Assignment: Destiny! Volume I: The Strange and Convoluted Lineage of the Flungk Z-44 Mk I "Boomerang" (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780988536463)

Here's what the editors at Warrior Sparrow Press know about J. Rutger Buck: J. Rutger Buck shows up at our offices sporadically, wearing jungle boots, cargo pants and a ratty G-4 flight jacket, and carrying a beat-up World War II Army Air Force issue Officer's Garment Bag full of dirty clothes and a helmet bag full of contraband. He is always just back from somewhere that we have never heard of, but it's a place that's in the headline news a couple of weeks later. We know he smokes Lucky Strikes because he's always throwing the empty packages on the floor. We think he has a stash of WW II C-rations somewhere that he gets them out of. He won't tell us what he does, but he says that he has wrecked more airplanes than most pilots have flown, usually in places where they can't recover them from. Men with strange accents and women with dusky voices are constantly calling the office trying to find him. We take down their numbers if they give them to us, but he never calls them back. Sometimes, after he's been here, there will be a guy standing under the streetlamp out front in the fog and rain, wearing a grey trenchcoat and a tattered brown fedora hat, and looking up at our front window. We used to run down to the street to try and catch him, but he would always be gone when we got there. He's getting older now, and his voice has gotten more gravelly, and there are now wrinkles in the lines of his face, that is, what you can see of it behind the Aviator's sun glasses that he always wears, day or night, indoors or out. He sleeps on a couch in the back office, with a loaded Browning 9mm with a round in the chamber and an empty bottle of Cutty Sark on the coffee table. He'll stick around a few days, and talk about retiring to a little ranch in the highlands of New Mexico or Arizona, maybe around Silver City. Then, one morning we'll come into the office, and he'll be gone again. And even though he is one colossal pain in the butt when he's here, we find ourselves hoping that he comes back one more time.