Hank Harnack

Henry "Hank" Harnack was a private in the Confederate Marine Corps' Heaven's Devils platoon during the Guild Wars, serving as the unit's firebat. A tall, gangly redhead and the son of a trucking company operator, he was quick to anger and impulsive, and counted Jim Raynor and Ryk Kydd among his closest friends after a rocky start with Raynor in particular.

Rivalry with Raynor#

As a child, Harnack was a habitual fire-starter who infuriated his parents. As a young man he became a star of the dangerous demolition motor sport on the Bronsonville team of Shiloh, and in one race he flipped his vehicle onto one driven by a rival player, Jim Raynor, nearly decapitating him. The act made Harnack an instant legend and earned him Raynor's lasting enmity, which he returned in full. When fuel grew scarce on Shiloh during the Guild Wars, the two clashed again after Harnack cut Raynor off in a truck line, and they came to blows; Harnack lost.

His defeat stung his pride and left him hungry for payback, an opportunity that arose when he and Raynor enlisted in the Confederate Marine Corps on the same day and ended up in the same training groups. They repeatedly fought despite the efforts of training corporal Thaddeus Timson to keep them apart. The rivalry finally cooled aboard the troopship Hydrus, bound for the warzone of Turaxis II, when a group of convicts due for involuntary recruitment broke loose and attacked Harnack; Raynor and his friend Tom Omer came to his aid, and the three fought their way clear and became friends. Their dropship to Turaxis II was shot down, and they hid until Confederate forces rescued them.

The firebat of the Heaven's Devils#

During training Raynor emerged as an acknowledged "recruit sergeant," and even Harnack followed his lead. On a punishment detail the two befriended a third trainee, Ryk Kydd, and tutored him in life away from the Old Families. The trio graduated together after a riotous final night in Braddock that ended with a stolen vulture crashed into a police station. Sent on toward Fort Howe, they were ambushed by Kel-Morian Combine forces and fought through to relieve the besieged Firebase Zulu, where Harnack killed three Kel-Morians in the assault on enemy APCs.

Settled at Fort Howe, Harnack acquired a flamethrower for want of proper authority and once put a shotgun to the head of the newly arrived Tychus Findlay to save Raynor from a beating. When Findlay was promoted and the base came under Kel-Morian attack, Harnack burned through bands of rippers, at one point accidentally setting off a fuel truck. The squad was absorbed into Colonel Javier Vanderspool's Special Tactics and Missions Platoon, the Heaven's Devils, and Harnack received a Thunderstrike suit fitted with a flamethrower, designed by the technician Hiram Feek. When the jump-capable armor was judged a failure, he badgered Feek daily until he was issued a non-jump firebat suit instead.

Through the platoon's later campaigns Harnack's flamethrower became its signature weapon. At Kel-Morian Internment Camp-36 he dropped onto an armored sloth and threw a grenade through its hatch into the ammunition store. At the assault on the divided city of Polk's Pride he burned through barricades and Guild Guards and finally destroyed a Kel-Morian goliath by setting its fuel line alight, an act that cost him his suit but won great accolades. After the city fell, the UNN reporter Max Speer photographed the Devils, with Harnack lighting his flamethrower so that Max Zander could light a cigar off it.

Death and legacy#

Colonel Vanderspool, bent on revenge for the loot the Devils had stolen from Fort Howe, conspired with the Old Family magnate Errol Bennet and the Kel-Morian overseer Aaron Pax to hijack a shipment of ardeon crystals and resocialize the Devils afterward so they could not implicate him. The Devils learned of the plot and planned their own theft, but Vanderspool's spy warned him, and the operation in the settlement of Korsy collapsed into betrayal when Pax double-crossed Vanderspool at the train station. Harnack washed the ambushing rippers with his flamethrower and later threw up a wall of flame to cover the Devils' escape from Vanderspool's resocialized marines.

Fleeing toward the starport, Harnack saw a chance to strike a distracted Kel-Morian sloth, but a stray shell had spilled portrenol fuel into a containment area, and when he lit his flamethrower beneath the vehicle the column of fuel ignited and set him ablaze. He tried to run but only spread the fire over himself. Ryk Kydd shot him in the head to end his suffering, and the sloth ran over his body as his fuel tanks detonated. Harnack was later memorialized on a plaque beneath a statue in Centerville, commemorating those from Shiloh who fell during the Guild Wars.

Character#

Harnack once had an obnoxious, boisterous personality that brought him into constant conflict with others, but his manner shifted during Marine Corps training. While off duty he remained hair-trigger and a little unpredictable, fond of hiding alcohol in his locker and of a vid mix implanted in his armor, but on duty he was "square," keeping his uniform and weapon in pristine order. He was a tall redhead with size-thirteen feet, and his enthusiasm for fire, kindled in childhood, found its outlet at last in the flamethrower he carried through the war.