In Ocala, Florida, two Army National Guard members are brutally murdered and their pre-teen daughters abducted. Local investigators believe the murders to be incidental to the abduction and concentrate their efforts on sex offenders in local the area. For the young apprentice hitman, however, the abduction was the last thing he wanted and the girls continued existence is more a complication to his life than anything else.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Mark Winters of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) in Lakeland Florida and his team, on the other hand, while equally haunted by the fate of the girls, comes to believe that the murders are part of string of continuing murders in a war between opposing drug cartels and the smugglers of automatic weapons operating within Florida. Their investigation leads them to the heart of the cartels' operations in Mexico.

Meanwhile General Phil Sambrook's has to focus on the investigations involving the potential misconduct of two separate special operations teams in Afghanistan.