Battleship (Movie Tie-in Edition) (31 page)

“Hopper,” she managed to say.

Cal patted her arm. “I’m sorry.”

Seized with rage, none of which was directed at the men who were supporting her, Sam pulled away from both of them and stood there, on her own, staring at the place where a ship of the line had once been and now wasn’t.

Mick had pulled out a pair of binoculars and was studying the scene more closely. “Don’t give up hope. There are lifeboats deployed.”

She knew there had been, and nodded. She knew there was still hope; it just seemed to be growing fainter by the moment. “The
John Paul Jones
can’t stop those things from sending their message now,” she said. She and Mick traded looks.

“You know what that means,” said Mick.

She nodded.

Cal stared at the two of them as they started moving back to the Jeep. They paused when they realized he wasn’t following them, and Mick gestured impatiently for him to climb on board.

“You’re getting that weird violent look again,” said Cal. “I don’t like that look.”

Sam could not have given a damn at that moment about what looks Cal liked or didn’t like. Obviously Mick was of the same mind, as he said to Cal, “You said that satellite only orbits by once every twenty-four hours.”

“Right.”

“So if they miss it, they have to wait,” said Mick.

Cal frowned, thought about it, then shrugged. “I suppose.”

“Then we’re gonna go try and buy the world another day,” said Mick. Sam nodded in agreement.

They got into the Jeep, and then Cal stopped where he was. “You’re planning to attack them directly, aren’t you.”

“That’s the plan, Einstein. Now come on …”

And slowly Cal shook his head. “I can’t,” he whispered, and he was trembling. “I’m not like you. I’m not heroic. I’m … I’m sorry.”

“Get in the damned Jeep, Doc. I’m not kidding around.”

“Neither am I.”

Sam just looked at him with a combination of anger and disappointment, and said, “We don’t have time for this.” Before Mick could get out of the Jeep and go after Cal, Sam had gunned the engine and taken off.

Calvin Zapata stood there and watched them drive away, left alone with his cowardice.

The small fleet of RHIBs, carting the last remaining survivors of the doomed
John Paul Jones
, glided across the water, a deathly silence having descended upon them like a blanket. In every direction Hopper looked as he sat in the prow of an RHIB, he saw on the faces of his men a sense of crushing defeat. Every crewman was suffering in his own personal hell, knowing they had failed, that the world was lost … because of them.

There was every temptation for Hopper to join them.

No one would blame him. He’d gotten some licks in, he’d taken out those stinger vessels. He’d simply been overwhelmed by a weapon he could not possibly have defeated.

He’d done his best, but it wasn’t enough.

Except he refused to accept that.

He stared resolutely at the horizon, eyes flinty, his mind racing. “No,” he said firmly. “It doesn’t end like this.”

Nagata was in the small ship with him. There was skepticism in his eyes, the same look of defeat that was reflected in the faces of everyone else in view. “What do you want us to do, Hopper? Ram them with the inflatables? We have no ships left!”

Slowly Hopper shook his head. “We have one.”

“One what?”

As the RHIBs came into the harbor, Hopper pointed straight ahead. “We have a battleship.”

Nagata still looked confused. “What? You mean behind the
Missouri?
” It took him a few more moments to realize what Hopper meant, and when he did, all of his usual reserve dissipated. “Are you
crazy?
That’s …” He gestured toward the ancient vessel that was permanently moored in Pearl Harbor. “That’s a museum!”

“Not today,” said Hopper.

Minutes later Hopper and his command crew were striding across the deck of the antiquated battleship. The rest of the survivors from the
John Paul Jones
—the ones who weren’t in immediate need of medical attention—were spreading out, looking around the vessel with the same sense of wonder that one might have seen from wide-eyed tour groups. They’d seen it all before, of course, but never with the notion of it being sent into combat.

“This ship is seventy years old,” Beast was saying. “It’s completely outdated.” He started ticking off the problems on his fingers. “The firing systems are all analog.
The engines probably haven’t been started in a decade, which would be fine, but they’re
steam
, which I have no idea how to fire up. And even if you did have a user’s manual and gave me six weeks to go through it all, we still don’t have enough crew to physically run the damn thing!”

