Early May 1945. Murphy’s platoon engages in one last battle against an enemy determined to keep fighting to the bitter end. The men are reluctant to risk their lives so close to the end, but they are US Army Rangers. Not prepared to give ground to a bunch of unrepentant Nazis. They hit the Nazis hard and inflict so many casualties they have no choice but to drop their weapons, throw up their hands and surrender. It is over.
Yet it is not over. An SS scientist is on the run. Gottfried Neumann has committed murder on an industrial scale inside the Treblinka death camp. The victims were mainly Jews, used as guinea pigs in his ongoing experiments into the effects of radiation on the human body. Research the Nazis are desperate to gather as part of their program to develop an atomic bomb, but others are no less interested in discovering the knowledge he has gained.
They hand Murphy one last mission. Find this man. Hunt him down. He assumes the purpose is to put him on trial for war crimes until he realizes the truth. Certain parties want him in the United States to aid the government’s atomic program. He is having none of it, and his men set out to find him and when they do, ensure he goes nowhere. Except to hell. They follow the ratline, the escape route established by the Vatican to aid fleeing Nazis, and repeatedly have to fight their way out of ambushes set by Neumann and his Nazi pals.
There are others determined to stop them. Americans. OSS, skilled guerilla fighters. As well as agents of the Vatican, sympathetic to the Nazi cause, and prepared to go to any lengths to protect the perpetrators of Hitler’s evil.