A little later this year the Axis of Time series will restart with World War 3.1, picking up where Stalin’s Hammer left our heroes and villains - with a massive Soviet assault into alternate Europe in 1955.
Below is the merest smidgen, of a sample, of a tiny taste of the prologue.
The email arrived on the President’s iPhone, early on the evening of 21 June, 1955. A pleasant chime sounded to alert Dwight Eisenhower that he had received an encrypted personal message from his Vice President, Phillip Kolhammer, who was then somewhere in Paris. Eisenhower did not hear the chime or even notice the buzzing of the phone in his pocket. He was busy hurrying down a corridor in the West Wing, all but running towards the South Lawn where Marine One thundered in the warm, summer twilight, waiting to evacuate him. A phalanx of Secret Service men surrounded him, almost carrying the former general forward in their grip, so insistent were they that he move at their speed.
And they were moving quickly.
Everything was moving quickly.
America’s thirty-fourth president had been enjoying a light supper with the golfers Sam Snead and Peter Thomson. The Australian, Thomson, had been in fine form, regaling them all with the story of his win in the British Open, when Bobby Cutler, Eisenhower’s National Security Advisor, had barged into the Old Family Dining Room, closely followed by a flying wedge of Secret Service agents. One of the agents pulled away from the main group to usher Snead and Thomson away through a side door. He was courteous, but insistent. The team leader of Eisenhower’s security detail, a blocky, shaven-headed Hoosier called Mike Curtain, took Eisenhower’s coffee cup right out of his hand, uttered a softly spoken apology and actually lifted the president by the elbow from the chair in which he’d been seated, enjoying Thomson’s gentle teasing of Snead’s double bogey on the final nine at St. Andrews.
“Excuse me Mister President, but we have to go. The First Lady is enroute and will meet us at the checkpoint. If you wouldn’t mind, sir?”
It hardly mattered whether Eisenhower minded. He was already moving across the room, propelled by the half a dozen hard-faced men with headsets and handguns who surrounded him. The President tried to apologise to Snead and Thomson but he was already enclosed by this human shield wall and the last he saw of his guests was a couple of very confused looking golfers, Snead still holding a half-eaten cookie, as they were bustled out of the dining room by the corner door under the stern gaze of John Quincy Adams’ portrait.
“Mister President, I’m sorry sir,” Bobby Cutler said, as he jogged to keep up with the bodyguards, “the Soviets have launched a massive attack out of the frontline Eastern Bloc states. Red Army tanks and mechanised infantry are pouring into western Europe. They used some sort of space-based weapon to destroy most of our forces in Germany.”
“Wait, they used atomics?” Eisenhower asked, finding his feet and increasing his own pace to keep up. He looked around for Captain Chandler. The USAF officer who carried the Football.
Chandler, a young black man, was keeping up with the detail. He looked like he could run for hours.
“No sir,” Cutler said as they turned a corner. “Something almost as powerful, but no atomic or hydrogen warheads. First intelligence suggests satellite launched kinetic impactors, sir. Very hard to defend against once they’re launched. And very powerful, very destructive when they hit. Like a nuke, but without the radiation and fallout.”
They moved quickly through the White House, which had earlier been quiet as the long summer day wound down into a pleasant evening. Now it heaved with frenetic activity. Staffers and military personnel and people he’d never seen before hurried and hastened and sometimes even ran through the hallways, but Ike the former military commander could see that it was purposeful, directed chaos. They all had jobs to do and no time to waste in dawdling. And they all deferred to the dark arrowhead of Secret Service agents flying down the hallways with the president at its centre.
“Where are the Joint Chiefs?” Eisenhower asked, his casual demeanour sloughing away in the rush of the moment.
“Admiral Burke and General Taylor are enroute from the Pentagon, sir. General Twining was in California for the F-15 ceremony with Secretary Trippe. They are in flight to Colorado. Secretary Dulles is in London of course.”
“Probably the best place for him,” Ike puffed. It had been many years since he’d been required to pass the Army physical, and nine holes of golf every couple of weekends had not kept him in martial trim. Even so, they were running now, actually running out of a pair of French doors held wide open by two marines, and across the South Lawn to where the helicopter waited, ready for take off. Ike felt the whipping blast of the rotor wash at the same time as Agent Curtain firmly placed a calloused hand on his neck to keep him moving forward, but bent over. All nine men advanced in such a fashion, at a run, under the blades of the big, augmented Davidson Aerospace chopper.
There was no ceremony to the departure. Just haste and confusion.
Where did they say Mamie was?
