There wasn’t so much as a murmur of dissent, but Halabi could feel the men bristle. Spruance remained silent, watching the lights of the helicopters as they hovered and swooped against the black curtain of the Pacific night. Karen would swear that her neck was burning with the intensity of the glares being directed at her by some of the bridge crew. But she clasped her hands behind her back and tried to take what small measure of consolation she could from the experience of riding atop one of history’s greatest warships.

She was startled out of her reverie when Spruance next spoke.

“Your people are very professional, Captain. They’ve saved a lot of men tonight.”

He didn’t add what a few men around him no doubt thought, that Halabi’s people had killed even more.

“Standards haven’t slipped, Admiral.”

“How long have you been at war, Captain?” Spruance asked in a distracted voice.

“Myself? Twelve years, sir. But it’s a different kind of war. More complicated, I suppose.”

“I don’t see how that could be,” Spruance said.

“Politics, religion, history.” She shrugged. “It gets very complicated, believe me. Often we’re not even fighting other states, just a state of mind. Ideas.”

Spruance turned completely around. Silhouetted against the glass, it was nearly impossible to see his face. “You can’t fight ideas with rockets and guns.”

“On the contrary, that’s exactly what you were doing out here, Admiral. You came here to kill men and sink ships. But it was ideas that sent you and the Japanese to war. And it’s ideas about how men and women should live that have sent England to war with Germany. I know that all sounds far too abstract, what with so much blood being spilled. But even after Pearl Harbor, you don’t understand the nature of the thing you’re fighting.”

Karen watched as Spruance folded his arms in the dark space of the bridge.

“You sound like you’re running for Congress—sorry, Parliament.”

“It’s just my MA showing. Conflict studies at Cambridge. You’ll have to excuse my academic interest in your war. It happened a long time before I was born. But we studied it closely. Because of the immense scale of violence and cruelty this conflict unleashed, there persists in our culture a horror of war, a belief that it is an unmitigated evil, even though this is also recognized as a just war. One that could not be morally avoided.”

“Because of Pearl Harbor,” said Spruance.

“No. Because of Auschwitz.”

Spruance shook his head. “Sounds like a Kraut name, but I’ve never heard of it.”

“You will.”

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0409 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942