The Handyman

Jake Blackwell wasn’t always a handyman. As an Army Ranger and part of the elite 75th Ranger Regiment, he’d done four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to be taken out by an IED while closing in on a sniper nest outside of Ramadi. The result? Traumatic brain injury, otherwise known as TBI. His life as a close combat and special operations specialist was over. What was not over, however, were the lingering effects of his TBI. Seizures, blackouts, and memory loss were all part of the problem, and no one wanted him on their payroll after ten years of fighting for his country. For Jake, there was no choice but to go into business for himself.
His last job seemed normal enough: spackling, painting, nothing he hadn’t done a hundred times before for other wealthy clients who lived in prestigious Potomac. It didn’t turn out to be normal after all, however, when he stumbled across a package containing what appeared to be blueprints of some sort. But what kind of blueprints contained the word detonator? What was he looking at? He answered his own question when he discovered that the plans were for a W54 nuclear device, known otherwise as the backpack nuke. It was one of ours, it weighted just fifty-four pounds, and the implications were mind-boggling. Someone could take out the Empire State Building with this thing, along with several other city blocks, and if the blast didn’t kill you, the radiation would. Literally tens of thousands could die with one detonation, and there would be no way to stop it from happening. What could two of these devices do, he wondered. Or ten, or fifty!
Why were those blueprints in that house? Who was the owner, and why did he possess plans, our plans, to construct a miniature nuclear device? Jake pursues the answers to those questions, risking not only his own life but that of his daughter who is kidnapped by the terrorists as part of their plan to get the blueprints back from Jake.