What about John and Barbara and their kids?
The Cabinet?
Congress?
Ike knew better than to slow everything down by asking. There were emergency protocols. Procedures for all this. There were no missiles inbound. He was sure of that. It was the first thing Bobby Cutler would have told him, and they’d be headed down, deep underground, not up into the sky where hundreds of Russian nukes would be certain to find them.
The Russians and their allies in the far east had not enjoyed the free world’s giant leaps in computers and electronic technology since the end of the war, but as old Joe Stalin liked to say, quantity still had a quality all of its own. If your crude but powerful ICBM was likely to miss a whole city by fifty miles, or get plucked out of the stratosphere by satellite beam weapons or an anti-missile rocket, well… why not shoot off a hundred of them? Some were bound to get through.
Agent Curtain almost lifted the president up the folding metal staircase into the main passenger cabin of the DA2 Condor, before strapping Ike into his seat. The urge to slap his hands away and tell him to stop fussing was strong, but Ike resisted it. Instead he spoke around the agent and over the uproar of the big, twin engined bird.
“Bobby, tell me about this space weapon they used. What do we know?”
“Not much, sir,” Cutler shouted back as he strapped himself in and the security detail took to their own seats. The main door slid shut automatically, cutting the outside noise dramatically. “The Brits sent Langley and Defense a big data packet. They’d had their own people on it, they say.”
“They could have said earlier,” Ike groused.
Cutler gestured helplessly.
“They raised it with our station chief in Rome a few weeks back, but this took them by surprise too.”
Eisenhower waved away the excuse.
“It’s too late for what ifs, Bobby. Just tell me what I’m actually dealing with.”
The National Security Advisor took a deep breath and started his briefing as the pilot fed power into the blades and the big, heavy-lift transporter climbed free of the South Lawn. Ike felt himself pushed into the plush leather cushion of his seat. Cutler took a piece of paper from his suit pocket, scanning the closely printed blocks of text on it.
“The communist first strike punched a hole in NATO ground and Air defenses in the Frankfurt Main Fulda Wurzburg Triangle,” he said. “US 5th army has been annihilated. Pentagon estimates that it has been reduced to well below ten percent of its combat strength, with just a few survivors, all of them rear echelon, scrambling to retreat to the Rhine. Estimated casualties are 240 000 US troops, 300 000 dependents and 360 000 German civilians.”
He paused to let the carnage sink in.
“Good God,” Ike said quietly. So quietly nobody heard him over the noise of the flight.
The chopper banked over sharply and he braced in his seat.
The Washington Monument shone with spectral beauty in the window to his left.
Cutler resumed.
“The Eastern Bloc air forces have scrambled. Squadrons from the Polish, East German, Czech and Hungarian air forces swept in immediately after the strike. Red Army Air Force wings staging out of forward bases in the east followed them five minutes later.”
“Did we get anything up?”
Cutler nodded, but it was a grim expression.
“NATO quick reaction forces scrambled just over 50 aircraft, including two AWACS, to intercept. They shot down 209 Pact fighters and fighter bombers. Confirmed kills by hard data. But Moscow has still has a 5:1 advantage in aircraft.”
President Eisenhower felt dizzy. His vision was blurring at the edges and he wasn’t sure it was from the quick take off.
“And on the ground?” he asked.
Cutler consulted his notes again, but he never answered.
He died while he was reading the brief.
Three Type 93 surface-to-air missiles, two of them shoulder-launched from the roof of a hotel on 15th Street, and the third from the back of a flat bed pick up on Constitution Avenue, streaked up through the deepening twilight, homing on in the Condor’s image profile, written to the silicon in their image-seeking guidance chips. The Type 93, an uptime Japanese-designed weapons system, ignored all of the Condor’s automated defenses, cutting through chaff and smoke and electronic countermeasures. All three warheads intercepted the president’s flight.
Now this is what I've been waiting for. It's been three years since WW3 started and I've been a touch curious about how things will turn out since Uncle Joe caught the West with its trousers down. It would be really good to have a map of what's happening. Please tell me there's a map. Lots of maps??
Reading through this again, after reading "Final Impact" and Stalin's Hammer again on the Kindle to get up to speed. It occurs to me that at the end of this TL's WWII, the Soviets were stopped by chemical attacks at the Oder, and Berlin was nuked by the Americans. So...just what East German forces are there? Did the Soviets set up a German puppet state in Silesia or East Prussia (areas that in OTL were annexed by Poland or the USSR respectively)? And why are they attacking a crucial area in the defense of OTL's West Germany when the border might be closer to the Oder? Unless Roosevelt really caved to Stalin after the war and divided up Germany along the lines of OTL, which would strike me as just weird and strategically stupid given how WW2.1 ended, and especially how the Soviets moved into France.
