SOMETIMES, surviving a war can almost seem worse than dying in it. In a Croatian village near Vukovar, no one who survived will ever forget the night they waited for the weapons they needed to make a last-ditch fight against the advancing Serbs. The promised delivery never came, and the village was overrun. Eighteen years later, a body is unearthed from a field, and with it the identity of the arms dealer who betrayed them. Now the villagers can plot their revenge. In leafy England, arms dealer Harvey Gillott regards himself as a man of his word. There is only one blemish on his record, and that was long ago. But Gillott, his family, his friends and his enemies are about to be pitched into a sequence of events that will unfold across Europe with breath-taking drama and almost biblical power. Harvey Gillott is about to find out what happens when the hand of the past suddenly reaches out to the present - and it's holding a gun.