Half black and half Vietnamese, emergency room physician Dr. Carmen Nguyen rides her motorcycle and practices medicine with equal passion. But her years on the ward have taught her one rule about becoming personally involved with patients: don't. Yet against her better judgment, she accedes to the dying request of Luke Redstone - an aging ex-miner who developed a rare cancer while living in the yellow-cake hills of Colorado.

Someone has been sneaking around Redstone's cabin with an eye to stealing his flock of fighting cocks. When the old man asks Carmen to watch over his coop, the former medical researcher becomes curious about these unnaturally strong and aggressive birds. She soon learns that their true value has little to do with their prowess in the pit, and she suspects that the secret may lie in the uranium-rich soil near a shut-down, once-thriving mine.

Carmen finds an ally - and perhaps something more - in Walter Rios, a gutsy, guilt-haunted river rafter who brings to her quest skills honed during his tour with military intelligence. Together they must confront a lawless businessman and his private army of stone-cold killers, in hard and bloody pursuit of a genetic bombshell with the shocking power to transform a species.