It's 1980 and the Middle East is engulfed in chaos and war as generals, ayatollahs and mujahideen fight for money, power, and God. Turkey's coup finds two seasoned operatives, Kemal Yilmaz and Shirin Demirel, forced to cooperate to survive. They're complete strangers but in the world of spy craft they know about each other. Although political opposites, their common denominator is Nadiye, Kemal's fiancee and Shirin's estranged sister who has disappeared. But there's no time to deal with her. Kemal and Shirin are fugitive agents physically and emotionally uprooted from their former lives and on the run. Despite their incompatible past, they agree to a mad, improvised plan to flee Turkey and head east for China's Sinjiang province where he has relations. Together they persevere by car, bus, truck, and foot on a five-thousand-mile odyssey beset with agonizing life-or-death encounters. Their desperate flight through four war-torn coountries--Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan--and into the desert vastness of western China force them to confront their own tenuous relationship as well as to uncover the mystery about Nadiye.