Black Magic begins with a scene of gripping terror in a Minuteman Missile Control Center deep under the prairies of South Dakota. When the two highly trained officers on duty encounter a force so hideous as to make death a refuge, warning is served: a new weapon has made American defenses as vulnerable as a eggshell.

But only one man really understands the nature of the weapon. He believes it because he once encountered it, in the wild Zagros mountains of Iran. There, at the Shah's Institute for Bioenergy Science, he was shown a boy. And the boy was so strange and so dangerous that the man almost lost his mind.