James Philip
The Burning Time
Author’s Note
‘The Burning Time’ is Book 5 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62.
It is February 1964 in a World in which the ‘swinging sixties’ never happened.
The atomic mushroom clouds over the Mediterranean have dispersed and now as the World teeters on the brink of a new thermonuclear war, it is dawning on the ‘victors’ that their ‘victory’, far from being absolute, was tragically pyrrhic.
In the uneasy half-peace the United States stirs from its post-Cuban Missiles War slumber. But will it awaken soon enough to overcome its own divisions to confront the new and terrible forces unleashed by Red Dawn’s first paroxysm of violence?
Now is a time for betrayal. Now is judgement day when all the mistakes of the months since the October War will come back to haunt the ‘victors’.
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 (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 fictional characters in ‘The Burning Time — Book 5 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 ‘The Burning Time — Book 5 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 say 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, 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
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had joined the Communist Party of Romania in 1930. At that time he had been an electrician on the railways with no inkling where that fateful decision would carry him in the following decades. He had made his mark in the Party during the Grivita Strike at the workshops of the Căile Ferate Române — The Romanian Railways — in February 1933. After the Army had ended the Grivita strike by killing seven of his fellow strikers; he became the leader of the influential ‘prison faction’ of the Party, was elected to its Central Committee in 1936 and began his inevitable rise. Under the regime of Ion Antonescu — a man no better than a Nazi lickspittle — he had spent most of the Second World War in detention at Târgu Jiu in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, escaping shortly before the Soviet ‘liberators’ arrived. Although he had been General Secretary of the Party since 1944, in the beginning he had moved slowly, patiently to consolidate his power base, only purging his main opponents in the early 1950s.
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had understood that while Stalin lived his personal fate, and that of his country depended on towing the ‘Moscow line’; accordingly, he had forced King Michael of Romania to abdicate, literally at the barrel of a gun. Likewise, he had pursued unrelentingly repressive policies against his opponents, including counter-signing orders sending fellow Romanians to work, and invariably, die in the slave labour battalions building the Danube-Black Sea Canal. Iosif Vissarionovich’s favour had been everything in those desperate post-war years and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the leader of the one former East European Soviet satellite which had — by some inexplicable oversight on the part of the Americans and the British — remained virtually unscathed by the Cuban Missiles War, was nothing if not a stony cold pragmatist.
There was a single black telephone on the table before him. It was connected directly to the Command Post — manned by hand-picked heavily armed Securitate shock troopers — at the entrance to the bunker complex.
“Comrades,” he began in coarse, unadorned Russian. His protégé and deputy, Nicolae Ceaușescu — who sat behind him now taking notes — had convinced him that in the new ‘World Order’ it was imperative that their former masters continued to believe that their one-time clients still accepted their right to rule. At least for a few more minutes. The air of the deep concrete bunker buried just inside the fortified perimeter of Otopeni Air Force Base was thick with vile Russian and Turkish cigarette and pipe smoke. The walls were clammy because this ‘nuclear refuge’ had only been half-completed in late October 1962 and nobody had got around to installing integrated electrical services or a fully functioning, filtered air-conditioning system in the complex. There had been other more pressing priorities since October last year. “Comrades,” Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the balding sixty-two year old Dictator of Romania repeated, clearing his throat with a bronchial cough, “I formally welcome you to my country. As always, your presence is both an honour and a comfort to all Romanians.” The dull, expressionless eyes of the other men around the table viewed him coldly; but Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej did not take this lack of response personally, or read anything untoward into it. The long, poisonous shadow of Iosif Vissarionovich still lay across all their pasts like a curse. In Stalin’s time showing one’s true emotions was a death sentence and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had understood this as well as any man. He had been one of the old monster’s most adept disciples; in fact he had been so committed to the old ways that the reforms of the Khrushchev years had, at first, been deeply unsettling.