A/N – This is the update. I didn't want to confuse you.

Prologue:

The cutting, pulsating roar of a helicopter broke the desert silence. The rhythmic whop, whop, whop, whop, whop, whop of the blades pounded on his ear drums as he sat in the back of the helicopter. The occasional times he looked out he could see, or thought he could see, little tufts of fur and scales disappearing under rocks and below the small amount of plants that scattered the area as the helicopter approached.

The desert was hot. The desert was dry. By definition it was definitely a desert. No water for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. Off in the distance could be seen the magnificent desert horizon with its blue glow. Around the edges of the desert were high, towering mountain ranges; chipped pinnacles of stone capped with a soft white frosting of new snow.

Behind them were the lights of a port town, an adjoining aircraft carrier moored several miles off shore; they could see its welcoming, blinking lights on the hanger deck, fighter jets landing every now and again, supported by nothing but the churning, swirling, cold, dark waters of the Indian Ocean beneath. The lights were a twinkling, rain-washed, watery orange - like street lights on a rainy night.

Ahead of them was the sun, sinking to meet the horizon in a graceful dip, its hot waves reddened by the pluming columns of smoke wafting up from the burning deserted wrecks here and there. It was very warm and still burned like crazy, heating up the burning, dusty, choking sand underneath them. CUTLAS very much enjoyed Middle Eastern sunsets, things of majesty and beauty - there was nothing on earth to rival them, at least, not in terms of sunsets.

The helicopter flew onward through the bright sunny air, occasionally doing lazy turns and loops here there, meandering about as the Captain had her fun, lazy pushing the stick side to side in a slightly amused fashion. She softly nudged it one way and back the other, making the long, black, smooth, graceful helicopter do soft maneuvers in the almost cloudless air; she batted the stick in almost the same manner as a kitten would a ball of yarn.

"Ey, Cap'in! You know this ain' fun-'ime with the helicop'er, righ'?" the lieutenant grinned from his co-pilot's seat next to her, the three silver stars on his clean and freshly-laundered British flight suit glinting in the Arabian sunlight. "We go' a mission 'o do," he stated, peering keenly over his darkly tinted aviator glasses briefly before turning quickly back to the stick clenched firmly in his hand.

The Captain grinned with her customary toothy grin, the teeth white but in bad need of braces. She leaned back in the elevated ejector seat, the four pin harness digging slightly into her stomach, and inched the helicopter onto a slight roll, sweeping a small pile of dust that had collected on the windshield and failed to be swept off by the blades off into the air below them. She righted the helicopter and lightly punched him in the arm. "Keep your eyes in the sky lieutenant," she replied to the young man.

He grinned and chewed on his stick of grass some more. "You know, I'll never understand why you guys say 'lieu'enan'' like it's go' an 'f' in i'."

She scoffed, "Oh, come on! You were raised in New Zealand for heavens sake! You're meant to say 'lieutenant' like that - come to think of it, you don't sound New Zealand at all."

"Ah well. And, FYI, down there we say 'Kiwi,'" he teased.

"Come off it!" she trilled in her resonating British accent, her hand slapping him on the shoulder. Suddenly, her face donned a serious look, "Take the wheel for a sec," she told him and leaned round her seat to look in the back of the expertly piloted MH-60L DAP Blackhawk. In the back, with the doors wide open, sat an assembly of men, most rather heavily built and holding assault rifles.

"Oi! You guys alright back there?" she asked, looking at each in turn. All of them gave her a small nod, some tipping their berets in her direction. One of them coughed and looked at her. He was taller than the rest of them and much less powerfully built. Over his insulating white clothes he was wearing kevlar with a pistol strapped to the side and was obviously suffering from the heat. On his nose sat a pair of very strongly wired glasses and from under his black beret could be seen some locks of fading red hair. His face looked kind, but filled with memories of experiences he'd rather not have had. He looked much older than he was, as if he'd been used too much in his life.

"Excuse me," he said politely, "You've been stationed here awhile, correct?" it seemed rhetorical and he continued without waiting for an answer. "What's it like down there?" he asked skeptically.

The Captain looked at him curiously. "Dear lord, you're CUTLAS, aren't you?" He nodded. The Captain shook her head, "I'll tell you this, it's a bloody crap-fest down there." She turned back to the instrument panel, already lit with its glowing reddish light; she had barely realized that the sun had set. Its last rays were already arching over the horizon.

There was silence and CUTLAS sat back in his bare-bones fabric seat, trying to take what little comfort he could get out of it. He looked out the bay doors and stuck his hand out into the jet stream, tilting it at various angles to make it go up and down. He smiled slightly, no matter where he was he loved the laws of aerodynamics - he knew his son would too. He had only just realized it was night and peered keenly out into the darkness.

