"Jack Vermillion is an ex-Marine who came back from Vietnam and turned a two-truck shipping outfit into a multimillion-dollar empire. His work is his life. His only grief, a son, Danny, who ran off the rails years back and is now serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery. A little downtime in Lompoc cooling his heels might do him some good. But a desperate late-night phone call from Danny, in the prison clinic after a suicide attempt, forces Jack to go looking for a federal deal to save him. So when Jack is approached by a retired U.S. Army colonel named Earl V. Pike to ship his private gun collection - very simple, very illegal - Jack makes the fateful decision to flip one illegal gunrunner for one slightly imperfect kid, and turns Pike in to the ATF." "At the same time, Casey Spandau, a female cop working Sex Crimes at the Two Five in Harlem, finally snaps - and decks a sleazy public defender who richly deserves it. After she's bounced straight into an NYPD-state police task force, Casey's future looks like a self-inflicted tour in cop hell. Then she takes a call from a state cop searching for a blue Mercedes involved in a savage double homicide. The suspect? Earl V. Pike, U.S. Army, Ret." What had appeared to be two separate cases are now on a deadly collision course to disaster. For almost as soon as Spandau starts her investigation into the double homicide, her unit slams straight into an ATF sting, and an explosive blue-on-blue firefight erupts with fatal results. Five officers down. Jack Vermillion finds himself on his way to prison - his company assets seized, his whole world shattered. But Jack isn't going down without a fight. He has only one way to prove his innocence, and it won't be pretty. And if anyone tries to get in his way? Well, there isn't a law enforcement agency in the world that can stop Jack Vermillion now.