Captain James Holland is the pilot on a routine flight from Frankfurt to
New York, packed with people eager to be home for Christmas. When a
passenger collapses from what appears to be a heart attack, Holland is
forced to request an emergency landing at London's Heathrow Airport. But
to his great surprise, the air traffic controllers will not let him land
in England--they tell Holland that his sick passenger has contracted a
dangerous new form of influenza and that the plane must return to
Germany.
But when German officials also refuse the landing, and other European
countries follow suit, Holland begins to suspect that he's in much more
trouble than anyone's letting on. In fact, his sick passenger is
carrying a deadly virus accidentally released from a Bavarian
laboratory, and it is feared that everyone on board is now infected. At
the same time, someone with access to the CIA's computers wants to shoot
the plane out of the sky, and there is a United States ambassador on
board with powerful terrorist enemies who want to see him dead. While
the panic on the ground spreads from the White House Situation Room to a
small airport in the Ukrainian Republic, Captain Holland has only one
concern: Where and when can he land?
