"Governments around the world are shocked when the sleepy South American nation of Manu unexpectedly launches a rocket from a secret jungle base. How could a backward country, dismissed by every superpower as irrelevant, join the Space Age seemingly overnight and in such spectacular fashion? As every intelligence agency on earth scrambles to send men to Manu, MIC director Simon Kirk enlists the only two agents who can be counted on in a crisis: Patrick “Podge” Becket and the brilliant Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright."