December, 1943: A badly damaged American bomber struggles to fly over wartime Germany. At the controls is twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown. Half his crew lay wounded or dead on this, their first mission. Suddenly, a Messerschmitt fighter pulls up on the bomber's tail. The pilot is German ace Franz Stigler-and he can destroy the young American crew with the squeeze of a trigger... What happened next would defy imagination and later...

En route to a conference, three NTSB experts are aboard a twin turbo prop plane when it crashes into a thickly forested moutainside. But the crash isn't an accident. The plane was brought down on purpose--and the NTSB experts weren't the real target.