by James Philip
Rosa would not be interrupted.
“The people of Malta will spit on your name when you are dead!” This said – or rather, hurled in her husband’s face – Rosa turned away and folded her arms across her chest as if she was chilled, shivering to the marrow of her bones.
Samuel Calleja ignored his wife and threw a feeble scowl at Rachel.
If Rachel had had a knife she would have gutted him without a second thought.
A few moments later as she hugged and unavailingly attempted to comfort Rosa in the corridor outside she got a grip of her anger; if she had put an end to Samuel Calleja then and there it would have been an act of mercy. It was better by far for the traitor to spend a sleepless night waiting to be marched out at dawn into the inner courtyard of Paola Prison, there to be chained to a stake to await his turn to be shot by firing squad alongside the first tranche of Soviet butchers convicted of war crimes against Maltese civilians.
Dan French was not wasting time or energy agonising over signing the death warrants of Soviet officers and senior NCOs who had been in any way complicit in the killing of non-combatants; they were in command of and therefore considered responsible de facto, for the actions and the crimes of all the men directly under their flag. As swiftly as the initial interrogation reports emerged from the Joint Intelligence Centre at Fort Rinella, the C-in-C was condemning the guilty. Likely Maltese and other civilian collaborators, turncoats and fifth columnists other than Samuel Calleja, whose guilt was transparent, would be subject to a more considered, quasi-judicial process in which some of the normal legal checks and balances might at some stage be allowed to intrude. But for the men who had commanded the murderous invaders there would be no half measures.
Nobody was going to be straining the spirit of mercy on account of the animals who had roamed the streets of the Citadel, Rabat and half-a-score of other towns and villages murdering women, children and unarmed men and boys.
Rosa extricated herself from the older woman.
She straightened, smoothed down her dress.
She sniffed, brushed aside her tears.
“Tomorrow morning I will be free of that man.”
Chapter 84
16:59 Hours (GMT)
Monday 6th April 1964
3 Miles North of Cleeve Hill, Gloucestershire
Seamus McCormick knew he was a dead man when he heard the thrumming of the approaching helicopters.
Frank Reynolds and Sean O’Flynn must have carried out their ‘demonstration’ at Brize Norton. Now the bastards were clearing the air corridors into and out of RAF Cheltenham.
“Shit!”
He had had to booby trap the Bedford lorry and move up to the northern end of the wood – maybe two hundred yards away – just in case the truck was spotted. He had planned to go back and retrieve the second Redeye but by the time he had wrestled the first one up to the firing position he had selected around dawn there was a patrol parked up among the farm houses below the wood.
A ‘ready to fire’ Redeye and its M171 launcher weighted over thirty pounds and if he had attempted to move both at the same time, if discovered or disturbed, he would have had no chance of getting away with one under each arm or over each shoulder.
The helicopters were closer now.
Fuck it! He had not come all this way just to take down a fucking chopper! Any idiot with an assault rifle could take out a helicopter if it came close enough!
He had rigged the driver’s door of the Bedford to a tripwire attached to eight ounces of plastic explosive positioned behind the truck’s fuel tank so if the guys in that patrol he had seen found the lorry he would know all about it at exactly the same time they did.
Above the thrumming of the helicopters he heard another sound.
The distant, unmistakable whistling thunder of multiple jet engines.
Chapter 85
17:04 Hours
Monday 6th April 1964
Flight 617, Final Approach to Runway 22, RAF Cheltenham
Peter Christopher looked over his wife’s head through the window of the jetliner. The Hawker Hunter floating fifty to sixty yards beyond the de Havilland Comet 4’s port wing tip had turned on its navigation lights.
For the first time he began to think about all the things which had happened to him since HMS Talavera had departed Portsmouth four-and-a-half months ago after a long, soul-destroying period tied up in Fareham Creek. He remembered – as if thinking about a different age – his fear that he might never meet Marija. Could it possibly be only November last year that Talavera had slipped her moorings and steamed out into the English Channel?
So much had happened to him that he half-suspected that if he met himself as he was back in late November of last year he honestly wondered if he would recognise that man. The last time he had seen England was when Talavera had taken on ammunition in Portland Harbour while channel gale blew the other side of the breakwater. He had been the Talavera’s technical whizz, the man who had spent most of last year training the crews of ships hastily brought out of reserve how to make their radar and communications suites work. Finally, in late November Talavera had gone to sea, and soon afterwards, to war.
