THE SHIP THAT TURNED

USS Nathan Hale has been at sea too long. The food is running thin, repairs are waiting on parts that never arrive, and thousands of sailors have stopped believing promises about when they are coming home. Then a sailor dies on the flight deck, and the deployment is extended again. Command Master Chief Elias Boone asks for one thing: stop flight operations until someone outside the ship is willing to see what is happening aboard it. When the order comes to resume operations and confine the organizers, enough of the crew refuses that the captain remains in command only on paper. Nathan Hale turns toward the Strait of Hormuz. An American destroyer follows. Washington demands control. A Marine fighter squadron refuses to become anyone's private enforcement arm. Thousands of sailors who never joined the uprising discover that there may be no neutral duty left to perform. And the people who seized the ship begin to disagree about what they are willing to trade for their own freedom. When a second mutiny rises inside the first, the man who helped remove the captain may have only one way to prevent Americans from firing on Americans: give the ship back to the officer he displaced. >"The chain of command doesn't break all at once. It turns."