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This book details Lee's life from Gettysburg to his death just five
years after the South's surrender at Appomattox. Rather than
retreating bitterly from life, Lee sought to heal the nation, even
meeting with his rival, Ulysses S. Grant, while the former Union
general occupied the White House. Leaving his military life behind,
Lee went on to become president of Washington College, where he was
revered for his fairness as well as his willingness to help
struggling students.
100 miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, a top secret experiment too
dangerous to be conducted on land is being conducted aboard the
U.S. nuclear attack submarine Sam Houston an experiment that has
just gone horribly wrong. A predator is loose on the Houston a
microscopic killer that strikes without warning, driving its
victims to terrifying heights of violent, self-destructive
insanity. Soon madness and terror reign 800 feet below the ocean's
surface, as those infected race to defeat the silent killer unaware
that another enemy follows in their wake. A vengeful pursuer is
determined to maneuver the crippled Houston toward an
earth-shattering undersea confrontation: a duel to the death in
deepest waters."
Rapid Response Team Memorandum Top Secret/Do Not Photocopy To:
Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) From: U.S. Space
Defense Operations Center, Colorado Situation Report: Unmanned
Soviet Kvant-3 space laboratory destroyed by defective U.S. Orbital
Weapons Platform. Communications inoperative. Soviet retaliation
imminent unless immediate action taken. Target: Low-power
Atmospheric Compensation Experiment (LACE) most powerful orbital
weapon in orbit. Equipped with SECRET hydrogen-fluoride, five
megawatt chemical laser. LODE 4-meter firing mirror, and Teal Ruby
AFP-888 aiming mechanism. Current Status: 38 degree circular orbit
at 130 nautical miles FULLY ARMED AND OUT OF CONTROL. Operation:
U.S. astronauts Colonel William Parker and Lt. Commander Jacob
Enright to fly Space Shuttle Endeavor in joint mission with Soviet
cosmonaut team to deactivate LACE. Risk Factor: HIGH Special
Orders: In event of mission failure, U.S. shuttle crew to be
terminated with EXTREME PREJUDICE. Brief: Presidential briefing NOT
RECOMMENDED.
Most folks would not trifle with the Hart brothers. Such folks
walked. Some folks did not know better. They are planted-not so
deep as to keep the cold of the high country from their bones, but
deep enough to keep the wolves from their place of repose. That
would do. They were well known as gun men, as shootists, as bounty
hunters. Their first loyalty was for each other. Their honor was
kept for themselves. Wherever they rode the people knew them and
their deadly skills. The Hart brothers were going to the Cedar City
Rendezvous. The territory was infested with renegades and outlaws;
nearly all of them far less honorable and far more rapacious than
the very capable Hart brothers. Death and rape and robbery seemed
to come out of the ground with the rippling heat like surf against
a shore. There seemed to be little that the law and decent citizens
could do to stem the tide . . . Until the sheriff of Cedar City,
Utah Territory, decided to let the criminal element take care of
itself and sent out invitations to the Rendezvous. Hundreds of
killers showed up. "You are all here by invitation. There be five
miles 'tween here and town. The object is for you to get from here
to there . . . alive enough to claim the fortune in gold. Those of
you what make it that far will get an equal share. And the
Governor's unconditional pardon goes with the loot." A murmur ran
thorough the great company armed to its blackened teeth, Some of
the shootists thought of saloons and every painted woman between
Memphis and Frisco. The Hart Brothers thought of fertile farm land
where a body could take root and grow along with crops and
children: "Men, the rules be simple: Every man for hisself from
here to the edge of town. You have until I get to town to find your
place and cover. When I signal with my rifle, this shoot starts!"
Before the sheriff was out of sight, the throng exploded in all
directions toward rocky hills, scrub brush cover, and small box
canyons. For fifteen long minutes there was silence. Then a shot
rolled lazily through the stifling heat. A heartbeat later, the
thin air erupted with musketry. In the first moments of the Cedar
City Rendezvous, a dozen men fell from their saddles and dropped to
the salty ground.
Franklin Pierce was president of the United States in 1855, the
Mexican War had just ended; the horrors of the American Civil War
had not yet begun. The last of the free spirits known as the
Mountain Men were securing their place in the legends of the
frontier. Among these fierce adventurers was a man who called
himself Highpockets. Into the harsh wilderness Highpockets had come
to escape the soot of the cities and the terrible memories of war;
with nothing but the strength of his heart and hands he had carved
out a life of freedom in the nearly inaccessible high places of the
Rocky Mountains. In the autumn of his days Highpockets stumbled
across a half-frozen, half-dead immigrant boy who had wandered in
the snow and ice-terrified after having been separated from the
wagon train carrying his Eastern European family across the vast
new world. Highpockets called the boy Cub and took him to the
wilderness domain the old man called My Mountain. There, for one
long winter, they lived together; the young boy learned a new
language and a way of life that he'd never even imagined existed.
By the end of the winter, the old man knew that Cub had learned
everything he needed to know to survive in a land as dangerous as
it was awesomely beautiful. It would have to be enough and more
than enough . . . for at the end of that winter Highpockets had
agreed to face the council of his old enemy, Painted Elk, to atone
for the murder of the chief's son. Both Cub and Highpockets would
be judged by the council of Elders . . . and both would learn that
justice in the high places was both fair . . . and deadly.
THE DEAD MAN S JOURNEY Journada del Muerte, the locals called it:
the blistering ocean of sand and sage between the Rio Grande River
to the west and the Sacramento mountain range to the east. The
bones of men and horses had bleached in the mile-high desert for
three hundred years. Spanish conquistadors were the first white men
to explore this new furnace of the Southeastern New Mexico
Territory and the first to perish. In the thin air, the riders
coming down the mountain were sharply etched against the blue sky.
Steam, blowing out of the ice-encrusted nostrils of their mounts
and their two pack horses, surrounded the horsemen in a white veil.
Descending the eastern face of the Sacramento mountains, the horses
walked slowly and painfully on cracked hooves. The icy earth
offered only a steep path paved with shards of glass; blood seeped
around well-worn iron horseshoes. When the riders looked to the
sky, they saw that the white sun would stay high enough for them to
make Fort Stanton, ten miles into the valley. The riders knew the
trail since boyhood. Words were not wasted in country where a man s
mouth would crack and bleed like his horse s hooves. Beyond the
fort lay the clapboard settlement of Lincoln. When Grady Rourke
died, his sons, Sean, Patrick, and Liam, came back to claim the
family land . . . What was left of it. It was January, 1878, when
the Rourke brothers came back to this hard and dangerous land. They
thought they were coming home. What they didn t know was that they
were about to become part of a vicious struggle for power. And that
they would be forced to choose sides with either John Tunstall and
Alexander McSween or J. J. Dolan and Sheriff William Brady. The
battle would quickly become the infamous Lincoln County War a dirty
little war with no rules, no heroes, and no happy endings. Douglas
Savage, the acclaimed author of Cedar City Rendezvous and
Highpockets has taken the historical facts surrounding the Lincoln
County War and its fascinating characters, and fashioned one of the
most readable and revealing tales of the American frontier.
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