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The Mississippi Valley, 1863. - The Confederate fortress town of Vicksburg is the lynch-pin holding together the eastern and western Confederacy. Major General Ulysses S. Grant is tasked by Washington to capture Vicksburg, giving the Union complete control of the Mississippi, splitting the Confederacy and dooming it to ultimate extinction.! However, there is treason in Grant's army—treason at the highest levels. His most secret plans are being leaked to the Confederacy; plans known only to a small group of high-ranking staff. But a security officer named John Brown has discovered something—something he will not entrust to any of Grant's officers. Instead, he frantically telegraphs for a pre-war friend, Captain Alphonso Clay, to come out West immediately; then Brown locks himself into a riverboat cabin, refusing to see anyone. ! Clay, a Union-loyal Kentuckian from a wealthy slave-owning family, responds to the call. He arrives at Grant's headquarters to find Brown has been murdered. Accompanying Grant's army on its march, racing the calendar, Clay frantically tries to discover the truth, knowing that if he does not solve the crime, Grants campaign will be at an end and the United States will cease to be.

An act of treason, a mysterious murder—and Grantʼs campaign in the West is finished

unless the mystery can be solved.

PROLOGUEDECEMBER 27, 1862

Corporal Hezekiah Whately was cold, wet, and afraid, yet oddly optimistic. He had spent days crammed into the stinking, uncomfortable river steamer, he and his blue-uniformed comrades crowded into space designed for barely a quarter of their numbers. The trip from Union-occupied Memphis down the foreboding Mississippi had seemed to take an eternity. The scores of transports had finally pulled into a large, stagnant bayou, which his captain had told him had the outlandish name of Chickasaw. His captain, a beardless college boy, was excited, and communicated that excitement to his troops. Whately, like so many of his comrades, was beginning to catch a glimmer of an end to the war here in the West. When his regiment had been herded like cattle onto the ship back in Memphis, no one but Uncle Billy Sherman, U. S. Grant himself, and possibly some of the headquarters staff had been certain of their destination. Of course, many had speculated about it; some had even dared to utter the name Vicksburg. However, few had dreamed that Grant and Sherman had the nerve to try for it so soon, without securing an overland line of supply. Whately thought about Vicksburg as he and his jostling companions began to shuffle down planks into the frigid mud at the edge of the bayou. He had some education, so he knew the significance of that small Mississippi river town, brooding on two hundred-foot bluffs above the Mississippi. The Confederate government had crammed it with canon. No Union vessel, not even the famed ironclads, dared come within range of its great guns. So

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long as Vicksburg defied the Union, the Confederacy controlled this stretch of Old Man River. So long as Vicksburg defied the Union, Grant’s mighty army was separated from the forces of General Butler, which had taken much of southern Louisiana in a smart amphibious operation. So long as Vicksburg defied the Union, the grain, meat, and hard-faced fighting men of Texas could flow into the Confederacy. So long as Vicksburg defied the Union, the Confederacy had a better than fair chance of establishing its independence. But, thought Whately, if Vicksburg fell it would be the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. As Whately slogged through the sucking mud to relatively drier ground, he peered upwards, trying to catch a glimpse of the town itself at the top of the bluffs. However, the river mist was thick. All that he could see were skeletal trees dotting a gentle upward slope that disappeared into the shifting tendrils of fog. Whately took solace from that fog. Undoubtedly the Confederates knew by now that something was happening; but they could not know exactly what, or exactly where the blow would fall. The Confederates had shipped in scores of heavy canon and their crews. However, they undoubtedly did not have many infantry. The Confederacy must have believed, just as Whately had believed until hours ago, that Grant was not ready to thrust directly down the river. Richmond did not have many fighting men to spare; they would not shift them to Vicksburg until the need was pressing. The mighty canons, which were so deadly to ships, could not stop, by themselves, a determined infantry assault. Infantry had to be stopped by infantry, Whately knew. What infantry there was in Vicksburg must be evenly spread along a miles-long perimeter. There had not been days for them to prepare, as there would have been if Grant had sent his ponderous army overland from Memphis. Whately was proud of the corporal’s stripes, which his literacy, far from universal out in the Mississippi Valley, had gained him—although he felt he really deserved officer’s straps on his shoulders. He was now smugly certain that he could see the simple brilliance of Grant’s plan. Load 20,000 troops under Uncle Billy onto every transport you could find, run them down the river ahead of the word that they were coming, and throw them straight at the unprepared Confederates. The relatively few defenders would have time for one, maybe two, volleys, and then the blue horde would overwhelm them. He knew that there was a chance that he would be killed in that volley or two; but he also knew that if he were out in front, there was a good chance a colonel, or better yet, a general,

