Tom O'Dell is a rural Wisconsin dairy veterinarian who has his own practice. With the emergence of worldwide unexplained instantaneous mass animal deaths, Tom is drafted by the USDA to be a CDC trained investigator and help protect the agricultural economy from devastation. Trained at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, he becomes part of a worldwide team of scientists to find a cause of these deaths. The team's first cases involve the death of 220 cows and heifer calves in a herd of free-range beef cattle grazing on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, where only the bulls and steers are untouched. There, they meet an ancient Lakota Sioux shaman whose dreams and visions have predicted the arrival of a 'Destroyer', who will bring on worldwide Armageddon. The team is commissioned by the old man to find this destroyer of life and that leads them on a worldwide manhunt.
They team up with French investigators from the prestigious Pasteur Institute and an old Parisian Nazi hunter. The man depicted in the old Indian's journals is discovered to be Wilheim Berhetzel, a Nazi war criminal, thought to be long-dead in a post-war plane crash into a Swiss mountainside. His death camp experiments to discover a fountain of youth drug and a lethal death-ray weapon becomes his obsession, which he continues to perfect in the secluded rainforests of Argentina. He emerges on the world's stage again during his assassination attempt on the president of France with his perfected weapon. The team's pursuit leads them through Europe and back to South America where they barely escape Berhetzel's attempt to kill them. The Nazi then disappears only to reappear in the United States with designs of overthrowing the government with the mass extermination of the country's leaders at the presidential inauguration ceremony.
