When the U.S. government was looking for human bullets to bring the Soviet Union to its knees, Brian Newman was an obvious choice. A high achiever, a delinquent, an Army enlistee on the brink of a court-martial for crippling a drill instructor, Newman combined the qualities of brilliant genius and ruthlessness the government needed to fashion the perfect human weapon. They transformed him into a commando so cunning that, left on his own in a remote Russian province, he devastated Russian heavy, industry in a hellish nuclear catastrophe.

Now the Americans have him back after he has endured more than six years of isolation in a frozen Russian gulag, tortured and drugged. Can Newman go free? Or has his ordeal stripped him of any last remnants of humanity and reduced him to a soulless psychopath? In spine-tingling debriefing sessions, a female psychiatrist believes she has figured out the Newman enigma. But before she can convince her colleagues of her theory, Newman escapes and sets into motion his own hidden agenda. As the world's finest covert operatives close in on him, the U.S. military and the psychiatric team are forced to confront a possibility even more disturbing than the specter of Brian Newman at large: That Newman is not even a Homo sapiens, but a new man, the uber man, ultimate successor to our race, Nietzsche's prophetic dream and our worst nightmare.