Dr John Edwards, a British surgeon living and working in New York is drawn into the world of power politics and espionage when he accidentally receives a plea for help from a defecting Russian scientist. At first treated with suspicion by the CIA, Edwards is reluctantly recruited into a multi-national team tasked with the rescue of Professor Komarov and the secrets he holds on a climate engineering project which could devastate the Western powers.
The only problem is that to rescue the Professor, the team has first to traverse two hundred miles of the frozen Polar sea and then break into a secret Soviet installation – and former nuclear proving ground - on the island of Novaya Zemlya inside the Arctic Circle.