Operation Anadyr (Timeline 10/27/62)

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn’t end peacefully and the 'swinging sixties' didn't happen. On Saturday 27th October 1962 American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of ‘Timeline 10/27/62’.

‘Operation Anadyr’ is Book 1 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.

‘Operation Anadyr’ is about the first hours of that alternative history of the world. It is about living through the cataclysm, and wondering how it happened. How did the unthinkable happen? How could our leaders let it happen? How does one quantify the magnitude of the disaster? And what of the survivors living with the aftermath of a world gone mad? ‘Operation Anadyr’ confronts these questions. In ‘Operation Anadyr’ the anatomy of the disaster is writ plain and the men and women who survive it begin to find their voices.

Love is Strange (Timeline 10/27/62)

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn’t end peacefully and the 'swinging sixties' didn't happen.

On Saturday 27th October 1962 American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of ‘Timeline 10/27/62’.

Love is Strange is Book 2 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.

Love is Strange picks up the story a year and a month after the terrifying events in Operation Anadyr, Book 1 of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series. In a partially devastated world in which people are beginning to discover what actually happened and who their friends really are, chaos and disintegration threaten and old allies drift like sleepwalkers towards new wars.

The USA has assumed a new global hegemony and written off its old European allies. Therein lie the seeds of a generational conflict but nobody in Washington wants to hear that kind of news, or recognise that the laurels of victory might in time come to crush the seemingly invincible American eagle.

In a Britain ravaged by nuclear war in which the survivors are struggling to come to terms with the cataclysm questions are being asked about the reasons why; and how what remains of the nation will survive in the new world. Out of the catastrophe new leaders are beginning to emerge and there is a growing consensus that one day there will be a reckoning.

The Pillars of Hercules (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 3)

The Ancient Greeks called the Straits of Gibraltar the ‘Pillars of Hercules’. The Rock of Gibraltar was the northern pillar; Monte Hacho in Ceuta its probable southern analogue. To the ancients the Pillars of Hercules delineated the western end of the known Mediterranean World. Beyond lay the limitless, impassable vastness of the Atlantic; wherein lay monsters…

It is December 1963 and the tensions that have been simmering since the October War have come to the boil in an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion so poisonous, that nobody in England or Washington DC has realised that in the background there is a third, malignant force at work.

When the CIA is implicated in the attempted assassination of the Royal Family, United States aircraft subsequently attack two British destroyers off the coast of Northern Spain and take part in a devastating surprise raid on the Maltese Archipelago, the belligerence of General Franco’s government over Gibraltar and the sabre-rattling of the new fascist Government of Italy suddenly assumes the proportions of a Machiavellian American plot to drive the final nail into the coffin of the British Empire.

In England the hard-pressed United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration is struggling to feed and house its survivors; and every time it tries to talk to the Kennedy Administration nobody is available to take its call.

On Malta hundreds are dead, thousands injured. Bunker-buster bombs have destroyed practically every key headquarters building, Sunken British warships lie in the oil-fouled waters of the Grand Harbour and Sliema Creek, and the medical facilities of the islands have been overwhelmed.

Off the Straits of Gibraltar a Royal Navy carrier battle group is fending off mass attacks by the antiquated Spanish Air Force and harrying Franco’s army and navy as they press around the beleaguered Rock, while far out at sea the Royal Navy’s one nuclear powered attack submarine, HMS Dreadnought, is playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with two US Navy submarines.

Britain and the United States of America are a heartbeat away from war. Never have two nations been so grievously separated by their common language. It is as if every word the former allies say to each other is being passed through a filter that translates ‘peace’ into ‘war’.

Red Dawn (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 4)

It is January 1964 in an alternative timeline in which the swinging sixties never happened.

The fires of Washington DC have been extinguished and there is a new but fragile rapprochement between the old trans-Atlantic allies. But both old allies are afflicted with internal schisms that threaten the prospects of return to politics and business as usual. Moreover, a month after the Battle of Washington there is no conclusive proof that Red Dawn actually exists, let alone that it was involved in the events which almost provoked a war between the old Trans-Atlantic allies.

However, something is going on in the Anatolian heartland of a devastated Turkey, around the Black Sea, in the Aegean and in the shattered former Soviet client states bordering the Balkans. Photographs taken by U-2 spy planes provide tantalising clues, radio intercepts hint at secret armies, and refugees fleeing from Turkey and the Greek Islands recount horrific tales of invaders burning towns and villages and of big grey warships anchored beneath the walls of ancient Constantinople.

How much is the peace treaty between American and Britain worth? Is the World really any safer than it has been at any time since the cataclysm of the October War? Is it already too late to prepare for the next war? The war nobody except a solitary rogue Soviet defector predicts is inevitable?

Now is the time for charismatic leaders to step forward.

The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5)

The Burning Time’ is Book 5 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.

It is February 1964 in a World in which the ‘swinging sixties’ never happened.

The atomic mushroom clouds over the Mediterranean have dispersed and now as the World teeters on the brink of a new thermonuclear war, it is dawning on the ‘victors’ that their ‘victory’, far from being absolute, was tragically pyrrhic.

In the uneasy half-peace the United States stirs from its post-Cuban Missiles War slumber. But will it awaken soon enough to overcome its own divisions to confront the new and terrible forces unleashed by Red Dawn’s first paroxysm of violence?

Now is a time for betrayal. Now is judgement day when all the mistakes of the months since the October War will come back to haunt the ‘victors’.

Tales of Brave Ulysses (Timeline 10/27/62)

Tales of Brave Ulysses is Book 6 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.

Ulysses is the English form of Ulixes, which in turn is the Latin form of the Greek Odysseus, hero Homer’s ‘Iliad’ that tells the story of the great Trojan Wars, and the ‘Odyssey’ which recounts the fable of his long journey home from those wars.

