After doing several tours of duty in Indochina with the US Army Special Forces, John Harwich of Cape Cod has returned to Southeast Asia, living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. As an expat, he has to leave Thailand every so often to get a new visa. He chooses to go back to ever-nutty Cambodia where he will have a reunion with a Vietnamese bargirl he met on his last trip into Phnom Penh. The first problem he encounters is that the girl is no longer working there. Asking some aloof working girls who claim to know her, Harwich hears that she has an illness that has forced her to stop working in the bar. Tracking the girl down, he learns she has an illness that there is no cure for. After being threatened not to talk about this by Khmer authorities, Harwich escapes them to return home to Thailand as the plague sweeps globally. Back in Thailand, he learns that the real story is worse than the plague itself.