It is 1944 and the war
is not going well for the Germans. Their only hope, as the Reich has
come to realize, lies in developing a nuclear weapon; but since the
bombing of their heavy water installation in Norway, their efforts have
lagged far behind those of the Americans. And so the U-boat approaching
the Maine coast in the dark of a January night carries a very important
passenger.
Baron Joachim von Niehauser is a Prussian nobleman, a man
well-versed in the arts of war yet one on whom its ugly lessons have not
been lost, a man distrustful of the Nazi regime but loyal to his
country. His mission is a critical one: to make contact with a German
spy placed long ago in the Manhattan Project, obtain the critical data,
and get it out of the country and into sympathetic hands.
Chain
Reaction is the chillingly suspenseful story of von Niehauser’s
desperate journey and his pursuit by FBI agent George Havens. Havens,
too, is a decent man, one whose own vision of the war has broken under
the pressure of his search across America for a brilliant and elusive
quarry, a search that ends in a final, brutal confrontation on a winter
hillside.