They needed a monster to get a little girl back. They imprisoned him for the way he did it. Now they need the monster again to do what he does best.
FBI Special Agent Diane Reskova waited with her team for a tracker to arrive on site in the Caribou Wilderness of California. A psychopath pursued unsuccessfully for two years by Reskova’s team had kidnapped California Senator Fred Hokanson’s niece, dragging her into the surrounding mountains. Hokanson recruits Jeremiah McDaniels unbeknownst to Reskova as the tracker. McDaniels, a Delta Force Colonel with CIA background, leads the FBI agents after Hughes. Ditching Reskova and her team, McDaniels saves Hokanson’s niece and beheads her kidnapper, Stanton Hughes.
After an off-hand remark McDaniels makes concerning a movie while accepting blame for the Hughes’ fiasco, the press label him ‘Cold Mountain’. Taken into custody on Reskova’s orders, McDaniels avoids prison by public outcry and Senator Hokanson’s intervention. With Hokanson’s shadowy sponsorship, McDaniels becomes the enforcement arm of Reskova’s team. With Kumar Rasheed, an Iraqi whose family McDaniels had saved during the second Iraq war, McDaniels supplies Reskova with a weapon she has neither asked for nor condones.
Funneled between America and Iraq, McDaniels stays one step ahead of American bureaucrats more interested in appearances than the safety of the country. Reskova, at first repulsed by McDaniels’ methods, soon embraces both the enigmatic McDaniels and his tactics. Reskova threads McDaniels and his Iraqi comrade Kumar Rasheed into her anti-terrorism unit with murderous result. McDaniels’ background and deadly skills become a point of fascination for the bewildered Reskova as her attraction to McDaniels quickly rivals her dedication to the FBI.