Lenin may have just seized power for the Bolsheviks, but Charlie Doig has just seized twenty-eight tonnes of Lenin's gold. For two days he's the richest man in the whole of Russia. However, on hearing that the Red armies have cut off his escape to the west, he decides to hide the gold for a later day and with Kobi, his Mongolian henchman, to make his way east along the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, and freedom.

Russia's in a state of chaos. People are fleeing the Reds in their millions. Charlie has to fight his way past refugees, bandits, murderers and shamans, only to discover when he gets there that the Japanese have invaded Siberia. He falls in with an old flame, a New Yorker now calling herself Countess Cynthia von Zipf. He saves the life of her protector, General Sato. As a reward, Sato offers him the position of Prince of Siberia - provided that he first goes to Nagasaki and eliminates a rival of Sato's. He accepts. With him travels one of Sato's men, a Doctor Hijo, who's been experimenting on Bolshevik prisoners in order to confect a vaccine against typhus.

Charlie finds Japan a paradise after Russia - until Hijo tricks him into being the guinea pig for yet another gruesome experiment. Having survived that, he comes to suspect that he's welcome to the Japanese only because of his gold. As an added twist, he's offered marriage by the daughter of the man he's been sent to kill. In an unforgettable final scene, Charlie, clothed in a samurai's blue and green robes, strides through the wood to the pavilion where Mimosa awaits him. She's after a share of his luck. But what can she offer Charlie, one of fiction's truly great adventurers?