It was so different from America, the Middle East. There were no streets in the desert, no road signs, no street lamps, no late-night clubs, no late traffic. It was quiet out here, for vast miles there was nothing but the darkness and sand. Here and there he could pinpoint pinpricks of the warm, orangey light of campfires. He turned his gaze upwards to the stars. Just hours ago he had been on an F-14 flying onto an aircraft carrier from halfway around the world.

As he looked out silently, the white, bathing light of the bay casting an eery shadow on him, he sent a prayer for his wife and children. He would come back from this, for them. He had been through worse. Heck, his recruitment had been worse. Probably. He felt a gaze on his neck and turned. An voice rang form the cockpit over the roar of the rotor blades, "Lights out, we'll be over the DZ, ETA twenty minutes." The lights dimmed to a very soft, low orange.

The man next to him nodded in his direction, "Do not worry, you will be fine," he grinned, "Besides, you have got us."

CUTLAS smiled gratefully at him, "Thanks Anil."

He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He could picture his wife, her swaying, angelic body tempting him closer as she wandered about in their wonderfully scented flower garden. She bent over, teasing him further and he strode up to her, embracing her with a kiss and playfully grabbing her apron. She giggled and broke away from their kiss to run off into the yard. He laughed heartily and ran after her, trying, and deliberately failing, to grab the hem of her silky sun dress. "Mommy, Daddy!" came a cry as a young girl ran towards them. The man grinned, ran toward her, about to scoop her up…

He felt a gentle shake and opened his eyes to stare right into one of the reinforced halogen lights. He turned and straightened himself out in his seat, looking over to Anil. "We will be over the Drop Zone in about a minute," he told him, looking deep into his eyes, making sure he was ok. CUTLAS nodded a little too vigorously and slumped back into his chair.

Sure enough, in a minute or so, he felt the helicopter swaying gently in the air, like a gravity-defying feather, as it came to a hover over the desert. Down below and around he could see the fires of a camp. He stiffened in his chair, this was it. He heard the distinctive sound of ropes as the soldiers around him lowered them to the ground and began zipping down them on their harnesses until he and Anil were the last ones.

Anil nodded solemnly at him and attached his own line before jumping out the door and sliding down the rope. CUTLAS hesitantly clipped his own carabiner to the rope. He felt a gentle, but strong hand on his shoulder and turned to see the Captain leaning around in her chair. "Hey, see you on the other side," she smiled, slapping him on the shoulder, "And just remember, we'll be your eye in the sky. Things won't go wrong."

He smiled and turned, placing his booted feet on the edge on the bay door floors and feeling the wash of the rotor on his neck. Before he jumped out he heard her add "You really don't look cut out for this." He smiled but didn't turn around.

"I'm not" he replied before jumping into the inky blackness of the night, catching his last glimpse of the coldly lit attack helicopter and of the woman's face framed in the door, a long strand of green hair blowing in the wind.

He sat up in his roughly woven cot, sweat drenching his face. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and wiped his face in a towel. It did more harm than good, sand and dust entering his firmly shut mouth. He spit it out and massaged his parched and cracked lips. He took a sip out of his canteen and swirled the bitter-tasting water around in his mouth before forcing himself to swallow it. He gagged.

CUTLAS hated sleeping now. Utterly detested it. Always. Every time he went to bed. Horror. It was worse than the reality. Well, almost worse. They were stranded. He wasn't even sure they were trying to complete the mission anymore. He just wanted to get home. To his family, to his son, to his daughter, to his wife. But he was here, somewhere.

Every time he lay down; lay down and closed his eyes; lay down, closed his eyes and drifted off into a realm of sleep. Every time, his eyes would burn. He slept - or, more accurately, he sleep-wrestled with the cot. He tossed and turned. All he could do was stand helpless, watching, frozen in horror. He would stand rigid. The fire, the flames, the acidic, choking smoke.

Every time he would relive it. Standing, Anil dragging him along in his wake as he watched in devastation, in shame, in complete remorse for his failure. CUTLAS would relive it every night. He would watch the smoke trail, see the flash, here the explosion and watch as the fireball plummeted, like a cold hard rock through void, to the ground and hit with a deafening explosion. Watch, as the smoke rose; watch, as the flames licked the bent, broken and twisted metal frame; watch as the crowds of people swarmed on it like ants, machine guns firing in triumph.

