Following personal tragedy Devonshire bom Nicholas Reede joins the British army as a teenage Ensign and is sent to India to become involved in the fighting at Lucknow during the Indian mutiny of 1857 where he is badly wounded undertaking an outstanding act of bravery. The senior British officer trapped there when the mutiny erupted had been on route to London with a secret dispatch containing information about an assassination plot against the life of Queen Victoria and revealing evidence of an international conspiracy threatening a major war in the region intended to end British rule in India. The mutiny had been deliberately triggered to prevent that information leaving India and when the injured Nick Reede is entrusted with the task of delivering the dispatch to England he and his small escort are hunted down by a man intent on stopping it at any cost. Nothing short of a miracle sees him plucked at death's door from the middle of the Bay of Bengal and thrust into the brig of a penal ship headed for Sydney. With total memory loss and plagued by nightmares, he is suspected of being a deserter and is placed among the lower ranks of a British regiment in Australia which is then dispatched to New Zealand to be pitted against the world's most fearsome guerrilla fighters, the legendary Maori.