John Dempsey is an agent with Ember.
The official name of the organization is Task Force Ember and it answers only to the U.S. President with his Chief of Staff acting as a cut-out. Under these auspices, it has tremendous clout to get work done, all clandestinely, but everyone in that group is aware of the fact that in any political environment, if bad things hit a fan, plausible deniability will come into effect and the Chief Executive will almost certainly claim no knowledge of or authorization of whatever trouble Ember found itself in. Those inside Ember will be on their own. Dempsey, being the key operative inside this new group, is quite happy with the arrangement.
But Before there was Ember, there was the U.S. Navy Seals and a Senior Chief Jack Kemper, a member of that elite Tier One fighting force for over two decades. Kemper loved his job and loved his military family/comrades, even at the expense of his own marriage and estrangement from his teenage son. He was good at it and had passed up promotion to Master Chief to be able to keep doing it. "Kemper did not consider himself a 'details guy'. He really didn't care what JSOC wanted him to blow up, clean up, or pick up; just tell him when and where, and he would get the job done. He had participated in so many missions as a member of the Joint Special Operations Command's covert Tier One SEAL team during the past twenty years that he'd lost count." He wanted it to continue.
Then a nasty wound in a mission put him temporarily on the sideline and a subsequent mission went incredibly wrong and all of his colleagues paid the ultimate price and even Kemper, in a betrayal that should never have happened, was thought dead.
Following that came the offer of a new life and a chance to go after everyone who had any involvement in that terrible day and make them pay. But if it became known that Jack Kemper had survived, he would always have a target on his back by those who would want to correct that and finish the job. To become part of this elite fighting force, Jack Kemper had to stay dead. And John Dempsey had to come to life.
Good Lines:
- "Regret was an unproductive preoccupation for old men."