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would notice him. Those officer’s straps could be his by nightfall. Whately’s pulse quickened, as much from that prospect as from the effort of going up the moderate slope. Whately glanced at his blue-clad companions to his left and right, and frowned. The mist blurred their outlines, making them look oddly unsubstantial, almost like ghosts. Suddenly, he felt wary, taking his Springfield musket off his shoulder and carefully checking to see that the percussion cap that would ignite the powder charge was firmly in place under the hammer. He now felt very lonely, even knowing that 20,000 companions surrounded him; he wished he could see more of them than his nearest neighbors. He chided himself for being a nervous fool. That’s what comes of growing up in central Massachusetts, he thought. The stories he had grown up with, the things he had believed as a child were silly. Like the whippoorwills, he thought, smiling ruefully at the memory. His father told him the tales of the whippoorwills that would sit outside the window of a dying person, timing their plaintive, spectral cries to the last gasps of the doomed man. His father had muttered that the whippoorwills fed on souls, and would try to catch the soul of the departed as it fled the body. If they caught the soul, they would titter gleefully until dawn; but if it evaded them, they would fly off immediately, silent and sullen. Suddenly, he became conscious of something that he had half-heard for some time. The unmistakable cries of whippoorwills. He looked at the bare branches of the trees he was passing, and noticed that familiar New England bird. As he mechanically kept marching forward, he frowned. What was this? Whippoorwills would have gone south long ago. Then he laughed at his own foolishness: this was the south. They were a bit of the home he had left, and would never see again. Strange how their cries rose and fell, almost as if… Whately started. He could hear his own labored breathing; the slope was becoming quite a chore. Those damn birds were keeping time with his breathing. It could not be true about those birds; his old man had just been throwing a scare into a gullible child. However, what if... He should at least let the rest of his regiment know. Hezekiah Whately opened his mouth to shout a warning that something was up, that something was wrong. But in that instant, from the mist in front of him, the inhuman, blood-chilling scream that would become known as the Rebel yell issued simultaneously from thousands of throats. A solid sheet of fire instantly followed it, as thousands of rifles and dozens of canon discharged their

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leaden burdens simultaneously. A .58 caliber ball entered through Whately’s open mouth, blowing out the back of his head.

About the Author

Jack Martin

Jack Martin is a life-long Californian; he never set foot outside the Golden State until his 30th year, but has traveled extensively - in his imagination. Trained in the prosaic fields of economics and law, and earning his living in the corporate bowels of an enormous aerospace company, in his spare time he stretched his mind by studying the wonders of astronomy on the one hand, and the glories of American history on the other. Sonia, his wife of twenty-seven years, was possessed of a brilliant practical business mind; yet she greatly enjoyed Jack's stories of the American past, and encouraged him to write them professionally. She especially enjoyed his speculation about a "secret history of the United States:" incidents and turning points so vital to our future yet so potentially terrible that knowledge of them was withheld from the American public. With her prodding, he has created a series of novels involving the character of Alphonso Brutus Clay: a Civil War Union officer who will find himself deeply involved in several such incidents that will never find their way into the history books. Sonia passed away on Christmas Eve 2009 after a brave four-year fight against ovarian cancer, and therefore did not live to see the first of the books that she inspired. However, Jack is convinced that somewhere, she knows.