A woman employed by the CIA working under the alias of Mariana is abducted and threatened with death because she and her murdered paramour accidentally photographed a convoy of long bedded Soviet trucks entering caves in northeast Afghanistan near the Wakan Corridor, an ancient Silk Road route to China. Near death and fleeing men sent to kill her, she is found by a nomadic 'Kuchi' boy who takes her into their camp where she is nursed back to life, only to be threatened again by other assassins following the caravan across Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains. Mariana uses her nurses' training to disappear from the expat social scene while traveling with the nomads. Suspecting she had fallen into enemy hands, her Australian grandfather sends one of his employees, a geologist named Dr. Jonathon de Vere who has Special Forces background, to find Mariana and return her to the United States. Complicating matters is the continual threat from radical mullahs who automatically assume any woman not shrouded in a full-body covering called a chadri is engaging in prostitution and subject to be stoned to death. Mariana must choose between discovery by the forces determined to kill her and masking herself with the subterfuge of a 'temporary marriage'. She becomes a phantom, a benevolent djinn among the people who would save her while she is a devil to those trying to kill her. Readers will find in this book an interesting explication of the customs, times and events that occurred when Afghanistan was at its 'tipping' point of transition from Islamic traditional culture and beliefs to the modernity that has brought Central Asia into the chaotic world of the 21st century.