He rubbed his face and sat up in his cot. He held up his badly bruised left arm up to his face and, in the cool, purple predawn light, squinted at the watch's bruised, burnt and dented face. He moved it back and forth, trying to catch the light of the single burning white light from outside his half-dug in hill on his watch's in an attempt to read the time.

Outside he could hear the rattling of a machine gun in the distance, keenly listen to the un-orchestrated booming thuds of explosions as they went off, close his eyes and meditate on the shouting, booing, hissing and war cries. How had humanity become so… beastly? A roaring, moral-less, depraved animal, killing what it wanted, murdering, raping and crushing. Even at five in the morning they were at it.

While looking through the small slot left by the tent between it and the dirt embankment that served as a window, CUTLAS heard someone enter his tent. He sighed, he knew it was time. The man handed him a pistol. "We move out in thirty minutes," he said, his voice commanding and final. CUTLAS nodded and took the pistol. Another day, another dollar.

"Time to move out" he muttered to himself before exiting the tent and stretching outside before the sun made things too hot.

It was official. He hated his job. Well, not exactly. But it was boring as hell. All his life he had been given these jobs, defying the dreams he had had as a child. But that was just something to suck up, wasn't it? He had only been assigned here for four months, the same amount of time as… but he wasn't meant to know that, was he? He picked up another letter, scanned it briefly with all the interest of a fly reading a quantum physics book and shoved it in the associated out pile.

He wasn't meant to know a lot of things he did. He knew why he was here. He was just another paper-pusher, wasn't he? Another 'mindless' drone of the system. A suit, an average joe, a run-of-the-mill, another steve. Just one more person to do the medial work. Just like that song… it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. That someone was him. He fished out another letter from the pile, Mrs. Beckheart, and tossed it into another pile.

Letters, letters and more letters. He gazed at the pile of them, needing to be sorted, and rubbed his head while grabbing another. Flynn Family the letter read. This was why he was here, this was what he'd been ordered to do, this was his job in this stupid paper-smelling trap. He'd been told it was for security purposes, he'd been told it was important. He snorted.

Important? Security? Important my foot, he thought, snorting again. Run of the mill indeed! Who else did jobs like these? Bad question, he realized, hundreds, if not thousands, of people did the exact same thing he did, sorting piles of paper all day. He could understand why it was called 'paper pushing.' By God, he'd die of blood loss from paper cuts before he'd drop dead of anything else.

Paper and more paper in this place. They could never get enough paper. Always, there was more being hauled in by the mailmen in their great sacks. Piles of the things. He couldn't imagine how they able to fit all of them inside the small post office, though it was probably a sign that he wasn't able to catch the slightest glimpse of the walls amongst the leaning piles of letters everywhere. If asked, he wouldn't be able to tell you what color they were.

He sighed audibly and slumped back in his rickety wooden seat, its splintery wood digging slightly into his fresh, clean black suit. He rested his elbows on the small faded blue table and interlocked his fingers, resting his hardly prominent and clean-shaven chin on top. Why had he ever chosen this as his job? Because it got money?, was the simple answer. Yes, it was boring. Yes, it was tedious. And yes, it didn't have too many perks. One of the few it did have was a good pay.

He was so glad his job wasn't being a mailman. That would be a never-ending crap-hole, he thought. No, he had only been stationed at the post-office for three and a half months. Every one liked him, he was a clean cut and respectable young mean, smartly dressed in a business suit and a smile that told you he was intelligent, but not cocky. He was intelligent indeed. From starting out as a junior official he had risen quickly through the ranks until he landed here.

The boss liked him. The postmaster liked him. Everyone liked him. He was average. He was normal. He was an average joe. Everywhere he went, people smiled at his carefree and hardworking attitude. He prided himself on his moral and ethical standards. And that was why he had chosen to uphold the law in the very same way that all small boys dreamed of. Nobody would have ever suspected he was NSA Liaison to the CIA Danville department.

He stretched out his arm and grabbed the letter he had been holding previously back. Very clear. Very, very clear, was the address: 82 Maple Drive. Those were the golden words. The words that made sure this letter would never get to its intended destination. This letter, that had travelled straight from the scorching deserts of the Middle East, blow by sand and hand written in a locally-made ink brewed by Arab merchants. Across the Indian and Pacific Oceans and across the wide west. Intended to reach a specific, very cared-about, person. And it would never get there.

He felt a twinge in his heart as he turned the letter in his hand. This man, this hardworking man. A defender of the country, a defender of freedom. Out on a dangerous mission upholding the integrity and liberty of his country was sending a letter to his loved ones at home. And after all that, this was what he got. A young, career-focused NSA agent thoughtlessly making sure it never saw the light of day to protect against "threats to national security."

