This fictional account of imprisonment and escape from the Gulag brings the horrors of Stalin's reign of terror to vivid life. A highly decorated infantry captain is unjustly charged with treason, tortured, and sentenced to 25 years of labour that he knows he will never survive. He befriends three other desperate prisoners, and together they plot to elude months of agony and certain death in the camp. They are aided in their escape by the camp's chief medical orderly, a native Siberian whose knowledge of native customs, the local topography, and healing and survival techniques enable the men to make slow progress by reindeer-drawn sled and on foot across the forbidding Arctic terrain. After 18 months of gruelling travel, their passage to freedom in Alaska is jeopardised when the Soviets unleash an artillery bombardment in a last ditch effort to halt their race across the frozen Bering Strait.