TV reporter and former star athlete Mickey Almon is covering a World athletic event in Moscow when he is arrested by the KGB after being approached by a scientist wanting him to smuggle secret information out of the Soviet Union. Almon is imprisoned and interrogated over several days by prison official Bukovsky who ultimately forces him to confess to being a spy for the United States. Though promised with release for doing so, Almon is instead transported to a railway station and placed aboard a train on a Stolypin prison car with other political prisoners bound for a labor camp near the Arctic Circle. After arriving, Almon meets a fellow foreign prisoner, a sarcastic Englishman who teaches him how to survive the brutal life of the camp. In time, after learning that his ultimate fate in the camp will eventually be death through hazardous labor, Almon and the Englishman conspire together to plot an escape to Norway.