The Ambassador's Son Read online

  THE

  AMBASSADOR’S

  SON

  Homer Hickam

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  THE AMBASSADOR’S SON

  Copyright © 2005 by Homer Hickam.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004051312

  ISBN: 0-312-35436-3

  EAN: 9780312-35436-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / March 2005

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / May 2006

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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  Also by Homer Hickam

  The Keeper’s Son

  Torpedo Junction

  Rocket Boys (a.k.a. October Sky)

  Back to the Moon

  The Coalwood Way

  Sky of Stone

  We Are Not Afraid

  THE CRITICS HAIL

  HOMER HICKAM AND

  The Ambassador’s Son

  “Superb . . . a tightly wrapped tale of wartime action.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “World War II storytelling at its best with plenty of action, exotic surprises, and compelling romance.”

  —James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys

  “A beguiling South Seas romance, an epic story of love and loyalty, a richly evoked roman-a-clef about a larger-than-life American legend—The Ambassador’s Son is all of this and more.”

  —James D. Hornfischer, author of The Last Stand

  of the Tin Can Sailors

  “The Ambassador’s Son is the reason I love to read . . . Homer Hickam is such a good writer that I’d probably read anything that he put out, but this adventure made me feel like a kid again.”

  —Rick Bragg, bestselling author of All Over but the Shoutin’

  “Fear, courage, cynicism, lust, and adrenaline propel this imaginary two-week episode in the young JFK’s life . . . the story is so gripping, you will have to know what happens.”

  —Nigel Hamilton, author of JFK: Reckless Youth

  To Captain Pat Stadt and the crew of the United States Coast Guard cutter RUSH (WHEC-723), with gratitude and admiration for your kindness and hospitality as we sailed across the wide, pearl-blue Pacific . . .

  SOME REASONABLY

  PAINLESS HISTORY FROM

  THE AUTHOR . . .

  This is a story of the strange kinds of love and passion that can sometimes occur during a time of war. When an author writes a love story, his readers rarely demand that he first establish the existence and nature of love. This is also true for passion. They are ancient emotions, instinctively understood by most people. A story of love and passion set during a time of war, however, especially a war as vast and complex as World War II in the Pacific, requires the reader to have some knowledge of that conflict. An author therefore has two choices: to bring forth the historical context of the war through exposition (and the necessary slowing of the action), or by presenting a little history up front. I have chosen for this particular story the latter approach. For those readers too impatient to wait for the further adventures of Josh Thurlow and the women and men who are always complicating his life (see The Keeper’s Son, Hickam, 2003), or believe they already know the history of the place and times, or simply dislike renderings of history, I think they will eventually get the gist of things by going ahead with chapter 1. For those who want to know a bit more, I shall endeavor to make my history lesson as reasonably painless as possible.

  The Solomon Islands, the locale for this story, are a group of subtropical volcanic and coral islands located about a thousand miles northeast of Australia. The Solomons have nearly always been a backwater, both in geography and in history. The indigenous people are not Polynesian, as famously presented in films and onstage in productions of South Pacific as adapted from James Michener’s fine novel Tales of the South Pacific. There are no golden people in the Solomons dispensing flowery leis and free love to all who reach their shores. The native Solomon Islanders are actually an ancient racial mixture of Negroid and Australoid peoples who generally happen to have very dark skins. Until recent times, they were mostly known to the outside world for their tendencies toward headhunting and sporadic cannibalism. They are, of course, otherwise a splendid people but history loves to dwell on the colorful and savage.

  In the late nineteenth century, a variety of adventurers, mostly British and Australian, tried to make the Solomons their home. They quickly discovered it was one of the toughest places in the world to live. Tropical diseases and disputes with the local populace resulted in the deaths of many of these colonists and chased most of the others away. Yet a few very hardy types persevered, and by 1942 a small colony of planters, traders, and Christian missionaries still hung on. They might still be there if the Japanese Imperial Army, fresh from an astonishing series of victories across Southeast Asia, had not arrived, first on one island in the chain, then another, always moving south. At the sound of the first distant shot, most of the colonists left with their families, never to return. Only a very few stubbornly remained behind, caught up in the clash between two of the mightiest countries in the world, the United States of America and Imperial Japan, each representing very different concepts of civilization, each determined to win at all costs. In the epic battles that ensued on these insignificant islands, the history of the world would be changed for all time.

