In the Central American republic of Guatemala, government-sponsored torture and mass murder had reduced the Mayan Indian population to a despairing acquiescence, and after five hundred years of struggle it began to seem as if the conqueror's peace could at last be claimed in the capital.
Then, at the beginning of 1995, a guerrilla leader whom the authorities had long believed dead sprang mysteriously back to life. No loyal Guatemalan could identify him, and the government was compelled to seek help elsewhere, from one of the two SAS soldiers who had helped to mediate a hostage crisis with the guerrilla almost fifteen years earlier.
To the government in Whitehall it appeared a straightforward enough exercise, but for the soldier and his comrades the mission soon turned into a nightmare of impossible choices, and then land of Guatemala, magical and cruel by turns, proved much easier to enter than to escape.