He suggested they arrive about six when the kids would be done with their evening meal and most of the staff would be gone for the day. He gave her Jo...n Doe’s room number on the third floor and the location of the observation room where he spent a lot of his evenings after dinner.Ken parked the van on a side street and shouldered his bag of gear. Halfway up the alley they came to the back gate that opened onto a small basketball court behind the building. There was no one playing or sneaking a. M.My priority was water and headache tablets, followed by strong coffee and some food to settle my stomach. When I’d managed all of this, my mind turned back to my missing wife. As I stared at the clock in our lounge, I thought that now was a respectable hour at which to call Claire, and I wouldn’t seem weak like I’d have done if I’d have called the night before. This conviction grew in me that now was an okay time to call Claire and still seem strong and in control in her eyes.I found myself. A part of him liked to think that she would run with him instead of away. The frail sound of her voice as she left stuck with him, haunting him and making him doubt everything he’d shouted at her. At the same time, he cursed himself wishing that Hadley would stop fighting the world and herself. Underneath all of her stubbornness and cheeky retorts, she was soft and vulnerable. If she had built a wall up to protect herself from something in her past, she should be able to take it back down. And. It has been said that it would take a million soldiers to take that island, it is so heavily fortified. Well, we don’t have a million soldiers … but we do have a division of Marines! Betio is a small island, about one square mile. It’s seven hundred yards wide – at its widest, and about two miles long. For those of you from New York, it’s about half the size of Central Park. There is no point on Tarawa more than ten feet above sea level. Now we had no interest in taking this island. It had no.