Gérard Vandervelde, an internationally acclaimed flautist, is a veteran of the First World War. A reserve officer in the Belgian Air Force, he is called back to active duty immediately after Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. As war spreads westward with the German assault on Belgium on 10 May 1940, another, even greater threat begins to emerge from the shadows.
In Nazi Germany, Otto Hahn has succeeded in achieving nuclear fission. His fellow scientists quickly realize that this chain reaction could unleash an explosion of unprecedented power. The thousands of lives already claimed by a war that has only just begun may prove to be nothing more than a grim prelude to the ambitions of a dictatorship determined to exterminate entire populations in the name of its so-called racial theories.
