A Last Secret - prologue

‘They are going to kill us all, be brave lads’

Prologue

It was around 5 p.m. on a sweltering Thursday in 1942 on Betio, a small islet of the Pacific atoll known as Tarawa.

The heat was suffocating, as it was most days in this stagnant part of the ocean known as the Doldrums. Under the rule of Dai Nippon Teikoku, the Empire of Japan, the island’s several hundred inhabitants - known as the Gilbertese to their former British colonial masters - lived off the fish caught in Tarawa’s expansive 400-square-kilometre lagoon. Japanese soldiers and Korean laborers toiled under the sun, constructing a runway and fortifying the islet.

Mikaera - like most locals, he needed no second name - watched from a distance. His gaze settled on a line of white men standing stiffly in the oppressive heat. Among them was an older man, Captain Isaac Handley, his face weathered from years at sea.

‘They are going to kill us all. Be brave, lads,’ Mikaera heard Handley say to the others.

A Japanese soldier stepped forward. Without hesitation, he raised his sword and decapitated the first European in line. Then the second. Mikaera squeezed his eyes shut, but before he could look away, darkness engulfed him—he had fainted.