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Keith Turley The author Keith Turley was born in Cheshire and educated for the last 2 years at a technical college in Manchester. At the age of 15½ he joined the Royal Naval Fleet Air Arm, where he trained in aircraft electronics and in his spare time developed a love for sailing. Married at the age of 21 he travelled to Scandinavia, the Middle East, Far East, Australia and Africa on an aircraft carrier but at the age of 30 he left the Navy to spend more time with his young family. Further study and a career change, enabled him to become a computer commissioning engineer and later a design engineer of computers. This entailed further travel to Japan the Far East and North America. During rest periods and holidays he has travelled extensively through out Europe skiing and walking. Whilst in his spare time he has indulged in various writing projects the latest of which, a first novel is Take Six Strides.

	Works by Keith Turley

Take Six Strides
by Keith Turley

Synopsis

An ex IRA bomber Shaun is in Northern Spain working for ETA and blows up a rail track as a train goes by. It goes slightly wrong, as only one carriage is derailed but this can be explained away as intentional. However he leaves his fingerprint and so has to leave the country. On the train is Peter Harding, an investigator working for the International Monitory Aid Foundation. The (IMAF) fund construction projects in third world countries. Peter is only inconvenienced and slightly hurt in the rail crash but saves a nun, who was in the same carriage, from severe injury or death. Meanwhile a U.S. senator’s assistant Drew Roband goes missing in a South American country whilst on a fact finding mission for the senator.
The (IMAF) have recently funded the building and completion of a dam the Presa Milagro in a South American country, Cordilla. This project is completed but has now run into difficulties due to sabotage at the dam and the destruction of the electricity pylons and is therefore unable to start repayments of the loan. Peter is sent to Edinburgh to learn something about dams and their construction prior to being dispatched to Cordilla to sort out the problems. During this visit he meets the designer of the dam David Mirand accompanied by his wife Helen, who is also his personal assistant. Peter and Helen dine together whilst waiting for David to arrive but fall out due to a misunderstanding. Later David is urged to assist the (IMAF) by his firm which are under contract to the (IMAF) and accompanied by his wife travels to Cordilla where he again meets Peter.
Fidel a KGB operator who feigned his own death some years previously and has since become Latinized is in the employ of Noberto the Minister of the Interior and learns that Shaun is likely to visit a South American country. He is diverted to Cordilla where he is arrested at the airport and thrown in jail. Subsequently Shaun is recruited and encouraged to plan the destruction of the dam by Fidel. Peter, David and Helen meet up at the airport in Cordilla and after an interview with the Minister of the Interior, soon discover the basis of a fraud. Later when on a journey to visit the dam David is murdered, Helen and Peter are falsely accused of the crime and are sentenced to indefinite confinement. They are then transported a hundred miles inland up the rift valley of the Rio Milagro, past the dam to a prison on the edge of a cliff high in the mountains where they are to be incarcerated. In this place they are confined not so much by prison bars but by the distance needed to travel to escape, the lack of suitable foot ware and the guard dogs. Here they soon meet up with the senator’s assistant Drew who had been reported as ‘missing’. Peter and Helen, determined to escape to prove their innocence and to report the fraud, become more attracted to each other.
The mountains to the North of the prison are too high and forbidding to walk over. To the South the border is too distant and to the East, over those mountains, is the rain forest of Brazil and Peru. The only way out of the country appears to be westwards towards the Pacific Ocean, Sao Agusta and the sea. Escaping to the sea would entail travelling through the adjoining rain forest and down the one road of the Milagro valley, a long and confining bottle neck. A plan is formed and a hang glider made out of bamboo, rattan and canvas is designed and built with Drew’s assistance. Peter is to fly the hang glider but it requires two people to carry it and some acrimony occurs between Drew and Helen as to who is to accompany him. This is eventually resolved by Peter choosing Helen and in the middle of the night as the moon rises they launch themselves of the roof of the prison. Flying by night along the edge of the rift valley then climbing up through the rain forest during the day to gain height for the next night’s flight they make their way down the valley past the dam to the coast. Catching sleep when and where ever they can their mutual attraction grows. Pursued by prison guards with dogs they also have to avoid the army patrols on foot and scramble bikes. It takes five nights when towards the end of their journey they receive some assistance from a convent where they find the nun that Peter saved from the train wreck in Spain is now working.
Their aim is not only to escape but also to reach Porto Agusta before a handful of visiting U.S. warships leave and before the dam is destroyed by an explosion. When they arrive at a high point above the bay the ships are still at anchor but it soon appears, are about to leave. Risking everything they fly in daylight over patrolling rubber boats and manage to land the hang glider on the light aircraft carrier despite Peter being wounded. Now they have to convince the U.S. navy to act, not only to save the other prisoners but to save the dam and avoid a catastrophe. A plan is formed that requires the U.S. marines to fly up country to rescue Drew and save the other prisoners with some assistance from Peter. Meanwhile a second contingent of marines, using great skill and daring and ably assisted by Helen flying the hang glider, performs an unusual attack on the dam in an attempt to stop it from being destroyed.