ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on questions of sovereignty, including especially who acts as sovereign and what their relation to places and peoples subject to sovereign's power is like. It explains the rising prominence of the private military contractor (PMC) and Special Forces Operator in post-9/11 espionage fiction. These two figures serve as the spy's proxy, often acting on intelligence provided by the CIA or doing an end run. The Major's reference to Pakistan obviously concerns the 2011 Navy SEALs raid on Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound. Harry Burton from Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows suffers from lost origins, having been removed from 'his' India just as the sun was setting on the British Empire, as well as from a distanced relationship with his daughter, Kim. The novel illustrates the gatekeeper's power in its ruminations on the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, again using the historical long view to re-situate a dominant perspective and, to lend additional insight into Harry's sovereignty.
