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
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.
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
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)