Chapter 4: Opening moves

South Pacific, February 2009

Between the tropics and the equator, there is a myriad of small rocky archipelagos. There are coral reefs that enclose lagoons and some formations still retain the rocky island or islands in the middle, leaving just the waters between the islands as a lagoon. they are mostly related with volcanic activity even though that might be long gone. They are mostly isolated from what we call "the modern world" and they are linked though small and simple airports and occasional shipping trade



Not all are inhabited and from those who are, the population lives off the tourism and exporting a few products, like crafts and fish products. Among these there is a mid sized atoll, which contains a big archipelago. At the height of activity, this atoll served as a base to the Imperial Japanese Fleet during WWII. The glory days ended a day of February in 1944 with the arrival of the US Attack Force 58 and their airborne bombs and torpedoes. Because of its location, this atoll was an advanced operation base for the IJF, which allowed them to comfortably resupply their vessels and shorten their operational lines. At a distance of 1000 km to New Ginny and abut 500 km to Micronesia, this atoll was near enough to be fairly easy to reach and far enough to be considered isolated.


Nowadays, glory days gone and all, the population peaked on less than 10000 inhabitants, much of it on the two biggest islands, whereas the third biggest is mostly left to birds. There is little infrastructure in the island, not much of it of modern age and all of it focused on tourism.


The proud vessels of the IJF are today a powerful diver magnet and thus the main income source for the locals. This explains a few things, as divers looking for this kind of mixture between history, wreckage exploring and wild nature are far in the spectrum from those whose adventure feeling is jump from one balcony to the next while being pissed drunk. So the economy is not what we would call booming. There was a caveat though. Among the wreckage there were several tankers and those which were not tankers or resupply ships , there where a lot of ships with full fuel tanks and carriers with extra fuel for planes and other land support ships with fuel for vehicles and more planes. After all those years, corrosion was starting to get to the tanks and leaks were almost of common nature. You could just remain floating mid way in height and see once in a while a dark waxy looking bubble making its way up towards the light.