In desperation, a WWII bomber crew jettisons its super secret cargo. Recovered seventy years later, an Afghan warlord becomes the world's newest nuclear power.
The accidental discovery of a fissionable metal compound leaves two Danish scientists reeling. The metal "donuts" are secretly off-loaded onto an American submarine just in advance of the invading Germans.
American scientists find the incredibly powerful nuclear material to be extremely unstable. Fearing a nuclear accident of unthinkable proportion, they elect to dispose of the materials well out over the Pacific. However, those plans go awry when the B-17 bomber designed for the mission is lost in a freakish dust storm somewhere over the Arizona desert.
Some seventy years later the materials are found intact but not by the American teams who yet still search for them. Aram Asad is an anthropologist, an Iraqi doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona. He hates America and Americans and the steel box he's just unearthed in the desert has strange markings on it that might make sense to his Uncle Anoush, the former head of Sadaam's nuclear development program.
Ken Larimer, his NRC Alpha Team, a Phoenix police detective and a beautiful, raven-haired, one-quarter Apache court investigator with a painful power to look into the future team up in an effort to recover the donuts and save the continent from nuclear inceneration.