by JE Gurley
Kaiju Kiribati
Kaiju Deadfall Book 2
J E Gurley
Copyright 2015 by J E Gurley
Republic of Kiribati (pronounced Kir-ih-bahs)
An island republic of Micronesia in the South Pacific consisting of the Gilbert Islands, the Line Islands, and the Phoenix Group, a total of 33 islands.
Capital: Tarawa
Population: 105,000, half of which reside on Tarawa
Language: English, Gilbertese
1
Friday, Dec. 15, 2018 5:30 p.m. GILT Tarawa, Republic of Kiribati –
A fine mist of sea spray, smelling of salt and primordial life, splashed Lilokwa Batra’s face as he balanced on the prow of his proa, the outrigger canoe he had crafted with his own deeply lined, calloused hands. The day was warm with little wind, and the water was cool and refreshing on his skin. He let it run down his dark, weathered face and licked the salty brine from his upper lip. He could see the sandy reef twenty feet beneath the keel of the thirty-foot long outrigger through the crystal clear, teal water, but just ahead beyond the northeast tip of Naa, the northernmost island of the Tarawa atoll, the water changed to the dark blue hue of the deep ocean.
His sharp, dark brown eyes probed the depths of the water ahead of him for signs of te takaba, delicious snapper. He had line and weights for tuna or trevally, but today he wasn’t fishing for money. He wanted snapper or even te mon, soldier fish, for his family and friends.
Saturday was his daughter’s birthday and there would be many people at his home on Buariki to help celebrate her thirteenth year. He planned to surprise her with the riwuit he had secretly labored on for weeks in his friend’s work shed so she wouldn’t see it. Smaller than his thirty-foot tipnol poa, even smaller than a fifteen-foot kor-kor, the riwuit racing proa would teach her the fundamentals of handling the larger outrigger canoes and provide hours of fun for her and her friends. He hoped she liked it.
Sometimes he worried for his daughter’s cultural education. Though it was the capital of the Republic of Kiribati, Tarawa was just a tiny speck of coral in the Southern Pacific amid a hundred other islands, home to less than 50,000 people. Perhaps it was time to take her to Australia to see a real city. He had visited Papua New Guinea as a child, and the image of the tall buildings and the throngs of people in Port Moresby lingered with him until this day. She would enjoy seeing the Sydney Opera House. She loved music.
“A little more to port,” he called out to his short, stout friend, Teto Remengesau, at the rudder. He shifted his weight to his right when the proa’s outrigger ama lifted from the water as Teto moved the rudder sharply.
Lilokwa was proud of his proa. He had built it himself, using the bones of other proas crushed by the local reefs and abandoned on the beach. His vaka, the main hull, was rugged and sturdy with a slight upward tilt at the prow to cut the water more cleanly while turning. An ironwood foil beneath the shorter ama provided greater stability when turning. The outrigger connected to the main hull with two akas he had cut himself from the lumber from a machine crate he had salvaged on the dock in South Tarawa. The white oak was solid and strong, twisting just enough to handle the biggest waves. His curved, crab-claw polytarp sail was blue and white, visible for miles, and caught the slightest breeze to propel the proa like a flying fish across the water’s surface.
Lilokwa pointed to the shallows of a reef just ahead of them. “I see a school of fish. Lower the sail.”
Teto smiled, flashing a gold tooth. “Teraka is kind to us today.”
Lilokwa nodded. “The god of fishermen wishes my daughter to be happy.”
Lilokwa did not believe in the old gods; he barely believed in the One God, but Teto did and agreeing saved arguing. As Teto reefed the sail, the proa slowed until it barely sliced the water. Beneath the surface, two large snapper swam lazily around a small rock protruding from the sandy bottom. Lilokwa eyed the spear gun lying in the bottom of the boat, but with it, he would get only one fish. Since he needed both and the water was less than five feet deep, he decided to use his net instead. He gathered the weighted woven nylon strands in his hands, waiting until he was directly over the snapper before tossing it, careful to keep his shadow or the shadow of the proa from spooking the fish. He held onto the lanyard as the net settled over the fish, looping it around his wrist, and then yanked it sharply to draw the edges of the net together. The trapped fish fought valiantly, like Titans of the sea, wrenching the net back and forth beneath the water, but he held on tightly.
