Call Down the Hawk

Author(s): Maurice G Nicholson

Location(s): County Mayo

Genre(s): Thriller

Era(s): 1950s various

Location

Content

It’s April 1995 and, after thirty years of bloody strife, change is in the air on the troubled island of Ireland with the movement for peace beginning to gather pace. Living in the beautiful county of Mayo, Harry Ballantine has finally put the life he had always dreamed of together. He has found love with his soul mate, Freya Andreassen, makes a good living running his Adventure Centre in the Delphi Valley and he spends much of his spare time hunting with his Peregrine falcons. But the past has a way of catching up with all men and it suddenly explodes back into Harry’s life again, twenty years after he thought it had gone forever.
Three men break into his home and take Freya as a hostage. They have an offer for their old IRA comrade– the sort that cannot be refused if his love and he are to survive. They want him to commit a foul act of murder that has the potential to fatally derail the burgeoning peace process. It forces Harry to revisit his awful past where he had been a different entity— Jallad, the finest Libyan trained assassin the movement had ever seen. It is a past he had long before discarded in self-disgust but now it may provide the only route to their salvation.
And Jallad has another meaning for Harry Ballantine. It was the name of the first Peregrine falcon he had ever seen during his time in the desert of Cyrenaica. The hawk, like him, had been the fiercest of assassins but, in her own strange way, she had also begun his rehabilitation and his humanisation.

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