Nineteen sixty-nine: A Navy SEAL, a trained assassin on a secret mission, is dropped off in the Vietnam jungle. Days later, a U.S. gunboat returns to pick him up, but the boat's young captain, Lt. William Sherman, panics under fire and leaves the SEAL behind. Twenty years later: Lieutenant Sherman is now a Pentagon admiral. When a beautiful woman is found dead in her home, and Admiral Sherman comes under suspicion, Navy Commander Karen Lawrence is assigned to conduct her own inquiry. With the help of a seasoned investigator and ex-Marine, "Train" von Rensel, Karen finds herself confronting a Pentagon hierarchy determined to avoid scandal - even at the cost of the truth. The pressure builds when yet another friend of the admiral is found dead under mysterious circumstances, and it becomes apparent that the SEAL is back. But he is no longer a SEAL; he is a sweeper, an intelligence specialist who cleans things up when covert operations go wrong. Only this time, he is on a mission of personal revenge. The two investigators find themselves trapped between one man's boundless ambition and another's relentless quest for revenge.