"The Golden Hour: In international politics, the hundred hours following a coup, when there is still a chance that diplomacy, a secret back channel, military action--something--might reverse the chain of events...Judd Ryker, director of the new State Department Crisis Reaction Unit, races from Washington across Europe to the Sahara Desert, he finds that personalities, loyalties, everything he thought he knew, begin to shift and change beneath his feet?and that friends and enemies come in many forms." -- from page [2] book jacket.