It's springtime in Newport and Alan Craik and his wife, Rose Siciliano, are on top of the world. She's headed for astronaut training; he's going into an espionage school. Parents, pilots, lovers, and loyal navy officers through and through, the husband-and-wife team are eager to take the next step. Then it all comes crashing down.
In a Virginia suburb of D.C., a senior CIA man has committed a series of clandestine acts that have led him into the most dangerous place he has ever been. Now George Shreed's dark secret is in danger - and a woman is demanding a million dollars in exchange for her silence. Shreed's next desperate move is to find someone to take the blame for the information he himself leaked. The fall guy will be a woman: Rose Siciliano.
Suddenly, an investigation targets Rose, and, by association, her husband, Alan. And as a circle of treachery tightens around them, events race out of anyone's control. In command of an airborne unit on the USS Thomas Jefferson in Trieste, Alan is contacted by the same woman who is blackmailing Shreed. Soon he is being pulled into a vortex of spies and counterspies while a series of stunning escalations take his high-tech airborne attachment - and the world - to the brink of war.