Ella Portman is an ASIO covert operative on a mission to stop a North Korean plot, with the help of a local cell of terrorists, to steal a military stealth drone and use it to attack Australia or the United States or their southern neighbour. The situation is unclear as the chase begins. As more information is gathered, the Australian and United States governments co-operate to prevent what is looking more and more like a Korean peninsula, and possibly a global, conflict emerging.
Amid assassination attempts and gunfights, it is found that the actions of a group of financially powerful megalomaniacs are at work. These people, who think it is simple to create a diversion and attack their neighbour and the world, will stand by and do nothing once they are in power, and it sets the world on a knife's edge. Ella is left in the desert to die with her two call-girl friends as her investigations lead to evidence of an underground secret superconductor mining operation in Queensland.
The chase goes from Southern Queensland and the freeing of a kidnapped family with the help of a failed pioneer aviation flight across Western Australia and the Pine Gap joint Australia-U.S. base to the Northern territories and across the sea to East Timor and into a shipwrecking Typhoon.
With an attack imminent and tensions around the world mounting, a strange twist takes place.