This is my third re-write. I’m happy with it now. If you read it, I hope you are too.


The mythical sword ‘Excalibur’ lies lost in one of the many unexplored cave systems that riddle The Rock of Gibraltar. Marion Chase is an WRAF Officer who is stationed at the RAF base on Gibraltar and spends her honeymoon in Morocco with her new husband Rob Leigh. Rob is working on a vast land reclamation project that is being undertaken as a direct result of ERA – The European Railway to Africa. ERA , trumpeted in the press as ‘The new ERA ‘, is the construction of a tunnel to run under the Strait of Gibraltar, linking Spain to Morocco. Work on the tunnel has already begun and much of the forty million cubic metres of rock that will be excavated will be returned to the sea at Gibraltar’s Europa Point. The resulting man- made land mass will be second in size only to Dubai’s seventy-two mile Palm project. There is a Royal Visit planned to mark these historic events and to acknowledge the UK links with the fiercely patriotic Gibraltarian people.

When, in 1988, a planned massive car-bomb explosion was foiled and three IRA members shot dead on The Rock, an undisclosed fourth man was also killed – Brendan Donnelly, the man they called ‘The Quartermaster’. His wife Niamh is still resident in Gibraltar, and their son Declan is serving in the British Army. Her whereabouts was unknown at the that time and has remained so ever since. That she had a son was also unknown to the authorities, but she has a terrible secret and has longed for revenge. She will exact that revenge upon the Queen of England, at the place where Brendan was taken from her twenty years ago. It is Rob’s university room-mate, Ben McAllister , now a Captain in the SAS, to whom the sovereign’s safety is entrusted for her forthcoming Royal visit. He shares Rob’s interest in mediaeval history (which they both read at York) and the two of them have remained close friends since they graduated.

Rob is still a history buff when he has time to spare, and believes that he has stumbled onto the scabbard of the fabled sword, which he acquires in a mountain village during his honeymoon. Before he can verify his suspicions the scabbard is stolen. By chance it falls into the hands of psychotic South London gangster Georgio (George) Thanatos but no sooner does he learn of its true value, than it is stolen from him too. Determined to possess the both the scabbard, and the sword, he sends his trusted Lieutenant, Lenny Stark, on a mission to find the scabbard and return it to him, but Lenny is not quite the reliable Lieutenant that George thinks he is and has plans of his own. Sooner or later Lenny and George will meet in a bloody showdown. It is George’s use of a Stinger missile to down a Police helicopter during an audacious raid on a security truck that sets off a frantic hunt for the missile’s source, a trail that leads right back to Gibraltar.

The story follows the search for the missing sword scabbard and the hunt the source of the Stinger missile. Who is the mysterious Arab who seems to be somehow involved ? Does the legendary passage under the Straits of Gibraltar really exist ? Can the suspected assassination attempt on The Queen be stopped in time ?
Who and where is Niamh Donnelly ?

These threads reach an explosive climax during the Royal visit to Gibraltar.


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Submitted: Feb 18, 2008    Reads: 104    Comments: 0    Likes: 0   

September 30th 2006. Switzerland

“The Swiss Lombardi engineering firm has won the contract to design a railway tunnel between Europe and Africa running under the Strait of Gibraltar. The company, one of 14 competing for the job, has one year to draw up the plans for one of the most complex projects of its kind ever, on the cards for over a quarter of a century.”  http://www.swissinfo.org

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