Road to War Books

1935: Cal Jardine is a soldier of fortune. Forced to leave Hamburg, where he has been helping Jews flee the Nazis, he is recruited by a secretive British committee to smuggle guns to Abyssinia, a country threatened by Italian invasion. But first Jardine must procure the weapons from Romania, a country full of treacherous locals, as well as German agents seeking his arrest. By sleight of hand, he contrives to steal the weapons he wanted to buy, before escaping the country leaving both the Romanians and Germans floundering. Taken to the Horn of Africa, the arms are then transported over a harsh landscape, an old slave trader’s route full of danger, into the hands of the Ethiopian Army. On his travels Jardine acquires more baggage than he anticipated, including a beautiful, but difficult American female in search of her archaeologist mother, a determined reporter and a daredevil French flyer, while missing out on a painful death by sheer good fortune. But the Ethiopians are ill-equipped to a face a modern Italian army using tanks, bombers, and poison gas. Trained for war, can Jardine simply walk away? Or will he be drawn into a bloody conflict against massive odds, and still save those who now depend on him?

1936. Having returned from Abyssinia, soldier of fortune Cal Jardine is convinced to travel to Barcelona and help facilitate rival athletic games to the Berlin Olympics. But now he finds himself in Spain as the first shots of civil war ring out; and the demands of friendship, love, and politics embroil Jardine once again in foreign war. A new adventure from the bestselling author of The Pillars of Rome.

1938. While Hitler sets his sights on the Sudetenland, not everyone in Britain is willing to appease him. Convinced that the Fuehrer’s land-hunger is insatiable, the head of the SIS recruits Cal Jardine to help him prove that Czechoslovakia is threatened with invasion. As jealousy and mutual suspicions within secret service ranks make it impossible for Jardine to tell friend from foe, he rediscovers old friends of dubious loyalty and makes new enemies of untested ruthlessness. The final installment in Ludlow's sweeping series in the pre-WW2 European powder-keg.