Also, one of the Soviet generals in Final Impact talked about a division of France after the conquest of Vichy France that would extend from Belfort to La Rochelle, so roughly about 40% of France, as part of a corridor from Austria to Northern Italy to the Atlantic. Wonder if that's where the borders wound up in the world of WW3.1.
I saw on your Facebook feed that someone suggested the RAAF having Avon Mirages - I like the idea of the RAAF getting Mirages a few years earlier, but not with Avon engines. Avons didn't have afterburners and their dry thrust was around 20% less than the Atar engines that powered the Mirage.
If you're keen on writing Mirages in, why not power them with GE J-79 engines, as used in the F-4 Phantom, F-104 Starfighter, B-58 Hustler, and the cheap export version F-16. The J-79 had around 30% more thrust than the Atar, and the Israelis used it to power their Kfir knock-off of the Mirage V.
However, seeing that France is under Stalin's boot heel, maybe Mirages aren't the best choice for the RAAF. Seeing as there was an F-15 ceremony in California, it sounds like the USAF has at least gotten to the point of running F-4 Phantoms, so why not have the RAAF operating Phantoms as fighters and F-111 bombers?
Having just re-read the OG series & Stalin's Hammer, I am very much looking forward to this new addition to the universe (in 2023.. it is coming right?). Too much to hope for a new Girl in Time addition as well?
JB. As requested. RAAF Avon-Mirages with IFR and Canards. These were actusl things. RR told Dassault the RAAF might buy the Mirage with an Avon. So they built one. "City of Hobart". Capable of sustained Supercruise if the literature is to be believed. And Temp RAAF didn't pursue that and IFR due to costs of modification. The Mirage being a thirsty beast could have used it. Especially in Vietnam had we ignored the French
So, I've been thinking (uh oh)...the attack on the President himself was apparently involving soldiers and equipment smuggled into the U.S. in advance (with the help of "fifth columnists") who then executed the attack. If so, the events in DC are more of a successful assassination attempt rather than a Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack (like what is happening concurrently in Europe). Is Kolhammer's location in Paris sufficiently concealed from the Soviets?
You killed Ike! Are there no sacred cows left in the alternate future? Make sure Trumps old man dies from choking himself in sex with a Russian hooker (prior to his birth) ..... Save the new world early!!!
I can't believe I didn't figure this out! That email is still a smoking gun, however. Now, how does this relate to missing the sixth target, since that is what led to Kolhammer sending the email? Now, I know you're familiar with the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (from WW), so I'm wondering what method of Presidential succession (beyond the VP becoming president upon the latter's death) is in place in this timeline.
I too am very much looking forward to this.
Here we go! President Kolhammer! Can’t wait for the complete book to be released into the wild.
Now this is what I've been waiting for. It's been three years since WW3 started and I've been a touch curious about how things will turn out since Uncle Joe caught the West with its trousers down. It would be really good to have a map of what's happening. Please tell me there's a map. Lots of maps??
Been waiting for what seems like ages and can’t wait to get my copy, love all JB’s books
Utterly thrilling! Nail biting. Damn the wait.
Take my money now!
Mr Birmingham.. Sir..
I regret to inform you of a mistake in the post.
You forgot to include a pre-order link for us to give you some money.
I know this was a small error caused by the Soviets but please fix this..
thank you Sir
Oh yes. That will do *very* nicely.
Which makes Kolhammer acting President....I assume this is our Kolhammer, the uptimer?
There aren't enough like and heart buttons.
We need to keep this out of the hands of the Chinese. Prescient fiction will doom us all.
Can we trick them with a happy bunny story?
OMG! You had me “ The email arrived on the President’s iPhone..”
What tease! You are a tune master yourself. I lost time reading the teaser and missed the start of work....again
So exciting. Seriously.
My all time favourite series. Can’t wait for this instalment.
Wow. That's some one-two punch to start off the prologue. And I'm sure the excitement has just started to accelerate.
Please tell me that we're going to have more than one new book in the series! Pretty please!
And sooo the hounds are loooose once again!. YEAH! get ya shit together...more more!
FYI - Today (July 15, 2020) marks exactly six months until the Transition on January 15, 2021!
Please tell me that Hollywood has decided to turn Axis of Time into a series.
