Once Upon a Time

by Jerry Ahern, Sharon Ahern, Bob Anderson

Once upon a time... before The Night of the War, John Thomas Rourke and his old friend Hank Frost found themselves involved with a duel conspiracy involving the U.S. Space Program and the Civil Rights Movement. The former designed to stop the Space Race and the latter would plunge America into a race war.Intricate covert actions, combined with racial hatred, placed pawns on the chessboard of intrigue. Could the unrest created by the Vietnam War be linked to the head of the space program? Could the Ku Klux Klan trigger a civilian uprising that would ultimately plunge the United States into another civil war? Two men—one a CIA operative and survivalist and the other a mercenary—again stand between the forces of good and evil.

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 5, 2014

About the author

Jerry Ahern (born Jerome Morrell Ahern) was a science fiction and action novel author best known for his post apocalyptic survivalist series The Survivalist. The books in this series are heavy with descriptions of the weapons the protagonists use to survive and prosecute a seemingly never-ending war amongst the remnants of the superpowers from pre-apocalypse times.

Ahern was also a firearms writer, who published numerous articles in magazines such as Guns & Ammo, Handguns and Gun World.

Jerry Ahern passed away on July 24, 2012 after a long struggle with cancer.

Ahern also released books under pseudonym Axel Kilgore.

Reviews

[Randy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An action piece set before the nuclear war that decimated humanity and John Thomas Rourke going into cryogenic sleep with his family for five hundred years. Along with his friend Hank Frost, the pair tackle a plot to disable America's space program and a planned race war by a neo-Nazi supposedly working for our side now.

Set in the early seventies, the two men discuss America's space program: the forthcoming shuttle line(first flight 1981), Apollo-Soyuz(1975), Skylab('73-'79), the attempt to subvert Werhner Von Braun(died 1977). Nixon is still President.

Good action, but I had to knock a couple of stars off for a bad history error.

Rourke and Frost meet in a bar in Austin patterned after the bars in Travolta's movie URBAN COWBOY. That didn't come out until 1980. I went back over the story a couple of times looking for maybe a flashback that had escaped my notice. If there, I missed it every time.