The Ambassador's Son Read online

  Phimble wished now he and Josh had talked a bit more about the pickup. They hadn’t actually established when it would occur, tonight or tomorrow morning. If it was night, he would have to land in the dark at the little harbor he’d only seen once. Landing at night was difficult even when a pilot knew the water. On the other hand, if he stopped at Melagi and waited until morning, the skipper would be stranded, and God only knew what foul temper that would cause! Phimble looked ahead to see Guadalcanal, a giant purple shadow rising from the sea. Tulagi and then Melagi were behind the big island, and the decision point on whether to continue north or stop for the night had arrived.

  “What do you think, Dave?” Phimble asked the megapode, who woke at the sound of his name. “Go get Josh or spend the night in the cave? What’s it to be?”

  Dave rose and padded his feet a few times, then shook his head. “You don’t want to go, Dave? But don’t you think we ought to pick up the skipper?”

  The megapode just stared at him while Phimble mused a little longer. “I have to go,” he said finally. “Sorry, Dave. I appreciate your opinion, though.” He keyed the mike. “Fish-eye? Stobs? Wake up and keep your eyes open, boys. We’re headed into Rufe country.” Phimble was aware that by such simple whims, life-changing decisions are often made. “Hey diddle diddle,” he sang, with a contrite nod to the megapode. “Right up the middle.” Dave raised his wings, then went back to sleep.

  The sun finally collapsed into the sea with a final spray of gaudy brilliance, and the South Pacific night moved in to cover the islands like a thick velvet cloak. The Catalina droned on.

  “Fire on the water, Mister Phimble,” Fisheye called from the nose turret, “about ten o’clock.”

  Phimble studied the area, where there should have been only open water. There was indeed a fire, and it suddenly blossomed, orange and red streaks streaming from its center, dimming to a glow. Other fires erupted nearby, these seeming to fall from the sky. Phimble puzzled over them, then realized what he was seeing. Some kind of vessel had been bombed and set afire, and the aircraft that had done it was dropping flares to make sure of the damage. Or perhaps there was more than one aircraft. It was impossible to say.

  Fisheye called with a pertinent question. “Is one of our boats being attacked by Jap planes, or is it a Jap boat catching hell from our boys?”

  “I dunno,” Phimble answered. “But I’m turning this crate around before they see us.” I should have taken Dave’s advice and landed at Melagi, he thought to himself. He eased over the wheel, pressed the proper rudder pedal, and gave the engines a little throttle to head back south.

  “But what if it’s one of our boats, Mr. Phimble?” Stobs called. “We can’t just fly off and leave them.”

  “What the hell do you expect me to do, Stobs?” Phimble demanded. “This is a Catalina, not a Corsair.”

  “I don’t know, sir. You’re the officer.”

  And there it was. Ensign Eureka Phimble, an officer and a gentleman according to the Congress of the United States of America, even though it had been a battlefield commission, was empowered to exercise the authority according to his rank. That meant he was in charge of the Darlin’ Dosie and responsible to see her used to accomplish the mission. But what was the mission? However it might be defined, it included the protection of American sailors, soldiers, and marines and there just might be a few of them down there taking a terrible beating from a Japanese bomber.

  “Hang on,” Phimble said, making up his mind. He stopped the slow turn and kicked the Catalina into a spiraling dive. Seven thousand, five hundred feet they dropped in tight circles until Phimble flatted Dosie and swept just a few hundred feet over the fire on the sea. He glanced at it, then fire-walled the throttles and pulled up. Dave, awakened by the dive, was in a deep squat from the g-forces and emitted a mild squawk in protest. “Sorry, Dave. Did you get a look, Fisheye?”

  “Sure did, Mister Phimble. It was one of ours, all right. An LCI, I’d say, most likely got caught in the dark coming back from New Georgia.”

  “Stobs,” Phimble said, “get on the horn, give Cactus a call, tell them the situation.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Phimble had but a brief moment to think about what to do next before a series of bright flashes flew past the cockpit. Then the Catalina hull rattled as if it had run into a hailstorm. They were under attack. “Jap float plane out there!” Fisheye called. “I saw it!”

  “What’d it look like?”

  “Single engine. Big float on its belly. Just like came after us this morning.”

