A cold breaking dawn by the River Thames and a tugboat operator sees a man on the bank being beaten by two other men.After going to him, the victim’s last words to him before dying are ‘the eagle will fall.’In the dead man’s pocket is the name of Alex Swan, former MI5 officer, and now with the Ministry of Defence Services Investigations Department.It’s 1969, and there is a race to the Moon. Simon and Garfunkel are on the radio and in the bookshops are bestsellers by Len Deighton and Graham Greene. World War Two is long over, and Hitler long dead, but not for a group of loyal ex-Nazis known as the Onyx Cross.Swan and his ex-detective colleague, Arthur Gable, learn that the dead man was a German-born scientist working on the Black Arrow satellite launch vehicle program at Highdown on the Isle of Wight.Although they have no idea as to what his dying words could mean. The nature of the case has also resurfaced a dark secret that Swan has kept hidden away since the end of the war.At Highdown following a test firing, the Deputy Chief Engineer Kevin Powell is found dead, boiled inside his protective suit under the rocket and Swan suspects that their deaths could be connected.Meanwhile, Gunther Fleischer, a former Nazi known as Merlin, has had his Onyx Cross operatives sabotaging space programs from the inside. As the war in Europe came to an end, Operation Falling Star was implemented by the German High Command. Scientists were to be killed, rather than have their knowledge fall into the hands of the US and her allies.