The Night of the Long Knives

July 1962

THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES is the tenth book of the COUNTDOWN TO WAR series.

It is July 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 head into a huge, clandestine thermonuclear gamble.

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…

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

The ticking is getting louder as the clock has reaches three minutes to midnight…

For my readers who prefer to read the Timeline 10/27/62 books in the chronological order of the overall narrative arc THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES = 10.