Fatal Combat. Don Pendleton

or she desired. He envied them, because he had come to associate his boredom with never being forced to work hard.

      He vowed to change that.

      He hit the street running after graduation. He parlayed his business degree into entry-level positions at first a finance firm, then a high-tech start-up. He moved to Detroit because, of all the cities he had ever visited, it was in Detroit that he had felt the least comfortable, the least safe. He set out to build a career there.

      He currently owned three companies, all of them profitable, all of them controlled by him. His firms made circuit boards, time and frequency synchronization equipment, industrial toolholders and tool bits. He had been profiled in every major business magazine on both coasts; he was heralded as the man almost single-handedly bringing domestic manufacturing back to the United States.

      It was in Detroit that he first thought to punish and challenge his body as well as his mind. He began studying martial arts. He earned a black belt, and then another. He moved from style to style, learning, doing, being, becoming.

      And he was still bored.

      He was rich. He could afford to hire other executives with similar promise and drive to run his companies for him, and he did. He took up the sports of the idle rich, traveling the country and beyond. He found extreme sports, and for the briefest of moments, the adrenaline rush of cliff diving, of free climbing, of white-water rafting and other dangerous pursuits almost kept him interested. But it wasn’t enough.