Combat veteran John Puller, now working as an investigator for the Army's Criminal Investigative Division, tries to solve the murder of an Army man and his Pentagon contractor wife in their isolated rural home.

When intelligence operative Sean Dillon stops Caspar Rashid at Heathrow Airport for a routine passport check, Rashid, a distraught man whose thirteen-year-old daughter, Sara, has been kidnapped and taken to Iraq to marry one of the Middle East's most feared terrorists, begs Dillon for help.

A disturbing tape has made its way to British intelligence, and from them to the new President of the United States: battlefield chatter from an ambush in Afghanistan, in which twelve U.S. Army Rangers and a British medical team died. Most of the Taliban voices are Afghan; however, the voice of the commander bears an Irish accent. The idea that one of their own could be responsible for such a massacre is appalling, and Sean Dillon is put in charge...