A bold yet flawed pilot, a cold killer, and a beautiful woman are drawn together in greed and murder. They use their knowledge of the Air Traffic Control System and the pine woods and swamps of the Florida Panhandle for a smuggling operation. No battle plan survives the first shot. The first shot is the murder of a Florida Wildlife Officer working alone while surveying wood duck nesting sites in the swamps thirty miles from Tallahassee. Violent death is a harbinger of sharp and deep mourning. A sense and a feel for place and time can give unbidden direction to the victim's friends in their search for a reason where there is none. The novel is set in the beautiful Florida Panhandle. There are large and small urban areas and vast stretches of farm land, pine forest, wet lands, and coast. The littoral zone southern boundary is the Gulf of Mexico. Over a million Panhandle acres are owned by paper and timber companies or the State of Florida. Much of the privately held land is managed in cooperation with the Florida Forest Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.