Patrick Coonan is an agent with the Quadrille.
That is the name of a special Department of Defense project for which Colonel Marlon Berkowitz was chosen to head. Berkowitz, a veteran of the Vietnam War, was told to "recruit and shape a very special unit of covert operatives to eliminate Soviet Bloc saboteurs operating in the United States". The sub-agency was created in the mid-80s and the primary period of operations that we follow in these adventures is the second half of that decade. The Cold War is still underway but the signs are emerging that the Soviet Union is in desperate trouble. Unfortunately for those in the intelligence community, that also meant that the infamous KGB was working overtime to save the ailing nation and the way chosen by it to accomplish that was to attack the West from the inside.
When looking for trained personnel to become his operatives, Berkowitz, rudely referred to by an opponent as "a bald chimpanzee", had several already in mind and prominent on that list was Coonan. We are told in an introduction of players in the first recorded adventure that Coonan was "a young Sgt. Major with the U.S. Ranger Corps, and an expert marksman who fought in Grenada performing covert missions assigned to him by Col. Berkowitz without Coonan's knowing. At the end of the conflict, he is stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia under Commander Silas Manor, and employed as master-instructor in the Rangers Sniper School."
Within the Quadrille, Coonan is given the codename of 'Delta'. His first indoctrination to the organization, once he had decided to accept the offer, came with an eight-page file he was told to read. "It turned out to be a manual explaining different ways of how to carry out a cold-blooded murder." An unusual welcome made interesting to Coonan once he got past the "I'm a trained sniper. I know how to kill." attitude and read the pages. He quickly came to realize that there was a lot to the killing business and all on "a different level of assassination" than what he was accustomed to.
Quite telling about the kind of man that Coonan is comes during the period of intense training that came with his new job. He spent several hours a day on the firing range, learned to fly several forms of aircraft, both winged and rotor, became an excellent driver, learned to sail, and considerably more. All of this training was recapped by him with the ending admission that "now I was having fun!"
He would have even more fun once he got into the field.