Someone is trying to steal Russia's store of a long-vanquished deadly disease, and Lt. Colonel Jon Smith, with the help of Covert-One, must stop the conspirators before they loose Armageddon upon the world.

Lt. Col. Jon Smith, a medical researcher, is contacted by Russian colleague with a strange request that he meet him in Venice in ten days. When he does so, no sooner does Smith sit down than his colleague is killed by a hail of bullets. But not before he passes on to Smith intelligence that someone is about to steal some of Russia's stash of the smallpox virus. A long-vanquished disease, smallpox only exists in storage at two research centers, one in the US and one in Russia. Smallpox, however, is astonishingly virulent and there isn't nearly enough vaccine available should there be an outbreak. Even worse, the vaccine stores on hand are very old.

At the request of Covert-One - an agency so secret and loosely organized that it has no building, no org chart, no salaries, and reports only to the sitting President, Jon Smith starts to track down who is after the smallpox vaccine and find out what they plan to do with it. But his adversaries are several steps ahead of him. They have already spirited the vaccine out of the heavily guarded research center and are bringing it to a research lab where they will genetically alter it to create one of the most deadly chemical weapons ever. With a cabal of generals and key figures in the military industrial complex working to develop the weapon, Smith must find and stop the conspirators before they loose Armageddon upon the world.