It is April 1964 in a World in which the ‘swinging sixties’ never happened.

War is chaos; and chaos is war. The post-October War world is at a bloody crossroads; betrayal and confusion preoccupies and distracts the West to the disasters about to befall newly remade, desperately fragile alliances as long kept secrets surface.

Theimpentrable fog of war spreads across the Mediterranean. Even while Malta burns and the survivors of the savage naval battle off its coast fight for their lives in the wreckage-strewn iron grey waters, the brittle rapprochement between the two trans-Atlantic pre-war nuclear superpowers comes under intolerable pressure both from within and without.

The new Anglo-American alliance has failed its first test and while the blame game rages, events are moving at terrifying speed. The enemies of the United States and the United Kingdom are finally ready to strike a devastating blow.

Like the Greeks of classical antiquity after ten years besieging Troy, the war weary, disillusioned peoples of what remains of the pre-October War free world are badly in need of heroes.

And like the Greeks of yore, they too await the return of their brave Odysseus to give them hope for a better future.

A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 1 (Timeline 10/27/62)

‘A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 – Part 1’ is Book 7 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.

It is April 1964 in a World in which the ‘swinging sixties’ never happened.

Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are poised to pour down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates like wolves upon the fold. The Shah is dead, Tehran has been destroyed by a nuclear strike; in Iraq there had been a coup d’état and civil war has broken out. Only a handful of British tanks and a few thousand widely scattered troops around the oilfields of the Middle East stand between the Red Army and mastery of the Persian Gulf.

The whole Middle East is in turmoil. The Suez Canal is blocked, the British staging bases in Malta and Cyprus are wrecked and in America Congress has refused to ratify the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty.

In the United States the popular mood is one of ‘America First’. The ‘victory’ of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction and grief more futile than it does in the second week of April 1964.

Faced with a war in the Persian Gulf that it has neither the materiel, or in some quarters the will to fight, the West – what remains of it after the disaster of the Cuban Missiles War of October 1962 – faces a humiliating, crushing catastrophe of a kind that will alter the balance of global geopolitical power for a generation.

Has the nightmare of the October War been in vain?

Only one thing is certain; the World will soon be turned upside down again.

The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 2 (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 8)

‘The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 – Part 2’ is Book 8 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.

It is June 1964 in a World in which the ‘swinging sixties’ never happened.

Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are pouring down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers like wolves upon the fold. The Shah of Iran is dead, Tehran has been destroyed by a nuclear strike; and the surviving imperial courtiers are squabbling over the distribution of the nation’s riches. Iraq has disintegrated before the advancing Red Army tanks.

The Kennedy Administration has turned its back on any new commitment ‘east of Suez’. Only a handful of British tanks and a few thousand widely scattered Commonwealth troops around the oilfields of the Middle East and a fragile web of hastily concluded agreements of with former enemies and embattled allies stand between the Red Army and complete mastery of the Persian Gulf.

The whole Middle East is in turmoil. The Suez Canal is blocked. The British bases in Malta and Cyprus are wrecked. In America Congress has refused to ratify the US-UK Mutual Defence Treaty.

In the United States the overwhelming popular mood is one of ‘America First’. The ‘victory’ of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction and grief more futile than it does in the first week of June 1964. The beleaguered British and Commonwealth forces in and around the Persian Gulf must face the fact that the cavalry – in the form of the slowly rebuilding American military colossus – is not about to come to the rescue any time soon, or if at all, ever again.

Faced with a war in the Persian Gulf that it has neither the materiel, or in some quarters the will to fight, the West – what remains of it after the unmitigated disaster of the Cuban Missiles War of October 1962 – faces a humiliating, crushing catastrophe of a kind that will alter the balance of global geopolitical power for a generation.

Has the nightmare of the October War been in vain?

Only one thing is certain; the World is about to be turned upside down again.

All Along The Watchtower (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 9)

A little over twenty months have passed since the cataclysm of October 1962.

It is a minute before midnight in Philadelphia on 4th July 1964 in a World stumbling inexorably towards a second, even more catastrophic nuclear war.

The United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom have stepped to the edge of the thermonuclear abyss; who will blink first?

In All Along The Watchtower the Main Series and the USA Series of Timeline 10/27/72 merge into a single global narrative of the most desperate hours in human history…

Crow On The Cradle (Timeline 10/27/62)

The sequel to 'The American Dream'.

It is January 1965 in a World in which the Cuban Missiles Crisis went horribly wrong and the ‘swinging sixties’ never happened.

In the United States a new President has entered the White House; in Britain the country will shortly be going to the polls for the first time since the October War. But with the return of ‘normal’ politics there is no return to the ‘normality’ of the old, now lost World order. That still lies in ashes, the terribly damaged Soviet Union has withdrawn back into its Cold War cave, the ‘conflict’ in Korea is red hot, the global economy is broken, everybody has lost so much and now the brutal realities of ‘politics as normal’ in American and the United Kingdom are about to come home to roost.

The shooting may have stopped in the American Midwest, and an uneasy peace may have descended in the Mediterranean and the Middle East but little has been settled. In England it seems as if the electorate will take its revenge on ‘The Angry Widow’ who led the country through the battles of 1964. In Philadelphia the new Administration finds itself embroiled in scandal within weeks, and the great peace conference in Manhattan stalls…

Across the wintery English Channel the survivors from the devastated lands of the East flood into France and suddenly the chaos stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals, with the British Isles and fascist Spain the last remaining remnants of what was once Western European civilization…

Peace of a sort has come to much of the World; but is it the tranquility of ruins or the bringer of fresh storms?

There has been no washing of the spears since the catastrophe of October 1962; who can say that the crow on the cradle has not had the last laugh…