Riley Covington is an American football player.
That profession is quite a distance from being a spy and Covington likes it that way. He is first and foremost a linebacker and his goal is to find and hit the guy on the opposing side who is carrying the ball, stopping forward movement and hopefully making him drop that pigskin. Getting a position in the big league is tough and keeping it is even tougher, as Covington has found out the hard way, but he is not a quitter.
What places Covington in this collection of spies and spy-hunters and the like is that fact that when he is not on the gridiron chasing runners, he is finding himself out on the streets going up against terrorists who have found their way into the States with the sole purpose of hurting its people.
We first meet Covington in 2003 when he is a 2nd Lieutenant leading a platoon in the dangerous and decidedly hostile country of Afghanistan. He and his men are part of the elite U.S. Air Force's Special Operations Command. It fell to his team to pre-scout combat zones in preparation for upcoming combat. "The special-ops personnel were dropped in from high altitude to take meteorologic and geographic measurements, then silently evacuated. Very clean, very quiet." Except when things went sideways.
Covington "was two years out of the Air Force Academy, where he had been a three-time WAC/MWC Defensive Player of the Year and, as a senior, had won the Butkus Award as the nation's top linebacker. He was six-two, rock hard, and lightning fast. His nickname at the Academy had been Apache-later shortened to "Pach"-after the AH-64 attack helicopter. Hit 'em low, hit 'em hard, hit 'em fast! Riley had sent more opposing players staggering to the sidelines than he could count." As he graduated from Colorado Springs, he "had been selected by the Colorado Mustangs in the third round of the Pro Football League draft, and commentators believed Riley had the possibility of a promising PFL career ahead of him. However, his post-Academy commitment meant putting that opportunity off for a couple of years. In the meantime, he had spent his last two thirty-day leaves in Mustangs training camps before rushing back out to wherever AFSOC wanted him next."
We start following Covington, except for a flashback to a particularly harrowing experience during the war, when he has served his commitment and was again seeking a life as professional football player. We are there when he is finding that the fighting of America's enemies did not end when his time with the USAF did.