The restless wave, p.1
The Restless Wave, page 1
Also by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret.)
To Risk It All
Sailing True North
Sea Power
The Accidental Admiral
Partnership for the Americas
Destroyer Captain
Coauthored by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret.)
2054: A Novel
2034: A Novel of the Next World War
Command at Sea
The Leader’s Bookshelf
Watch Officer’s Guide
Division Officer’s Guide
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2024 by James Stavridis
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stavridis, James, author.
Title: The restless wave: a novel of the United Sates Navy / Admiral
James Stavridis, USN (Ret.).
Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023018475 (print) | LCCN 2023018476 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593494073 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593494080 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States. Navy—Officers—Fiction. |
World War,1939–1945—Naval operations, American—Fiction. |
LCGFT: Historical fiction. | War fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.T387 R47 2024 (print) | LCC PS3619.T387 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230510
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018475
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018476
Ebook ISBN 9780593494080
Cover design: Evan Gaffney
Cover images: (sky and ship) National Archives photo no. 80-G-421130; (head) edfuentesg / Getty Images; (sea and sailor) BRYAN DENTON / The New York Times / Redux
Designed by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_7.0a_148370030_c0_r0
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
1 What’s That Buzz?
2 Reef Points
3 Bella, Not Pilar
4 Plebe Summer
5 Parade Rest
6 Youngster Cruise
7 Navigating Rocks and Shoals
8 A Code of Honor
9 The Fallen Angel
10 Escape and Evasion
11 Perilous Path
12 Setting a Course
13 Underway Early
14 Pearl
15 The Pink Palace of the Pacific
16 A New Snake Ranch and an Old Motorcycle
17 A Tale of Two Georges
18 Surf’s Up
19 Half a Year
20 Love and War
21 On USS Nevada
22 The Broken Ship
23 To Begin Again
24 The Big E
25 Mr. Doolittle Goes to Tokyo
26 Meeting at Midway
27 After Midway
28 Kai at Night
29 An Admiral’s Gift
30 The First Circle
31 The Knife Fighters
32 Twisting on a Hook
33 The Morning After
34 Two Letters
35 The End of the Beginning
36 A Random Walk
37 Ten Seconds
38 A Ten-Second Decision
39 A Letter and a Funeral
40 Pearl Redux
41 The Serene Admiral
42 Taps to Guard the Dead
Coda
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
For Further Reading
About the Author
_148370030_
To the finest sea writers:
James Hornfischer, historian
Patrick O’Brian, novelist
“Il Miglior Fabbro”
The Greater Maker
Dante Alighieri
Purgatorio, canto 26
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep,
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea!
William Whiting, Navy Hymn, 1860
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto 1
1
What’s That Buzz?
Oahu, Hawaii
In his uneasy sleep, he heard a distant, steady hum. Bees.
He often dreamed of the bees, buzzing out behind the small cottage in the Florida Keys where he’d grown up. His mother, Bella, was a fanatic for fresh honey, a staple of her native Italy, where beehives were part of her family’s country villa. Bella loved spreading the honey over fresh-baked bread or drizzling it over yogurt. She was born in Florence, of a prosperous family whose leather-tanning business failed, leading them to emigrate through Ellis Island early in the century. On the weekends in Italy, the family would go to a rustic cabin in the Tuscan hills for long, lazy dinners. The table was covered with bowls of fresh berries, cream in beautiful clay pitchers, bowls of yogurt, grilled lamb and rosemary-scented sausages, strong Chianti in green glass pitchers. For dessert there were beautiful sugar-dusted pastries, which the family drizzled with local honey. Bella had learned to gather fresh honey as a child, and in the hills around their rustic country home the family kept beehives. Each weekend night, the trees over the big table on the swept gravel behind the villa swayed in the summer breeze, leaning approvingly down toward the happy diners.
The love of sweetness came with her to America, and in Florida she devotedly tended a half dozen hives behind their home in the Keys. From his tiny bedroom at the back of the house, Scott Bradley James would often hear them droning on hot afternoons while he tried to focus on his schoolwork.
Long after Scott left Florida in 1937 to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, he would hear the bees in his dreams. The buzz would start softly, then grow louder and more insistent as the bees traversed the short distance from the tropical foliage on the fringe of the property to the hives. The bees loved the purple wild orchids, white and green honeysuckle, and bright-pink bougainvillea, returning again and again from their white wooden homes.
