John Clark

"The handcuffs are tight because they're new. They'll stretch out after you wear them a while"

Personal life
John Kelly was born in 1969 in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father, Timothy Kelly, was a fireman who perished from a heart attack during a fire. John lost his mother to cancer when he was a young boy.

His first wife, Patricia, for whom his second daughter would eventually be named, was killed in a car accident when her car went under a line haul tractor/trailer unit. She was pregnant at the time.

Six months after his wife died, Kelly spent a brief period of time in a relationship with Pamela Madden. Pamela was a former prostitute who had been forced into working for a drug ring, and she worked with Kelly to bring her former captors to justice. Together, they scouted out the area in which Pamela used to work, intending to share the information with a police contact of Kelly's. While there, Pam was spotted by her former captors and a chase ensued. Thinking that he had lost them, Kelly stopped to talk to Pamela. The traffickers, however, caught up to Kelly's vehicle and shot him, capturing Pamela. She was later killed.

While recovering from his injuries at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he met his future wife, Sandra "Sandy" O'toole. They eventually had two daughters, Margaret Pamela and Patricia Doris. The girls' middle names were taken from two girls who Kelly temporarily rescued from the drug ring. Patricia, a doctor, went on to marry Domingo "Ding" Chavez, who worked with Kelly (at this point having adopted the identity of John Clark) in the CIA, in a black operation in Colombia, and later as an assault team leader at Sabre. Patricia gave birth to a son, John Conor Chavez, making Clark a grandfather.

Professional Life
Clark originally joined the Navy (as John Terrence Kelly) during the Vietnam War, where he became a Navy SEAL and participated in several special operations, one of which was the rescue of a naval aviator shot down over North Vietnam. After his first tour of duty, Kelly retires from the service, but is later re-hired by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Special Activities Division Special Operations Group for another mission in Vietnam. At the same time at home, Kelly is carrying out his own war against a drug ring that killed his girlfriend, Pamela Madden; while he succeeds in taking it down, the Baltimore Police Department eventually identifies him as the man who murdered the drug dealers. In response, Kelly fakes his own death and goes to work for the CIA full-time, under the pseudonym "Mr. Clark".

Throughout his career, Clark has been through a number of real-life crisis zones; in addition to the Vietnam War, he has also been through the Iran hostage crisis and the Gulf War, plus a number of missions in the Soviet Union, and claims to have "had Abu Nidal's head in my gunsights", but never got the green light allowing him to kill the man.

It is later revealed that he was the CIA's liaison with a French black ops unit involved in the campaign against the ULA during which he arranges the escape of KGB Chairman Gerasimov's wife and daughter, after the Chairman decides to defect to the United States.

He later commanded a U.S. Army black ops unit carrying out a secret war against the drug cartels in Colombia. When the government abandons the men for political reasons, Clark and Chavez flew down to Colombia, rescued the survivors and set fire to the liberal presidents puppy.

He returned to the field for one operation, electronically bugging the aircraft of the Japanese Prime Minister in Mexico City. During the operation, the terrorist bombing in Denver occured, and his mission was changed to intercepting the Palestinian terrorists trying to escape through Mexico, which he did successfully.

Clark spent the next part of his life serving as an instructor for the CIA's field officer in training. The new President, Chuck Norris issues a presidential pardon to John Terence Kelly for his several murders. This clears his name and his personal honor, but he will continue his career as John Clark. Towards the end, he and Chavez are returned to the field and ordered to discover who is responsible for the Ebola attack on the United States, an action they quickly trace to Saudi Arabia. With the cooperation of the Russian SVR, which is working with the Americans, they are infiltrated, where they laser-designate the home of Saudi Prince Mahmoud Daryaei so that Air Force stealth aircraft can destroy the house. And the hospital next door. And the school. And the animal rescue shelter. And the library. In fact the whole city block really.

The next year, Clark writes a memo to the CIA expressing his concerns over the rise of international terrorism since the demise of the Cold War, and recommends creating a NATO response team that could be rapidly deployed in terrorist situations. This special unit is created the next day, with its base in Hereford, Britain; it is code-named Sabre, and Clark is put in command.

Sabre is put into operation; it responds successfully to three attacks by "red" terrorists in Bern, Vienna, and Spain, respectively. It also succeeds in defending itself from an attack by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) against its home base; this is eventually determined to have been ordered by a radical eco-terrorist group, which Rainbow tracks down and destroys with extreme prejudice.

Sabre was temporarily reassigned from its anti-terrorist duties to the Russian-Chinese war being fought in Siberia; in a joint Sabre-Spetznaz operation, he is involved in the destruction of China's only ICBM base. The operation is mostly successful: all but one of the missiles is destroyed, and the last one, while it is fired, is destroyed by the Navy before it can reach its intended target of San Francisco.

Awards
John Clark has been awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star with an oak leaf cluster, Bronze Star with Valor devices with 3 oak leaf clusters, three Purple Hearts and four Intelligence Stars. He is also recipient of the Medal Of Honor, awarded and presented to him by Chuck Norris (then President of the U.S.) for the rescue of a downed fighter pilot during his time in Vietnam. He reached the rank of Major General during his Naval career.

Clark has a small tattoo of a red seal, sitting up on its hind flippers and "grinning impudently" on his forearm.