Battle ship captain CO commander Tom Chandler courteously accommodates zoologist Dr. Rachel Scott's wishes to research birds in the Arctic while his crew engages incommunicado in war games. When his patience is exhausted, a satellite call to the White House has his return order overruled by the Pentagon, the top-secret research is national security priority. Then a Russian force attacks her last and successful sample hunt, but is fought-off. Chandler orders a hasty return home, but finally learns the world is in the grip of an unprecedented pandemic which wiped out most of humanity. It started from Egypt but spreads over all continents, wiping out all demographic, economic and political order. They attempt to bring the bird virus sample, the only hope to develop a vaccine, to a US lab, but the disease already rendered the entire country lawless, hence too unsafe, so Scott must improvise in the primitive lab aboard.
