A stunning terror bombing strikes a research facility in France, a much-admired African-American general is killed in a hit-and-run accident, and Pentagon staff officer John Reynolds finds an old friend--now an influential lobbyist--drunk and fearful. In short order, Reynolds must face a car bombing at his front door, his girlfriend's murder, and the wrath of a retired Green Beret general as scarred as he is inexplicably wealthy. Struggling to behave honorably--and to resist a beauty as corrupt as any human being on earth--Reynolds finds himself at the center of an international plot to sell the Pentagon the most expensive fighter aircraft in history . . . even though the weapon may not work. In an homage to the great noir fiction of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, Ralph Peters has written the most rapid-fire, hard-hitting novel of his career--a story of Washington corruption that could have been lifted from today's headlines.