The one valuable lesson his soldier daddy had taught him was that the Pentagon purchased more weapons than anyone and overpaid for every single one of them. And even better, when you needed more profit, you just asked for it and they gave it to you. It wasn’t their money, after all. And there was nothing easier to give away than someone else’s cash, especially since America had the biggest piggy bank in the world. It seemed a damn fine business to be in, because as Creel quickly found out, one really could sell the U.S. military $12,000 toilets and $9,000 hammers and actually get away with it under a mountain of legal trickery and congressional hearing mumbo-jumbo.

Creel had spent the next several decades building what was now the largest defense conglomerate in the world, the Ares Corporation. According to Forbes magazine he was the fourteenth richest person on the planet with over twenty billion dollars to his name.

His late mother had been a native Greek with a fiery temper and fierce ambition he’d inherited along with her dark good looks. After Creel’s father had been logistically snafued in Korea, she’d remarried to a man higher up the socioeconomic scale who’d shunted Creel off to boarding schools and not very good ones at that. While the sons of other wealthy men had everything handed to them, the outsider Creel endured their taunts and sweated and scraped for every nickel. Those experiences had given him armor for skin.

Naming his company after the Greek god of war was a tribute to the mother he’d loved above all others. And Creel was proud of what his company produced. The name stenciled on his four-hundred-foot motor yacht was Shiloh, one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War.