On February 19th, 1942, the Japanese launched a surprise air attack against Darwin, destroying valuable supplies and shipping. On the same day, several hundred miles away, their forces landed on Timor, an island which was to form one of the stepping stones to an ultimate invasion of Australia itself.

The main struggle for control of the island was brief and decisive. Pushing the small Australian and Dutch force back into the mountains in the interior, the enemy secured the island. Nothing now stood in the way of the invasion of Java, the only important island still in Allied hands.

But on Timor itself, the Allied force remained intact in the face of increasing pressure. Daily, they attacked the enemy troops on the island. The mere fact that they survived at all was a military miracle, the inescapable fact that they did much to disrupt Japanese communications on the island was even more incredible.

For more than a year, these men fought and harrassed the enemy in the steaming jungles and swamps, their lives a crazy and dangerous pattern of disease, fear and hair-raising peril until they were evacuated.

On a spring day in 1941, Captain Peter Adair was summoned to London on a top-secret mission. Here, he was told that one of Britain's topmost scientists, thought to have been killed when the Germans invaded Denmark, was alive and in a German prison-camp, wearing the uniform of an R.A.F. officer. It was essential that this man should be smuggled out of the camp and back to England along the River Line, one of the networks of communications which enabled shot-down Allied airmen and those escaping from enemy camps to get home through Belgium, France and the Pyrenees.

Adair's task was to bail out over Germany and be made a prisoner of war by the enemy. The chances of his being sent to the same camp, provided he landed in the vicinity, were considered sufficiently good to warrant the attempt.

This is the novel of that attempt, of a man who deliberately endured the sufferings and hardships of prison life so that he might help another man, an extremely important man, to escape. A story for all those whose hearts warm to high excitement, a tale of a fight against tremendous odds and of one of the most fantastic escapes of the entire war.