Thirteen-year-old Dakota is the son of Nathi, a Kiwanjian bush pilot who flys an ancient cargo plane. Dakota is already skilled in take-offs and landings from dirt airstrips in the dead of night, skimming hilltops to avoid radar, and dodging high-tech fighters. Dakota has only known war in his life--war in which children kill other children commanded by adult "generals." One side wants to rule the land, the other claims to be fighting for freedom, but both bring only terror and death to the innocent people caught in the middle. Who started this war? Who profits from it? Dakota doesn't know. In Houston, Texas, Nicole Neale, a divorced single-parent with an almost-thirteen-year-old son named Zack, fights a more civilized kind of war to hold her executive job with a small manufacturing corporation. Except for road-rage on her daily commute, Nicole's enemies usually aren't violent, but they still lay mines in her road to success. Will winning her war in corporate boardrooms save her son Zack from what seems like enslavement to video games, junk food, empty materialistic values, the lure of money, and possibly drugs? Except for two years in Africa as an idealistic teen in the Peace Corps, what does Nicole have in common with a Kiwanjian bush pilot and possible terrorist? How could chubby, web-surfing Zack relate to a war-hardened child-soldier like Dakota? And, why should an American corporation, subsidized by the U.S. Government, have any interest in a tiny African country? Their lives would seem to have no common ground, and yet they will be drawn together in a shared struggle for independence.