Battleship

him at all was nothing short of astounding to him.

He reached out to her, tried to take her hand, but she shook it away. So he folded his arms, looking uneasy as he said, “I do have the respect. And I… I’m sorry.” It seemed a hopelessly inadequate thing for him to say, but it was all he could manage.

She took a moment to regain control of herself and then looked up at him. He could see the red rims of her eyes. She’d been crying before she ever came to see him. “Stone says there’s going to be a captain’s mast as soon as you get back.”

“Yeah.” It was all he said. There didn’t really seem much of anything else for him to say.

There was such despair on Sam’s face that Hopper was starting to feel as if he were some kind of sadist for even spending time with her. “What is wrong with you?” she said, and thumped her palm on his chest for good measure.

“I’m not sure.”

She was starting to tear up again, and she wiped them away as quickly as she could. There were others around, sailors and officers and their spouses, and the last thing she needed was for the daughter of the admiral to look weak, as if she were all choked up over the notion of her boyfriend going off to war games. Sam spoke to him low and intensely: “Something is wrong, Hopper. Really wrong, and you have to make it right. I love you very much, but something has got to change. Make it right.” She didn’t wait for him to leave her. Instead she walked away from him as quickly as she could.

Hopper stood there for a moment, wrestling with the possibility of running after her, maybe even blowing off the war games completely. Let her know where his priorities were. But what would be the result of that? Desertion charges? Dishonorable discharge? Then again, wasn’t that a foregone conclusion, with the captain’s mast? If he was going to go down, why not just go down in flames?

Because if you wait till after the mast, you might still have a whisper of a breath of a prayer. Turn your back on the Navy and it’s all over. You, Sam, all of it. You’ll never be able to make it right the way she wants you to.

These were the thoughts that hung on him as he joined his shipmates aboard the John Paul Jones.

Later, as he stood leaning on the railing of the prow while the destroyer prepared to pull out, he wondered if it was indeed too late to fix things. Sam had talked of love, but she’d walked away from him. She’d spoken of his making things right, but hadn’t suggested how he could possibly go about it.

Maybe she’s already preparing emotionally to cut me loose, and who could blame her? Is there any point in…?

Then he saw her. She was standing in the parking lot, leaning against the Jeep, her eyes clearly searching for some sign of Hopper. Then she spotted him, raised her arm, and waved.

She came back to see me off.

It was like a jolt of adrenaline to his heart. He gave her a salute and then did a double tap of his fist against his heart, followed by a V-for-Victory sign with his fingers. He was trying to tell her every way he knew that he still loved her and would try to find a way to fix things, for her. It was a great message and he was positive it was exactly what she needed to hear.

Now all he had to do was find a way to make it actually happen.

U.S. FLEET, OUT TO SEA

Stone Hopper was never more comfortable than when he was on the bridge of the Sampson. He considered it to be his place of power, and his authority flowed from there. All eyes of his bridge crew were upon him, and he addressed them in a calm, almost leisurely manner. They listened attentively to his every word.

“All right, everybody, that was a great under way from Pearl. Solid job all around.” He nodded in approval and everyone was smiling. They knew they were the best damned crew in the fleet—no reason to pussyfoot around it. “And good job on liberty. No incidents.”

The moment he said it, he knew what they were thinking. There were certainly no incidents involving the crew of the Sampson. But the elephant in the room was the awareness—which had become common knowledge by that point—of the trouble that Stone Hopper’s idiot brother had gotten himself into.

He didn’t bother to address it. What was there to say? Instead he told them briskly, “Now, let’s get buttoned back up. We’re gonna be close maneuvering with a lot of other nations. This exercise will allow us to put our training to a rigorous test. I’m excited to see what we learn.”

They nodded, almost as one.

He regarded them sternly. “Teamwork is unity of purpose. All of us pulling together. Trust your fellow crewmen. Respect is earned. There is no greater feeling I know of than individual excellence forming teamwork that leads to victory. Victory through teamwork. Be safe out there. Look out for one another. And let’s keep chargin’. Working together, supporting one another. Your voice counts. Speak up.”

He straightened his shoulders and saluted them. They snapped off a sharp, perfectly coordinated response and then went to their assigned tasks. Stone watched them moving with smooth efficiency. He should be focusing completely on them and taking pride in their actions. Instead he was thinking about Alex’s troubles. Did you let him down somehow? Was this, in any way, your fault? Ultimately he decided that it was not, and that sooner or later he was going to have to stop taking emotional responsibility for Alex’s screwups. At some point Alex Hopper was going to have to grow the hell up, and if it took a full-blown court-martial and being drummed out of the Navy for that to happen, well…

At least he’d finally learn.

Either that or spiral downward faster than ever.

Every department head on a ship such as the John Paul Jones was utterly convinced that his little realm was the center of the vessel’s universe. The bridge crew would have assured any visitors that the bridge was the ship’s soul, while the engine crew would have declared that the engine room was the ship’s heart.

Alex Hopper knew for a fact that the combat information center, typically abbreviated as CIC, was where it all went down. Engines, bridges, those were all fine for what they were, but a fishing trawler had a bridge and an AMC Gremlin had an engine. The John Paul Jones was a destroyer, designed for combat on the high seas. Without weapons, nothing else mattered, and the CIC was packed with a billion dollars’ worth of Aegis-class weapons technology. Any battle that the John Paul Jones found itself in was going to be fought from this room, and Alex Hopper was making damned sure that everyone in his command knew that. As long as he was weapons officer, nothing was going to stop the John Paul Jones from being the best damned destroyer ever to have sailed the Pacific Rim.

There were nearly two dozen people populating the CIC. Most of them were manning an assortment of very sophisticated computers, capable of providing every single reading that could possibly be desired.

“I want this understood: we are not in this weapons room to learn, we are here to crush the other ships. Is that clear?”

Raikes was the gunnery officer. As Hopper spoke, she could actually be seen to caress the controls, as if Hopper’s words amounted to foreplay and she was being turned on by them. It was entirely possible that was the case. Aside from Hopper, there was no one in the CIC who got more jazzed from blowing things up than Raikes.

He moved through the CIC, checking each system, one by one. “Let’s remember,” he reminded them, “all this technology was manufactured for the U.S. Navy by the lowest bidder, because that’s the American way. So we stay on top of things now to make sure nothing fails us when we need it. Clear?”