All nine-going-on-ten-year-old Wade McHenry wanted to do at the beginning of the summer of 1956 was to join his daddy, an Air Force serviceman, in North Africa. The Suez Canal crisis, however, delayed the plans. While Wade and his mother waited for the crisis to end, Wade had to risk his live to save the life of a gravely ill relative, work against time to exonerate his hero, who had been accused of a crime Wade was convinced he did not commit, and suffer from what Wade saw as a betrayal by a much older woman with whom he had fallen madly in love. Before the summer was over, Wade learned that heroes are not super-humans, but ordinary people capable of extraordinary acts of courage."