Nick Foley is an adventurer.
That is a very bad description of the line of work that Foley has chosen to be involved in when we first meet him; then he would likely better be called an Aid Worker, part of an Non-Government Organization multinational group working in the Kashgar region of Western China alongside the Uyghur. He was helping put in an irrigation system until the matters detailed in the first recorded adventure curtail that and throw him onto a different path.
However, I chose adventurer because he was out to do something else other than his former occupation and other than going back to a life that was no longer for him. His previous employment has been in the U.S. Navy as part of the elite SEAL program. When he decided he had had enough of that and that it was time to more on, he was left with the question of what next. His volunteering to head to China seemed a good idea.
"He had never planned to be a SEAL. In fact, his plan had been to join the Peace Corps and travel the world to help the less fortunate. But during his junior year of college, he had taken a twentieth-century military history class on a whim. He had always been a fan of history, and with all that was going on around the world since 9/11, the course sounded fascinating. The professor, a retired Navy admiral, had been a SEAL and had argued that unless the forces of evil spreading oppression were unseated, the oppressed peoples of the world would never live in peace and prosperity-no matter how many bridges, or irrigation systems, or primary schools the NGOs of the world built. There is evil in the world, and evil must be stopped, no matter the risk. No matter the personal sacrifice. Three days after the semester ended, Nick had dropped out of college-to the shock and dismay of his mother-and had enlisted in the Navy, intent on becoming a Navy SEAL."
He has elected to apply to be a medic in the SEALs and had received a year-long training as an "Eighteen Delta"; that education would play a big role in how his life would again change when trouble showed up in China and Foley found himself again in a dangerous struggle, this time getting unwillingly involved with the Chinese Ministry of State Security and the American CIA.
Luckily, he will have the aid of Dr. Dazhong 'Dash' Chen of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a beautiful woman who will become far more to Foley than just a temporary colleague.
And then there is Chet Lankford of the CIA and the constant question in Foley's mind whether that man was a friend or a major pain in the neck that seemed to always try to get him killed.