User blog:SW10048/Pure Evil Proposal: Sir Damian Cray

What's The Work?
Eagle Strike, the fourth book in the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. Alex Rider is about a teenager who gets forced to join MI6 and fight various terrorists and madmen, such as Sir Damian Cray, the subject of this proposal.

Who Is The Villain And What Has He Done?
Sir Damian Cray is an industrialist, pop star and political campaigner and the main antagonist of Eagle Strike. Although he's done a lot of good work, even being knighted as a result, he isn't as good as he appears, as he has a history of committing villainous actions:


 * He had professor Milburn, the head of a laboratory that was experimenting on animals, run over and killed after he refused to close down his project.
 * He murdered a group of loggers in the Amazonian rainforest and buried them to never be found by their families.
 * He locked some Japanese whalers in their deep freeze to die of hypothermia.
 * At the beginning of the book, he orders Yassen Gregorovich to blow up journalist Edward Pleasure's villa after discovering that he knows he has dealings with corrupt NSA agent Edward Roper, despite knowing he has a wife and teenage daughter in the villa with him. Although neither are inside at the time, he had no problem with killing them.
 * In one of his worst actions, he has one of his henchmen kill a journalist because she asked him an annoying question.
 * He has a photographer who was working with Edward Pleasure gunned down, even though he knows full well that he can't expose his dealings with Roper, as he can't even leave the house.
 * He kills Roper via suffocation because he didn't realise that Pleasure and the photographer were following him, even though he took care of them both, an act which he takes sadistic pleasure in doing and even describes as "fun".
 * After capturing Alex, instead of just killing him, he forces him to go through a large life-size recreation of a video game he created in the hopes of seeing him get killed for fun.
 * He has Sabina Pleasure, Edward Pleasure's daughter and Alex's girlfriend, kidnapped in order to get him to bring him a flash drive containing nuclear launch codes that he needs for Operation Eagle Strike, his ultimate endgame, even getting Yassen to prepare to cut her fingers off in front off Alex when he tries to destroy it, forcing him to give in at the last second when Sabina is about to be mutilated.
 * Cray's endgame, Operation Eagle Strike, is to access Air Force One when the US president comes to visit the UK in order to use the launch codes to trigger a US nuclear strike against Afghanistan and all other major drug producers, killing millions in the process.
 * After getting the airport where Air Force 1 has landed evacuated with a fake biohazard scare, he blows up several of his associates for no reason other than to make it look real, even though the airport has already evacuated.
 * After slaughtering the staff of Air Force 1 (who hadn't evacuated for some reason), he shoots Yassen for stating that he doesn't kill children, and so refusing to follow his orders.

Freudian Excuse?
His parents died in an accident when he was young, but this doesn't change anything, as he tells Alex that he wasn't sad, and may have even been responsible.

Mitigating Factors
He claims to care about the environment, but was willing to damage it beyond repair by causing a nuclear holocaust during Operation Eagle Strike. He also says he's doing Eagle Strike to end drug addiction, but that doesn't justify causing what is essentially the apocalypse just to further a cause, and a lot of what he does isn't even related to drugs.

Verdict
Definite PE.