Gibraltar Road — Philip McCutchan

A phone rings in a London flat. A little later an Admiralty physicist disappears from Gibraltar, and a body is found washed up against its shores…

Deep below Gibraltar's Rock, a secret, auto-powered nuclear fuel-production unit throbs and hums as its builds up a store of AGL SIX, a dangerous new motivating-agent for the British atomic submarines to be based there.

This fuel unit has developed a fault. Allowed to overrun beyond a certain point, it will produce the biggest atomic blast since Hiroshima.

Only Ackroyd, the persecution-complexed inventor of the unit, can stop it. And Ackroyd has disappeared.

Commander Esmonde Shaw, R.N, of the Naval Intelligence Division wants to get out and settle down with a house in the suburbs.

Unfortunately for Naval Intelligence's finest secret agent, these peaceful plans will have to wait.

Shaw establishes that the physicist has fallen into the hands of foreign agents operating from Spanish territory.

Shaw's job is to get Ackroyd back to Gibraltar before the Rock blows up -- and before Ackroyd is smuggled out of Spain.

As Shaw wanders rounds the Spanish streets, he catches the heavy odour of a well-remembered perfume. Karina Czercov, the most dangerous, beautiful woman behind the Iron Curtain, is caught up in this intrigue.

Something in the air tells them that this encounter was going to be a fight to the finish.

Gibraltar Road is a high-octane thriller filled with espionage and intrigue.

Praise for Philip McCutchan

"A nautical war buffs feast...[McCutchan] keeps an authoritative hand on the wheel and his descriptions of battles at sea ring with laconic truth." -- The New York Times Book Review

'A gripping page-turner.' - Tom Kasey, best-selling author of 'Trade-Off.'

Philip McCutchan(1920-1996) grew up in the naval atmosphere of Portsmouth Dockyard and developed a lifetime's interest in the sea. Military history was an early interest resulting in several fiction books, from amongst his large output, about the British Army and its campaigns, especially in the last 150 years.