The small man woke sharply, the ever-present trembling slowly subsiding, the deep throb of the huge motors returning through the flightening dreams to his consciousness. His head had fallen against the window frame: the briefcase chained to his wrist had twisted and the latch was cutting into the back of his hand... Sunlight crept in through the half-closed curtains, but the other passengers still slept soundly. A dead planet, in orbit, high in the thin air: a satellite morgue... He glanced at his watch. Five A.M.: four hours to Rio de Janeiro... He knew, moments later, that somebody had acted too soon. He could picture the startled looks on the faces of the crew bunched in the eerily lit nose as the message came clattering in over the air — the report that Hans Busch had boarded the plane at Idlewild with $2,000,000 in cash. More important, he still had to clear customs, and the Brazilian authorities would be most interested in examining the briefcase of the man in seat 6B. He was right. Captain José Da Silva was very interested. Da Silva, in fact, knew a lot about Mr. Busch already — a lot that Busch was sure no one could possibly know. He even knew the number tattooed on Hans Busch’s arm

When the Brazilian liner Porto Alegre docked in Barbados in 1956, the passengers reveled in the gay carnival-time hysteria ashore, while the few officers left aboard invited a four-man calypso band to liven up the dull shipboard routine. But the smiling musicians were even more adept at cracking the purser’s safe than playing their steel drums, and the Porto Alegre left the friendly Caribbean minus half a million dollars’ worth of gems. A young police officer named Da Silva nailed the thieves, sent them to jail, and waited fifteen years for the release of the last surviving member of the gang to lead him to the well-hidden loot. But prison had changed William Trelawney McNeil, mastermind of the shipboard heist. Once a charming lady killer, now a bitter, half-mad adversary, he leads Da Silva on a danger-laden chase through a green hell where the natives hate the Brazilian detective as much as McNeil himself