Over four years had passed since the cataclysm of October 1962. It is over four years down a road in which the 'swinging sixties' never happened. Every attempt to restore normality, or even an illusion of a reality that does not promise either war without end or a return to medieval chaos has, thus far, seemed doomed to failure. To the West the Soviet Union seems hell-bent on confrontation, in Washington DC a President whom only months before was the victor of terrible civil war finds himself at the nexus of a blizzard of controversy, while in Europe, the British and Free French troops seemed locked in an unwinnable war with the Chelyabinsk Kremlin's proxies in the south. And then, while Congress seeks to fight old battles with the defunct Kennedy Administration over the provisional report of the Warren Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, a new scandal that strikes at the very root of everything the United States thought it used to hold dear - in that halcyon pre-October War era - breaks like a tsunami upon the White House, the CIA and the FBI as the President prepares to travel to San Francisco to attend the rededication of the United Nations. And this is all happening in the wake of a seemingly disastrous, acrimonious summit with the British - America's only 'special allies in world full of enemies, at Camp David which has done absolutely nothing to paper over the gaping chasms in their respective approaches to many of the great issues of the day. Yet, oddly, not all may be lost. There are even a few people, although - truth be told - not very many, who dare to believe that a turning point, that one of those unaccountable pivotal moments in history may have just be on the horizon. Or has it? What is it to be? War without end; or something different? Or perhaps, something better... Problematically, before anybody can move on there is the small matter of the war in France, and of the undeclared war along the length of the Rhine to halt Soviet infiltration out of the wreckage of Germany and Central Europe; there is also the small matter of the fate of a rusting battlefleet anchored at Villefranche-sur-Mer, the poisonous schisms inside both the US and the Soviet leaderships, and the shocking unravelling of the lies which have brought the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the cusp of open warfare. * * * Author's note to readers: The release of Eight Miles High follows so soon after Warsaw Concerto (only a couple of months) because it is, essentially, the second half of the same narrative arc, and if I had held it back any longer than a couple of months, I would have felt really guilty about it. Inevitably, one gives one's characters a hard time now and then; but one should try - and honestly, I do try albeit not with infallible results - not to do the same to one's readers!