The Strange Secret of Kickapoo Crossing

Book excerpt: An old Indian blessing which becomes a curse, shadows Bryce Harrington’s early life during summer stays at his stepmother’s family farm at Kickapoo Crossing in northeast Iowa. The blessing of the Kickapoo Indians follows him as a young U.S. Navy intelligence officer serving in the Soviet Union and France during World War II. But the Kickapoo blessing urns into a curse by careless actions of a 4-F guitar-playing bootlegger at Kickapoo Crossing while Bryce Harrington is gone, and destroys virtually the entire family who nurtured him in his youth. But Bryce Harrington is protected by a special talisman given him by his dying Grandma Susie; and, following his return to the U.S. for further education, he learns of the colossal Russian blunder of not recycling precious palladium pellets used in fertilizer production by former Soviet munitions make Azurite Fertilizer Works. He returns there as a businessman and also as an undercover agent for the U.S. Pentagon to learn new secret Soviet methods with codes that were shutting down U.S. surveillance of Russian military operations. Bryce Harrington’s success in this endeavor and subsequently in business, and his resolution of the Kickapoo curse, follow in a thrilling, mysterious conclusion.