Nemesis

According to a shock CIA report, Russian cosmonauts have deflected a giant asteroid onto a collision course with the United States - presenting the President with an impossible moral dilemma: either he must wait passively for almost certain annihilation, or retaliate first with a massive nuclear strike.

The only hope of averting catastrophe lies with an elite team of the world's top astronomers and astrophysicists, gathered secretly at Eagle Peak Observatory, Arizona. They have five days to identify the asteroid - codename Nemesis - and stop it. If they can't, the President will have to assume the asteroid is going to hit and make his appalling choice.

But as time begins to run out and the search for Nemesis becomes increasingly desperate, British asteroid expert Oliver Webb has an extraordinary idea - that the key lies in the dusty pages of an obscure seventeenth-century Latin manuscript, a manuscript which has just gone mysteriously missing . . .