  Neither of the major combatants who fought in the Solomon Islands initially planned to fight there. Japan’s purpose in World War II was to create a vast sphere of economic dominance across China and Southeast Asia. In the Pacific, only one country realistically stood in its way, and that was the United States of America. In 1941, the Japanese government toted up the strength of their naval and ground forces, compared it to what the Americans had in the Pacific, and determined that if they were ever going to attain their dream of dominating the region, now was the time to accomplish a quick knockout of the opposition. The surprise attacks on the United States in Hawaii and the Philippine Islands in December of that year were the result of this calculation (or it might better be called a miscalculation), followed by a surge of Japanese forces across Southeast Asia and thence south to New Guinea, Rabaul, and Bougainville. Almost without a thought, they continued to plunge toward Australia, although it was never clear what they would do when they got there. That was when the Solomon Islands entered Japanese military planning, especially one large island that offered a suitable area for an airstrip from which their bombers could interdict the sea-lanes leading to Australia and New Zealand. That island’s name was Guadalcanal.

  In June 1942, a little more than a thousand Japanese engineers and Korean laborers were put ashore on Guadalcanal to build an airstrip. A few hundred miles to the south, American forces had established themselves practically overnight in the island group known as the New Hebrides with the idea of slowly building up a force that could defend Australia and New Zealand and then perhaps move cautiously north. When reports came in about the construction of a Japanese airstrip on Guadalcanal, Admiral of the Fleet Ernest J. King decided to put a stop to it.

  Although most of the American civilian and military leaders in Washington, D.C., including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, were determined to concentrate on the war in Europe, Admiral King, famously prickly and tough (it was said he shaved with a blowtorch), insisted on forcing the issue ag
ainst the Japanese in a place where his navy and Marine Corps could reach them. Reluctantly, Roosevelt gave King permission to proceed. In August, the United States Marines arrived in the southern Solomons for what they hoped would be an easy fight against the few Japanese troops guarding the still unfinished airfield on Guadalcanal.

  At first, it was a pushover. The Americans came ashore all but unopposed, piling up their goods on the beaches and securing the airfield. The Japanese engineers and the Koreans ran back into the hills. That might have been the end of it except the Japanese military, drunk on victory, refused to give up territory to the enemy even if it was on an island they didn’t much need or want. More than anything, they desired to teach the Americans a lesson. Japanese troops, supported by the Imperial Navy, were ordered to retake Guadalcanal.

  Thus, with neither side in the contest understanding the intentions or the determination of the other, a brutal seven-month campaign began with the cream of the Japanese military hurled against a rapidly assembled American counterforce of marines, army regulars, and National Guard troops, and what battleships, destroyers, cruisers, PT boats, landing craft, and freighters could be scraped together. The battle for Guadalcanal turned into a bloody slugging match between nearly equal forces. In the end, the Japanese would be utterly defeated and killed nearly to the last man. It is not hyperbole to write that the Japanese were astonished at this result. There were many recriminations in Tokyo. What had the army and navy done wrong? Who was to blame? Certainly it was not possible that the American fighting man might be the equal of the superior Japanese warrior.

  A few Japanese politicians, unaffected by the samurai code of Bushido, knew after Guadalcanal that the war was essentially lost, especially considering the battering the Imperial Fleet had suffered at the Battle of Midway. What Japan had in its inventory was about all it would have to fight the entire war. The Americans, on the other hand, had very quickly implemented a massive and efficient retooling of their entire economy to produce the implements of war. Millions of fresh, well-trained troops were in the pipeline along with massive cargoes of weapons, big and small.

  Even with the evidence of ultimate defeat provided by Guadalcanal and the great sea battles, the Japanese refused to face the reality of the situation. Instead, they fashioned another strategy. They would go on the defensive and stop the Americans by demonstrating courage and brutality on a scale they believed Western culture could not imagine nor sustain. They reinforced their positions on the central and northern Solomon Islands, told their men to die bravely and to take as many Americans with them as possible, and waited. They would not have to wait very long. Vice Admiral William Halsey, commander of the American forces in the area, had discerned the enemy’s mind and had instituted a straightforward but terrible response best illustrated by a big billboard he had planted on a hillside in Tulagi, the capital of the Solomons, where every American naval vessel and the troops they carried could see it. It said, very simply, ADMIRAL HALSEY SAYS KILL JAPS, KILL JAPS, KILL MORE JAPS.

  JUST A LITTLE MORE

  HISTORY FROM

  THE AUTHOR . . .