“I already thought of that,” said Hopper. “Stone brought me here to visit once, back when I first enlisted. I’ve stopped by every so often, talked with them. Great guys. There’re experienced hands ready to serve; more than enough to fill our needs.”

“What are you talking ab—?”

But Hopper had stopped walking, and was now pointing ahead of them. Beast, Raikes, Ord and several others stared where he was indicating, and it was all they could do not to laugh. Then, faced with the seriousness of their situation, not laughing suddenly became quite easy.

An assortment of old salts—Navy men who were actually more ancient than the ship whose deck they were striding across—were approaching them. They were grizzled, and they weren’t moving particularly quickly. But they walked with their heads held high, distinct pride and—of all things—an attitude of certainty that, now that they’d been called in, everything was going to work out just fine.

There was one who seemed to be the natural leader. Tall, angular, with a square jaw and quiet blue eyes, he strode up to Hopper and straightened his back. “Captain,” he said, and saluted. “Saw you fight those bastards. Hell of a thing. Sorry about your boat.”

Hopper nodded. “Schmidt, isn’t it?”

The old salt nodded. “Lieutenant J. G. Schmidt, yes sir. That was a long time ago, though. ‘Andy’ will do for an old man.”

“Well, Andy, everything old is new again.” His gaze
took in all the elderly sailors who were waiting to hear what he had to say. “You men have given so much for your country over the years. No one has the right to ask any more of you. But I
am
asking.”

“When we saw what was happening,” Andy said slowly, in a rough voice, “we said ‘not again.’ Not in our lifetimes.” His eyes were haunted; he seemed to be looking inward to images that he had witnessed decades earlier, on that terrible day in 1941, images seared into his mind that could never be erased. Then his eyes hardened to steel. “What do you need, sir?”

“I need to make this ship ready for war.”

Andy grinned. “War we can do.”

Hopper’s crew moved with renewed energy, prepping the
Missouri
for action. Some of them were muttering about how ridiculous this whole venture was, but invariably they’d wind up saying it within range of one of the old salts, whose collective hearing was apparently still pretty sharp. As a consequence the reluctant sailors would be on the receiving end of a sound
thwap
to the head and a growled, “Show some respect, sonny,” from whichever of the elderly sailors happened to be within earshot.

Everything that smacked of either tourism or the ship being a museum piece was quickly scuttled or tossed overboard. Down came the large banner that read,
“USS Mighty Mo Museum,”
accompanied by a loud ripping noise that garnered some cheering from the old sailors. Hopper spotted, with amusement, one old sailor sweeping his arm across a shelf full of merchandise, knocking it all to the deck and then kicking it off the edge of the ship. A particularly joyous moment was when Beast, Ord and several of the old salts combined their efforts to heft a six-hundred-pound “Mold-a-Rama” wax machine, a particularly cheesy device that—for a buck—would produce a small wax replica of the
Missouri
while you waited. Kids
loved it, and the old salts hated it particularly with a passion. For some reason it struck them as the ultimate trivialization of a once proud fighting vessel. Andy seemed especially enthusiastic about lending a shoulder to the endeavor. Slowly they hoisted it up over the deck. They grunted and shoved and for a few moments it seemed as if the machine was going to win the battle and thud back onto the ship. But then the momentum shifted to them and seconds later the wax machine tumbled down, crashed into the dock and shattered.

“Wax on, wax off!” shouted Beast as the old salts and he high-fived one another.

Andy started chanting, “Way to go, Mighty Mo! Way to go, Mighty Mo!” The rhythmic cheer caught on and soon all the elderly sailors were saying it, too.

Beast turned to Ord, chucked a thumb at Andy, and said, “Check it out. The rhyme of the Ancient Mariners!”

Ord stared at him. “The what now?”

Beast closed his eyes in annoyance. “Just get your ass up to the control room, okay?”

“Fine. Uh …” He glanced around. “Never actually been on a battleship, much less one this old. Where—?”

Overhearing the exchange, Andy called, “Segar! Bring the young man up to the control center!”

“Right this way, young feller.”

