After surviving a Pan Am Clipper crash Michelangelo Barrier and his Sikh friend Raj find themselves caught up in the Japan-China war in 1939. Michelangelo is joined by a mysterious French-Chinese woman in search of a priceless ring developed by her late husband and a German scientist 16 years earlier. The lost ring contains a secret that promises to bring peace to a world at war. Interrupting the search, however, is their incarceration in a Japanese prison camp. They need to escape or die. They need to find the ring or the world will destroy itself in war.