The Levelling Dust

At the end of the Second World War, the sometimes benign, sometimes malign, levelling dust of fate dictates the course that Robert and Douglas Bowen’s lives will take. Haunted by guilt over the part he played in the death of their parents and the subsequent death of a younger brother in a fire at an orphanage, Douglas recklessly risks his life during the Korean War; contriving a daring escape from capture with his comrade, Jim Feltham.
After recovering from his wounds in a Hong Kong hospital, with the help of nurse, Jane Hazell, he is seduced by the treacherous Linda Yeung.
After Linda is killed in a horrifying car crash while being pursued by Douglas, the young soldier is recruited into a sinister branch of MI6, known as ‘Gordon’s Ghosts’ and soon finds himself fighting to prevent a vengeful member of the IRA from murdering an army sergeant in a remote corner of the Aden Protectorate.
Jane Hazell meets up with Douglas again when she is posted to Aden’s military hospital. They fall in love. Meanwhile, the quixotic and repressed, Robert Bowen, who has aspirations to become a writer, loses his heart to the beautiful Barbara Meadows. When she is selected by a fashion magazine to be their, ‘Coronation Year Girl’ he joins the Merchant Navy in a fit of pique and promptly falls foul of a ship’s bully.
Fate decrees that Robert, reunited with Barbara and on the brink of literary success, encounters Jim Feltham and learns that his brother accidentally killed his mother with a shotgun; his father subsequently taking the blame and committing suicide.
Douglas is now serving at the Atomic Research Station in Woomera, South Australia. When Robert’s mentor, the broadcaster, Vernon Farrell, decides to conduct his Christmas radio programme from the site, the unbalanced Robert, bent on settling scores with his brother, travels there with him, but suffers a nervous breakdown before meeting Douglas.
Douglas inveigles himself aboard the light aircraft evacuating Robert from Woomera. When the bribed pilot lands the ‘plane in the desert where Chinese mercenaries are waiting to kidnap two eminent nuclear physicists who are also aboard, the two brothers are thrown together in a desperate fight for survival.