It's 1950, and Harry Block, a fighter jock who distinguished himself in the skies over Europe in World War II, is recalled to active duty in Korea. Harry decides to bail on the president's "offer, " his career, and his keeping up-with-the-Joneses suburban life. He hijacks a plane, reinvents himself as Harry Kraft, and sets out to live an extraordinary new life of action and adventure, set against the tumultuous halfway point of the American Century. Harry fetches up in the hazy tropical heat of Guatemala, a sleepy dictatorship under the thumb of the American U.S. Fruit Corporation and run by a shaky president besieged by rumblings of popular uprisings and military coups. Here he's content to fly cargo planes for small-time smugglers and enjoy the local attractions, but he can't escape the land he fled from, particularly when the C.I.A., the army, communist agitators, the president's wife and U.S. Fruit all seem to be conspiring to try to kill him