The Long Shot

by Mike Atherton (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2014

  $3.50

  The 'Long Shot' is set in WW1. Jack Adams and Jim Cunningham are friends and work as gamekeepers on an estate in Derbyshire. One a natural shot the other with an intuitive gift for observation. The Great War has already started when a chance meeting with a serving officer on leave introduces them to a new kind of warfare, sniping. The Germans are already experts in this deadly game of marksmanship and the British are losing men at an alarming rate, something needs to be done urgently. Working as a team in the battlefields of France and Belgium the two men quickly make a name for themselves. Jack becomes notorious, or heroic depending on which side you are on. He is a wanted man, dead rather than alive. Circumstance and events lead Jack to be the hunted rather than the hunter and the man charged with hunting him is an older, and wiser German sniper named Albert, he too has a bounty on his head but this time by the British. Following the infamous and ultimately futile Somme offensive, Jack is set to find and destroy his German counterpart. Albert has other plans, he intends to live through this carnage and return home, not to the new Germany but to his wife back in the Black Forest. He will take any path to get him home, but after he is witness to a despicable act by one of his own officers he is left vulnerable and he has to take matters into his own hands. Jack and Albert are thrown together in a dramatic meeting. Their paths run parallel but their ambitions are the same. The two men have more in common than anyone would have imagined and both men have known personal tragedy. The German high command let slip that their Commander in Chief will be visiting the front line trenches for a special presentation, and as word gets out a plan is hatched to assassinate the chief of the German army General Ludendorff. Both men have a desire for this war to end and the killing of the high commander of the German armies will help speed along the process. Jack can take the shot but only Albert can help him find the target. This is the story of that journey; culminating in the final mission, assassinate Ludendorff. The Long Shot is the story of two snipers with everything to live for but this mission will test Jack and his new unlikely ally Albert, to their very limit.