Ord turned and saw what appeared to him to be the oldest man on the planet. Segar’s eyes were set in what seemed a permanent squint, and his face was all jowl and bristle, with his head thrust forward defiantly on a thin neck. He was wearing white ducks and a short-sleeved blue shirt that had the
Missouri
’s name emblazoned above the right breast. His forearms were incredibly well muscled, given his age.

“You’re a sailor?” said an astounded Ord.

“D’ja think I’m a cowboy?” said Segar. He gestured for Ord to follow him and then moved with surprising
speed. He didn’t walk so much as he waddled with long strides. Ord hustled after him.

Segar brought him straightaway to the control room, which was blocked off by cordons meant to keep tourists out. Without hesitation Ord picked up the wooden barriers and chucked them aside. Then he entered the room, Segar right behind him, and stopped dead in his tracks.

Where there ordinarily would have been a computer array, Ord was faced with what seemed to be ten thousand analog dials.

He stared at them, not knowing where to begin. Then he said hopefully, “Is there, like, a mouse or something?”

“Nope,” said Segar, shaking his head. “Used to be, but we got cats on board, so that ain’t a problem. Which is good ’cause sometimes the little buggers could get up inside there and start buildin’ nests. Screws up all the readings.”

Ord stared at him. “Riiiiight.”

Meanwhile another old salt, named Grumby—rotund and with a hearty laugh—had accompanied Beast down to the engine room. Beast stopped in awe, having much the same reaction as Ord had up in command. Massive boilers loomed over him like iron sentinels. He didn’t even know where to start, and looked to Grumby in bewilderment.

The old man laughed. “Step aside, son.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a book of matches. He lit one and then held it up in Beast’s face as if he were about to perform a magic trick. Then he tossed it to one side. It sailed through the air like a tiny shooting star and landed inside one of the boiler’s pilot burners. “Here there be dragons,” he said solemnly.

An instant later Beast understood what he meant as, with a massive roar of flame—as if indeed belched up
from the mouth of one of those mythic reptiles—the oil that was deep within the bowels of the boiler ignited. “Best hold your ears,” Grumby advised him. Beast clapped his hands over his ears, although he noticed that Grumby was not doing likewise. Instead the old man was manipulating a complex array of dials, firing up the engine, which gave off a hellacious roar that was quite simply the loudest thing Beast had ever heard. Yet Grumby wasn’t flinching from the racket, which led Beast to conclude that years spent down in this cacophony had probably made the old man partly, if not mostly, deaf.

Grumby shouted over the noise,
“Like a kitten!”

And Beast thought,
Right, purring like a kitten. A thousand-pound kitten
.

Hopper arrived at the helm, Nagata right behind him. A sailor named Driscoll was there waiting for them. Driscoll had narrow, canny eyes beneath bushy white eyebrows, and carried with him an air of adventure, as if he were a sailor on a quest to hunt down some great, legendary monster.

There was a sense of majesty in the room. Heroes in a great war had tread here, and—in a sense of ironic turnaround—had done so in battling the very people from whom the man at Hopper’s side had descended.
Funny how enemies can become friends
, Hopper thought, and wondered briefly if that meant someday the aliens now trying to annihilate them would eventually be allies.

Then he remembered the explosive death of his brother and hoped he wouldn’t be alive to see it. He didn’t want to live in a world where he had to be best pals with the monsters that had killed Stone. If that made him some sort of racist, if that was shortsighted of him … fine. He was really okay with that.

“How we looking on fuel?” he asked Driscoll.

“Six hundred tons, sir. Just enough for maintenance runs.”

“Ordnance?”

“Scraped what we could from storage. It ain’t much.”

He nodded and then said, “Cast us off, sailor. Set course for Saddle Ridge.”

Driscoll ran off to carry out the orders. As the combined crew of young men and old salts made final preparations for the ship to depart, Hopper—as he walked around the helm, running his fingertips along it with reverence—said, “You got kids, Nagata?”

“Children, yes. Three. I have three girls.”

“Three girls.” Hopper whistled softly.

“I am hoping to try for a boy, but my wife … she only makes girls.” There was something in his voice that sounded like a trace of humor, although with him, it wasn’t easy to be sure.

“Girls aren’t so bad.”

“They are my angels,” he said softly. “Do you have children, Mr. Hopper?”