Shadow of the Storm

Bol

The air in October 1987 is thick with more than just the salt-spray of the Solent; it is charged with the static of a brewing disaster. Guy Miller, armed with his 12th birthday present, a Maxcom CB radio, expects his family holiday at Warner's Yarmouth to be little more than a boring trudge through his father's architectural obsessions. But the "Secret Solent Squad" is born the moment a rhythmic S.O.S. flashes from above the dark, arched windows of Fort Victoria-a signal the adults dismiss as a mere reflection. While the parents indulge in the forced merriment of "Agadoo" and free champagne, the children begin to peel back the layers of a clandestine mystery hidden within the historic masonry. Beneath the casemates, in the damp shadows of the ammunition stores, a strange, sweet scent wafts through the cracks-the unmistakable aroma of a hidden "baker" at work in a bunker where no kitchen should exist. The local Yellow Jackets, Matt Granger and Daz Skelton, are no longer just entertainers; they are watchers protecting a secret worth thousands, aided by a menacing figure in a yellow sou'wester and a compromised resort manager. As the barometer plunges at an unprecedented rate, the Squad finds themselves trapped in the heart of a "wooden grave" during the most destructive storm in a century. With the ground saturated and the forest screaming as hundred-mile-per-hour gusts topple the Monterey pines, the boundary between an autumn adventure and a life-and-death struggle vanishes. In the darkness of the Great Storm, the only thing standing between the children and the "curtains" promised by their enemies is a mother's iron will and the fading signal of a handheld radio.

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Pagina's: 87, Paperback, Independently published