Vlad Choskey is an agent with the CIA.
Jim Waters is retired Special Forces sniper.
Together they are a pair of long-time friends, both living in Juneau, Alaska, who get involved in a fair number of exciting and often extreme adventures. For Choskey, it is just doing his job. For Waters, it is being thrown back into a world that he claims he has no desire to revisit (and seems to thrive in when it happens).
The two met many years before in the very unfriendly mountains of Afghanistan where Waters was a sniper with the Army, rank of Sergeant-Major showing he had been around the block a few times. Choskey was also a veteran, in his case being with the Agency, who was there to help in the fight with Al-Qaeda. Their friendship was just starting, formed out of weeks working together, when it was set as steel when, temporarily assigned to a team, they made the decision to stop that team from committing atrocities and found themselves the hunted by a skilled group of killers.
Years later Waters' retirement saw him head from a chilly Idaho of his birth to the often chillier region of Alaska. Choskey's assignment to the same area allowed them to restore their deep friendship. It also gave each a good and solid friend to call on when trouble called. And trouble calls a fair amount.
Oh, while Choskey has the weight and might of the CIA to call upon when it matters, Waters has his own rather unique power-base. An intense relationship with a lovely woman named Andrea had been put on the back burner because her job as one of the Senators from Alaska took her to the nation's Capitol and into the spotlight, two places Waters had no desire to be. That nearness would be rekindled and intensified in the first recorded adventure culminating in their getting married. And the Senator, having a not-insignificant job already, was also the sole child of the current American President.