Dead Ringer

An agent approaches the main character in Las Vegas to recruit him into a clandestine position because he is a double for an agent who was recently assassinated. He is to meet the Director in Washington D. C. in the next few days With a short briefing he is immediately put to work in Central America fighting the drug cartel.

Fred was born on a sharecrop farm in the Midwest at the start of the Great Depression and first attended a rural school with nine other students ranging from the first to the sixth grades. He trapped for furs, hunted, fished, worked on farms and ranches mending fences, branding cattle, and vaccinating calves until joining the Air Force at age seventeen just after graduating from high school. During the Korean War, he was a mechanic on B-29 bombers on Pusan Field, Republic of Korea as an emergency crew member, and later, a Crew Chief and Line Chief assigned to the 5th Field Maintenance, 9th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force, Strategic Air Command, Travis AFB on SAC’s huge Atomic Bomb carrying B-36. After discharge just before Christmas of 1952, the former Staff Sergeant used his GI Bill and earned an AS in engineering, a BA, and an MBA over a twenty-three year time span. Mr. Barber has worked around the world; North, South, and Central America, the Caribbean, the UK, Scandinavia, Europe, Polynesia, Russia and Russian Siberia, Finland, South Africa, China, Korea, Japan, Australia, and the Middle East; Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. He and his wife lived for a time in the UK where he was part of the Status of Forces on a covert Spec Ops base in Yorkshire. Fred worked in Aerospace; DOD, DOE, FAA, and covert INTEL Agencies most of his adult life and still occasionally consults on spec ops projects. Some of Mr. Barber’s most recent contract/consultant tasks have been on the Airborne Laser Project (ABL) at the Birk Flight Test Center, Edwards AFB; in Minneapolis on large remotely controlled Navy guns; on a small covert base in the desolate Nevada Desert working with UAVs in the Special Projects Office supporting the DOD; in Washington on a carbon-fiber/aluminum composite aircraft; and lastly lecturing on ISO9001 and AS9001 Quality Systems in ten major US cities. Now, after working sixty-four years (until he was over 80), Mr. Barber is almost retired. He and his wife, Yvonne, of sixty-two years, reside in Arizona within view of a beautiful desert lake—Lake Havasu—and the ancient Colorado River. Fred is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) of Las Vegas and sits on the Education Committee