On a traffic-crowded street in the middle of the evening in NYC, a bickering couple sits waiting in their car while a road crew completes work on the street ahead of them. Abruptly, a large bundle falls out of the back of the white van in front of them. When the man rolls down his window and shouts to the van driver that his doors came open, the van takes off, leaving the bundle in the middle of the street. The couple in the car, as well as the road crew, is horrified to see a small hand reaching out from the bundle. That hand belongs to a young girl named Sophie Douglas, who had been abducted by a child molester. When the SVU detectives get the case, Olivia tries to interview Sophie concerning the several days of captivity that she spent with her abductor. She learns that Sophie's kidnapper has rotted teeth, but not much else. When Sophie becomes traumatized, her equally upset mother orders an end to the interview.

Munch and Fin track down known pedophiles with white vans. They find one piece of scum who violated his parole, but he wasn't in the area at the time Sophie was abducted. After a long day with no new leads, Olivia suggests they call it a day. When her fellow detectives agree, she calls up Michael, her new beau, and makes arrangements to meet with him later. However, that date will have to wait, for just as the foursome enter the elevator, Captain Cragen informs them that they are all staying. A man in a white van has abducted another little girl. And thus begins a gripping hunt by the SVU detectives for a little girl who is caught in the web of a sadistic killer with rotted teeth. Digging up his past crimes, they discover that if he follows his pattern, then his latest victim has but three days to live, and so they work around the clock to find her before its too late.

The relentless, exciting race to find a little girl lost makes Countdown an enthralling episode to watch, but the real icing on the cake here is the personal scenes between Olivia, Elliot, Munch and Fin as they struggle to find clues…as well as try to stay awake. Working for 36 hours straight, with just the occasional catnap for a respite, the SVU detectives, who are normally cool and calm under pressure, start to squabble and get on each other's nerves in several truly funny scenes that provide some much needed comic relief. Even the unflappable Cragen blows his stack at Olivia at one point, and the episode's writers, Dawn Denoon and Lisa Marie Peterson, give Cragen the best line of the show when he sees all four detectives--including Olivia--waiting for him when he emerges from a stall in the men's room: "I'm not tipping all of you." Countdown is simply a marvelous story that's well told, using the entire SVU cast in a very effective manner; it's riveting right to the bitter end.