The Burning Sky — David Donachie

The first installment in Donachie's sweeping Roads to War series set in the pre-WWII European powder keg

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 Rumania, 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 Rumanians and Germans floundering. Taken to the Horn of Africa, the arms are then transported over a harsh landscape, along an old slave trader's route full of danger, and into the hands of the Ethiopian Army.

On his travels, Jardine acquires more baggage than he anticipated -- including a beautiful but difficult American woman in search of her archaeologist mother, a determined reporter, and a daredevil French flyer -- and avoids a painful death by sheer good fortune. But the Ethiopians are ill-equipped to 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 can he manage to save those who now depend on him?