They were a small, poorly armed tribe of Indians that had settled in northern California. But the Modoc had two things that set them apart. One was the fury of a warrior who had seen his people murderously betrayed by a U.S. Army captain. The other was a strange landscape of lava beds along the Oregon border -- a place where the Modoc would lure their enemy into a fateful fight.Captain Jack, leader of the Modoc, was driving his people into a desperate battle against the United States. Now, as one atrocity leads to another, a cast of the innocent and the damned are swept into the struggle: a San Francisco newspaper reporter hungry for a story, a husband and wife team of Indian scouts who must hunt Captain Jack down, and a U.S. Army general desperately trying to head off an all-out annihilation.