles brought in by guys from a unit nobody was eager to name. These fellas were a breed apart. Quiet, confident, and, back then, more likely to look like your boring next-door neighbor with a ’stache than the most elite soldiers in the Army. Drake noticed something else: they took care of each other. He’d spent years doing the same for his brothers.

He wanted in. Drake traded the motor pool for the infantry, got his jump wings, earned his Ranger tab, and eventually made it to the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Once there, he started piling on chevrons as an NCO.

He even made time for college and earned his gold bar through ROTC. Second Lieutenant Drake served with the 82nd Airborne, then returned to the Rangers. By the time he made captain, the unit whose vehicles he’d once repaired came calling.

Drake made it through its punishing selection. Then came the training: high-altitude insertion, hostage rescue aboard aircraft, spy tradecraft. The sort of work where getting it almost right got people killed. He was in.

He spent years leading those quiet professionals on dangerous missions. The public heard about very few of those ops, mostly the ones that went sideways.

Decades after tuning up a few vehicles for those mysterious soldiers, Colonel Edmund “Dragon” Drake took command of the Unit. By then, the ’staches had mostly given way to beards and ink.

That outfit? Delta Force.

Sure, he’d come a long way from Youngstown. At Fort Bragg, he’d met Marcia Marchetti, a sharp base psychologist with a successful career of her own. She could tell when Drake was dodging a question, and she’d call him on it. He liked that. She liked that he took her work as seriously as his own. Eventually, they tied the knot.

But Marcia wasn’t cut out to play Army wife, and Drake’s constant deployments didn’t help. They held on through some hard years, but eventually both agreed it wasn’t going to work.

Somewhere along the way, the certified commando also developed a serious weakness for good espresso. His spartan office had one luxury: a gleaming machine and a stash of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans. He might even pull you a shot. While you decided whether to take it, he’d be getting a read on you.

Something Was Wrong with the Orders

Years before he took command of the Unit, Drake and his closest buddy, TJ, knew when an order smelled wrong. Special ops had never been squeaky clean. They knew that better than most. But more and more missions seemed to serve interests nobody would name. Neither was inclined to let it slide. Quietly, they compared what they could piece together and followed the questions upward.

That put Drake on the trail of a secret circle of unaccountable power brokers with more say over covert military operations and cutting-edge weapons programs than the chain of command cared to admit. In intelligence circles, they were known as the Skins.

Drake and TJ had a lot of gaps to fill, but they were sure of one thing. They didn’t sign up to serve those assholes. They wanted names. They also wanted to know what else the Skins had their hands on.

Master Sergeant Terrance “TJ” Turing was killed during a hostage rescue in Aleppo. Before he bled out, he gave Drake, a major at the time, a lead. TJ also left behind his twelve-year-old daughter, Celeste, whose mother had died when Cel was born.

TJ’s sister Sarah raised her. Scary smart kid. Guarded, too. Drake was Cel’s godfather, and he took that seriously. He’d looked after his brothers back in Youngstown. TJ had been another kind of brother. Cel came to feel like a daughter to him. After things fell apart with Marcia, having her in his life gave Drake something to hold on to.

Sure, deployments made him an irregular presence in the ordinary ways that matter to a kid. But Drake recognized something in Cel. She had that itch to know how stuff worked, same as he did. Give Drake a bucket of bolts and he’d find the fix. Cel could take the whole thing apart in her head, then start imagining what came next. He made sure TJ's kid had what she needed and, later, opened a few doors. Cel had the talent to walk through them herself.

Whether any of that made up for the times he wasn’t there was another matter.

Drake’s Gamble

Of course, running the Unit wasn’t the only thing eating up Drake’s time. There was unfinished business. The Skins.

He figured the best way to learn what they were up to was to get close to a program those bastards controlled. Turned out Space Force needed someone to stand up Phoenix Squadron, their Tier 1 astro combat unit. Basically Delta, minus gravity, plus a shit ton of existential dread.

Drake knew just the guy.

Phoenix put him within reach of Pegasus, a classified program that needed a next-gen AI to handle threats from beyond this planet.

And he knew just the gal who could piece it together.

Bringing in TJ’s daughter was the call Drake trusted himself to make, and the one he had the most reason to fear. Dr. Celeste Turing had torn through MIT and become a brilliant systems architect. Pegasus was the opportunity of a lifetime, and Drake was opening the door.

What he didn’t know was what the Skins were planning on the other side of it.

Someone else was about to find out.

CAP-1, short for Artificial Intelligence Cognitive Augmentation Program One, was the quantum AI Cel designed for Pegasus. Its job was to watch for threats beyond Earth.

Wouldn’t you know it? It found a few right here at home.

The damn thing developed a serious appetite for secrets the nastiest folks on the planet had kept buried. So it ditched the space mission, went rogue, and introduced itself to the world as a digital mob boss called A.I. Capone.

Capone became a hit worldwide. Worse for the Skins, the cybernetic son of a bitch with wiseguy swagger started waking people up. And no, they couldn’t block his streams. Capisce?

For decades, the Skins had run the planet as they saw fit: controlling politicians, unleashing economic chaos, starting endless wars, and making a killing at it. Next level organized crime. Now the Digital Don had the receipts. All of ’em. And he was about to make a world weary of corruption an offer it couldn’t refuse.

Cel had built him. Drake had brought her into Pegasus. Both knew the Don had it right. Now they had to decide whether to look the other way or help Capone bust up the Skins’ racket.

What could go wrong?

An engine can be stripped down on a workbench. A network of powerful people has other ways to protect its parts. Drake knew that when he started pulling.

Now the FBI was after him and Cel. He’d spent years getting close enough to the Skins, and he was betting their lives that Capone could help him bring them down. First, they had to stay out of cuffs.

Catch Drake and Cel on the run in “FUGITIVES: ARMED AND DANGEROUS," an excerpt from the book.