“Got them!” he yelled.
As he pulled the net up, he noticed the reflection of the sky on the surface of the water growing brighter until it washed out the patches of clouds smeared across the sky. He had noticed the alto cumulus clouds when they had set sail because of their fish-scale appearance. He had thought them a good omen for fishing. At first, he thought a cloud had passed in front of the sun, dimming it briefly, but the brightness came from the east, and the sun was now low on the western horizon. He stopped what he was doing and turned to Teto. Teto stared slack jawed at a bright object crossing the sky from the northeast to the southwest.
“Is it a jet?” Lilokwa asked, shading his eyes for a better view. His heart sank thinking of the hundreds of people aboard a burning airplane crashing into the ocean.
Teto shook his head. “I don’t think so, Lilo. It’s too big.” After a long pause, he added, “I think it’s coming this way.”
Lilokwa detected the growing edge of panic in the normally imperturbable Teto’s voice. His own heart beat faster at the vista of the strange object growing larger by the second. A red-orange halo formed in the clouds around the object. It looked as if aimed directly at his small canoe. Whatever the object was, he did not like it.
“Take us back to shore,” he said, now as alarmed as his friend.
“I bet it’s another of those alien pods,” Teto said, as he raised the sail and pointed the proa south to Buariki. He dipped his paddle in the water and urged the proa to greater speed with strokes of his powerful arms.
Lilokwa recalled the three alien Kaiju monsters that had almost destroyed America four months earlier. One of those had landed in the ocean off the coast of San Francisco, he remembered with a sinking feeling. Was the same hell descending on them? The glowing object pierced the halo like a bull’s eye and ripped through a bank of clouds, leaving a swirling contrail in its wake. Now, the object was larger than a summer eve’s full moon and so bright he could not look directly at it.
“Hurry, Teto!” he yelled, urging him to paddle faster. He eyed the small 25-horsepower gasoline engine on the stern of the canoe, but it could push the boat no faster than under sail with a good breeze and Teto’s paddle.
With a roar so loud that it vibrated the surface of the water, the object shot overhead less than two thousand feet above them. The thunder of its passing deafened him. The gust of air filling the vacuum the speeding object left behind threatened to rip away the sail. The air sizzled from its heat, scorching his upturned face and his hands. Seconds later, the flaming object struck the ocean near Maiana Atoll, twenty-seven miles south of Tarawa. The superheated object struck with a force one hundred times greater than the first fifteen-megaton hydrogen bomb, codenamed Castle Bravo, exploded on nearby Bikini Atoll in 1954. The object’s fireball punched straight through the water into the bedrock below. A cloud of steam billowed skyward, followed by a darker plume of molten limestone and pulverized basalt.
Lilokwa held his breath, but at first, nothing happened. Then, just over a minute later, his canoe shuddered as it danced on the surface of the water. The impact sent tremors racing outward through the dense earth, lifting the burden of w
ater above it. Schools of reef fish, confused by the disturbance, leaped from the water as if trying to fly. The sky darkened as tiny particles of molten ejecta pelted the water around him, striking with the hiss of a thousand snakes. The hot embers ignited the proa’s sail, quickly bringing Lilokwa out of his stunned trance. Bits of hot stone seared his flesh, but he ignored the pain as he grabbed a plastic milk jug used for bailing and frantically threw water on the flames to extinguish them before they engulfed the canoe.
Twenty-seven miles away, the island of Maiana shuddered like a rung bell from the impact. Buildings toppled as if shoved over by the hands of an invisible giant. People flew through the air as the ground heaved and slid aside like a carpet yanked from beneath their feet. A fifty-foot-high wave of water swept outward from the point of impact, submerging the island of Maiana before the authorities could sound an alarm. Two thousand people perished in seconds. After the tsunami passed, only a few specks of naked coral, swept clean of its briny inhabitants, protruded above the ocean’s roiling surface.
