Patrick Boyce is assigned to a South Korean submarine as an American observer. When the submarine goes down, he finds himself in North Korea. After witnessing the massacre of his fellow survivors, his only chance of survival is to somehow get across the DMZ...
Synopsis:When U.S. Ranger PATRICK BOYCE participates in a botched operation in Afghanistan that results in the deaths of civilians, he is reprimanded and banished to a desk in South Korea. Once there, his routine duties include assignment to a South Korean submarine embarking on a routine patrol as an American observer. But when the submarine suffers an explosion that wipes out its engineers, the surviving crew and Boyce are forced to abandoned their sinking vessel in rough waters. They manage to reach the shore, where they are accosted by North Korean soldiers. Convinced that he is caught in an international incident that will result in months of detention before the U.S. and South Korea are able to negotiate a prisoner exchange, Boyce is shocked when the North Koreans open fire, massacring the South Korean.
Boyce flees for his life, but now finds himself alone in North Korea. His odds aren't good - North Korea is the world's most racially homogenous country, where a Caucasian face is automatically the face of the enemy. But soon Boyce is accosted by a small group of men he recognizes - the sunken submarine's engineers, all of whom supposedly perished when the vessel floundered. It turns out they are an elite American team, made up of Asian-Americans masquerading as South Korean regulars. They staged the explosion in engineering that forced the rest of the crew to abandon ship, believing that the capture and subsequent swap of the South Korean crew would serve as a nice cover for inserting themselves into the North in order to carry out the mission Washington has assigned them; the destruction of a massive chemical weapons facility the North Korean regime is building inside a mountain complex that looks, to all the world's prying satellites, like a hydroelectric plant.
But with the South Korean crew dead and Boyce on their hands, their mission has gone haywire from the start. The team has no choice but to stash Boyce in the house of a North Korean engineer who is cooperating with the American infiltration team. They will carry out their mission, and then return for Boyce so they can all depart the North together.
They key to the American team's mission is that Siemens, the German engineering company, is smuggling a bomb into the North Korean chemical weapons facility inside one of the massive drill bits used by the enormous tunnel boring machines that are excavating the construction site. But when the German spy accompanying the drillbit is murdered by an overzealous North Korean officer, Boyce is forced to come out of hiding and play the part of the Siemens employee. With scant knowledge of German, and even less knowledge of tunnel boring, Boyce has to put on the performance of a lifetime in order to get the weapon into place and avoid detection.
With a suspicious and violent North Korean official always one step away from uncovering the plot, Boyce and the team somehow manage, by the skin of their teeth, to destroy the weapons facility. But the biggest challenge turns out to be getting out of North Korea without causing an international incident that could re-ignite the Korean War just when the United States' forces are spread perilously thin across the globe...