No Higher Honor (19 page)

The
Roberts
painted the
Alvand
with both fire control radars, and Rinn sent a radio message for good measure: “Unknown vessel, this is a U.S. Navy warship. Divert your course. I intend to stand on.” The Iranian hung in for several minutes, and presently the
Roberts
's forward lookout could distinguish the water creaming at
Alvand
's bow. But the Iranian skipper lost his nerve at three miles' distance, veered off, and disappeared over the horizon. Rinn let him go.

But the
Roberts
was waiting for the Iranian ship the next morning, thanks to a bit of detective work by the radar operators. At the suggestion of XO Eckelberry, the combat team had dug through the ship's electronic memory, looking for patterns in the
Alvand
's behavior. They discovered that the Iranian captain began each day's patrol at dawn in the same place. The
Roberts
mounted a stakeout. When the
Alvand
appeared at 5:30
AM
, the U.S. warship began to shadow it from the horizon.

The work paid off a few hours later. The
Alvand
closed on an unescorted tanker and radioed orders to heave to and prepare to be boarded. This kind of thing happened every day, and the situation could go several ways. Sometimes the Iranians would send a whaleboat over to search the target ship for Iraq-bound arms and military equipment. But sometimes the radio call was just a ploy: once the merchant stopped, the warship opened fire.

The
Roberts
, whose crew had been monitoring the conversation on the bridge radio, accelerated toward the tanker and frigate. The
Alvand
warned the U.S. warship to stand clear, and when Rinn ignored the warning and stood on, the Iranian bugged out to the northeast. Score one for Detective
Roberts
.

The American frigate was just getting warmed up. A few days later, the teleprinter in the ship's radio room rattled with reports that a trio of Boghammars and a
Sa'am
frigate had been spotted in the Hormuz strait, headed southwest toward Abu Musa. Rinn doused his running lights, shut down his radars, and set out to hunt. By 4:30
AM
, the U.S. ship had settled about three nautical miles off the Iranian frigate's quarter. It was a perfect tactical position: near enough to keep an eye on his quarry, distant enough for a Standard missile to arm itself in flight. “Got him!” Rinn crowed to his brother. “No higher honor!”

For half a day, the
Roberts
stayed glued to the tail of the
Sahand
. The Iranian captain changed course several times in hopes of shaking his American shadow, but to no avail. Around 3:00
PM
, his patience snapped. He hauled his frigate around, pointed his bow southeast, and headed for the
Roberts
at twenty-eight knots. The duel was on: guns and gas turbines at five miles. Rinn cranked up his engines and veered to meet his adversary. The Iranian frigate approached, its bow riding a bloom of white water. The
Sahand
's skipper seemed to be made of sterner stuff
than his colleague aboard the
Alvand
, and the gap between the ships closed to less than a mile.

Rinn waited, waited—and then turned sharply to starboard. The
Roberts
heeled hard, letting the
Sahand
speed by. The U.S. frigate kept turning, rudder straining against the sea, until a full circle put it back on the Iranian's tail.
Sahand
jinked north and then cut back hard to starboard, crossing the bow of the
Roberts
and heading east. Rinn took his ship northward and then doubled back to face the
Sahand
. The Iranian turned northeast across the
Roberts
's bow once more, and the American frigate barreled through its foe's dissipating wake. The
Sahand
captain finally ran out of ideas. He gave up and steadied on a northeast course. The
Roberts
settled back into its trailing position.

Rinn was ecstatic. “This moment [is] one of the most exciting I've had in the Navy,” he wrote.

Around 8:00
PM
, Middle East Force called the
Roberts
off the hunt, instructing the frigate to drop back over the horizon and track the
Sahand
by radar. The message praised the ship's work and included a word of warning against being too provocative.
¹⁰
Rinn shrugged. “Tomorrow is another day,” he wrote. The next time
Roberts
tangled with
Sahand
, the U.S. crew would need help.

By the first day of March, Rinn was starting to worry about fuel. The high-speed duels with
Alvand
and
Sahand
had burned off oil by the ton, and the
Roberts
had just wrapped up a quick escort mission, ushering a single reflagged tanker through the strait. The big tanks in his engine room were down to 42 percent, raising the uncomfortable possibility that the frigate might get into a tussle it couldn't finish.