  Phimble cursed. It was surely a Rufe, and Rufes rarely traveled alone. Phimble sent up a silent prayer that these Rufe pilots were inexperienced, ill trained, and short on fuel. He knew better than to expect a Tomahawk to chase them away. The night sky belonged to the Japanese. Stobs stuck his head into the cockpit. “Mister Phimble, my radio’s all busted up. A slug went right past my shoulder and slammed into it. Got some glass in my face, but I’m OK. I got a call off to Cactus about the LCI. Not sure if they got it, though.”

  Phimble said a silent prayer of thanks that Stobs hadn’t been killed. “Can you fix the radio?”

  “Not sure. I’ll have to open it up and see.”

  “All right. Do that later. Right now, get on one of the blister guns. If you see anything flying out there, and I mean anything, shoot at it.”

  Stobs snapped off an “Aye, aye, sir,” and disappeared. Phimble threw the Catalina into a hard turn, aiming her nose toward Guadalcanal, and pushed the throttles to the stops, working for altitude. Getting out of the area was his only hope, one that was soon dashed when tracers again flew past the cockpit. The Rufe had found them. Aft, Phimble felt the vibration of another storm of bullets pounding the hull. “You all right, Stobs?” he called.

  “Yes, sir. But we got more than a few holes back here.”

  A flash of light blinded Phimble, and he threw up his hands before he realized a flare had gone off within a few feet of the cockpit. He flew right through it, but more flares were popping all around. One Rufe or many, Phimble knew Dosie was caught in their light like a moth against a flame.

  “There’s one!” Fisheye yelled, and at the same time cut loose with the forward gun. Phimble’s hopes started rising again as he watched Fisheye’s thirty-caliber tracers streaming out from Dosie’s nose, beautiful red streaks arcing into the blackness. Then he saw some of the tracers quit abruptly in a shower of sparks. “I got him, Eureka!” Fisheye yelled.

  “Attaboy!” Phimble crowed. Then he heard the ominous sound of the starboard engine cutting in and out. He throttled back on the gas, too late, because the engine suddenly burst into flames. Dosie’s nose began to drop as Phimble quickly feathered the engine. “Level out. Level out. Level out,” Phimble chanted as he strained on the yoke. “Come on, old girl. Level out!”

  It was as if Dosie’s nose had taken on a ton of lead. No matter how hard Phimble pulled back on the yoke, she kept plunging through the night toward the waiting sea. A howling devil seemed to be screaming in his ears, but it was only the skin of the Catalina shrieking through the ever denser air as it got closer to the ocean. Phimble suddenly had the oddest thought, that he was going to die sitting next to a megapode. It wasn’t exactly how he might have predicted the circumstances of his death.

  “Dave, first off, I’d like to apologize,” Phimble said. “You were right. We should have stopped at Melagi. But Pogo says you’re magic. If that’s so, I sure would like to see some of your magic right now.” Then, hedging his bet, Phimble cast a prayer toward the More Traditional Occupant in heaven.

  The old megapode, pushed back against the seat by the force of the fall, cocked his head as if thinking about Phimble’s request. And still the Darlin’ Dosie fell, the wind tearing across her wings in a banshee cry of imminent destruction.

  20

  It was a long run north across the Coral Sea, and it lasted through the night. Kennedy, who’d never expected to be behind the wheel
of a PT boat again, enjoyed the feel of the big engines, even though the pounding that came up through the deck from those engines was taking its toll on his legs and back. Ready kept offering to spell him, and finally, gritting his big teeth against the pain, he handed the controls over and stretched out on the deck beside a torpedo tube. Before long, the Jackson twins showed up and bolted a padded bench behind the wheel. Kennedy struggled to his feet and came over and sat on it. “This is good, very good,” he said. “But how did you build it?”

  “There’s always a few strakes and stubs on any boat,” Once advised.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We found some scrap lumber.”

  Throughout the night, Kennedy was aware that Thurlow’s boys were roaming around the boat, fussing with this and that. Once and Again seemed to be most curious about the torpedo tubes. They queried Kennedy as to their operation and were astonished when he told them that the torpedoes were punched out of their tubes by black-powder charges that often didn’t work.

  “There must be a better way,” Once said. The two boys went back to the tubes, scratching their heads and pondering, then came back and said, “Compressed air would work better.”