Reading through this again, after reading "Final Impact" and Stalin's Hammer again on the Kindle to get up to speed. It occurs to me that at the end of this TL's WWII, the Soviets were stopped by chemical attacks at the Oder, and Berlin was nuked by the Americans. So...just what East German forces are there? Did the Soviets set up a German puppet state in Silesia or East Prussia (areas that in OTL were annexed by Poland or the USSR respectively)? And why are they attacking a crucial area in the defense of OTL's West Germany when the border might be closer to the Oder? Unless Roosevelt really caved to Stalin after the war and divided up Germany along the lines of OTL, which would strike me as just weird and strategically stupid given how WW2.1 ended, and especially how the Soviets moved into France.
Also, one of the Soviet generals in Final Impact talked about a division of France after the conquest of Vichy France that would extend from Belfort to La Rochelle, so roughly about 40% of France, as part of a corridor from Austria to Northern Italy to the Atlantic. Wonder if that's where the borders wound up in the world of WW3.1.
I saw on your Facebook feed that someone suggested the RAAF having Avon Mirages - I like the idea of the RAAF getting Mirages a few years earlier, but not with Avon engines. Avons didn't have afterburners and their dry thrust was around 20% less than the Atar engines that powered the Mirage.
If you're keen on writing Mirages in, why not power them with GE J-79 engines, as used in the F-4 Phantom, F-104 Starfighter, B-58 Hustler, and the cheap export version F-16. The J-79 had around 30% more thrust than the Atar, and the Israelis used it to power their Kfir knock-off of the Mirage V.
However, seeing that France is under Stalin's boot heel, maybe Mirages aren't the best choice for the RAAF. Seeing as there was an F-15 ceremony in California, it sounds like the USAF has at least gotten to the point of running F-4 Phantoms, so why not have the RAAF operating Phantoms as fighters and F-111 bombers?
Classic JB--gut punch out of nowhere and a long road back. Most excellent!
As Big Kev used to say 'I'm excited!'
Awesome! Is there a release date yet????
Nooooooooooooooo not Ike! You red bastards'll pay...
Thank you Sir. May I have more? ;)
Be sure to give us all a heads up on final date please. I’m checking Amazon weekly, but dont Want to miss out on day one release.
Any updates? Just finished Stalin’s Hammer (where’s hardback edition??!), eager to keep reading.
Dumb question has this book been released yet? If so, when and how did I miss it :-)
Any update on a release date?
Just finished the whole series. It’s fantastic! When is this coming out?
Having just re-read the OG series & Stalin's Hammer, I am very much looking forward to this new addition to the universe (in 2023.. it is coming right?). Too much to hope for a new Girl in Time addition as well?
Love your work!
Whennnnnnnnnnnnn?
Is there any update on this?
If you dont hurry Putin will overtake you
Hey JB is there a release date for this yet? Love the series and can’t wait for this new trilogy
Any update on a release yet? Its nearly the end of the year already🤐
So when will WW3.1 be published?
Soooo whens this coming? Is it out? I cant find it?
Just reread Golden Minute and enjoyed it as much as the first time.
Can’t wait, hanging out for the new series.
I fucking cannot wait.
Ah, now this is what I call good news.
When might we see Dave Hopper again?
JB. As requested. RAAF Avon-Mirages with IFR and Canards. These were actusl things. RR told Dassault the RAAF might buy the Mirage with an Avon. So they built one. "City of Hobart". Capable of sustained Supercruise if the literature is to be believed. And Temp RAAF didn't pursue that and IFR due to costs of modification. The Mirage being a thirsty beast could have used it. Especially in Vietnam had we ignored the French
Can't wait for the tie-in to the Tasmanian Babes Fiasco in chapter 37 .... just Putin out there....
So, I've been thinking (uh oh)...the attack on the President himself was apparently involving soldiers and equipment smuggled into the U.S. in advance (with the help of "fifth columnists") who then executed the attack. If so, the events in DC are more of a successful assassination attempt rather than a Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack (like what is happening concurrently in Europe). Is Kolhammer's location in Paris sufficiently concealed from the Soviets?
You killed Ike! Are there no sacred cows left in the alternate future? Make sure Trumps old man dies from choking himself in sex with a Russian hooker (prior to his birth) ..... Save the new world early!!!
I can't believe I didn't figure this out! That email is still a smoking gun, however. Now, how does this relate to missing the sixth target, since that is what led to Kolhammer sending the email? Now, I know you're familiar with the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (from WW), so I'm wondering what method of Presidential succession (beyond the VP becoming president upon the latter's death) is in place in this timeline.
so will this be a print edition?