James Philip
A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 1
The Timeline 10/27/62 — Main Series is:
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 2017)
Books in the Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series exploring the American experience of Armageddon from an entirely American point of view are now available:
Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series:
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country (Available 31st December 2016)
Book 5: The American Dream (Available 2017)
To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it up in my own head. None of the fictional characters in ‘A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 1 — Book 7 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ — is based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events described in ‘A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 1– Book 7 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ — have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.
The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ is an alternative history of the modern World and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in many cases their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always state — unequivocally — in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it all up in my own head.
The books of the Timeline 10/27/62 series are written as episodes; they are instalments in a contiguous narrative arc. The individual ‘episodes’ each explore a number of plot branches while developing themes continuously from book to book. Inevitably, in any series some exposition and extemporization is unavoidable but I try — honestly, I do — to keep this to a minimum as it tends to slow down the flow of the stories I am telling.
In writing each successive addition to the Timeline 10/27/62 ‘verse’ it is my implicit assumption that my readers will have read the previous books in the series, and that my readers do not want their reading experience to be overly impacted by excessive re-hashing of the events in those previous books.
Humbly, I suggest that if you are ‘hooked’ by the Timeline 10/27/62 Series that reading the books in sequence will — most likely — enhance your enjoyment of the experience.
Chapter 1
After a wet and dreary, almost wintery weekend when dawn broke over Lincolnshire the sky was clear and the first rays of the morning Sun brightly illuminated the low-loaders queuing along the perimeter road. Several of the ugly vehicles were hauled by big Scammell tank transporters, including several of World War II vintage which had been recovered from half-forgotten mothball depots after the October War.
The light of the new day fell across the fresh camouflage paint on the slab sides of the big tractors; and as each periodically fired up its engine clouds of acrid yellow grey smoke belched from their exhaust stacks, hazing the still Lincolnshire air.
The slow, methodical business of moving nuclear bomb components from dispersed sites across the old airfield to the assembly bunkers had continued unabated while the big transporters came and went for over a hundred hours now. Shifts of ordnance technicians and changes of the guard — eight hours on, eight hours off — succeeded one after the other until to the men and women of 92 Maintenance Unit, Faldingworth Nuclear Bomb Store (Permanent Ammunition Depot), night and day slowly merged into an unbroken, meaningless continuum. At regular intervals technical teams were escorted out to the concrete ‘hutches’ — small above ground ‘hardened’ structures where the fissile cores of individual weapons were stored — and returned to the big ‘Special Munitions’ assembly bunkers with their heavily shielded loads. Every hour, sometimes one, or perhaps, two warning alarms would sound, the great steel blast doors of the complex would roll open, and another bomb, or pair of bombs, would be unhurriedly, carefully trundled out to be gently hoisted onto the low-loader that had been summoned forward to bear it away to its designated ‘Forward Permanent Ammunition Dump’.
Most of the high-yield weapons were being sent to the FPADs — in former years, the modified ‘bomb dumps’ — at the RAF V-Bomber stations at Conningsby, Scampton and Wyton; while eleven low-yield, Hiroshima size bombs, were scheduled to be transported to the Royal Naval ‘Special Weapons Depot’ at Fort Nelson near Portsmouth for future deployment onboard the aircraft carriers HMS Ark Royal (currently in dockyard hands), HMS Eagle and HMS Hermes (both based in the Mediterranean).
At the gates to RAF Faldingworth each departing transporter would pick up an escort of machine-gun armed Land Rovers, Ferret armoured cars and at least one truck load of heavily armed infantrymen before setting off for its final destination. Striking out ahead of each convoy RAF Regiment detachments cleared all the roads, and units of the 4th Infantry Division, based in Lincolnshire continuously patrolled and ‘secured’ the countryside around all the routes between Faldingworth and the V-Bomber stations awaiting the deadly cargoes. Different security arrangements were being developed to transport the ‘Navy’s eggs’ south to Portsmouth in either a single large, or two smaller ‘fighting columns’.
RAF Faldingworth was in the eye of the approaching storm.
A State of Emergency had been declared within hours of the atrocities at RAF Brize Norton and at RAF Cheltenham a week ago; and one hundred and seven hours ago the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had unilaterally declared war on the Soviet Union.
RAF Faldingworth had come into existence as a decoy airfield called Toft Grange in July 1942. On completion it had become a Bomber Command satellite station of RAF Lindholme; between August 1943 and February 1944 hosting 1667 Heavy Conversion Unit. Then in the spring of 1944 the Lancasters of No. 300 (Polish) Squadron had taken up residence at Faldingworth, staying until the official disbandment of the Free Polish Air Force in 1946.
Although the old wartime airfield was unsuitable for the operation of the new generation of post-war fast jets, Faldingworth survived the disposal programs and various rationalizations of the late 1940s and 1950s as Bomber Command was re-shaped ahead of the formation of the V-Bomber Force.
Soon after № 92 Maintenance Unit had started operating at Faldingworth in 1948, the RAF had determined to concentrate its ordnance in a small number of strategically located depots — under a 1950 plan codenamed ‘Galloper’ — rather than in literally scores of local sites as had been the historic practice. The new ‘Permanent Ammunition Depots’ or PADs, would accommodate purpose built bunkers, assembly and handling facilities. It was initially envisaged that the new PADs would be at Binbrook, Conningsby, Waddington, Scampton, Hemswell and Faldingworth. However, it was one thing making a decision; another entirely implementing it. Between the original ‘staff decision’ in 1950 and the planned opening of Faldingworth and the other PADs, Britain had acquired nuclear weapons and it was belatedly appreciated that storing thousands of tons of conventional bombs on the same sites as the new ‘special weapons’ posed very obvious, and possibly insuperable problems. Safely storing and handling the new ‘special weapons’ like Blue Danube, the RAF’s first ‘homemade’ atomic bomb, required wholly different and vastly more complex skills and procedures than those appropriate to managing even the most advanced conventional munitions. Secrecy and security were paramount; and after much treasure had been wasted and large areas of countryside had been dug up to bury unnecessary and redundant concrete bomb dumps, plans for most of the Permanent Ammunition Depots were scaled back or quietly abandoned.