Lt. Wray Larrick, USMC, is being medically retired for injuries incurred in an ambush in Vietnam three months earlier. He is held over by Naval Intelligence to work the case of a young marine murdered at remote Camp Fuji, the site of a top-secret code relay station. N.I. suspects it might be related to Wray's predicament and the deaths and injuries of twelve of his platoon members. Thrown into the investigation with a C.I.D. cover, little to go on and no experience in such matters, he struggles for a place to start, encountering numerous possible suspects, including his former best buddy, the camp gunny, the senior sergeant in charge of the code center where the victim worked, the local Japanese detective in charge of the case and his American cousin who is an army sergeant stationed nearby, as well as an American international arms dealer of dubious character who sidelines as a jazz club owner in Yokohama, and one of his customers, a North Korean trade delegate. Complicating it all is the evolving possibility of several related recent murders in Montreal and Virginia, and onboard ship in the Pacific, and in Japan again. But the solution to the case might lie not so much in the wide net of his growing investigation as much in the nagging detail lost somewhere in the recesses of Wray's memory, the proverbial "devil in the details."