SUNSET ON RAMREE
Historical, War, Suspense 15,000 words
$3.95 US .pdf
Sunset On Ramree by Robert Appleton
Summary
Will friendship be enough to keep Shigeatsu and Kodi alive in the deadliest place on Earth?
It is the deadliest crocodile attack ever recorded. On February 19th, 1945, one thousand Japanese soldiers retreated into the fetid mangrove swamps of Ramree Island hoping to escape their British enemy. However they soon discovered that the sixteen kilometre stretch of marshland that promised to offer safe cover, had delivered them straight into the jaws of hell.
Inspired by true events during WWII, Sunset on Ramree follows young musician-turned-soldier Shigeatsu Nakadai and his best friend, Kodi, as they head ever deeper into danger.
Though you wouldn’t know it to look at them, crocodiles are among the quickest animals on the planet. There’s a split-second between an impala bending to drink and a crocodile leaping up with a sideways swipe, clamping its jaws around its prey, and starting the dreaded submergence. Once those jaws are locked, the hold is ironclad. It’s almost impossible to pry them open. On land, though only for short sprints, they can move extremely fast. In water, they are kings. Their muscular legs and tails propel them upward with shocking speed toward their prey. It’s not hard to see why they’re feared even more than sharks in many Indo-Pacific regions. And as Ramree Island lies in the Bay of Bengal, we are at the heart of their domain.
It starts with one or two attacks. A quick cry of pain, a splash, limbs thrashing, and if the water is too shallow for the crocodile to pull its man down for drowning, it will roll him over and over on the surface. There is nothing more terrifying than hearing that sequence—the staggered scream, the tail lashing, the loud spurts of water being thrown aside. There might as well be a hundred crocodiles for the sheer panic that ensues on the bank ahead of us. As men trample vegetation while fleeing the water’s edge, their flesh is torn on the sharp bracken. The smell of blood is now in the air. On top of that, we have wounded soldiers among us, casualties of both British bullets and the previous crocodile attack. If these reptiles are attracted by open wounds, every last one ought to be headed this way.
What’s worse, they like to feed at night.
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Credits
Sunset on Ramree © 2009 by Robert Appleton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic of mechanical including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Cover Art © 2009 by Dawné Dominique
Edited by Lauren Gilbert
Copyedited by Heather Williams
Layout and Book Production by Ally Robertson
ebook: 978-1-926704-18-0
print: 978-1-926704-27-2
First Editions * July 2009
Production by Eternal Press