Chapter 1

The island was not impressive in any one particular singular detail.

As islands go, it could only be said that it was pretty average with average rainfall, average humidity and average thickness of lush underbrush for small animals to hide eating the seeds from the trees and advantageous sheltering of the plants to take root and multiply.

On three sides, the island was buffered by a wall of coral that acted to keep the sea predators away from the slightly sloping terrain. Humans and animals including creatures of the deep dark bottom reaches could only make an inroad to reach terra firma along a short stretch of unbuffered beach that extended about a hundred meters from one end to the other. It was the open front door of the island and the surrounding reef insured there was no other entranceway.

When the exhausted and disoriented O'Keefe accidently floated into the narrow opening from a rough sea skirting a storm of some consequence, he was only semi-conscious and had no inkling of his good fortune. The supplies he towed behind him were connected to his waist with a sturdy rope from the rope locker were salvaged from the sunken torpedo boat that had disintegrated into splinters and quickly sinking bodies and other parts too numerous to mention.

He was nearly naked motionless and prone on the shell-littered shore and felt the sharp edges of the broken ones pressing into his sun damaged skin. The tail of supplies was still bouncing around in the surf and he pulled on the rope to drag it up to safety on the beach. He saw some birds up high in the trees and was surprised because to all intent and purposes this was a solitary island albeit in a scattered chain that stretched for leagues across many horizons.

A man now in his mid-thirties, Patrick O'Keefe was a sailor above all else. He had tried his luck on the mainland in various employments but had been unsuccessful in all.

When the long expected war came along, it was almost like a life preserver being thrown to him to pull him back into the middle of the empty blue sea. He felt like he had come home once again and that now he was here he would never leave again. It seemed almost like a stroke of good fortune that he was assigned to the torpedo boats. He liked their speed and their ability to move around the larger slower targets like a bunch of stinging bees protecting their hive. The guns made a satisfactory thumping sound that was more to his liking than the large guns on the big metal clad ships and the crew was so small that they were more like a band of brothers than anonymous souls thrown together to be maimed and die in relative distance of spirit.

Patrick was reasonably certain that the remainder of the crew were all in Davey Jones's locker buried at sea with the remainder of the broken little boat that had seen lots of action in the South China Sea.

The explosion had happened so fast that he still was in a bit of shock at the sudden change from being a member of an effective fighting force attacking the enemy fleet to a solitary man attempting to survive the shifting moods of the rolling seas and finding a friendly ship for rescue or a safe harbor to put down his anchor.

The wheeling birds settled down after seeing that this interloper presented no immediate threat to their pattern of life. The only sounds now were the pounding surf and the occasional cry of some tiny living creature hidden in the brush.

He saw that there were shelled fish and turtles on the beach and coconuts under the trees and felt that this island promised the survival he was looking for. Still, he was a "castaway" with slim chance of rescue and far from the channels that the opposing forces used to fight their give and take war of attrition. The regular shipping was curtailed to a mere trickle because the enemy gave no quarter to civilian vessels. The bottom of the shipping lanes was sprinkled with the carcasses of broken ships sunk without mercy.

Patrick started to drag the supplies up to a raised bluff a short distance from the beach. He figured it was close enough to make the availability of the shellfish, turtles, and fish his main staple of diet and he planned to set up a tarp to make a catch basin for rain water.

Things were looking up and his main concern was that he not be discovered by one of the enemy patrols that constantly scoured the islands looking for survivors just like him to torment and use for target practice. He knew that the orders of the fleet were to bypass all the small islands so his likelihood of rescue was almost non-existent. His best bet was to lay low and wait out the ebb and flow of the conflict hoping that it all passed him by and he might eventually be rescued at a later date.

The days seemed to blend into one another and he eventually lost all track of time. He remembered a tasty fish or some welcomed driving rain giving him the water he depended on for survival but unusual events were sparse and he was somewhat grateful for that because such things posed more danger than blessing.

He had a handgun with a grand total of six rounds of ammunition. Not exactly a deterrent of firepower to repel an invasion of enemy searchers. It was more of a comfort of possession than an expression of confident armed resistance.

He had only his skivvies, tattered as they were, left to cover his nakedness, but after discovering that the island had a sizable population of oversized rabbits, he felt their pelts would furnish clothing as well as an extended food supply. Patrick felt conflicted about taking advantage of his new neighbors in such a terrible way but he assuaged his conscience about the unfortunate doing in of his friendly island residents as necessary for his survival and a good conservation tool to keep the furry things from over-populating and stripping the island of all vegetation dooming themselves to extinction in the process. There was no telling where the little beasts had come from, but they were not a danger and seemed resigned to their fate with sad little knowing eyes that tended to disturb his sleep with regret.

Just as he remembered reading in a children's story a long time ago, he gathered a heap of dry fronds and other materials he found to put ablaze if a ship of friendly origin came within visual contact with the island. He had already seen a couple of smaller ships sail by slowly but he felt certain that they were enemy ships from the cut of the outlines and the way they sat real low in the water just like typical enemy ships. He had no desire to jump from the frying pan into the fire just to have human contact once again.