Talavera had led the gun line off Santander and within the day been reduced to a crippled wreck fighting for survival in the teeth of a North Atlantic winter storm off Cape Finisterre. The scars from that action had barely healed by the time Talavera was in the thick of it again at Lampedusa. Somehow he had gone from being the ships ‘radar expert’ to being her second-in-command and then her commanding officer when David Penberthy had been struck down. His friend Hugh Montgommery, Talavera’s Executive Officer had died in the battle of Cape Finisterre; there had been no body, just a spray of bloody viscera after two unfired GWS 21 Sea Cat missiles had exploded and the two A-4 Skyhawks that had left Talavera dead in the water after the first bomb run had strafed the helpless destroyer with their twenty-millimetre cannons.
The Battle of Lampedusa had been Talavera’s last action before he had stepped ashore on Malta. That had been an odd thing. He had expected to find Marija waiting for him on the shore; and dreamed of such, but she had been nowhere to be seen. He had never met Marija and Alan Hannay’s friend Jim Siddall, the Redcap who had been killed by Samuel Calleja’s booby-trap in Kalkara. In retrospect he had known little and understood less about the love of his life than he had imagined. It was Margo Seiffert who had brought him to his senses; in hindsight his father had probably played his part also in finally bringing him together with Marija. Once together they would never be apart again, that was the way of it and he had been too stupid to understand as much until it had happened.
By rights they ought all to be dead now.
Red Dawn, the Soviets, whoever the real enemy was, had fired nuclear missiles aimed at Malta in February. Those ICBMs ought to have killed them all. Instead, he had unhesitatingly followed Captain Nick Davey’s HMS Scorpion into the wake of and under the burning stern of the USS Enterprise. Afterwards he had emerged an even bigger hero; notwithstanding he had only been doing his duty.
That was all he had done last Friday.
His duty...
God, was that only three days ago?
What was duty if it was not protecting the ones you loved?
The Comet was shaking and bumping through the turbulent air rising off the Cotswolds as the pilot bled off speed and lined up for the runway at Cheltenham.
Peter sensed Marija’s terror.
He bowed his head, kissed her hair.
“It will all be over in a few minutes, sweetheart,” he whispered.
She reached up to her shoulder, seized his hand for comfort and held onto it like her life depended upon it.
Chapter 86
17:05 Hours (GMT)
Monday 6th April 1964
3 Miles North of Cleeve Hill, Gloucestershire
What he had thought was the approach of two big jets was a single Comet and a pair of fighters. The jetliner was flying higher than th
e big aircraft he had seen landing that morning but well within the kill range of the Redeye resting heavily on his shoulder.
One of the helicopters – a Westland Wessex – which had over flown the wood a few minutes ago had swung around and was hovering somewhere a few hundred yards to the south.
The bastards must have spotted the Bedford truck parked in the woods.
It did not matter, it was too late.
He stepped out of the tree line.
Track the target, let it go past, lead it by a few degrees and let the bird fly...
It all seemed so straightforward in theory but right now Seamus McCormick felt as if the whole World was pressing in around him, crushing the life out of him. His mind kept racing, every movement required almost superhuman strength as if he was pushing back against some invisible wall. The M171 launcher might have weighed a ton not thirty pounds.
WAIT! Wait! Wait!
Shoot too soon and the Redeye will fly harmlessly into space, fire too late and the same thing will happen and I have got only the one bullet!
Sweat stung his eyes.
Suddenly the Comet was almost directly overhead.
He felt the ground flinch as his finger tightened around the trigger mechanism.
The launcher made a soft whumph sound and kicked at his shoulder.
The sound of the Bedford lorry blowing up raged through the trees behind him.
The Redeye, fired at an angle of some seventy degrees to the horizontal appeared to stall about twenty feet above Seamus McCormick’s head. For a split second he was afraid it was going to fall straight back down to ground within feet of him.
But then there was an incandescent blue white explosion and the missile was accelerating away at a speed that defied belief as the shadow of the jetliner scudded across the woods far below.
Chapter 87
17:07 Hours (GMT)
Monday 6th April 1964
Prestbury, Gloucestershire
The XM41 Redeye Block I surface-to-air missile had reached a speed of approximately Mach 1.5 when it buried its blunt nose into the wing root of the Comet. At that velocity the warhead, a blast fragmentation device built around twelve-and-a-half ounces of HTA-3, a powerful nitroamine high explosive chemically not dissimilar to RDX, did not actually detonate until after it had penetrated the crew cabin of the jetliner. Other than for the thirty or so lives that explosion snuffed out – some seconds before the impact of the shattered pieces of the compartment and the surrounding airframe on the ground short of the threshold of Runway 22 at RAF Cheltenham – the activation of the warhead was incidental. The initial impact of the Redeye travelling at supersonic speed had caused a sympathetic explosion in the inner port Rolls-Royce Avon Mark 521 J65 turbojet which had resulted in the separation of the port wing from the rest of the airframe. Around two seconds later aerodynamic stresses on the cabin compartment caused the intact fuselage and starboard wing to shed the forward section of the crew compartment spilling bodies, alive and dead, into the air over a thousand feet above the rolling Cotswolds Hills.
