Plot

When the daughter of a well-known and well-respected base commander is murdered, an undercover detective is summoned to look into the matter and finds a slew of cover-ups at West Point.

The naked corpse of Captain Elisabeth Campbell, daughter of Lieutenant General "Fighting Joe" Campbell, is found staked out on the urban warfare range of Fort MacCallum. Army CID detectives and ex-lovers Paul Brenner and Sara Sunhill are called in to investigate, and find themselves wrapped up in a maelstrom of sexual impropriety and misguided face-saving.—Jeff Cross <blackjac_1998@yahoo.com>

When a general's daughter, an army captain in psychological operations, is found murdered, two warrant officers are brought in to investigate. The young woman was staked down with tent stakes, strangled, and presumably raped. But what the investigators find is even more bizarre, relating back to her days at West Point and involving the general himself and his aide. The daughter's one confidant also ends up as an apparent suicide and is assumed to be the culprit. Cover-ups and sexual scandals rampage throughout the film.—John Sacksteder <jsackste@bellsouth.net>

Paul Brenner, an investigator for the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, joins with his former flame Sara Sunhill, also an investigator, to uncover the truth behind the apparently ritualistic murder of a woman officer who also happens to be the daughter of the Commanding General of Fort McCallum, Georgia.—Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>

Military police detectives Paul Brenner and Sarah Sunhill investigate a horrifically bizarre rape and murder of a respected female Pysch-Ops officer who is also the daughter of a renowned retiring general. Yet the case becomes more complicated when the autopsy showed no evidence of sexual assault. Furthermore, that is but the beginning of the twists when they discover the victim's secret life, her past and a disturbing determination by senior staff to keep this investigation short and quiet.—Kenneth Chisholm <kchishol@execulink.com>

Chief Warrant Officer Four Paul Brenner (John Travolta), a Vietnam Veteran of the 196th LIB, is in Georgia masquerading as First Sergeant Frank White at a local army base, to broker an illegal arms trade with a self-proclaimed freedom fighter. Part of the disguise of his character is speaking with a strong Southern accent. While on the base, his car gets a flat tire. He is on the side of the road trying to remove the wheel nuts with a small pair of pliers and not having much success when a pretty young officer arrives and helps him change the spare with her cross brace (lug wrench). The officer is Captain Elizabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson), the base commanding general's daughter and army captain in psychological operations.

The next day Brenner calls in to see her with a basket full of chocolates and bath soaps as a thank you to her for her help. Both times he is in contact with her he is keeping up the pretense with the Southern drawl. Elisabeth is at first warm to him but after a few minutes of conversation she becomes cool and distant, saying she has a lot of work to get through. The next evening, she is found murdered. Brenner and another warrant officer, Sara Sunhill (Madeleine Stowe) are brought in to investigate, as both are part of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command. At the scene, the base Provost Marshal, Colonel William Kent (Timothy Hutton) and several of his military police have secured the area. Captain Campbell's nude body has been staked down with tent poles, strangled, and presumably sexually assaulted. Colonel Kent has 2,000 military police that he is in charge of at the base and is considered both the police chief and the staff officer who advises Captain Campbell's father, Lieutenant General Joe Campbell (James Cromwell), on all military police matters.

They search Elisabeth's home off base and find it typical of a career Army officer, with one exception: through a false door in the basement, they find what appears to be a sexual dungeon of sorts, with handcuffs, harnesses, and a camera connected to a VCR. Sunhill goes to their car to make a call from her cell phone, and while Brenner gathers the tapes, he is attacked by a masked figure armed with a steel snow shovel. The culprit manages to disorient Brenner long enough to steal the videotapes. Brenner questions Elisabeth's close confidante, Colonel Robert Moore (James Woods), who also works in Psych ops. Though cordial and somewhat cooperative, Moore is evasive when questioned, and gives an alibi of being in bed asleep at the time of the murder. However, this proves false when Moore's fingerprints are found on Elisabeth's dog tags that were found in a plastic trash bag several yards from her body, along with her clothing. Brenner arrests Moore on charges of conduct unbecoming an officer and takes him to jail.

Moore is later released by the officer in charge of the jail and restricted to house arrest. Brenner, Sunhill, and Colonel William Kent, return to Moore's home and find Moore dead on his couch with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to his forehead. The General's adjutant, Colonel George Fowler (Clarence Williams III), attempts to close the investigation at the crime scene, stating that Moore killed himself out of guilt because he killed Elisabeth. Brenner states he intends to keep the case open and much tension is seen between them. Further cover-ups are revealed, and it's later learned that Elisabeth was sexually promiscuous with virtually all the officers that made up her father's staff. It's also revealed that Elisabeth was an honor student at West Point until her sophomore year and barely managed to graduate. Brenner and Sunhill visit Colonel Dr. Donald Slesinger (John Beasley), the academy's psychiatrist, who explains that Captain Campbell had been gang raped by fellow trainees while a cadet at West Point. During a large training exercise of around 1000 personnel, she had found herself separated from her group and was jumped by six male cadets, beaten and raped all night, almost to the point of death and left to die in an isolated area (staked down in exactly the same manner she was murdered in). Luckily, another trainee group which had got lost, found Elisabeth and rescued her. Elisabeth never knew the names of her assailants, but Sunhill tracks down one of the attackers and engineers a confession by telling him the advances in DNA technology mean his 'gene prints' are traceable. She pretends that the bloodstained underwear she shows the soldier is the genuine article.

The agents pay a visit to the general, who corroborates the story. Fearing that the assailants would never be caught, Campbell acted upon the advice of another general and decided to cover up the incident since such a scandal would destroy the academy, not to mention his own ambitions to become Vice President of the United States. This denial of justice severely traumatized Elisabeth, causing her to partake in various violent sexual activities.

Campbell reveals that he did encounter his daughter the night of her murder, and that Elisabeth herself, with the aid of Moore, staged the reenactment of the academy incident in an attempt to force her father to face the truth he covered up. Unmoved, Campbell left his daughter tied to the stakes.

Realizing that Kent is the only suspect left, Brenner decides to question him. He calls Sunhill but learns that she was returning to the murder scene...with Kent, who also wants to see Brenner. Brenner arrives and confronts Kent, who admits that he killed Elisabeth after she rejected him and threatened to tell his family about the affair. Kent then commits suicide with an anti-personnel mine.

Parallel to these events, Brenner and Sunhill manage to invalidate Campbell's reasons for the cover up by swiftly discovering and arresting all of his daughter's assailants (the charges they face guarantee a minimum of 20 years in prison). As Campbell prepares to get on the plane to accompany Elizabeth's body to the funeral, he is confronted by Brenner, who lays the burden of his daughter's death on the general; disgusted, he tells Campbell that his betrayal of Elisabeth was what really killed her and that Kent had just put her out of her misery. He then tells Campbell he will be court-marshaled for conspiracy to conceal a crime, thus destroying the general's career.

The film ends with a montage of Elizabeth's happy childhood and Brenner and Sunhill departing in opposite directions and an admiring glance by Sunhill at the departing Brenner. A written epilogue explains that Campbell is found guilty for the crime and court-martialed, soon after disappearing from public life.