Mercenaries

I've been noting elsewhere that 2009 is shaping up into the year of the mercenary. Maybe I'm just noticing it more because of course Death Force is about a unit of mercenaries. But the upcoming Sylvester Stallone film The Expendables, the new A Team movie, plus plenty of computer games featuring mercs suggests its rich teritory for thriller and adventure writers. It certainly seems that way to me. As characters, mercenaries are completely flexible. They can seek out trouble, they can get involved in all kinds of wars, and yet they are still their own men, answerable to no one apart from their conscience and their wallet. They are, in fact, the closest you can find to cowboys in the modern world. And a writer can't find a much better subject than that.