Lunch, a quiet game of golf, a routine social call on M, who is convalescing in his Regency house in Berkshire—the life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency, until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped and all of his house staff savagely murdered.

The action ricochets across the globe, but quickly enough lands Bond on a volcanic Greek island, where the malign Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army of China is collaborating with the ex-Nazi commander, Von Richter, in planning a world-dominating conspiracy. The stakes have never been higher, nor the dangers more complex. Bond’s allies—the beautiful, brown-haired Greek agent, Ariadne Alexandrou; along with a tough-as-nails former World War II resistance fighter—are quickly neutralized by the venomous Colonel Sun. Alone and unarmed, faces off against these two nefarious villains.

Stripped of all professional aids, James Bond faces the deadly devices of Colonel Sun and his Nazi cohort in a test that brings him to the verge of his physical abilities.