  One of the more famous and misunderstood episodes in the battle for the Solomon Islands between the United States and Japan occurred a little past midnight on August 2, 1943, when a PT boat skippered by United States Navy Lieutenant (jg) John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the future president of the United States, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer in the Blackett Strait off the island of New Georgia. After clinging to the wreckage of his shattered boat overnight, Kennedy, at the time an emaciated youth with a bad back, malfunctioning bowels, and probably a touch of malaria, ordered his crew to swim to an island four miles away, only to discover it was but a spit of sand with neither food nor water, save a few coconuts. Aware that the Japanese tended to murder their prisoners by beheading or evisceration, Kennedy and his crew spent the rest of the day hiding behind the bushes that lined the beach and being pelted by bird excrement.

  While crouched in the stinking bushes, Kennedy, the second son of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to Great Britain, surely must have reviewed in his mind what had led to his present situation. The mission that had sent him out the night before had been the result of a sudden brainstorm by the commander of Kennedy’s squadron. Without rehearsal, fifteen boats had sallied forth to form a picket line across the strait between Rendova and New Georgia. Their purpose was to interdict the fast Japanese destroyers nicknamed the Tokyo Express that sped down from the north each night. Strict radio silence was kept, which meant no boat commander knew what the other one was doing. Only a few of the boats had radar, and Kennedy’s boat wasn’t one of them. When Kennedy saw flashes of light in the darkness, he assumed the action was on. He tried to get into the fight but couldn’t find it. He was attempting to get his bearings when something massive struck his boat like a gigantic seagoing meat cleaver, tearing it to pieces and instantly killing two of his men. It was a destroyer of the Tokyo Express.

  All the next day, Kennedy and his crew hid in the bushes. One of the crew, the mechanic, was horribly burned. All were hungry and thirsty. As darkness fell, Kennedy was apparently seized by a sudden energy. He announced he was going to swim into the shark-infested waters to signal the PT boats he was certain were searching for them. Nothing anyone could say could keep him from following through on his plan. Carrying a salvaged flashlight, he plunged into the sea.

  All night, Kennedy swam, fighting a vicious current and reportedly being visited by hallucinations. The next morning, completely spent and bleeding from numerous coral scratches, he staggered ashore to report failure. After resting a few hours, but not sleeping, Kennedy once more displayed a tremendous reserve of energy. He convinced his reluctant crew to swim to another island several miles away. After an arduous swim, their new island also proved to have neither food nor water except for a few more coconuts. Another miserable night and day passed, during which, it was reported, Kennedy slept very little. Expecting rescue, he kept looking out to sea. When no ships appeared, he began to suspect the truth and bitterly remarked on it to his crew: They had been abandoned.

  The next morning, a terribly thirsty, hungry, and sleep-deprived Kennedy tried to convince his men to swim to yet another island. They refused. Finally a fellow officer, along on the mission for a joyride that had turned into a hellish nightmare, agreed to go. After hours of struggling against wicked currents, they managed to reach the island and discovered a small wooden box containing Japanese crackers and candy. It was nearly midnight before they were able to claw their way back with the pitiful food. To Kennedy’s surprise, two native Solomon Islanders were waiting for him. They were coast-watchers, men who reported Japanese naval and air movements to the Americans, and had just happened to be paddling by in their dugout canoe when they spotted the forlorn PT boat sailors. Kennedy scratched out a message on a coconut asking for help, and the two men carried it off. The next day, another canoe manned by two more coast-watchers arrived with a message. Their chief, a Britisher named Evans, had contacted Kennedy’s PT base, and help was coming. Kennedy was transported via the canoe to an island named Wana-Wana, where Evans lived.

  Kennedy arrived at Wana-Wana around midnight, about the same time the PT-157 from Rendova pulled up to the dock. He climbed aboard the boat and collared its commander. “What the hell took you so long!” he vehemently demanded. Astonished by the verbal attack, the 157 skipper sputtered that everybody thought Kennedy was dead. The next morning, a sullen Kennedy directed the 157 to his crew. They were all transported to Rendova. After hearing Kennedy’s story about how he’d been run down by a Japanese destroyer, some of his military superiors were determined to court-martial him for dereliction of duty. How was it possible, they asked, to be rammed by a huge, noisy destroyer on an otherwise quiet night? They muttered that Kennedy and his crew must have been asleep.

  What happened during the next two weeks to the future president is not entirely certain. Some historians maintain Kennedy was taken to
a naval hospital, although there is no record of it. Others say he brooded at the Lumbari base on Rendova, bitterly waiting for his fate to unfold.

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part II

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part III

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Part IV

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Part V

  Chapter 58