The Launch at Union Iron Works
A One-Day Western

About this book:

San Francisco, 1891. The fog clings to Potrero Point like a shroud as the dawn bell tolls twenty-four times, waking three thousand men to the most dangerous day in the history of Union Iron Works. By high noon, the USS *Olympia*—forty-five hundred tons of cold steel, triple-expansion engines, and Navy ambition—must slide down greased timber ways into the bay. But the launch grease has frozen to iron-hard tallow, a tugboat's wake has jammed the submerged track, and the yard's chief engineer is hoarding the steam pressure Ethan Burke needs to soften the ways. With the Governor's daughter christening the bow, Admiral Benham inspecting the hull, and fifty reporters scribbling for the morning editions, the foreman has seven hours to bend physics, bureaucracy, and a mutinous crew to his will.

Ethan Burke doesn't have the luxury of heroics. He has a brass badge, a nickel Ingersoll, and a body that remembers every rivet splinter and boiler burn. From the boiler room's suffocating heat to the forty-five-degree water beneath the keel, he fights a war on two fronts: the icy physics of a launch gone wrong, and the quiet sabotage hiding in the shadows of the foundry. A missing wedge. A bent flange. A whisper in the boiler room. As the tide rises and the political knives come out, Ethan discovers the greatest threat to the *Olympia* isn't the frozen grease or the cross-current—it's the man standing beside him on the slipway.

One day. One launch. One foreman who knows that reputations don't float—iron does, provided you do the job right. *The Launch at Union Iron Works* is a gritty, clockwork Western where the frontier is industrial, the weapons are wrenches and steam lances, and the showdown at high noon plays out on a greased timber runway with three million dollars of Navy steel hanging in the balance.