Rinn sent a message to the
Coronado
asking for advice. “Hope they are paying attention,” he wrote his brother. “I'm starting to worry. Prolonged surface engagement or bad weather could be problem.”
¹¹

Two hours past midnight,
Roberts
crew members spotted
Sahand
about fifty miles off Abu Musa. The Iranian seemed to have learned from Rinn's playbook: he extinguished his ship's lights and radar, made a twenty-five-knot rush toward the American ship, and painted the
Roberts
with fire-control radar. This guy was definitely more aggressive than the
Alvand
.

The radar pulses tripped the electromagnetic sensors on the
Roberts
's mast, touching off an alarm in CIC. The electronic warfare team bent
to their computers, which identified the Iranian emission: it was the guidance system for the Italian-built Sea Killer, a sea-skimming missile with a fifteen-mile range. This was a bit unexpected.
Alvand
had carried no missiles; was
Sahand
better armed? The
Roberts
replied by returning the favor, locking up
Sahand
with tracking radar of its own. But it began to look like this engagement was going to involve more than dueling radar beams. Rinn ordered the 76-mm gun readied for action. Two-foot rounds moved from a rotary tray up the screw feeder. The ships sped past each other and began to jockey for position. So far, so good.

The engagement took a new twist when
Sahand
broke off to pursue a container ship that had appeared in the channel. The frigates were some miles apart at this point, and over the radio the
Roberts
crew heard
Sahand
order the ship to stop. The merchant was registered in the Iraqi port of Basra—not a good omen—and the
Roberts
was, for the moment, too far away to help. Rinn had his radioman call for help.

An answer soon arrived from the French frigate
Montcalm
, some fifteen miles distant. The U.S. and French crews had met a few days earlier when they dropped anchor and exchanged small groups of sailors for dinner. Rinn and a few officers spent a fine evening on the foreign ship, enjoying crusty bread and trading tactical tips. Now,
Montcalm
heeded the U.S. frigate's call—and just in time.

The French warship appeared on the horizon just as
Sahand
lowered a whaleboat to the water. Clearly, a boarding party was headed over to the container ship.
Roberts
and
Montcalm
firmed up their plans via flashing light signals and closed on the Iranian from different directions. Rattled, the skipper of
Sahand
recalled his whaleboat and sent the merchant on its way. The allied warships steadied up about three miles off the Iranian's stern, one to port, the other to starboard.
Montcalm
kept up the tail for a few hours;
Roberts
dropped back to eight miles' distance and stuck there for a day.
Sahand
stopped no more ships.

Two days later, with fuel reserves down to 39 percent, Rinn got the order he was looking for: break off and go fill 'er up. The message specified no tanker for the rendezvous—simply a time and a location: off the tip of the Omani Peninsula, just fifty miles from the Iranian coast. That was odd.

The frigate presently dropped anchor at the appointed place. A thick mid-afternoon haze settled over the water. Not long afterward, the bridge-to-bridge radio crackled. “This is MV
Yusr
,” said an accented voice. “I come along your port side now,
Roberts
.” A small black-hulled tanker with a beige deckhouse and red stack glided into view. Inflatable Yokohama bumpers dangled along its sides.

“Any idea who these guys might be?” Rinn asked Eckelberry.

“No, sir,” the XO responded.

The captain of the mystery tanker maneuvered his big ship expertly alongside the smaller frigate. The U.S. sailors exchanged lines and hoses with the mariners, who looked Asian, perhaps Chinese. As the hazy sun faded into the sea, 124,000 gallons of F-76 flowed from tanker to warship. When it was done, the tanker skipper collected a navy voucher from the
Roberts
, plus a dozen FFG 58 ball caps for his crew, and his ship slipped away into a starless night.