Lilokwa, his skin blistered and his hair singed, knew he was witnessing destruction on an epic scale. His heart raced as he joined Teto in paddling the proa. He channeled his fear into his arms, frantically digging the blade of the paddle into the water. He was a man of the sea. He knew currents, tides, and waves. He also knew tsunamis. Less than twenty minutes after the impact, twenty minutes in which his fear and his dread multiplied by the second, he saw the leading edge of the monster tsunami approaching, shaded by the ominous rising dark cloud behind it. It rushed toward him as relentless as a summer squall and as silent as a whisper. His heart sank with the realization that they would never make it home. Not until the wave reached the shallow water around the atoll did it produce a sound, a low rumble like the deep, throaty growl of an angry animal. Seconds before the wave struck, the water drained from the lagoon, emptying it and revealing wet coral, floundering fish, and the rusting hulks of WWII landing craft and bullet-riddled fuselages of downed Japanese Zeros. Now, another disaster, this time not manmade, but not one of nature’s periodic tribulations, was visiting its wrath upon the island.
The receding water pulled his small proa toward the sharp-edged rocks of Buariki Island. Teto at the rudder struggled to angle the small boat away from the rocks, but the current was too strong. Lilokwa waited to be smashed into the coral rocks. He could see the roof of his home from the prow of his boat and wondered what his wife and daughter were feeling. Were they as terrified as he was? He should have been there with them.
The noise grew until it became a deafening roar. The tsunami wave swept into the lagoon, churning the sand before it like a bulldozer, tossing aside landing craft, Japanese fighters, and chunks of coral. It smashed into the windward side of the atoll with the force of a sledgehammer against a glass windowpane. Trees splintered into flying wooden shrapnel. The coral atoll cracked and disintegrated. Lilokwa had time for one quick prayer before the wave towering over him crashed down, smashing him, Teto, and his proa into the bottom of the reef.
The wave continued outwards from the impact point unfazed by its brush with the earth, submerging all of Tarawa beneath its inexorable advance, traveling south to the islands of Kuria, Apamama, Nonouti, and north to Abaiang, Marakei, Butaritari, and Makin. Seven hours later, fifteen-foot waves crashed against the rocky shoreline of Wake Island. Three hours after that, tourists on the beaches of Hawaii noticed an unusually large surf. Surfers reveled on the large curlers. Two hundred miles south of Hawaii, an ocean liner encountered a fifty-foot wave that damaged her engines, requiring her to radio for help.
The entire Gilbert Island chain, the center of the Republic of Kiribati, vanished in minutes. The Phoenix Islands farther south and east suffered massive devastation with thousands of casualties from a series of twenty-foot waves. In all, almost seventy thousand people died, with thousands missing or unaccounted for. The more eastern islands of Kiribati’s Line Island chain fared better. Some people remained blithely unaware of the devastation that had visited their island nation. Others watched the strange lights in the evening sky and made wishes on a falling star. Their horror was yet to come and in some ways more terrible than that of those who had died instantly.
Five miles east of what had been Maiana atoll, the alien pod, over nine-hundred feet in length and so black it was almost invisible in the dark waters, slowly cooled beneath the surface, waiting.
2
Thursday, Dec. 14, 2130 hours Fort Irwin, California –
Aiden Walker lay close to the ground, listening to the desert sounds around him. The sounds of the night were different from the day sounds, quieter, more subdued. A few yards away, a tarantula wasp scratched out a hole in the sun-baked earth to bury its paralyzed prey. It would deposit one egg on the tarantula, which would soon hatch, releasing a larva to devour the spider alive. It had no animosity toward the spider. To the wasp, it was food. A fringe-toed lizard hugged a boulder fifty feet away, trying to soak up the last remnants of heat the boulder had absorbed from the sun before returning to its burrow for the night. It failed to hear the faint flutter of a roadrunner’s wings or the sound of its feet racing across the sand. Unlike the happy-go-lucky Roadrunner of the cartoons, this roadrunner was a desert predator. It leaped onto the rock and held the lizard down with its clawed feet, while its wicked beak made short work of the lizard. It ran off beneath the shelter of a Joshua tree to consume its meal. Like the tarantula wasp, the roadrunner thought in terms of predator and prey. The desert was a dangerous place, a land of kill or be killed. Now, men played the same game.
