Friday afternoon, Chicago. Twenty-eight-year-old Marine Fred Smith walks out of General Dynamics with Federal Express in pieces: $28 million burned in eighteen months, 180 packages a night, and a fund chief who cares more about his tee time than Fred’s survival. The pumps are locked over a $24,000 bill. If the Falcon jets don’t launch at 5 A.M. Monday, the board calls the loan and liquidates the company.
In Memphis, his wife Linda is exhausted and three-year-old Wendy needs her daddy back. At the hangar, fourteen Falcon 20s and 389 employees who believed in his vision—pilots who left airline careers, people who put jet fuel on their own credit cards. Failure isn’t an option for a Marine.
Instead of taking the flight home, Fred boards a red-eye to Las Vegas with $100 in his wallet and a $1,000 credit line from a stranger, sealed on a handshake: a wing and a prayer. He has to win $24,000 by Monday. Marine rules: never touch company funds, play every hand by the book, and walk the second he hits the number. He sits down at Binion’s Horseshoe and doubles down on the only weapon he has left.
What he didn’t plan on was Rayna. At midnight, a mystery woman steers him off the tables and into a long black limousine, whisking him away from Binion’s to the Sultan’s Table at the Dunes. She whispers ideas in his head that will change the way the world ships packages forever. But every hour she keeps him from the tables puts everything at risk, and with her seductress ways, he may never see his family again.