A Hard Rain

September 1962

A HARD RAIN is the twelfth and penultimate book of the COUNTDOWN TO WAR series.

It is September 1962. A train of events which has been slowly, menacingly coalescing ever since October 1961 is beginning to play out.

The end game is nigh.

OPERATION ANADYR is morphing from a reckless whim in Nikita Khrushchev’s fevered imagination to a massive, chaotic clandestine thermonuclear gamble which is weakening the defence of the Soviet motherland.

It is the hurricane season in the Caribbean, a thing never taken into account by the 12th Main Directorate of the USSR’s General Staff. The missile sites are under construction, the ships are sailing from Russian ports, thermonuclear warheads being entrained for transportation Severomorsk to be loaded onto Cuba-bound ships while in Washington DC, the Administration – distracted by the holiday season and a welter of problems of its own, Laos, the Indian-Chinese standoff in the Himalayas and rising tensions in the deep South – is sleepwalking…

Historians are frequently astonished by the thought processes – or the lack of the same – of so-called ‘great men’. The capacity of leaders to believe their own rhetoric in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary is, it seems, ubiquitous down the ages. What we learn is that bad things do not always happen because bad people will them; sometimes good, stupid, and naïve men just misread the runes…

Late summer heralds a quickening of the path to war and the crisis is much closer than anybody can imagine.

President Kennedy is watching the America’s Cup racing in Nantucket Sound, holidaying for long weekends at Newport, Rhode Island.

On Cuba, equipment designed to deal with the Russian winter rots in the tropical humidity and the Pentagon formulates its plans for an invasion…

The ticking is getting ever-louder as the clock has reaches one minute to midnight…

For my readers who prefer to read the Timeline 10/27/62 books in the chronological order of the overall narrative arc A HARD RAIN = 12.