James Philip
The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 2
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 1st June 2017)
Book 10: Crow on the Cradle (Available 27th October 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
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)
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 Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 2’ — Book 8 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 ‘The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 2’ — Book 8 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
Commander Stephen Turnbull eyed the low, hazy coast to the north-west as it was imperceptibly swallowed by the gathering dusk. In these latitudes night fell like a veil in minutes. A mile astern the big dark silhouette of HMAS Sydney — the former aircraft carrier converted into a fast transport — was already just a vague, blackening outline against the velvet cloth of the warm, still evening and her smaller attendant minesweeping companions invisible. In a few minutes the only thing which would tell a mariner that he was not steaming across a great ocean far from land, was the slowly surging tidal current of the Arvand River — fed by the great press of fresh water flooding down to the Persian Gulf from the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates at al-Qurnah above Basra — and the narrowing of the deep water channel to the north as it carved through the endless sandbanks and treacherous shoals at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab.
Her Majesty’s Australian Ship Anzac was closed up at battle stations, running without and lights other than a single hooded stern lamp, sounding her way up river, searching for the deepest water. Over geological time the Shatt al-Arab had moved east and west along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf, and every year it deposited millions of tons of new silt, moved old sandbanks, cut a myriad of unsuspected channels to the sea, and closed others. No chart was to be trusted a year after it was drawn and the shifting ‘navigation’, twenty-five to fifty feet deep most of the thirty-three miles from the Gulf to Abadan and up to thirty feet deep as far north as Basra moved seasonally. It was for this reason that the border between Iraq and Iran south of Basra and Khorramshahr followed the middle of the ‘deep water channel’, rather than the middle of the Arvand River.
At fifty-six Stephen Turnbull was the old man of the Royal Australian Navy contingent in the Gulf. He had been on the Reserve List eight years — running the family sheep farm in the New South Wales outback — before the October War; the senior substantive commander on the Navy List, his promotion dating back to February 1943. He had been one of the few survivors of the doomed ABDA — Australian, British, Dutch and American — squadron destroyed by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of the Java Sea in early 1942, ended the Pacific War in command of a fleet destroyer in Tokyo Bay, and before his ‘retirement’ had commanded one of Anzac’s sisters during the Korean War. He had honestly believed he had come ashore for good in 1954; and to his astonishment never really missed the sea.
He would not have returned to the sea at all if his wife and youngest son had not been in London on the night of the war. He had married Hermione in 1940, both their daughters, Daphne and Janet having been born during the 1945 war and their son Donald in late 1946. Hermione had emigrated to Australia in 1936 with her first husband, Dan. She was from Sheffield, England and the newlyweds had moved to the other side of the World in search of work and a better life. Dan had died in a dockyard accident and Hermione had — like a perfect English rose — brightened Stephen Turnbull’s life from that moment on that day in December 1939 that he had first set eyes upon her.
They had talked about ‘taking six months out’ to go back to the old country for twenty years, but never quite got around to it. With Daphne recently married, with Janet in the second year of her nursing training in Melbourne, and Stephen unable to find anybody he trusted to manage the family farm for such a long absence, in the end Hermione had taken Donald on ‘the trip of a lifetime back to the old country’ in September 1962 to meet her maternal grandmother and her surviving aunts, uncles and cousins. The commanding officer of HMAS Anzac, at that time still an outback sheep farmer, had planned to fly to Europe to join his wife and son for the last weeks of their stay in England in late January 1963. And then the World had gone mad.
The Navy had tried to promote him Commodore; to stick him behind a desk in the Navy Department in Canberra, or at the rapidly expanding base at Williamstown in Victoria. He would have none of it, had demanded a sea command and eventually he had been reunited with Anzac, a ship he had last seen a decade before during the Korean War during the blockade of Wonsan.