"The passengers and crew on an Airbus en route to Australia suddenly begin coughing up blood and hemorrhaging violently as the plane plunges to the ground. There are no survivors. A luxury yacht in the South Indian Sea blows up, and a lone woman escapes the contagion that has inexplicably killed everyone else on the boat. A helicopter whose occupants have been stricken by an unknown illness crashes into a bridge in South Africa, killing motorists and pedestrians. The world is facing a devastating bio-terror event, and a game of brinksmanship gets underway as the major powers jockey for position: China sends a naval flotilla to seek the source of the plague and find a way to weaponize it; Russia maneuvers quietly on the sidelines to seize the deadly prize in its quest to regain an empire; while back in Washington D.C., Chase Williams and his top secret Black Wasp special ops team must find out who is behind these deadly attacks before war is unleashed. What is the secret linking an illegal diamond mining operation, a controversial cure for AIDS, an apartheid-era conspiracy to cover up attempted genocide, and a brilliant but utterly amoral entrepreneur with a score to settle? Black Wasp mounts an ingenious attack on two fronts, from the storm-tossed seas off South Africa to an edge-of-the seat-chase as they seek to find the truth behind this lethal disease before millions of innocent lives are lost." --Provided by publisher.