In 1908, an enormous explosion occurs over Siberia, leveling thousands of hectares of forest land. Seventeen years later, Dr. Miroslav Orborski, a politically unpopular Russian physicist, has collected evidence that suggests there is far more to the explosion than commonly believed. He unwittingly enlists the help of a criminal organization headed by the Barkov brothers to find a powerful and technically advanced object that survived the explosion. Unknown to Dr. Orborski, the Barkovs have another agenda. Financed by a group of paranoid and corrupt government officials, they have been ordered to dispose of the troublesome Dr. Orborski and secure the valuable object. But the Barkovs, no strangers to greed and corruption themselves, have a different plan in mind. It's up to the National Science and Development Foundation and its chairman, Viktor Treschev, to save Dr. Orborski and find the object before the Barkovs get to it. The situation rapidly becomes complicated when a Russian farm family, a reclusive hunter, and Norman MacLeod, a Canadian merchant marine seaman, are reluctantly drawn into the deadly, high-stakes game that crisscrosses Russia and finds its way into eastern Canada in a race to find a device that could change history forever.