1975 - On the day of the Fall of Saigon, a decorated Vietnam War pilot is kidnapped while leaving a bar in Olongapo with a prostitute. His decapitated body is dumped outside the US Naval base in Subic Bay. As the story hits the media, Teodore Fragio, high school teacher in Portuguese Cove, has to confront his own war crimes while on a mission to rescue this same pilot after being shot down earlier in the war. Soon after, a postman in rural Alabama is similarly murdered by machete. He had been the cox'sun of the naval river boat involved in the rescue operation. Fragio just wants to live his life in denial. But the boat's engineer, now a legislator in Texas running for Congress, understandably worries about his political future should their crimes come to light. He convinces Fragio to find the other member of the crew, the gunner, to insure his silence. The gunner has become a peyote guide in his hometown of Naco, Arizona. He is somewhere deep in the Senora Desert of Mexico with a client. Fragio brings his friend, Norm Aveiro, on a disastrous road trip into the deep desert, one step behind the killer. The road trip is a bloody one from the Mexican desert to the state capitol building in Austin, Texas, to Fragio's home in Portuguese Cove. This is a story of retribution and redemption, spiritual awakening and the brutality of war and its aftermath.