Missile Paradise. Ron Tanner

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      Copyright © 2016 by Ron Tanner.

      Ig Publishing

      Box 2547

      New York, NY 10163

      This is a work of fiction.

      Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. The Marshall Islands do exist, however, and Kwajalein is real. Americans do live there and their work is indeed top secret, though their presence is not. As those who have lived there may notice, I have taken some liberties with some details of daily life and with some facts having to do with the region. For those few readers who catch me taking such liberties, I ask your indulgence.

      ISBN: 978-1-6324-6012-7

       To Newton Lajuan

      America’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness, is our belief in second chances, our belief that we can always start over, that things can be made betteer.

       —Anthony Walton

      The problem is, we don’t know how contaminated we are. We found out the Americans had been dropping bombs east of us which were never recorded. They could have irradiated the whole damn area. The Americans says Kwajalein is helping in the prevention of nuclear warfare. That’s the biggest joke we ever heard.

       —King Amata Kabua

      Contents

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

      Part II

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

      Acknowledgements

       PART I

       ONE

      Cooper anchors a good hundred yards from the pilings—because he doesn’t have the strength to tie up, much less negotiate the breakers. The island looks like an accident of nature, a thicket of palm trees on a hump of sand, hazy in the distance. Cooper can’t be sure how much of the haze is due to heat and salt spray and how much is a product of his alarming fever: 104 by the thermometer’s last warning. His right leg looks like a broiled side of beef, yellow-brown and bloated, a crusty custard of puss attracting all manner of flies on this windless afternoon.

      His pain is a hot and humming thing, as if it had a life of its own. Like a teeming colony of red ants: always busy, always chewing.

      Ahead he sees only a single, aged pier, which suggests that the island has few inhabitants and receives fewer visitors. He’s not completely ignorant about the mid-Pacific. He’s done some reading. He knows that these atolls are crowns of coral left by sunken volcanoes a million years ago. Some come and go with the surge of storms. Many have never been visited or have been visited only long enough to be deemed uninhabitable because there’s little fresh water out here. It’s tropical, yes, just north of the equator, but not rain-forest tropical. The rainy season crashes through every summer, sometimes a typhoon in the spring, but most storms are squalls, abrupt and short-lived, the sun breaking through to bake things dry within the hour. Always the relentless sun.

      This afternoon’s squall won’t even reach him: he sees skyscraping thunderheads thresh the water a mile away. The clouds are trundling north, black as a nasty bruise. Behind him lies a silver gleaming, endless horizon. No wind today, so he couldn’t sail even if he had the strength. Which is why he put into this lagoon two days ago to find a landing. Since then he has been congratulating himself for this show of prudence.

      The atoll’s name, he thinks, is Lili. Or, rather, he wishes it were Lili because the name reminds him of his ex-finacée, Lillian. Orange-haired Lillian, three inches taller than he (which accounts for her slight stoop); green-eyed Lillian, a collector of vintage pottery, which she displays on shelves and tables throughout her A-frame in Montara, just south of San Francisco; swan-necked Lillian, who leotards her yoga in front of the CD-player, with its music of Zen garden gongs, the A-frame resounding with eerily sonorous notes at eerie intervals: bong . . . bong . . . bong; cinnamon-scented Lillian, who bakes oatmeal-cinnamon-coconut-raisin granola for breakfast; speech-impeded Lillian, whose stutter makes even her anger sound charming.

      “Must have been destiny,” she claimed of their first meeting. She was selling plants at the Saturday flea market in the sandy lot near the Half Moon Bay marina, where he moored his boat. He was living over the mountain in Palo Alto, spending every free hour—and every dollar he made—on rehabbing the Alberg 35, which was in the water but hardly ready to sail.

      “Think I could use one of these on my boat?” he asked, raising a potted spider plant for an appraisal.

      “You’d kill it,” she said. Not a criticism exactly, just flat fact.

      The way she looked at him from her lawn chair behind the plant-ladened card table, her narrowed eyes peering over her wire-rim sunglasses, made it clear that she knew he was flirting. Because he was still sweaty, and his hands greasy, from a hard day of engine work; because his hair was flattened from leaning into tight places; because he needed a shave and was wearing his worst work clothes, paint-splattered and ragged, he thought he had nothing to lose.

      It seemed she didn’t either. She was pretty—maybe too pretty for him—and had an oddly defensive manner, as if she were out to prove herself, though a woman over thirty shouldn’t have that need.

      She put him on edge.

      It didn’t help that to her right, in the shade of a pink-striped sunbrella, sat her thirteen-year-old daughter, eyeing him curiously—a squinting, shorter replica of her mother, except the girl was wearing a black loose-collared man’s shirt over a baggy black T-shirt that fell to her black-stockinged knees. She wore black Birkenstocks and her hair was dyed black-black and tied off in a dozen angry little knots as if to announce a protest.

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