It is set six years after the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein wants revenge, and has managed to acquire a particularly deadly and persistent variant of VX nerve gas from the Chinese. When the Chinese deliver the agent, something goes wrong, and a U-2 spy plane making an unscheduled flight takes photographs of the results.
Harper is sent out with a team of marines and a civilian weapons expert.
The civilian should never have been sent on the mission and the marines are unhappy with their orders. Support for the mission is unreliable, and Harper fears he has been sold out, again. Harper is a good, strong character, and even if you have not met him before, you quickly come to like him. It's not surprising that databases are a subject of the book, since De Bono runs a database consulting firm called 'Systems Consulting'. The story is quite long, but it gets going quickly and has a good mix of politics, technology and action.