He’d been stung plenty but had learned to appreciate the bees’ single-minded focus on the mission at hand: creating their tiny kingdom and fighting to build its waxy walls, guarding a queen at its buzzing heart. And the honey was good, raw, and sweet.
As he slept in Hawaii on this Sunday morning in late 1941, the hum began so distantly and softly that Scott was puzzled, even in his dreams, at the bees’ lethargy. But then the droning became more insistent, at a pitch he recognized, and in his mind’s eye he pictured his mother walking out the back door and heading toward the hives, her smoke pot in hand. He smiled in his sleep.
Then the buzzing changed pitch again, and Scott stirred, half waking. Something did not fit into the normal pattern of his dream. He opened his eyes. Kai, the young woman sleeping by his side, seemed to sense his unease and cried out softly in her sleep. She turned her head slightly, and in the dim first light shining around the edges of the khaki window blind, he could see the small gold cross dangling from her neck.
As he stirred, Scott remembered with pleasure that Kai’s parents were away on the Big Island visiting relatives of her mother, a native Hawaiian. He knew they weren’t entirely comfortable that their daughter had been dating an officer lately. He’d told them that he had duty aboard his battleship, USS West Virginia, that weekend and wouldn’t be spending time with their only daughter. Changing a duty section sign-in sheet was easy. He had quietly slipped down the ship’s after brow and jumped on his 1938 Indian Sport Scout motorcycle.
As he felt her next to him, all the images of the night before came alive in his mind. They had slept together for the first time, and Kai had fallen asleep well after midnight. He had stayed up another hour, smoking and looking at her. God, it was so good being here next to her. He wondered where all of this would lead.
Suddenly the lovely dreams and memories vanished. The buzzing climbed to a crescendo, and instantly he was fully awake. That sound was not made by South Florida honeybees.
Aircraft were passing overhead, many aircraft, flying in close formation above the dark green hills in the Lualualei Valley, where the small bungalow
As the insistent buzz rose and rose, the full impact of his situation landed: absent without leave from his assigned duty, in bed with a chief petty officer’s daughter, and uncertain why waves of planes were flying overhead. His stomach clenched, and he realized he was scared.
He reached for his watch on the nightstand. It was 7:30 a.m.
The buzzing grew even louder.
He stepped outside the bungalow and looked to the east for confirmation. Long lines of Japanese Zeros were overhead. Jesus, he thought, where are our fighters? He scanned the horizon, searching for U.S. aircraft and seeing none. All he registered besides the Zeros were the high, heavy rain clouds in the distance above the mountain range, which seemed gravid, with dark gray underbellies, serving as a cold, uncaring backdrop to the enemy aircraft whose engines whined louder and louder as they passed by.
He walked back into the bedroom and shook Kai awake. He leaned over her and kissed her. She murmured something he couldn’t understand. “Those are Japanese aircraft, and they are headed toward Pearl,” he said. “Do you have an air raid shelter on this compound?”
Confused, she shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Scott hugged her quickly. “Stay inside. Wait for the shore patrol. I have to get back to my ship.” He walked outside, kick-started his motorcycle, and roared off.
2
Reef Points
Florida Keys
One day when he was eleven years old, his mother asked him what his first memory was. He told her it was of being in a car in a thunderstorm, sitting in the front seat between his mother and father, watching the windshield wipers go back and forth. She laughed and said, yes, she remembered that day—they were driving east and north on the road between their cottage in Key West and his father’s fishing camp on Dark Forest Key. “Lord, that was a storm,” she said.
What Scott didn’t say was that above all, he remembered his mother’s fear. She’d been afraid that his father would drive their dilapidated Model A jalopy into a watery ditch. Somehow, he sensed her fear that day, even as a tiny child. And he could recall her relief when they pulled safely up to the two-room cinder-block structure with a small dock out back on the island. The storm was passing over as they unloaded the car, and the last drizzle of the lingering squalls spat on the corrugated tin roof of the tiny dwelling. For the rest of his life, Scott would remember talking to his mother about the storm of his earliest memories. He’d see plenty of big Florida storms as he grew older, of course, but that sense of worry about seeing one brewing on the horizon, followed by a sense of relief and release when it ended, stayed with him over the years. He gained a faith in good outcomes but retained a healthy respect for how badly events could turn in an instant.
His mother was the reader in the family. Her family had once been rich, well educated, with an expansive home in Florence itself and a weekend cottage on half a dozen hectares in the Tuscan hills. The leather business had been good to her father, and his two daughters were educated young ladies. Bella had been taught both French and English as a girl, and she often thought back to those days when the family could afford fine clothes and beautiful books. She was proud to be from such an intellectual city and to have grown up with books around her.
