Six previous missions had been overwhelmingly successful. They always relied on each other to get out alive, Lex was thinking as he and his four-man SEAL team lay hidden in the wet jungle grass. Their mission was to destroy the North Vietnamese encampment with explosives and to eliminate the officers.

When their mission goes terribly wrong, the team is separated, and Mack is killed. The SEAL motto is “Leave no man behind. Dead or alive they come home,” so Lex carried Mack’s body to a riverbank and prepared himself to meet his own end only to awake weeks later to discover he is alive and the remaining members of his team, Al and Kit, are missing in action. To top it off, he has a guard posted at his hospital room door and a female voice talking in his head! Lex has many questions and no answers until two men who identify themselves as CIA show up to ask him questions about an “ancient dragon necklace” stolen on his last mission. The Chinese want it back and will stop at nothing to get it. Lex knows nothing about a stolen necklace, but the mysterious female voice talking in his head does.

On their last R&R, Al Palden had talked his three team members into allowing him to tattoo fierce-looking Chinese dragons on their bodies. Al was quick to assure them it would heal rapidly and disappear whenever they wanted it to. Unknown to the men, each dragon had a name, a personality, and was a different color. As Lex soon discovers, the dragon tattoos will play a pivotal role in his life and in solving the mystery of the missing necklace and the whereabouts of his missing team members.

While recuperating in the hospital, Lex is more interested in reuniting with his lost love, Leah. He had to break her heart because of his top-secret missions. Can he win her back? Does he even want to if his wounds are too severe? Will he ever leave the hospital? How will he find the rest of his team?