When a student vanishes from Ethan North Academy the nation's oldest military preparatory school is forced to close forever, unless a small band of Alumni can solve the mystery. Enter disabled ex-Boston cop Kevin O'Connor, discredited oceanographer Walter Weiss and Alaskan hunter Derek Yeager, who was expelled from Ethan North twenty years earlier, two weeks before graduation. Together with their former teacher Master Sergeant Rocky Chambers and school president Colonel 'Trip' Hammond, they join the missing boy's mother, Liu Chen, in the desperate quest to find her son in the misty Appalachian foothills of Parsons County Pennsylvania.