When the business collapsed and the family emigrated with the last of their savings, they eventually came to Florida, seeking a fresh start in the agrarian center of the long peninsula, which her father joked reminded him of Italy—just hotter, flatter, and with no decent wine. Bella’s father managed to rebuild his leather business, and while never as wealthy again, the family settled into a comfortable life in their new land.
When she met and married Scott’s father, Robert James, a Navy sailor from the Florida Keys, she insisted on taking a small trunk of books to their new home on Key West. All were classics, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil, and Dante’s Divine Comedy with the Gustave Doré illustrations that terrified and fascinated Scott as a child. The prize at the heart of the tiny library was a leather-bound set of the Harvard Classics, a fifty-volume set that she turned to almost every night and from which she gradually educated her son. He loved hearing her read to him, the Italian accent softened by a decade in Florida, but still a lovely, lyrical voice that floated above and around his head as he would drift to sleep. Scott especially loved the seagoing memoir Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., about a young man’s adventures under sail in the nineteenth century.
Bella and her new husband often went up to their modest place on Dark Forest Key. At first Bella hated going up there, far from her friends and books. And she hated the random violence of the Florida weather: the truly dangerous hurricanes, the sudden, blinding squalls and thunderstorms, the unpredictable flooding of hardscrabble roads. But over time, she came to realize that even the worst of storms would break. That sense of life as a series of passages through storms, holding to faith in coming through them, was the essence of Bella, and it was passed along to her only child.
Scott’s father frequently wanted a midweek break from his daily work on Key West, where he captained a small recreational fishing boat. The weekends were spent taking rich northern men out to drink moonshine and beer despite the ineffective national prohibition. They smoked big Cuban cigars and went after the big marlins of the Gulf Stream. The clients were largely inept tuna fishermen, and the lunches Scott’s mother packed for the customers would end up feeding the fish more often than not—thrown over the transom one way or another. But the excursions paid the bills, paid off the small cottage just off Duval Street, and kept Scott’s father on the water, where he felt most at home.
Robert James hated being called Bob. He had been in the Navy during the Great War, a quartermaster on a little destroyer, where he learned celestial navigation, shot the stars with an old sextant, rode the huge blue and black waves of the North Atlantic, and bound himself to the saltwater life. When his ship sailed south from the high Atlantic toward its home port of Norfolk, he’d stand on the fantail of the destroyer as it shuddered through the gray-green swells, the afterdecks of the ship rising and falling. Robert’s eyes would be drawn to the distant line of the horizon, where the sea met the sky, and in those moments, he felt a peace he’d not known growing up in central Florida on a midsize cattle ranch. He was looking at something far bigger than his own small life: God lives in those big rollers, Robert would think, and I’m looking at eternity.
After the war, Robert James came back to Florida, but he knew he wanted a life by the sea, not on an inland farm. Robert said goodbye to his parents and hitched a ride to the bottom of Florida, to the small village of Key West, and hooked on with a couple of fishing captains, bouncing back and forth between commercial fishing and charter work with tourists. He met Bella in 1920 in Tarpon Springs, and their only child was born late that year, at a time when the recovery from the Spanish flu and a high-flying postwar economy combined to bring tourists to the salt air and honky-tonk world of the Keys.
Robert James thought hard about a name for his son. Bella was happy to let him choose, and so Scott Bradley James was named after two naval officers. Robert James had two nautical heroes, and he thought about both of them as he held his newborn son. The first was the dashing British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, whose quest in Terra Nova to cross the Antarctic on foot ended in his death in 1913. Scott’s courageous exploits had captured the imagination of the world, especially those who knew the sea and its challenges. To Robert he represented determination and a willingness to fight whatever the world put in front of him.
Robert also thought from time to time about a quiet American rear admiral who had embarked briefly aboard his destroyer during the Great War: Bradley Fiske. Robert admired Fiske’s magnificent walrus mustache and heard from the lieutenant who was the navigator in command of the quartermaster’s division that Rear Admiral Fiske was worshipped in much of the new American steel Navy. Robert could remember the lieutenant saying that Fiske was a brilliant inventor and the best ship handler anyone had ever seen. After Fiske retired, Robert read an article by him in a naval journal, laying out the case for a war between the U.S. and Japan in the Pacific. Robert didn’t have an opinion about that one way or the other, but he figured anyone who could invent things, drive a ship, and write articles about big world issues was someone to admire.
