A fast-paced action adventure moving swiftly around the world while staying anchored and true to the realities of Alaskan life.
In 1907 Tom Hornbuckle has staked his claim along a bank of Fish Creek next to Felix Pedro's gold claim and discovery just north of the Chena River. Claim jumpers kill one of his fellow miners. Hornbuckle makes a startling find of gold and sets out to insure no one will take it from him. Hornbuckle is killed by the claim jumpers, but not before he has sent his lovely Irish wife a quartz rock imbedded with gold. Fate intervenes when Susan receives her husband's gift to her just as the great San Francisco earthquake ends her life and buries the proof of Hornbuckle's discovery for nearly a century. Ninety-five years later, an international consortium of economic power sought out the same gold, as a hedge against a collapsing stock market they would trigger in the United States and Europe. To seek revenge for long forgotten failures, they would bring America to her knees.
Brad Milner, a special anti-terrorist consultant for the FBI, follows the trail of a murdered young woman whose only mistake was to rediscover a gold strike lost in the frozen earth of Fairbanks at the Fort Knox Gold Mine. Milner is pursued by a relentless killer who must keep the secret of the gold from being revealed before the consortium's plan is set in motion. Even worse, his lover is held hostage, used as bait, and may die as a result of his own determined pursuit. Following the trail of greed and gold leads to a conspiracy larger than Milner realizes. The more he unearths, the larger the web of intrigue grows. Narrowly escaping death, Milner struggles to reverse an economic war already out of control. As the deaths mount, Milner must call in help from surprising sources, including the former KGB in Moscow, a Pakistani computer and mathematical genius, and an old friend in the Federated Police of the new and weakened Confederation of Independent States. Milner discovers that sometimes winning is worse than losing as he himself becomes the primary and only suspect in a murder. He has no defense—except his own clandestine past.
