David Richards is a mid-level diplomat assigned to the sleepy Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar. The time is the early 1980s, when the American Empire had begun tentatively to flex its muscles once again. Kutar is a diplomatic backwater. For centuries, desultory tribal conflict has flared once in a while in the arid hills hundreds of miles from the coastal capital of Laradan, and as the book opens, rumors of a small, pitched battle there reach the inhabitants of Laradan. As they always have, they ignore the stories, but this time something is different: the Americans decide to do something about it.As any casual student of geopolitics will know, this is bad news for the inhabitants of the kingdom of Kutar. Urged on by a Kurtzian American military advisor named Colonel Munn, the little-used Kutaran army marches into the hills. In quick order they are decimated, and with sickening rapidity the heights above Laradan are occupied by a rebel force possessed of the government's abandoned artillery. Soon the Americans, and all other foreigners, are ordered to abandon the country and leave the people of Laradan to their fate.David Richards is ordered to remain in the beleaguered city and, along with a collection of ex-pats and foreign nationals, is holed up in a colonial dinosaur of a resort called the Moonlight Hotel. And the siege begins.