Steve Rawlings is a kidnap recovery expert.
He got his start in that line of work as a young man. When his parents and siblings died in a car accident when he was fifteen and living in Oregon, he ran off rather than go into the foster system. Being tall and broad for his age, he was able to work as an itinerant farm and ranch hand throughout the West, working his way slowly south until he eventually reached Mexico City. There a run-in with muggers out for his last few pesos saw him take down three before the Federales showed up. Rawlings was grabbed by two American strangers out to keep him from prison.
That rescue took him to Guatemala where he went to work for a private military unit where the jobs took him "into bad places throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean to deal with bad people. Our work included taking down the private criminal gangs of third world dictators, a lot of them communists, but all of them crooked! But we also took on jobs retrieving kidnap victims, wealthy businessmen or their families that had been snatched for profit, a very big business in those countries, even today, but overall, we went after bad actors doing bad things to good people."
Rawlings would stay in that line of work until he was in his late thirties. After that, his life got rather strange and he made a few wrong choices, including marriages to two different "nice girls" who did not stay nice to him for long. The second such union resulted in three children who took their mother's side in the divorce so when we actually meet Rawlings, he is back to his itinerant days.
After an interesting small war on behalf of a Wyoming ranch couple going up against a greedy mining company with some very unpleasant associations with enemies of the U.S., the 6'2" Rawlings will find himself back, at age 58, in working with the American government to combat those who would use kidnapping as but a stepping stone to even nastier plans. He may have gotten older but his recent life as a ranchhand has kept him in terrific shape, which is a good thing considering the unpleasant folks he would soon be going up against.
As Rawlings tells us, "my call sign is Stiletto, given to me years ago because I have a proclivity to using sharp objects in my work. A guy once told me I was the type of person who liked to smell the fear on the people I went after, up close and personal, you might say."