In the ninth century, renowned Buddhist guru Padmasambhava is said to have ridden a winged tiger to a treacherous cliffside cave, ten thousand feet above sea level, in the Paro Valley of Bhutan. There, he reached the pinnacle of Enlightenment, and left behind a legendary amulet with the power of the gods. This talisman is known to history as the Tiger’s Penis.

1948: Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces are on the run. Chairman Mao is wrapping his commie fingers around all of China, and his partisans have heard rumours of the fabled Tiger’s Penis, with the power to control and break the minds of men, having been unearthed in the Himalayan peaks. Chiang doesn’t have the forces to snatch this idol up and keep it from the communists. It comes down to one plucky crew of mercenaries to venture high into the mountains and find this mythical amulet...

Olive Yang was born a Burmese noblewoman. Kawashima Yoshiko was born a Manchurian princess. Now Olive is a gun-runner and smuggler, fresh off a breakup and looking for solace at the bottom of a bottle. Yoshiko is a Japanese war criminal and fugitive having paid off the executioner to fake the hanging. Both are strident and audacious, kicking ass and taking names – Olive with a laser-dagger bolted to a prosthetic arm and Yoshiko with a résumé of seducing and honeypotting targets on behalf of Japanese spymaster handlers. And both reject the genders expected of them, crossdressing and living Bohemian lifestyles with a retinue of girlfriends they each sometimes call their ‘wives’. Down on their luck and stuck in the mountain city of Kunming, they're offered a paying job from one of Chiang's loyalists looking to prevent communist disaster...