The Pillars of Hercules

Book 3: Timeline 10/27/62

by James Philip

Genres: Alternative History sci-fi; Space Exploration

Synopsis

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.

The Ancient Greeks called the Straits of Gibraltar the ‘Pillars of Hercules’. The Rock of Gibraltar was the northern pillar; with 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...

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.

It hardly seems possible things could get any worse.

But after the CIA is implicated in the attempted assassination of the Royal Family, United States aircraft attack two British destroyers off the coast of Northern Spain and B-52s of Strategic Air Command mount a devastating surprise raid on the Maltese Archipelago; suddenly the belligerence of General Franco’s government over Gibraltar and the sabre-rattling of the new fascist Government of Italy overnight assumes the proportions of a Machiavellian American plot to drive the final nail into the coffin of the British Empire.

The situation is unrelentingly grim. On Malta hundreds are dead, and thousands injured; bunker-busting 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. Meanwhile, off the Straits of Gibraltar a Royal Navy carrier battle group is fending off mass attacks by the antiquated Spanish Air Force, harrying Franco’s army and navy as they press around the beleaguered Rock, while far out at sea the Royal Navy’s one, recently commissioned 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 literally 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’.

Author’s note to readers: since the publication of ‘Operation Anadyr’ in October 2014, the Timeline 10/27/62 series has branched into and explored a number of additional narrative arcs and themes, and in several standalone stories.

For my readers who prefer to read the Timeline 10/27/62 books in the chronological order of the overall narrative arc THE PILLARS OF HERCULES = 8.

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Release date: January 30, 2015

Print pages: 270