"It is 1948. World War Two is over, Hitler is dead. The Nuremberg trials have concluded. The Marshall Plan attempts to rebuild Europe, though Germany remains occupied by American, British, French, and Soviet military forces. William Thomas Cochrane, an American intelligence agent, is in England with his wife, Laura, visiting friends and family. Bill Cochrane has accepted an invitation to be a guest lecturer for one year at the University of Cambridge. But when summer arrives, so does the first major international crisis of the postwar years. Under Joseph Stalin’s orders, the Soviet Union employs the Red Army to block the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control."
"Cochrane’s country is calling him back to active duty for a special assignment in the newly divided Germany, one which will take him behind newly drawn enemy lines and into a perilous netherworld of ruthless black marketeers, petty criminals, prostitutes, ex-Nazis, and Soviet spies."