This is a taster of my first novel, a 104,000-word alternative-
history action thriller published by iUniverse in 2000.
September 1940. The German army is massed along the French coast, poised to invade Britain. Only Churchill’s exceptional defences make them hesitate. Then a rumour that Churchill has died of a heart attack spreads like wildfire, and the country braces itself.
Danny O’Shea is at work in Newport Docks when the invasion begins. He races home to find his house bombed and his wife dead. His son Adam has learning difficulties. Terrified of what the Nazis will do to him O’Shea flees with him to Tredegar, hoping to hide him with his grandmother until he can be smuggled out to neutral Ireland.
When a vindictive local policeman is selected as the Gestapo officer for Tredegar, O’Shea is forced to flee again. They head for Swansea, hoping to stow away on an Irish boat. But on a lonely road in the Welsh Mountains they stumble across armed men attacking some German trucks. After a fierce skirmish the Germans are overwhelmed, and the men take the O’Sheas and a captured German to a remote farm belonging to Bethan Frost.
Bethan is furious that hostages have been brought to her house and she makes her younger sister Cerys take care of them. Worse still, she’s told that whatever she was expecting to find on the German trucks wasn’t there. She rants about betrayal and double-cross and starts regarding everyone with mounting suspicion. The O’Sheas are put in the kitchen and German taken to an out-house.
That night O’Shea goes outside to use the toilet and he’s horrified when he sees Bethan in the pig-house torturing the German. He staggers back to the kitchen and, aware that he can’t just take Adam and run, decides to keeps quiet.
The next days there’s lots of activity, people coming and going, muffled voices, slamming door. Friction grows between Cerys and Bethan.
Initially O’Shea likes Cerys, but he’s alarmed when she asks if he’d noticed any boxes on the German trucks. He says he didn’t and her mood changes dramatically, becoming dark and angry, and she storms out of the kitchen.
The next day she tells O’Shea that a man called Clooney is coming to take him and Adam to Liverpool where they will be set free. But O’Shea is concerned, suspicious of her motives.
As Clooney arrives German soldiers attack the farm. In the confusion O’Shea glimpses Cerys and Clooney running away across the fields. Adam hides but O’Shea is captured. Everyone else is shot, including Bethan. Before she dies she asks O’Shea to remind Cerys about Alice through the looking glass.
The German captain, Eric Weiss, demands to know what Bethan said. O’Shea says she was frightened, talking gibberish. Eventually O’Shea is thrown into the back of a truck, and he’s amazed to see Clooney already sitting there. Clooney says Cerys got away.
The truck crashes on the way to Cardiff and they escape, but when O’Shea falls ill Clooney abandons him and, with no means of identification, O’Shea ends up in Cardiff prison.
Months later when Weiss visits the jail he recognises O’Shea and takes him away for questioning. During the brutal interrogation Weiss explains that the British had developed an awesome new weapon in a secret laboratory in Brecon. When the Germans discovered it Weiss was responsible for getting it to Berlin. But his top-secret operation wasn’t so top secret. Their trucks were attacked and the weapon was stolen. Now Weiss was in serious trouble. He eventually traced it to an organisation led by the Welsh Nationalist Bethan Frost, but nothing was found during a raid on her farm.
Weiss believes that, as she lay dying, Bethan told O’Shea where she’d hidden it. He wants that information. O’Shea is taken to an old mansion where the Gestapo are waiting to extract it from him.
During a minor distraction O’Shea escapes
Now, as he desperately tries to get back to his son, he's pursued by both the Germans and the insurgents. And he doesn't know which way to turn, because betrayal and lies hamper every move he makes ...
