War of the Eagles Read Free Page B

gotten quiet and he walked in front of me so our eyes wouldn’t meet.
    â€œTadpole,” I called, using the nickname only his sis–ters and I called him. He turned around. “All that means is that some people are stupid. You just wait. Someday you’ll be Dr. Tadpole, living in a big city, proud father of five children, owner of a large house and fancy car, and, best of all … married to the lovely Kiyoka.
    A smile came to his face and he slowly nodded his head but didn’t say a word.
    â€œCome on, enough daydreaming,” I teased. “Let’s go and see the excitement of Prince Rupert.” I started to walk again. I had to admit, at least to myself, that Rupert had certainly become a lot more exciting in the last few years since the war had started.
    Prince Rupert sits on the north part of Kaien Island.
    The island is so close to the mainland that a bridge was built to connect the two. It probably has the best harbor in the world, deep and wide and protected from the winds and currents. A ship in the harbor is as safe as a toy floating in a bathtub. I looked down at the ships at anchor in the harbor and counted over two dozen boats serenely bobbing up and down. I heard you could put more than a hundred boats out there.
    The harbor curved out of view further inland. I covered my eyes with my hand and I was able to shield enough glare to make out the faint line, in the distance, where the submarine net crossed the entire harbor, separating it from the open ocean.
    We were coming in slightly from the west. This part of the harbor was taken up by the freight yards. Prince Rupert was built at the end of the railroad line, so tracks have always been its history, but over the past two years they’d multiplied like rabbits. There must have been twenty sets of tracks branching off the main line. Each line was filled with freight cars, all waiting to be unloaded and stored. The problem was that they could get them here a lot faster than they could unload them. To make matters worse, they were running out of places to store things. I’d heard at school they were thinking of using the school gym as storage. Nothing dangerous though, like explosives or weapons, although tons of those were in those freight cars.
    Just over from the freight yards ran the dry dock. Two big ships sat in berths being repaired. They were American ships that had run aground coming through Telegraph Passage by the mouth of the Skeena.
    Between fixing those ships, building new ones and doing general repair work, the shipyards were working seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. They had almost two thousand people working there, not even counting the soldiers who guarded it and the big fuel storage yards off to the side.
    The main streets of the town run straight, either parallel or on right angles to the harbor. It was strange to see traffic on the wide streets. Before the military got here, there were practically no cars or trucks. There wasn’t much point since there was no place to go.
    The road out of Rupert ran over to the mainland and then stopped about eight miles later. Now there were jeeps, big trucks carrying supplies, and those strange “ducks,” trucks that could go into the water. Soldiers, sailors and even a few fliers were always on the street.
    Most things in your life seem to get smaller as you get bigger. This hadn’t happened to Prince Rupert. I got older and it got bigger. Before the war, Rupert was a sleepy little town of six thousand people. It had been that way for years and years. But in the last two years it had just exploded. The sign saying Welcome to Prince Rupert, listed the population. It seemed like they should have a little man with a paint brush just standing there changing it by the minute. Now it read Population 21,000.
    We left the sidewalk to move around a sandbag bar–rier built to provide protection for an anti-aircraft gun. “Wow,” I said, looking