Greg Armstrong is an oilfield engineer in Tabriz, a North African country which is mostly desert. He lives in the town of Sabah, a sea port that looks out on the beautiful waters of the Mediterranean.
Not everything is beautiful in Sabah, as Greg starts to discover when he accidentally witnesses a covert military operation. His life is normally complicated enough by the demands of living and working under a ramshackle, oppressive State, but now the dark underworld of international terrorism begins to enfold him. Only the strange expatriate community of Sabah stands between him and the Security police.