  Kennedy shrugged at the suggestion, and the twins went away again, puzzling more over the tubes. Then they came back and said, “We need to get rid of these tubes entirely, that’s the answer. They’re awful heavy. Get another three knots, maybe more, out of this boat if they were gone. Why not just roll the torpedoes in? We could rig up a rack.”

  Kennedy knew the answer to that one. “It won’t work. Torpedoes have gyros in them, and they get confused if they’re spun around. The tubes keep them in the correct position.”

  “But the torpedoes we see airplanes carry don’t have tubes,” Once pointed out.

  “Maybe they don’t have gyros,” Kennedy answered uncertainly.

  “I bet you’re right, Mister Kennedy,” Again said. “See, Once, I told you he was smart.”

  “But we don’t have any torpedoes anyway,” Kennedy reminded the twins. “So this is all an intellectual exercise.” The two teenagers grinned at him, then each other, and went on their way.

  Millie came up from below and reported to Kennedy that the biscuits were cooling and he had managed to get the galley shipshape. He also advised that he had taken a look at the trio of big Packard engines and, though he didn’t have half the knowledge of Fisheye, his thought was that maybe by changing the gear ratios on the supercharger impeller, a bit more performance might be squeezed out of them. Kennedy replied that such an idea certainly sounded reasonable and plausible, though he had no idea what it meant, and told Millie to go ahead if he liked. Millie had looked at him for a long second and then said, “We’d need a quiet harbor to do it, sir. You see, it’s kind of hard to work on engines while they’re running.”

  Kennedy tried not to feel like an idiot and managed it by taking a nap. An hour later, Millie was back with a report to Kennedy that he’d fired up the radio and contacted a radioman he knew on Guadalcanal, and communications seemed to be working well and would likely get better. “Stobs will make that radio sing, sir. You’ll see. He’ll be talking to his folks on Killakeet afore an hour.”

  Then the Jackson twins swung by once more. “We’ve figured out what to do about the torpedoes,” they said.

  Kennedy reminded them once more that there was a severe lack of torpedoes, but off they went, slyly elbowing one another. When Kennedy went below to get away from the constant interruptions, he was suiprised to discover the twins installing a vent in the captain’s cabin. He’d never been able to spend much time in his cabin aboard the PT-109, since it was usually hot as an oven. But the boys invited him inside and finished up their work, and he lay and basked in the cooling air fed from the deck by their simple device. Still, he couldn’t sleep, and he climbed back to the cockpit and settled on the soft bench, while Ready curled up around the base of the starboard gun tub. The bosun immediately fell asleep, the blessing, Kennedy reflected, of the innocent. Kennedy sat on the little bench and was nearly happy as the boat skimmed across the sea in the glow of the moon.

  Ready, after sleeping for an hour, sat up and rubbed his eyes. He rose to stand beside Kennedy. “Have you ever heard of the Curlew, sir?” he asked. “That would be the CSS Curlew!”

  “I can’t say that I have,” Kennedy confessed, pushing his fist into his back. “CSS? Do you mean the Confederate States?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. My great-granddaddy served aboard the Curlew as a gunner. It was a fast little schooner before the war, but Granddaddy put every kind of cannon on her that she could carry. She was a bad’un for sartain. Sank a number of Yankee boats before they finally blew her up.”

  “But your granddaddy survived, I take it,” Kennedy said politely.

  “Oh, yes, sir, he did. He went on to become a great Killakeet fisherman, taught my daddy everything he knew about fish like daddy taught me. But I been thinking about what Granddaddy did with the Curlew, sir, and not so much about what he did with the fish.”

  “Well, that’s fine, Bosun. I know you’re proud of your rebellious ancestor.”

  “I’m more than proud, sir. I’m thinking.”

  “That could mean trouble,” Kennedy replied, and found himself mildly alarmed.

  “No trouble,” Ready promised. “Not at all.”

  Kennedy sought to change the subject, since he had little interest in Confederate schooners or the guns placed on them. “This is the first time I’ve heard anything about your family, Bosun. Fishermen, you say? How many generations do you go back?”

  “Oh, sir, back forever, I guess. Killakeet O’Neals have always been fishermen. My folks also own and operate the Hammerhead Hotel, but you can bet my daddy still cares about fish. A man named Cat-tail Garner is the captain of Daddy’s boat.”

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “I’m the third son of four boys and five girls.”

  The revelation from Ready unaccountably pleased Kennedy. “There are nine children in my family, too!” he enthused. “I’m the second son of four boys and five girls.”

