When thirty-five-year-old litigator Hunter Lee decides to turn his back on the rat race that has made him rich but cost him his marriage, he takes the advice of his brother and goes to Montana. There he joins the elite Smoke Jumpers, marines of the firefighting world, who parachute out of C-5 airplanes to contain the worst forest fires of the remote West. But escape from the ugly side of human nature is hardly what he finds when word reaches him of a small town's little secret involving arson and the reckless quest for profits at the expense of lives.