James Philip
Red Dawn
Author’s Note
‘Red Dawn’ is Book 4 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.
It is January 1964 in a World 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 Timeline 10/27/62 World is:
The 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 (Available 1st July 2015)
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses (Available 1st January 2016)
Later in 2015 the first two books in the Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series exploring the American experience of Armageddon from an entirely American point of view will be published:
Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series:
Book 1: Aftermath (Available 27th October 2015)
Book 2: California Dreaming (Available 27th October 2015)
Book 3: The Great Society (Available 26th January 2016)
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 characters in ‘Red Dawn — Book 4 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ — are based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events described in ‘Red Dawn’ — Book 4 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 their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing for sure 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 say in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it up in my own head.
As with real historical characters, real historical ships are treated in a documentary — where they were and as they were deployed — fashion up to and including 27th October 1962. Thereafter, all bets are off because in this post cataclysm timeline, everything changes.
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, and develop 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
It was a brutally cold, raw winter’s day in the savagely mauled but unbroken capital city of the United States of America. It had snowed again overnight but the morning had brought crystal clear azure skies pocked with fast scudding high clouds, and a bright, dazzling sunshine that seemed to mock the frozen ground and the foggy frost that every breath expelled. The great crowd had been gathering along Pennsylvania Avenue all morning, its ranks swelling from every side as the people of the great city came together to mourn the slaughter and the destruction of the insurrection, and to celebrate their survival.
Looking down Pennsylvania Avenue from the steps of the Capitol Building where he’d been sworn in as the thirty-fifth President of the Republic six days short of three years before, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a little surprised by how perversely normal the city seemed beneath its wintery coat of freshly fallen snow. If he tried very hard he could almost forget the fire-blackened and blasted building behind him, the desecration of the Smithsonian, the depressingly long list of great public buildings wrecked by truck bombs and left to burn down as for awful three days the fighting had raged, washing up and down the wide boulevards of the city like rip tides of death.
The tanks and armoured personnel carriers which had rumbled down those streets a month ago were parked in and around the city; a comforting presence for the survivors. F-4 Phantoms orbited the capital constantly, their thunderous jets never so distant as to be beyond the edge of human hearing. No civilian aircraft was permitted to overfly Washington or approach within fifty miles of it, no vehicle could enter it without first being exhaustively searched at one of a dozen nominated entry points. Navy gunboats patrolled the Anacostia and the Potomac Rivers, their captains granted absolute powers of seizure and operating under rules of engagement which allowed them to fire first and ask questions later. The 101st Airborne Division and elements of the 2nd Marine Division had invested every corner of DC, and every member of the cruelly depleted Washington DC Police Department now had as many as half-a-dozen heavily armed paratroopers or Marine Corps grunts at his back when he, or she, ventured out onto the streets. Regardless of the fact that large parts of the US Government had decamped to Philadelphia, including the entire House of Representatives under the leadership of the Vice-President, the rule of law would be enforced in the nation’s capital, and its hard-pressed citizens would henceforth live in safety.
Or rather, in relative safety.