Day of the Bomb by Steve Stroble Read Free Book Online Page A

ensure where her loyalties truly lay.
Can’t be too safe these days. The word is that Uncle Joe, Comrade
Stalin, has taken to sleeping in a different room at the Kremlin
each night. Is that what happens when you rule as emperor for too
long over a kingdom of your own making? Do you just become one of
Shakespeare’s sorry characters, perhaps Hamlet, Macbeth, or Julius
Caesar? Truth is stranger than fiction. Look at Mussolini, hung
upside down like an Italian sausage along with his mistress by his
own people after they shot them full of holes. What ungrateful,
unloyal citizens they proved to be. At least Il Duce made the
trains runs on time or so they claim.
    ***
    More of a time of closure than vacation, Arkhip’s
days spent at home passed too quickly for her, “just a slight
parole from my life sentence in Uncle Joe’s vast prison system” she
said to her father when she was certain no one could eavesdrop.
Poor Father. Ever since Mother’s death he had begun a long, slow
slide toward his own departure from this life for the next. Yes, he
still clung to the God of his youth, though secretly of course. But
now that his brothers and sons had been swallowed up along with the
other tens of millions whom WW II had taken forever from Russia he
seemed not to care what happened to him.
    Arkhip extracted a last oath from him the night
before she left for Moscow. “Promise me that you won’t say or do
something just so you can be a martyr.” She cried when he nodded
and gently said he loved her but loved Jesus Christ even more.

7
    Life had at last reverted into a routine for Jason
at his new home on Monkey Island. The first two weeks had been
spent settling in by building shelter and a small reservoir for
rain water and cannibalizing the PT boat for usable materials. With
no belongings other than his life jacket, waterlogged wallet, dog
tags, and uniform to take care of, his life had become simpler but
more complex as well.
    He placed the jacket on a wire suspended between two
trees to protect it from the rats, which loved to gnaw on any
object that could be carried away in bits to feather their nests.
Whenever Jason looked at the vest that had kept him afloat for two
days, he thought of the Professor because he was the one who had
convinced him to wear it at all times: “You see, Jason, when a ship
goes down there might not be enough time to put your life jacket on
and still make it off of the boat in time. Let’s say some torpedo
hits us at night. You’re asleep in your rack. By the time you wake
up, put on your vest, and head for deck, the ship has begun to
list. You’re fighting a hundred other guys to go through hatches
and upstairs so some of you won’t make it and go down with the
ship. But if you wear it while you’re sleeping, you’re one of the
very first ones up on deck. You jump overboard and have enough time
to swim away from the ship before it blows up or sucks you under
the water as it goes down. Captain Uley told me all about the time
his carrier sank.” Jason kept it nearby in case the kind of typhoon
that could make an entire island disappear came his way. He figured
Monkey Island was as risk of that because it was the smallest
island he had ever seen in his years of traveling the South
Pacific.
    He was now grateful for earlier contacts with native
Polynesians on other islands where he had gone ashore from his
troop transport after they had been taken from the Japanese. One
had shown him the many uses of breadfruit, including using it as
caulking on boats. Remembering the Professor’s admonition of
“you’re dead meat without fresh water,” Jason had dug a shallow pit
next to his lodging constructed of plywood from the PT boat and
covered with palm branches sent to the ground during storms. His
shelter was a lean-to propped up next to the trunk of largest tree
on the island. He lined the pit with stones and filled the spaces
between them with breadfruit caulking.
    Whenever it rained, the pit