The sole survivor of an Army plane crash in the Peruvian hinterlands, Jim Ellison subsisted for nearly two years on his raw animal instincts. When he returned to America and became a police lieutenant, Jim discovered that the abilities that had kept him alive in the jungle now gave him extraordinary senses of perception. With the help of Captain Simon Banks and a grad student Blair Sandburg, Jim now attempts to use these powers to apprehend a terrorist bomber called the Switchman.

The town of Cascade is brought to its knees when Garrett Kincaid, a notorious criminal that Jim Ellison had arrested years before, seizes control of the town's police station with the help of his gang of felons.

During a flight to South America, Captain Banks and his son Daryl crash land in the Peruvian jungle and eventually stumble across a shady lumbering operation run by a man named Reischer.

Jim and Blair are assigned to protect pop singer Angie Ferris from an obsessive, escaped convict named Jay Weston.

When employees start dying "accidentally" aboard the North Star Five oilrig, Jim and Blair discover that their newest assignment has them walking a decidedly watery beat.

Sandburg becomes trapped between floors in a skyscraper elevator controlled by an extortionist, who threatens to send the elevator plummeting to its doom unless a hefty ransom is paid.

In the Peruvian jungle, a Chopec Sentinel named Incacha is enraged by the pollution of his land by a contaminated oil well and the murder of one of his tribesman by an employee of the Cyclops Oil Co. ... Back in Cascade, Ellison foils a burglary but accidentally shoots a security guard. Luckily, the guard is OK, but Ellison's dismay causes his Sentinel powers to disappear.

When basketball players on the Cascade Jaguars start turning up dead, Jim must calculate the difference between a good shot and a deadly one.

Ellison knows that the city is in for trouble when Garrett Kincaid, the leader of the Sunrise Patriots militia group, escapes from prison. While Jim tracks the escaped convict, Captain Banks, Daryl Banks, and Blair Sandburg attend a Cascade Jaguars' basketball game.

When Blair's mother Naomi secretly submits her son's Sentinel thesis paper to a publisher, Jim discovers that being famous can be detrimental to your health. While Jim and Blair protect a local union leader named Jack Bartley from attempts on his life, information from Blair's paper is leaked to the press and Ellison is caught in the middle of a media frenzy.