Blood and Country Synopsis
Blood and Country leads straight on from Salts War with the newly promoted sub-Lieutenant Sam Salt's experiences as he embarks on his first two missions as a fully trained Naval intelligence officer with the (NIS) following his passing out of the Royal Naval training academy at HMS Invergordon in Scotland. On his first mission he is sent out posing as an ordinary seaman; A rating, to investigate the importation of Soviet weapons and class 'A' drug's being smuggled into the UK aboard Royal Naval warships. The shipment's ultimately bound for the provisional IRA.
He is sent to the port of Tangiers via the British Naval Garrison on Gibraltar and starts to suspect that somebody very high up in the Royal Navy is co-ordinating the shipments being smuggled across the 26 miles of Mediterranean Sea, by Soviet submarine.
The second investigation in the book runs concurrently with the first, and involves former SS guards from the Konzentration Lager Majdanek in eastern Poland who have escaped down the Odessa, the Rat Line aided by the Catholic church at the end of the War in 1945.
Horrific murders of Franciscan and Benedictine Monks are occurring as they attend evening prayers in their hill-top monasteries each time HMS Eagle the Royal Navy 42000-ton aircraft carrier docks in a Mediterranean port.
The murders are graphic and frenzied, and the clues lie in the form of two separate tattoos in Yiddish imprinted on the sown-up eyelids of the victims after each attack.
The tattoos spell the word BEYZ which translates as "Evil" in Jewish, the second tattoos are the letters K and L representing.
Konzentration Lager.
How are they linked? Well that's the clever part, and the reader will need to read the book to find that out.
I feel at this stage I need to mention my two personal favourite chapters: God Forgive Him, and "Hell Now Walk."
"Hell, Now Walk" describes the well documented historic trek west by poor Jewish prisoners, as the Russian army closes in from the east during the Nazi retreat.
Whereas God Forgive Him provides a graphic description of the awful Killing Process and is particularly gruesome.
Both these chapters follow one another for a good reason, and I think the reader will be as horrified and as appalled as I was, when I thought them up. So, I hope, you enjoy reading both manuscripts, I think you will find them extremely tense, even horrifying in parts.
I am about to embark on volume three. Seven Dragons, but I won't bore you with any of those details yet.
Kindest Regards.
Nigel J Williams.
