Twenty-three years old, a chess-playing athlete with an intensely individual point of view, Johnathan Anders is still in the middle of an intensive three-year training period when an emergency forces his superiors to use him in the field. The job is routine, to discover what has caused a Russian trawler to sail into the reefs off Guernsey in the Channel Islands. But Johnathan is not content with a routine investigation. Following his instincts with a determined courage which almost amounts to recklessness, he uncovers a plot so secret and so dangerous it has already cost the lives of eleven men. From that moment Johnathan is plunged into the most dramatic adventures of his life, culminating in a thrilling chase from the Channel Islands to the Outer Hebrides.

Assigned to investigate the death of a fellow agent in the wreck of a Russian trawler, British spy Jonathan Anders must outwit the Russians, who want him dead, and the British police, who want him for murder.