Three members of Mather Air Force Base's security force return from Lake Tahoe after locating a stolen nuclear device planted in a casino by a deep-cover, ex-Cold War Soviet spy. Disarmed with the help of two agents from a clandestine National Security Agency team, the bomb is safely back at the base. The steady routine of guarding a military installation is no sooner back to normal when Lieutenant Colonel Bart Winfield, code-named Tupelo in the elite circle of global clandestine operatives, is surprised by a visit from Mary Benson, lead agent of a task force urgently searching for two other missing nuclear weapons-as well as the ultra-secret Black Star System. The three members of the Mather team and Bart's wife-a former OSI agent-are whisked away by helicopter to the West Coast Headquarters of the National Security Agency for a meeting with a hidden agenda and faced with a life-changing decision that involves ex-Spetsnaz smugglers and a shadowy rogue spy ring. They have little time to prepare before they are sent undercover in Seawind Bay, a sleepy coastal village with a checkered past, where secrets from a by-gone era mix with the contemporary high-tech computer world. Threats come at them from all directions and they must sort out who among the townspeople they can trust. When two of their members are kidnapped, they work feveriously to rescue them. The puzzle of how a building with the word Druid carved in stone above a door fits into a spider web of government corruption and international terrorism is mixed with an unusually high number of deaths from seemingly unrelated accidents.