It was an oddly assorted company of passengers that boarded the S.S. Chetwynd in Hong Kong and Singapore to take passage to Fremantle. The old vessel, operated by a line that had a poor reputation, was the kind of ship that could hardly attract the finest officers or crew and was patronised only by the least demanding or affluent of passengers. In this company, living in such close quarters, there was inevitably a certain amount of friction. But human passions would prove insignificant by comparison when the indescribable fury of the storm hit.

The gunners on the Golden Ray were a strangely assorted bunch. The seamen were more of a type, but the soldiers seconded to the job could hardly have differed more from one another. There was the professional, Sergeant Willis, in love with his job, Vernon the intellectual, and Miller the tragic communistic misfit who found his Russian Mecca not quite what he expected. The background and past of each character in the book are skilfully woven into the narrative of the ordeal at sea in both directions, and experiences on Russian soil at Murmansk.

When the S.S. Southern Queen encounters a life boat marked Valparaiso a boat that had been sunk by the Japanese a year earlier, a strange mystery begins. More interestingly the sunken ship carried gold. There was a man in the life boat and despite his 'amnesia' he still wants to go back to the Pacific. Rains and Jones follow close behind.

There were five dead men in the cabin of the boat, lying under six fathoms of Caribbean water. But the men had not been drowned: they had been shot through the head at close range. John Fletcher had gone down to photograph a sunken ship, but he took photographs of the boat and its cargo of dead men instead. Soon he is having trouble with the island police, some men from President Clayton Rodger's private army of thugs and two CIA agents. Now Fletcher wishes he had followed his first impulse and said nothing to anyone....

Harry Banner turned up in London one November evening. He had just got back from Venezuela and he wanted to see Robert Cade. He'd known Cade six years earlier in Buenos Aires and now Banner wanted a small favour, just to keep a parcel until he called back for it. The trouble was that Banner never did call back, because the next morning he was found dead in his hotel room with a stab wound to the chest. Other people came looking for the parcel at his flat, but by that time Cade had decided a trip to Venezuela might throw some light on the reasons for Harry's murder. However, in San Borja, the climate could be very unhealthy for someone who went round asking too many questions.

When a valuable cargo ship is abandoned in the mid-Atlantic, Captain Barling of the S.S. Hopeful Enterprise has very special reasons for wishing to tow it into port. But is he justified in risking men's lives for the sake of his own desires? Shipmate Adam Loder thinks it is nothing but a wild goose chase and chief engineer Jonah Madden is worried about his ailing engines; but Charlie Wilson has a deeper worry that he is hiding.... However Barling has more than fearsome gales to contend with as a tenacious rival threatens his chances.