The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are mere footnotes in history, the west finally banished from the Middle East as a powerful new Caliphate unites the Islamic world to form the super-state of Arabia. While Europe wallows in a deep economic depression, rising food and oil prices spark growing social unrest across the continent. In Downing Street, Prime Minister Harry Beecham struggles with a country in crisis. Desperate to find a way out and seeking to forge new ties with an isolated America, Harry is summoned to an urgent security meeting and informed that a large number of surveillance targets have suddenly disappeared off the grid. Something was happening, but what? Elsewhere, on a busy street in south London, Hishi Khan, a British intelligence operative, is frantically trying to reacquire one such surveillance target. He has been tracking the man for some time but now the target has shrugged off his surveillance and escaped on foot after a brutal shooting outside an underground station. For Kirsty Moore, the day has been spent recovering after partying too hard the previous evening. She's relaxing on her third-floor balcony in west London when a van rolls quietly to a stop behind her apartment block. Overhead, a British Airways jet drowns out her screams as surface-to-air missiles are launched into the summer sky... Operation Swift Sword has begun. The initial assaults are carried out by sleeper teams, heavily-armed deep-cover operatives whose tasks include neutralizing police and military units, seizing power plants and media stations and spreading chaos and anarchy across the continent. Their actions would create a power vacuum, one that will be filled by the Islamic armies that have just received the order to advance. Their destination, Europe itself. Trapped in Whitehall by the sudden and devastating chaos, Harry is herded into the basement beneath Number Ten and told the most terrible news - Britain is under attack. Power has been cut to the city, communications are down, there's no command structure and the armed forces are in disarray. The only option left is to escape the city before it falls. Fleeing through an emergency tunnel system with a team of Special Forces soldiers, Harry and the survivors attempt to reach Alternate One, the highly secret crisis management complex where refuge must surely be found. Yet as Europe buckles under the Islamic onslaught it becomes increasingly clear that sanctuary must lie elsewhere, far to the north, where the final battle for survival will trigger the largest evacuation ever witnessed as war erupts along the Scottish border. The face of Europe is about to change, moulded by a series of events that will have repercussions far into the future.