What a joke, he scoffed. Who was he to stop this man's letter? He had done nothing but serve the nation tirelessly, putting it ahead of his family and social life. And now he wanted to give them one slight comfort and the liberty was being denied to him. He deserved to comfort his family, to assure him that he was not dead. He was a good man. The agent had met him once.

But that was part of the job. The man's eyes hardened. He knew this was what would happen when he signed up. He was an agent. All contact with the outside world was to be severed. Anything outside the mission did not exist. He did not exist. He was a shadow. A ghost. A phantom of the most intelligent kind. Highly trained and emotionally un-reactive; at least, he was supposed to be.

And, it was his job, as CIA Liaison, Danville Department, to do his duty to his country and place the letter in a dusty NSA file in a derelict warehouse where it would never again be known to anyone outside of the NSA. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Wasn't that always what Spock had said? And it was true. By stopping this letter getting to his family he was doing his country, and his kinsfolk, a favor. He was doing it for the greater good.

Or was he? His eyes softened as he twiddled with the letter absentmindedly and he listened to the tiny voice in the back of his head that he had been ignoring for seven years. This was going to this man's family. His wife and children whom he loved. Was this really going to benefit everyone? Or even anyone? Should he really be doing this? Was it likely that this man had put national security? He took one hand off the letter and reached down to the black briefcase that the letter was supposed to be disappearing in. His hand twitched and he hesitated. A bead of sweat, that had nothing to do with the hot summer air outside, rolled down the side of his cleanly cut face.

His job, or the right thing? Nobody would know… his hand slid over the smooth briefcase and clicked it open. He looked at the letter and turned it over in his hand once more then dropped it in the briefcase. He'd make the decision later, he decided. For the time being, the letter could stay in the briefcase. "Hey, your shift's over!" he heard someone call to him from the front. He nodded to himself and shut the briefcase with a 'snap!' He'd make the decision about the letter tomorrow.

He stood up out of the chair and stretched with a yawn. As one of the mailmen passed him, going into the back office, they exchanged a polite "Hello" before the agent grabbed his briefcase and navigated his way through the tower cliffs of paper precariously oiled on the surrounding desks. As he walked he thought about the letter, what should he do? "Have a nice day," he smiled at the lady in the front office as he walked out of the shop. How on earth was he going to make the decision? He sighed, he needed a coffee.

As the agent left the janitor walked into his office to sweep it and give it a general clean. It wasn't very dirty. just covered in too much paper. He grumbled as he swept up letter after letter on the floor. Beckheart, Charleston, Flynn, O'Niel… the letters were truly endless. He swept and swept until they were all up off the floor and deposited neatly for sorting on the desks. Someone would get to them soon, he decided. Boy, it was a long time since he'd seen the name 'Flynn' around.

Central Tel Aviv was nice this time of year, he thought. He walked past some of the medium height skyscraper apartments and raised his head to admire them. They were nothing. He had seen Western skyscrapers in America. Those were skyscrapers. Towering over the streets, homes of the extreme aristocracy and plutocracy. These were mere imitations of what the Americans had built.

But it was his country. It was Israel. He had always loved Israel. Reading stories about it and dreaming about how he, no one else, could make Israel great, a giant among nations. When he had finally set his foot on Israeli soil he had fallen in love with the country. And now here he was, walking the nicely paved streets of Tel Aviv under the warm Israeli sun.

But he couldn't enjoy it. No, he couldn't enjoy it. He was here on a mission. Or, more correctly, he was here to get a mission. He was making his way idly towards a ten o'clock meeting with the Mossad Director of Foreign Operations [Western Asia]. He stood for a second more, looking up at the fluffy white clouds making their own way over the top of the skyscrapers on a firm, steady eastern breeze, before he looked back down at the sticky black asphalt ground and shoved his hands into his neatly stitched suit's pockets before starting to walk toward HaKirya again.

He walked past more buildings and peered at each curiously until he came to the gate to the fenced-off military base. As he got close to the vomit-inducingly clean stainless-steel gate one of the IDF guards, a slightly shorter than average man with dark tan skin and a small, messy mustache that looked like it had simply been allowed to grow but had become stunted, dressed in pine forest green tactical gear, held out his hand. "Identification?" he asked, his tone robotic and emotionless, something generally expected of soldiers, or, at least, guards.

The suited man turned slightly, looking on the inside flap of his jacket while fishing around in his pocket. After a few minutes, during which the guard's face did not visibly move but seemed to become harder, as if he was not amused at all, the suited man held out a smoothly laminated card with his picture and a name on it. The guards took it in his roughly, and dustily, gloved hand and looked at it scrutinizingly for what seemed like a millisecond. "Special Agent?" he asked in gruff Hebrew.