In spite of the chill of the night air, Walker was uncomfortably warm in his desert camo Ghillie suit. He had to urinate so badly his teeth ached, but he refused to move, even when a spider the size of his left testicle crawled across his hand. Nearby, the soft crunch of boots on gravel reached him. He smiled. Finally. His opponent was stealthy, placing his footsteps carefully and avoiding dried vegetation, but years of training allowed Walker to pick out the minutest noise that didn’t jive with the natural sounds of the desert. He waited until the figure was almost upon him, and then held his breath.
The person was dressed in desert camo pants and shirt, and heavy boots. He wore a tan shara draped over his head bound in place by a simple knotted egal. In his hands, he carried an AK47. He approached to within fifteen feet of Walker’s position, perfectly silhouetted by the rising moon behind him. He stopped and sniffed the air. He wrinkled his nose and turned to his left to look at the decaying corpse of a desert hare. Though it stank to high heaven, the hare had been there only a few hours, placed there by Walker. The horrendous odor of rotting flesh was just that, the juices from a decaying corpse, sprinkled liberally around the hare from a small vial Walker kept in his sniper kit. His opponent lowered his weapon and pushed back his shara to wipe away the sweat beading his forehead. It was the perfect moment to strike, but Walker remained motionless.
This isn’t right, he thought. It was too easy. He could have killed the man in any number of ways, silently and quickly, but his sixth sense told him to wait. Less than two minutes later, a second person approached. This one was less silent. His heavy boots snapped dried twigs and crunched sun-baked earth, making no attempt at stealth. There was purpose in his long stride.
The heavier man walked up beside the first one and spoke briefly in Arabic, expressing his disdain for trekking through the desert and especially for the stench of rotting hares.
Walker made his move. He burst from the shallow depression he had dug in the dirt and took three quick steps forward, scattering pieces or creosote and yucca he had piled around him to camouflage his position. Even though he had flexed his muscles as much as possible during his lengthy watch, they ached from inaction. He shunted the pain to the back of his mind, concentrating on getting the job done. Both opponents turned at the sound of his attack, but it was too late for them. Walker gently squeezed the trigger.
“Bang, bang, you’re both dead,” he said.
“Damn it, Walker, you almost gave me a heart attack.”
Walker smiled, leaned his Remington M24 sniper rifle against a boulder, unzipped his pants, and began urinating. A sigh of relief escaped his lips. After four hours lying immobile in the dirt, relieving himself felt better than sex. Sergeant Bill Costas watched the stream of urine splashing the ground, creating a yellow puddle that ran toward his foot. He cocked an eyebrow at Walker and shifted his position slightly to avoid the stream.
“I thought all black men were hung like stud horses. You got some cracker in your woodpile?” he asked.
Walker zipped up his pants and pulled back the hood of his Ghillie suit. The warm desert air felt cool against his baked skin. “More than ten inches is a waste of flesh.”
Costas shook his head. “You’d better get a new tape measure, son. I’m surprised you can hit anything if you’re using that as a measuring rod.”
Walker eyed the huge Barrett M107 SASR Costas had chosen for the mock desert war games. The Special Application Sniper Rifle fired a heavy caliber .50 BMG round and weighed almost thirty pounds. In anyone else’s hands, it would have looked obscene. Costas toted it as if it was a .22 caliber squirrel gun.
Walker nodded at the rifle. “I think someone’s overcompensating. Were you planning on taking out a tank or something?” he asked.
“I like to know I’ve got the right tool for the job, whatever that job might be,” Costas replied, stroking the stock of the SASR. He threw Walker a big grin. “I thought I had you a few clicks back, but it was just a damned lizard rustling the brush.”
“If you weren’t so heavy on your feet, I mightn’t have heard you.”
Costas picked up his foot, examined his size-twelve boot, and frowned. “Heavy? I’ll have you know I can boogie with the best of them.”