There were no survivors.
[The End]
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Tales of Brave Ulysses: Book 6 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series. I hope you enjoyed it - or if you did not, sorry - but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilization depends on people like you.
* * *
As a rule I let my books speak for themselves. I hope it does not sound fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned, but broadly speaking I tend towards the view that a book should speak for itself.
However, with your indulgence I would like briefly – well, as briefly as is possible without being overly terse – to share a few personal thoughts with you, the reader about the Timeline 10/27/62 World.
I was not yet seven-and-a-half years old in October 1962 when I realised my parents were paying an awful lot of attention to the radio, devouring every line of print in the daily newspaper and were not quite themselves, a little distracted in fact, now that I think about it. I heard the word ‘Cuba’ bandied about but did not know until much later that the most dangerous moment of my life had come and gone without my ever, as a child, knowing it.
I was not yet eight-and-a-half years old when one day in November 1963 the World around me came, momentarily, to a juddering halt. I had heard the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and I even knew that he was the President of something called the United States of America. I did not know then that he was a womanising, drug addicted and deeply conflicted man who had lied to the American people about his chronic, periodically disabling illness which in any rational age ought to have disqualified him from the Presidency; but I did know that he was a charismatic, talismanic figure in whom even I, as a child more interested in soccer, model trains and riding my new bicycle, had invested a nameless hope for the future. And then one day he was gone and I shared my parents’ shock and horror. It was not as if a mortal man had been murdered; JFK had become a mythic figure long before then. It was as if the modern day analogue of King Menelaus of Sparta - hero of the Trojan Wars and the husband of Helen, she of the legendary face that launched a thousand ships - had been gunned down that day in Dallas.
The Cuban Missiles crisis and the death of a President taught a young boy in England in 1962 and 1963 that the World is a very dangerous place.
Many years later we learned how close we all came to the abyss in October 1962. Often we look back on how deeply Jack Kennedy’s death scarred hearts and minds in the years after his assassination.
There is no certainty, no one profound insight into what ‘might have happened’ had the Cold War turned Hot in the fall of 1962, or if JFK had survived that day in Dallas. History is not a systematic, explicable march from one event to another that inevitably reaches some readily predictable outcome. History only works that way in hindsight; very little is obvious either to the major or the minor players at the time history is actually being made. One does not have to be a fully paid up chaos theoretician to know that apparently inconsequential small events can have massive unforeseen and unforeseeable impacts in subsequent historical developments.
I do not pretend to know what would have happened if the USA and the USSR had gone to war over Cuba in October 1962. One imagines this scenario has been the object of countless staff college war games in America and elsewhere in the intervening fifty-three years; I suspect that few of those war games would have played out the way the participants expected, and that no two games would have resolved themselves in exactly the same way as any other. That is the beauty and the fascination of historical counterfactuals, or as those of us who make no pretence at being emeritus professors of history say, alternative history.
Nobody can claim ‘this is the way it would have been’ after the Cuban Missiles Crisis ‘went wrong’. This author only speculates that the Timeline 10/27/62 Series reflects one of the many ways ‘things might have gone’ in the aftermath of Armageddon.
The thing one can be reasonably confident about is that if the Cuban Missiles Crisis had turned into a shooting war the World in which we live today would, probably, not be the one with which we are familiar.
A work of fiction is a journey of imagination. I hope it does not sound corny but I am genuinely a little humbled by the number of people who have already bought into what I am trying to do with Timeline 10/27/62.
Like any author, this author would prefer everybody to enjoy his books – if I disappoint, I am truly sorry – but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. I really do believe that civilization depends on people like you.
Other Books by James Philip
The Timeline 10/27/62 World
The Timeline 10/27/62 - Main Series
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower
(Available 1st June 2017)
Book 10: Crow on the Cradle
(Available 27th October 2017)
Timeline 10/27/62 - USA
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country
Book 5: The American Dream
(Available 27th October 2017)
Timeline 10/27/62 – Australia
Book 1: Cricket on the Beach
(Available 20th December 2017)
Book 2: Operation Manna
(Available 20th December 2017)
Other Series and Novels
The Guy Winter Mysteries
Prologue: Winter’s Pearl
Book 1: Winter’s War
Book 2: Winter’s Revenge
Book 3: Winter’s Exile
Book 4: Winter’s Return
Book 5: Winter’s Spy
(Available 31st January 2017)
The Bomber War Series
Book 1: Until the Night
Book 2: The Painter
(Available 31st March 2017)
Book 3: The Cloud Walkers
(Available 31st March 2017)
Until the Night Series
Part 1: Main Force Country – September 1943
Part 2: The Road to Berlin – October 1943