After a five hour delay at Los Angeles International Airport the weary passengers of flight ACL248 finally get some sleep as they cruised at 27,000 feet above the Sierra Madre heading south for Mexico City. Nobody took much notice as the dimmed lights of the cabin flickered for a few moments. In the cockpit Captain Luis Juarez cursed the maintenance company and ordered his junior pilot to carry out a routine check on the aircraft's electrical systems. Less than twenty minutes later ACL248 disappears off Mexico Approach Radar. Three thousand miles away, NTSB aircrash investigator Ron Carter is fast asleep in his Washington apartment when the phone rings. A voice on the other end tells him they have a bird down.The following day Carter, along with the other investigators of the NTSB `Go-Team', is picking through the remains of ACL248 as she lay in a thousand burnt little pieces on a desolate mountain peak in the Sierra Madre. Of the 148 passengers and crew there were no survivors. The initial findings of the investigation point to pilot error. Carter, however, after listening to the flight recorders, feels uneasy about the events which led to the crash. His suspicions fall on the maintenance company, General Airfactors (GenAir) based in Los Angeles. He is also contacted by FBI agent Nancy Kronziac who informs him that one of the GenAir mechanics who had worked on ACL248 was under surveillance for his ties to an ultra right wing group in southern California with a clandestine network of associations all over the country. Carter and Kronziac follow a trail of clues which takes them from the rocky slopes of the Sierra Madre to the highest echelons of the Federal Government in Washington.