Agent Orange

It was hot and damp inside the African hut. Maria’s face contorted with pain as another contraction swept over her and racked her body. Outside, her husband, Patrick, waited anxiously for the birth of the child he so desperately wanted. Suddenly its head appeared; “push Maria, push”, urged the elderly midwife. By the dim light of a flickering candle, the baby emerged. The old woman bent to catch the child, but as she caught sight of it her smile turned to horror.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Steve Woodman, a CIA official working for the United States Department of Agriculture, is gathering information about the illegal manufacture and use of Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam War to destroy jungle growth and reveal enemy troops. But the lethal chemical proved to be a sentence worse than death for the babies born to anyone who came into contact with it. Steve knew, for it had claimed the lives of his wife and deformed child.

His investigations lead him to Africa and Clive Hyde, a bullying fertilizer baron whose greed for wealth far outweighs his social conscience. Posing as a journalist for an agricultural magazine Steve suspects that it is Hyde’s chemical plant that provides the crop spraying fertilizer used by the sugar cane farmers to make their crop grow taller. The same sugar cane fields in which Patrick works.

When the beautiful, young widow, Sarah Williams, shows Steve her stunted and grotesquely twisted vegetable crop, his suspicions are confirmed; and when he discovers Patrick and Maria’s disfigured child he sets out to crush Hyde’s illicit operation.

But first he must contend with the insanely jealous Johnathan Taylor, Hyde’s right-hand-man and former suitor of Sarah, who will stop at nothing to destroy Steve and win back his woman.

And as Steve slowly peels away the layers of lies and deception he finds himself moving inexorably into a nightmare of hate, violence and murder - a nightmare from which it seems he can never awaken.