The Last Ship (1988)

The Last Ship is a 1988 post-apocalyptic fiction novel by American writer William Brinkley. The Last Ship tells the story of a United States Navy guided missile destroyer, the fictional USS Nathan James (DDG-80), on patrol in the Barents Sea during a brief, full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It details the ship's ensuing search for a new home for her crew.

An eponymous television series loosely based on the novel aired from 2014 to 2018 on the TNT network.

Background

The story is told in a first-person point of view by the ship's commanding officer, "Thomas", whose full name is never revealed. Thomas is writing this account several months after the war in order to describe the odyssey of his Norwegian-homeported ship, USS Nathan James (DDG-80), in the aftermath of the conflict.

Thomas begins by describing his ship to the reader. He discusses the ethics of commanding a warship, the capabilities of nuclear strike forces, daily life aboard a U.S. Navy ship in the Arctic Circle, and the nature of his ship's mission. Captain Thomas remarks that, despite the reduction in the land-based ICBM arsenal, there is still considerable power in the SLBMs and Tomahawks; his ship alone has more power than several missile silos combined.

Plot

On December 21, at an unspecified year, without prior warning, Thomas, the captain of the U.S. Navy destroyer, USS Nathan James (DDG-80), receives authenticated orders to carry out a nuclear strike on the Soviet city of Orel and its nearby ICBM silos. The nuclear-tipped Tomahawks are fired off in an emotionless, automated manner. Over a period of hours the crew watches them make landfall on radar and listens as the radio stations from Orel go off the air. With the mission completed, they report back to their superiors, and a reply from the U.S. Navy comes through, ordering them to break with general orders, but the message garbles to gibberish towards the end without relaying their new orders. With one exception later in the book, this is the last official communication from the U.S. Navy that Nathan James ever receives. While they can later surmise there must have been a series of major exchanges, the crew never learns with certainty what led to the launches or the exact sequence of events.

Thomas decides to head southward into the North Sea and then to the United Kingdom, in order to re-establish contact with friendly forces. The ship encounters dense clouds of radioactive smoke all around Great Britain. Reaching London via the River Thames, the smoke becomes too dangerous, and they are forced to retreat. As the ship is sealed, Thomas catches a glimpse of the ruins of Big Ben through the smoke, with its clock hands stopped at the presumed time the bombs fell.

Lacking information, the ship sets off to scout the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea, counterclockwise from southern Italy to Gibraltar. Off the coast of Brittany, the ship encounters a non-communicative submarine which tails them until the ship arrives off the destroyed Rock of Gibraltar, where it vanishes. Nathan James continues to scout the Mediterranean coastline, finding only scores of disfigured survivors suffering from radiation sickness who have fled the chaos inland. Off the coast of Southern France, Nathan James finds a luxury sailboat with the passengers apparently killed mid-meal, suggesting the use of a neutron bomb on a nearby coastal city. The corpse of the ship's radioman is found deeper within, along with his limited report of areas hit with nuclear weapons, painting a bleak picture for Europe, the Soviet Union, and North America. Returning to Gibraltar, the Soviet Navy ballistic missile submarine Pushkin surfaces to make direct contact.

The two vessels quickly establish a truce and agree to a joint operation. The Pushkin, fully fuelled but low on food, will first scout West Africa, then attempt to reach a secret Soviet supply base in the Arctic and retrieve supplies and nuclear fuel for Nathan James. The U.S. Navy destroyer, relatively well-stocked with food but low on nuclear fuel, will scout North Africa, then make her way to the Pacific Ocean in search of habitable land for the two crews. Thomas keeps the deal he made with the Soviet captain, from most of his crew, in order to not get their hopes up. Trading food and a place for the Soviets in any society the Nathan James' crew builds on land, he is promised nuclear fuel, if found at the Soviet base. Before Nathan James scouts Mediterranean Africa, many crew members request to be baptized. With Thomas’ blessing, the ship's Jesuit chaplain conducts the sermon on a beach.

Strangely, despite not seeing evidence of direct nuclear strikes, the ship finds no people, only radiation levels which steadily increase the farther inland from any shore the party lands on. During the journey, the crew salvages relatively uncontaminated farming equipment, plants, and even two goats from a small island to potentially start farming any hospitable land.

Eventually Nathan James receives a message from the National Command Authority ordering all recipients to reply. They do so, but the message repeats unaltered with machine-like precision; they conclude it is just an automated transmission. Based on his knowledge of the Soviet Union's targeting of North America, the Soviet submarine captain's report, the French radioman's report, and what he has seen of Europe, Thomas, along with most of the ship's officers, concludes that the United States has simply ceased to exist, and what remains of North America is uninhabitable.