“Why,” Rinn wrote to his brother, “do I feel like a chapter out of
Lord Jim?
”
¹²

WHEN KEVIN FORD
had a spare moment or two, he documented what he could of the deployment with his bulky video camera. The ship's chief cook and unofficial videographer, Ford had recently wrapped up a tape to send home to the
Roberts
families in Newport. His first video production featured scenes from the Mediterranean and the Suez passages and some footage from the Gulf. After an introduction by the captain, the tape cut to Ford himself. A compact, broad-backed figure with a straightforward look and a wisp of a mustache, Ford led the cameraman around the ship, describing things in a Rhode Island accent. He pointed out a shipmate who was patrolling the deckhouse in bulletproof vest and rifle. “Ya see that sailuh, all dressed up like a soljuh? He's gahding the ship, making sure no bad guys come aboard while we're all out here.”

The twenty-seven-year-old Ford was about as young as a navy chief could be. A native of East Providence, he had enlisted the day after he turned eighteen, seeking adventure and military service. He chose to become a cook—in navy argot, a mess management specialist—because he liked the hours. Cooks stood no duty watches and, on large ships at
least, worked just three or four days a week, albeit in fifteen-hour shifts. But Ford was far from lazy. Possessed of a cheery acumen and a can-do attitude, he rose through the ranks as fast as the navy would let him take the advancement tests, and donned the khaki uniform of a chief after just nine years.

On the
Roberts
Ford ran a team of twelve cooks, plus the junior sailors lent to the kitchen as busboys. Together they served their roughly two hundred shipmates three meals a day—plus plenty of post-midnight snacks to boost morale during long nights. Ford also developed a knack for picking up extra jobs around ship: besides videographer, he was a member of the damage control training team and a line captain during underway replenishment.

Belowdecks, his camera found a mess cook in a T-shirt, who grinned, flexed, and laid a kiss on a bulging bicep. Another muscular fellow in a yellow lifejacket told the camera, “We're all out here doing okay. We can't wait to get back.” A tall sailor with jug-handle ears looked up from a book. “I don't have anybody who really knows who I am,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone.

The video wound up with shot of Rinn in a thin olive sweater out by the exhaust stack. “It's February 28, 1988, and we're on Abu Musa patrol in the southeastern part of the Gulf. It's been a hotspot for the past two months, with about twenty ships coming under attack by rocket-propelled grenades. We've been on patrol for seven or eight days here, and I'm happy to say I think we've been instrumental in preventing any attack being conducted in the area.” Ford edited the tape on his camera and mailed it off to Newport.

ONE REASON THINGS
had gotten worse around Abu Musa was that the violence had largely been quashed in the northern Gulf. In fact, no merchant had come under fire there since November, and the credit belonged largely to the secret forces of Operation Prime Chance. Like cops shooing street thugs from the neighborhood, the army helicopters and navy patrol boats had forced the Iranian raiders to ply their deadly trade elsewhere.

But the unsteady peace was shattered on 5 March. Not long after midnight, the
Roberts
bridge radio crackled with dispatches from USS
John A.
Moore
(FFG 19), a frigate on patrol near the barge
Wimbrown VII
. A pair of Iranian speedboats was approaching,
Moore
reported. The frigate tried to warn them off with radio calls and then put two 76-mm shells into the water in front of the boats. The Boghammar drivers just poured on the speed. They whipped past the warship at forty-four knots, opening up with chattering machine guns. The frigate returned fire, sending nearly a hundred rounds after its nimble antagonists. The boats soon faded from radar, and the frigate gathered up bits of wreckage, but it was far from clear that the boats had been sunk.
¹³

The
Moore
's skirmish was the first exchange of naval fire in the Gulf in three weeks, and Admiral Less quickly dispatched six of his sixteen ships to squelch the fighting. The
Roberts
was headed northwest at full speed. Rinn found the
Moore
's captain understandably exhausted but confident that he'd performed well.
¹⁴
The next morning, Less sent the
Moore
to Bahrain for a rest and put Rinn in charge of protecting the barges. “SBR's got the bag!” he wrote his brother. “Things are getting interesting.”

The attack on the
Moore
came by sea, but the skies around the barges were even more full of peril. They seethed with warplanes. The geography of the northern Gulf funneled Iraqi strike jets southeast to their watery hunting grounds and drew Iranian fighters hungry for air-to-air battle. To the
Roberts
, every one of them might as well have had “frigate killer” painted on its nose.