Chapter Three
Boston, Massachusetts
Two Years Later
Nate Wilde awoke with a start, shooting straight up in bed.
He was drenched in sweat and his heart was racing.
After taking several deep breaths, he looked briefly around the room and peered into the darkness.
Slowly, he recognized the familiar surroundings of his apartment and began to relax.
Throwing the covers off, Nate swung his feet over the side of the bed and rubbed his face with both hands.
It had been a long time since he had thought about Yemen.
The attack had happened over two years ago, and he had largely put the events of it behind him and begun to move on.
Even though everyone on the ODA, with the exception of Long and Deforest, had seen multiple combat rotations, this was the one that broke them.
Long was medically retired and hired on by the Department of Homeland Security Human Exploitation Rescue Operative (HERO) Child-Rescue Corps program, which trained wounded veterans in computer forensics to catch child predators.
Shane Price, who had been on his first enlistment, left the military to focus full-time on his stock portfolio.
He still kept in touch, and Nate knew he had used his investments to open a mixed martial arts gym down in Florida and was doing very well for himself.
Even Wally had left the British army shortly after for the private sector and was working kidnap and ransom negotiations for a big insurance firm out of London.
And then there was Tim. While he and Nate had been inseparable for nearly a decade, the events of Yemen deeply affected him.
When Nate chose to leave the army, the fiery redhead took it personally.
The issue was never really resolved, and Nate got the impression that Tim felt Nate had abandoned the team.
The two had barely spoken since, but he knew through mutual acquaintances that Tim had gotten divorced, recently left the service himself, and found work training local police departments in shooting and tactics back home in Kentucky.
For Nate, Yemen had been enough. After years of combat deployments he had finally reached the point of fatigue.
The former Green Beret had watched too many of his friends die over the years, and the job no longer held the same sense of fulfillment for him.
Instead, it only created holes in his life and brought a feeling of emptiness.
Nate left the army six months after returning from that final deployment and after having served eight years in the Special Forces.
It was such a sudden departure that the Department of War had to mail him his Silver Star for his actions in Yemen, which he kept in a box at the top of his closet with the rest of his military memorabilia.
Seeking direction in his life, he fell back into a passion he had harbored since he was a child: history.
Nate’s father was a tenured professor at Stanford, though that had only happened around the same time Nate had joined the military.
Previously, he had accepted jobs at different universities around the world, taking his son along with him.
It was lonely growing up just the two of them, as Nate’s mother had passed away due to complications during childbirth and his father was not overly affectionate.
But despite a lack of nurturing, his father had instilled in him a propensity for academia, a passion for travel, and a love of history.
When Nate attended Boston University and earned his undergraduate degree in archaeology, his father had approved.
But after graduation, when Nate enlisted in the army with an 18X contract that guaranteed him the opportunity to try out for the Special Forces, his father had not been so supportive.
For his part, Nate couldn’t quite explain what had caused him to make the choice.
Like many people his age he had been affected by the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, even though he had been young when they occurred.
But he also felt a sense of moral responsibility.
He was a strong, able-bodied young man who had the ability to do something, and therefore, the obligation.
And so he had enlisted. His father had tried to talk him out of it, believing that his son, who was extremely intelligent, should follow in his footsteps and become an academic.
Soldiers were “cannon fodder for the elites,” he had told him, and Nate should not throw his life away fighting the wars of vain men.
Of course, Nate hadn’t listened; he was too headstrong for that.
And he wanted to be the one doing the work on the ground, and so he had enlisted rather than commissioning as an officer.
So Nate joined the army and, after completing Infantry School and Airborne School, he passed the grueling Special Forces Assessment and Selection and the ensuing year and a half of training at the Special Forces Qualification Course, conducted at Fort Bragg and Camp Mackall, North Carolina.
After graduation he was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group based out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and deployed numerous times to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and of course, Yemen.
He had intended to fulfill his initial five-year enlistment and then leave the service, but soon found himself signing on for an additional term.
He enjoyed the work, but really it was the people that kept him around.
People like Tim and Shane and John Kendall.
But even though Nate remained estranged from his father during that time and the two had barely spoken since, he never lost his inclination for academics.
Between deployments, trainings, and schools, he continued to seek out higher education and earned his master’s in archaeology from the University of Tennessee.
He enjoyed learning and studying and there was a balance that education brought into his rough-and-tumble life that kept him grounded.
However, after Yemen Nate just couldn’t see a reason to stay in the military any longer.
The team room was filled with ghosts, and even though new team members arrived to replace the fallen, it wasn’t the same.
Since his enthusiasm for a warrior’s life had begun to fade, he focused on his other passion and applied to several graduate schools across the country to pursue a PhD in archaeology.
He had always graduated with academic excellence, and his hard work paid off when he was accepted into Harvard.
Nate left the military and through a combination of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, federal grants, VA disability payments for his wartime injuries, and student loans, he was able to move to Boston, rent an apartment, and begin his studies in the same city in which he had first attended college years earlier.
Since that time he had thrown himself into his studies, acing his classes and establishing a good reputation as a solid researcher.
He focused on Near Eastern archaeology, improving his Arabic skills and picking up French and ancient Aramaic along the way, being somewhat of a polyglot.
He also learned to decipher cuneiform, the language found on Ahmed’s coin.
All that momentum had carried him to this point, and today he would pitch his dissertation proposal for his original research to an examining committee made up of faculty members from the university’s anthropology department.
Nate reached over and grabbed the alarm clock sitting on his nightstand, checking the time. It was five thirty in the morning. “Good enough,” he mumbled to himself. He had gotten almost five hours of sleep, which was about typical. Rest remained fairly elusive these days.
His presentation wasn’t until nine, giving him plenty of time to kill.
Nate stood up, walked to the bathroom, and turned the handle on the sink.
The old pipes groaned as water was slowly forced through them and began to pour into the basin.
Nate cupped his hands to catch the icy liquid and splashed the water on his face.
The coldness helped wake him and clear his mind.
He returned to the bedroom and pulled on a pair of old running shorts and a T-shirt, then laced up his On Cloudrunner shoes.
Nate went down the narrow stairs and exited the front door of the town house in which he rented an apartment and stepped out onto Pembroke Street.
His rental was near Boston University and south of the Back Bay area of town, but across the river and quite a distance from Harvard, where his classes and lectures were held.
While he had varying streams of financial assistance that helped him survive, and he had saved up a small nest egg while in the service, a place in Cambridge was still a little out of his price range.
The world was still dark and silent. Redbrick buildings and green, leafy hickory trees lined the walkways, illuminated in the darkness by streetlamps placed up and down the road.
Boston was a busy city, but most people were not yet stirring at this hour.
It was when Nate enjoyed it most, as he generally had the streets to himself, save the random passerby or vehicle.
He conducted a series of dynamic stretches on the sidewalk in front of the row of townhomes, then took off jogging down the street.
A good run always cleared his head and helped focus his thoughts, which he would certainly need today.