Roger Two Hawks, an Iroquois serving as a combat pilot in World War II, takes part in Operation Tidal Wave on August 1, 1943 and is shot down during the raid on Ploieşti, Romania.

The mystery is resolved when he sees a globe and finds that he is in a world where the continents of North and South America do not exist, having mostly been drowned for the whole of humanity's tenure on Earth.

As a result, the ancestors of the various Native American tribes did not cross the non-existent Bering Strait but wandered westward into Europe, taking the general place of the Slavs in our history.

The Iroquois live in Romania and Ukraine, which is known as Hotinohsonih in this timeline, while the Algonquin occupy Kinukkinuk, roughly co-terminus with our Czech Republic and the Aztecs dominate an equivalent of Russia.

Though very different from our world, in this reality, too, a war is going on resembling the one which Two Hawks left behind, with Perkunisha, an alternate aggressive Germany-analogue trying to conquer Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (though its dominant people are not Germanic but rather Lithuanians).

He goes through a very fast-paced series of adventures, involving such elements as Hittites who survived into the 20th century, a Luftwaffe pilot who also ended up in this world, an England which had never known a Roman Empire nor a Norman Conquest but has many Cretan and Semitic elements in its makeup, an unknown chapter in the life of Elizabethan adventurer Humphrey Gilbert, an Arab-colonized South Africa (known as Ikhwan) and Hivika, a mysterious island on the site of our world's Colorado, where an underground Polynesian temple is to be found, suggesting that Polynesians colonized the North American archipelago in the thirteenth century.