Rex Wyman, a world-famous software billionaire,is determined to win the world's longest and most challenging yacht race, from San Francisco to Japan via the Alaska -- through some of the roughest seas imaginable. He sets out onboard the Victory, a 75-million-dollar racing yacht designed and navigated entirely by computer.

Wyman desperately needs this triumph: his business empire is crumbling, his assets dwindling, and only a public-relations coup like this can save him. But not even his girlfriend, a beautiful and gifted computer programmer, realizes the lengths he will go to in order to win. Meanwhile, he must evade a long list of secret enemies intent on making this ocean race his last one. So, when an enormous sub-arctic storm engulfs the Victory, the stakes become not just win-or-lose but a matter of life and death.