The man nodded and the guard handed the card back to him. The man didn't question the guard's judgement as he passed through the heavily wired and alarmed security gate and simply accepted the fact that the guards were hand picked, sometimes; he was sure this one had been. He glanced back down at the card in his hand and sighed before slipping it back into his pocket. He didn't like being Agent CASPER, it wasn't the being an agent that bothered him, it was the name. Honestly, they couldn't give him a better name than CASPER? He sounded like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

He shook his head to clear it of these, not so much unnerving as just plain weird, thoughts and shoved the card back in his pocket. He looked up at the glass doors of the compound just as he tucked his coat back in and pushed them open, revealing a large square corridor with smooth, un-chipped grey walls and light blue-grey carpeting. It was almost as if robots lived here, he thought.

Just as he was walking in, trying to ignore the horribly menacing-looking guards on both sides of the doors, he was greeted by a young man a a neat sky blue suit with a large, pearly white smile that seemed to stretch his face and a bowler haircut that was so neatly combed CASPER would have thought it belonged to a doll had he not seen it clearly attached to the man in front of him. The thought that it might have been a wig had barely occurred to him when the man open his mouth. "Hello, Corporal! I'm Lieutenant Amir with Amam. I'll be assisting you indirectly in your upcoming mission - it's a joint operation. Here, this way to the briefing room."

CASPER could've sworn he felt the wind get sucked right out of him as the Lieutenant talked and was overwhelmed enough that he just took a breath and followed him down the corridor, through several more side-corridors, through some locked doors and down one or two staircases. CASPER hadn't even had a chance to introduce himself before he was sat down in an unfurnished room and found himself face to face with the Director of Foreign Operations [Western Asia], Amir seated next to him.

"Good afternoon, Corporal, Lieutenant," he greeted them rather uninterestedly, to CASPER he seemed like was the hyper-serious workaholic type; when he opened his mouth barely a second later, it almost confirmed it for CASPER. "Right, down to business." He reached down under the table to a briefcase and pulled out a thin dead-yellow file with the Hollywood-esque 'Top Secret' stamped in Hebrew across the front which he laid down on the table, scooting it over in front of CASPER and Amir.

He folded his hands and rested his elbows on the table staring intently while CASPER slipped open the file and pulled out the few sheets of paper and pictures that were inside. After reading them over and glancing at some of the photographs he turned his attention back to the Director. "This is quite a high value target… and a major asset to the Americans," he stated, looking intently at the Director. He glanced back down at the papers, "What, exactly, is the mission?"

The Director smiled slightly, it didn't suit him, and reached over to one of the pictures. "You catch on fast, Corporal. This-" he held up the picture, "-is him in Moscow, 1978. This-" he held up another picture of the same man talking with another, "-is him in 1995, Jerusalem… after his defection. This-" he pointed to the man he was talking with, "-is Sergey Kuropatkin, a Russian agent working in Jerusalem. We suspect that his loyalties may not lie with the Americans."

"That could be a major breech," observed CASPER, "But why the sudden interest? That was almost five years ago, why now?"

The Director sighed, "Five years, five decades. What difference does it make?" he asked rhetorically, "But the reason now is that our intelligence reports indicate that the US, in cooperation with the British, have inserted him into Southern Pakistan in, what we believe to be, a mission to track the movement of nuclear weapons. We also theorize that the Russians, or some of the more extreme remains of the KGB, have involvement and that this man is also involved, meaning that-"

"The nukes could be possibly compromised," CASPER finished for him.

The Director nodded. "Your mission is to track this man down, assess the threat level, if he is involved to stop him and, if necessary, kill him."

"What deems it necessary to kill him?"

"If he shows any sign of attempting to take control of the nukes. Amir here will be indirectly assisting you as your contact, stay close," the Director finished. All CASPER could do was nod, he hated these missions.

A/N - A new start to my It All Started With a Letter story. Sorry it took so long but I've been really bogged down in schoolwork and updating will be really slow. Stick with me though.

Hope you like it. These are all around fourteen years before the main story and should hopefully explain some things as well as adding depth to the story.

Characters (excluding CUTLAS, CASPER, Amir, the Captain, Anil and the Director): Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh.

Story (and other characters): Me!

P.S. The MH-60L DAP is an American Special Operations helicopter, Tel Aviv is a city in Israel, Mossad and Amam are Israeli intelligence agencies and HaKirya is an Israeli military base in Tel Aviv.