His father was a big man given to wild mood swings that regularly erupted into terrifying violence.
John’s mother kept vodka bottles hidden in the house and took combinations of pills as she drank “orange juice” from early morning to late evening, when the sounds of the father’s snoring would at last release the tension in her shoulders.
It was not a fun home. John didn’t stay there much, only enough to keep the heat off his mother. Instead, he ran with a rough crowd, got in fights, did minor theft and B&E, and forged identification to sell to underage college kids so they could buy alcohol.
He had a knack for it. John analyzed things and came up with methods to improve the documents. He always went home each day, but seemed to incur his father’s wrath at an ever more frequent pace. Some of the beatings left John with eggplant colored bruises and ragged cuts that should have been stitched. However, he was a large boy and grew larger and stronger over the years. Things came to a head shortly before his fifteenth birthday.
John arrived home that afternoon and saw his father raising a flashlight to strike his wife as she tried to get behind the couch. John caught his father’s arm and shoved the older man against the wall.
“Oh, boy, you shouldn’t a done that. Now I’m gonna have to make an example of you.”
“Get with it then,” John said. He was six-one and weighed one hundred sixty pounds. He had also lived in the weight room at school for two years and was powerful beyond his slender frame. His father was an inch taller and forty pounds heavier, but John didn’t care. It was time to stop him.
It was a terrible battle that broke furniture, knocked holes in sheetrock walls, destroyed the television, and pulled the phone line out of the wall, but in the end, it was John Sunday who stood over his father.
He said to the man on the floor, “You ever touch her again, and I’ll do worse than this.” He toed the man’s chin, “You understand me?” His father nodded, glassy eyed.
John went to the bedroom where his mother cowered on the bed. She said, “Johnny, you get out of here. He’ll hurt you when he gets up.”
“He won’t be getting up for a while.” John said, “What you have to do is leave here. Get some clothes, get whatever money there is and go. You can start over somewhere else, live a decent life. I’m going, too. I’ll contact you when I can.”
John hugged her a long time before breaking and walking to the door. He stopped and said, “Call the ambulance before you leave.” When John went out, he didn’t glance at his father.
John Sunday didn’t waste any time. He altered his own birth certificate to show he was eighteen and headed for the nearest army recruiter. The war in Vietnam was escalating and it seemed like the perfect place to hide out for a few years.
He thrived in the military environment, put on ten pounds of muscle and excelled at self-defense, firearms and explosives. He also showed an unusual ability to pick up foreign languages.
John was assigned to the First Battalion, 7th Cavalry. In November, one day before his fifteenth birthday, John and four hundred other soldiers were transported by helicopter to LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, where they fought over two thousand highly trained North Vietnamese regulars in a three-day battle so fierce
the Vietnamese renamed the place The Valley of Screaming Souls.
It was while in the military that he found his calling. A CIA team needed to work clandestinely across the border in Laos. John had some knowledge of the border area and could speak Vietnamese, so was assigned with them. He hit it off with the men and, although their mission didn’t locate its target, they kept him in mind for other missions. After John’s military time was up, the CIA invited him to join.
He worked Southeast Asia until the end of the war, and then had assignments in Europe, India and South America. His specialty was solo deep cover ops. One assignment in the seventies also introduced him to a new technology, which he instantly took to: the personal computer and the internet. His expertise was all the more unusual because of his age. Most of the computer geniuses setting the pace were young and independent. John learned from them all and became an expert at hacking personal and company computers, including those in other countries.
He met his wife Elizabeth while stationed in Washington, D.C. working the computers and getting his headquarters time. She was smart, pretty, and funny. They hit it off and soon became inseparable. Elizabeth helped him reconnect with his mother shortly before she died of liver failure.
Life was better than it had ever been, and to top it off, Elizabeth bore him a child: Jett.
Jett was nine when Elizabeth discovered a lump in her breast.
**
Jett lost her mother two years later. John was devastated. He might have stayed in the depression if it hadn’t been for the kid. During the next year, Jett kept close to her father and comforted him in small ways, made optimistic statements, told jokes, and fixed meals. It paid off. John slowly recovered his enjoyment of life. He and Jett became very close, with John talking to her about adult things and asking her opinion on a number of issues.
Jett was twelve when John returned from a two-day assignment with his arm in a sling, and a bullet wound in the shoulder that wept a pink stain through the bandage.
John thought about her that night and came to a decision. If anything happened to him, there was no one else for her. The next morning he began to teach Jett the things he had learned over the years, things both legal and illegal, things that could mean survival.
By thirteen, Jett could pick the lock on any door and disarm most alarm systems, car or home. She could hot wire vehicles, repair engines, handle a checkbook, case a neighborhood, lose a tail, and survive on the streets or in the wilderness. She also learned quickly how to hack into company computers, and how to forge a new identity.
John took her on assignments, both as a cover and because he loved her and didn’t want to be parted. Jett began participating after the third one, primarily acting as a decoy or lookout.
By fourteen she was tall, beanpole thin and could give him fits when they practiced Krav Maga. On one assignment in Miami, Florida during the Christmas holidays, several burly Cubans stopped John when he tried to enter a condo in South Beach. John was after a file put together by a recent Cuban stowaway who lived on the second floor. In the file was correspondence from Castro’s brother outlining a plan for expanding espionage in Florida.
Jett saw what was happening with her father, so she went to the side of the condo, shinnied up a manicured gumbo-limbo to a window, jimmied it and went inside. A shower was running and a man was singing some Spanish song. She moved past the open bathroom door and made it to the master bedroom where a locked file cabinet sat in a corner. She had it open in seconds, grabbed the file and was about to close it when she saw a copier in the small office off the bedroom. Jett went in, closed the door to keep the noise down, and copied the file.
She returned the original, locked the cabinet, and was out the window and down the tree before the singer finished his shower.