Bruno Wildermann of the Wrinfield Circus is the world's greatest trapeze artist, a clairvoyant with near-supernatural powers and an implacable enemy of the East German regime that arrested his family and murdered his wife.

The CIA needs such a man for an impossible raid on the impregnable Lubylan Fortress where his family is held, to remove a dangerous weapons formula from a heavily guarded laboratory.

The story, written in third person narrative, includes espionage, murder, romance and humor.

It is typical of his later period works, in that while it is quite well plotted (if stretching the bounds of believability), it is simplistically characterized, with dryly sardonic and superbly competent protagonists (particularly Bruno Wildermann, the trapeze artist and secret agent), a ravishingly beautiful and virtually helpless female protagonist, and almost cartoonish Communist antagonists.

[3] In the film Operation Thunderbolt, Col. Yonatan Netanyahu (Yehoram Gaon) reads the novel en route to the 1976 Israeli raid on Entebbe Airport in Uganda.