  “That’s swell. My brothers are all scattered about. Two are in the Coast Guard, and the other, he’s the oldest, works a boat down at Morehead City. He lost his hand when he was seven. Got it caught in a piece of machinery at the cannery. All my sisters are married to fishermen who are in the Coast Guard or the navy for the duration, except for Wesley, who joined the army for no reason anybody can figure out. He’s in the paratroops. How about your brothers and sisters, Mister Kennedy?”

  “My older brother Joe is in the navy,” Kennedy said, trying to put a little pride into his voice but failing. “He’s a pilot. Flies a B-24 and hunts U-boats out of a base in England. My sister Kathleen—we call her Kick—she’s in England, too. Got herself a beau, a lord, in fact. He’s divorced, so that’s a problem, but Kick is tough enough to find a way around her problems. My brothers Bobby and Teddy are too young to join the armed forces, so they’re still at home. My other sisters are Eunice, Pat, and Jean. They’re home, too, and are just squirts.”

  Ready was a good counter, especially with his fingers. He toted them up and came out one short. “That’s but four sisters, sir. You left one out.”

  “Did I? Well, there’s Rosemary. She’s the oldest of the girls. In fact, she’s the firstborn of all the Kennedy kids.”

  “And what is she doing, sir? Married and with a bunch of babies, I suppose.”

  Kennedy shook his head. “No. Rosemary was born . . . well, not right, Bosun. She was always slow and didn’t fit in with the rest of us. My father told us how important it was to always win in everything we did. But Rosemary never seemed to care about winning. She just wanted to read her books or play with her dolls, and I guess we left her out of most things. When there was a dance at the club, though, I would always dance with her, and tell her jokes and make her laugh. She loved to laugh. She had a pretty smile.”

>   “She sounds like a girl on Killakeet. Her name is Willow. She seemed slow for the longest time, and everybody worried about her. Some said she was a hoodoo and ought to be put in a place away from everybody else. But then one day, everybody realized she was actually terribly smart, only in a different way. She’s married to Captain Thurlow’s brother now. Maybe Rosemary will prove to be like that, too.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Kennedy replied stiffly. “She had an operation. It didn’t turn out quite as planned.”

  Ready sensed Kennedy’s discomfort in talking about his older sister, so it was his turn to change the subject, except he couldn’t think of another one. Finally Kennedy did, asking, “When you go back to Killakeet, what will you do?”

  Ready smiled. “Why, I’ll fish, sir.”

  “Take over your daddy’s boat?”

  “Oh, no. Like I said, Cat-tail Garner’s got that job. I’ll hook on with somebody, though. I’m a good hand.”

  “But it’s your daddy’s boat. You should be able to take over, be its captain.”

  Ready gave Kennedy’s comment some thought. “But then what would happen to Cat-tail? It would be terrible hard for him and his family if I took his job away.”

  Kennedy looked far away for a moment, into the darkness and beyond. “Ready, I wish I were you. I really do.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Ready answered.

  “It’s because you can’t imagine why,” Kennedy replied with a catch in his voice. “That’s the reason.”

  “You’re hurting, sir. I can see it the way you keep squeezing your eyes and pushing into the small of your back. Why don’t you lay yourself down somewheres?”

  “All right,” Kennedy said. “Thank you, Bosun. You are a great help.”

  “Like I told you, Mister Phimble said I was to be, sir.”

  “Then, whether he likes it or not,” Kennedy replied, “I shall thank Mister Phimble the moment I see him again.”

  21

  Josh’s eyes fluttered open, and for a long second he wasn’t absolutely certain where he was. An investigation of his immediate surroundings revealed that whatever part of the world he might be in, he was lying on a mat of plaited palm fronds in a round bamboo hut. The quality of light filtering through the walls of the hut was gentle and golden, and its warmth was comforting. Josh discovered that he felt good, a bit lazy, and thoroughly satisfied, all of which worried him. Through an open doorway he could see a placid blue sea, lapping gently against a sandy beach. A wild rooster crowed somewhere nearby, the final hint as to his location. It was morning in the Solomons, and Josh was inexplicably happy, though a little voice in the back of his mind kept telling him he had absolutely no right to be. That same voice also told him he’d better stop being happy at the first opportunity, lest disorder occur, the bane of any sailor who hoped to keep a taut ship.