Synopsis: From the back cover of the Del Rey first edition: "The most desolate place on Earth - Chile's Rapa Nui, Easter Island - home of the enigmatic stone faces, and site of the forced landing of the crippled NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis. For pilot Frank King, diplomat Joyce Fisher, and island governor Ernesto Obregon, the crisis of the orbiter's near crash-landing was only the beginning. Beneath the unseeing eyes of the ancient gods, NASA's best minds had to build an emergency spaceport on a stone-age desert owned by a hostile nation - before the shuttle's lethal rocket fuel could endanger the whole island... before local terrorists could take the rescue mission hostage... and before a web of international tension and human passion could explode in violent confrontation on the island at the center of the world."