With few happy memories of Clarksville, Gant found his way into the United States Air Force, becoming a fighter pilot.
After the war, he leaves the military and is recruited by the CIA and works for some time in a menial job in a Los Angeles pizza restaurant while shadowing a KGB cell.
After crossing the Soviet Union from Moscow to the airbase where the Firefox is being developed, with the help of various MI6 agents and several false identities; dissident scientists involved in the project create a diversion allowing Gant to steal the plane.
Gant escapes from the KGB and with the help of a Russian double agent named Anna Akhmerovna, the Soviet Union as well.
Gant meets up with a team of western intelligence experts that have recovered the MiG-31 from under the Finnish ice, but have not been able to move it to safety.
Dmitri Priabin, the ranking head of the KGB, still holds a vendetta against Gant due to the death of Anna Akhmerovna.
In this novel, he investigates the crashes of two examples of a fictional airliner, and discovers that they were both sabotaged by a former CIA agent working for a rival aircraft manufacturer.