A spacecraft glides gorgeously through the solar system toward Earth. But it's on no pleasure trip. It arrives on our planet and immediately engages two Russian MiG fighter jets in a dogfight — and turns them into dog food.

Meanwhile, not far from there, Chechen rebels hoping to salvage high-tech goodies from a downed, unmanned American military aircraft encounter a mysterious man in a cloak and slouch hat, wielding a scythe. It's an appropriate instrument — because moments later, he is a grim reaper cutting through them like wheat. The armed rebels finally surround him and bring him to a makeshift compound, where he is tortured. Perhaps that's just part of his plan to find where the rebels have kept the aircraft's all-important disk drives....

In the nearby city of Grozny, a beautiful blonde streetwalker is killed by a shadowy creature, who takes her form. Shortly thereafter, she (it?) enters a nearby Russian Army tactical-supply depot — and destroys it.

By now, Jack Bavaro, the hard-as-nails head of the U.S. government's Interceptor Force, knows that the Russian skies have seen "an unidentified inbound" with "an unspecified displacement signature" and a propulsion system unlike any known on Earth.

Translated: trouble.

Covert intel eventually indicates the craft's displacement signature is the same as that which was detected in the Mexican town of El Descanso, back when all Hell broke loose last time — back when Sean Lambert , the IF team leader, led the charge against a hostile, extraterrestrial shapeshifter in a conflict that ended with the detonation of tactical nuclear weapons.

Things are different now. This incursion has taken place within the borders of a mercurial, uncertain ally — and the alien has taken over a nuclear reactor from which "a Chernobyl-level release would make Three Mile Island look like a leaky faucet." It's a very different challenge for Lambert and his new team...and one that requires new weapons, including a microwave rifle and a chain gun that fires a 300-piece payload of razor chain.