No Higher Honor (25 page)

In a heartbeat, a single low-tech weapon had roughly halved the structural strength of a U.S. Navy warship. Many hours would pass before the crew of the
Roberts
realized just how fragile their ship had become.

ON THE BRIDGE
wing and weather decks, the stunned crew gaped as the fireball burst from the ship's exhaust stack. The plume of smoke and fire stabbed into the air above the radio mast. The blast had ripped shards of metal and insulation from the guts of the ship, coated them with fuel, and set them alight. Now fist-sized chunks of flaming debris plunked down all over the ship. Others landed in the water, surrounding the hull with hissing wisps of steam. Small fires flared on paint, hoses, canvas, and the tarry nonskid walkways.

The forecastle dipped and then surged upward, vaulting Bobby Gibson from the lookout's chair. Airborne for an instant, he could see only water and forecastle. Then the deck rose up to meet him, and he landed hard on his neck and shoulders.

On the bridge wing, Rinn was dumbfounded. “The ship just blows up underneath me. A totally different sound than anything I'd ever heard, as if the ship got dropped from a ten-story building. Not a 155-mm [artillery shell] explosion, not a bomb going off, just
baahhm
. Everything shook, and in a totally different way. The whole stern lifted up. A huge fireball came out of the stack, and I thought, ‘Damn, we blew up an engine.' Or the helo. I don't think anybody thought we hit a mine.”
²⁴

Someone pulled the 1MC handset from its mount, hit the aircraft crash alarm, and announced to the crew that the helo had hit the deck. Nicholson stared at a black-and-white video monitor. It clearly showed the SH-60 on the flight deck, rotor blades still spinning away. It took the quartermaster a moment to realize what was actually going on. He grabbed the handset and corrected the previous call: “Mine hit, mine hit. The ship has hit a mine!”

Coming out of the signal shack, Signalman Roberts felt automatically for a list—a tilt in the deck. There was none. He looked over the side. A sea snake went by. If it came to abandoning ship, there were plenty of lifeboats aboard, rolled into canisters the size of fifty-five-gallon drums and primed to inflate automatically when dunked in water. Roberts hoped fervently that he would not have to put their seaworthiness to the test.
²⁵

The explosion was the loudest sound Ted Johnson had ever heard. The hangar deck bucked, flipping the hull technician into the air like a rag doll. He crashed to the rough nonskid deck, his fall cushioned by his bulky fire suit. Black smoke belched from the midships bulkhead. The blast had ruptured the exhaust duct that carried fumes from the gas turbines up from the engine room to the stack. The smoke filled the hangar and then ceased as the gas turbines ground to a halt far below. Johnson checked the sailors around him and looked out to the helicopter. It looked okay, but its blades were spinning down and the engine seemed to be off. He'd never seen an aircraft knocked out before, and he decided it wasn't going anywhere soon. So he picked himself up and headed below to Repair Locker 5. Somewhere, there were fires to fight.
²⁶

In sick bay the blast jolted everything into the air. Aspirin bottles and bandages went flying. In the first split second, Rick Raymond thought it was the ship's gun going off. Then he noticed that he, the corpsman, and everything else in sick bay were airborne. “That's when we realized we hit a mine,” Raymond wrote. For a moment, everyone just looked at each other. What happened? What comes next? “Then I said, ‘I gotta go,' and went running down the passageway to grab a hose.”
²⁷

In the mess room, time slowed to a crawl for Lester Chaffin, who found himself drifting upward and then falling slowly to the deck. Time returned to its normal pace as he picked himself up and felt gingerly for broken bones. He was fine, but the ship was clearly in trouble. The jolt had shattered the glass sneeze-guard on the salad bar, and shards lay on the blue linoleum. More ominously, smoke was beginning to waft through ventilation grates. As electrician for Repair Locker 5, Chaffin's job was to check the equipment in AMR 2 for flames and cut power to anything that had caught fire. He pulled open the engineering hatch and slid down the ladder. To his dismay, the lower deck was already filling with black seawater. Chaffin found fellow electrician Whitley already on the scene, so he grabbed a firefighter's oxygen mask and tried to enter the main engine room. But the hatch was jammed, and he headed back to the repair locker, shaken by the chaos.

Chris Pond recalls the ship being picked up, shaken, and slowly let back down. The 1MC squawked. “Check for damage and report to DC Central,” someone said, his voice cracking. “I think we just hit a mine.”
Pond and three others raced aft along the port side, skidding to a halt outside the hatchway to the mess room. Tendrils of vapor were seeping out from inside. He received permission to investigate and grabbed a hose. Stepping through the haze, he spotted its source: it was harmless steam, rising from the food-warming trays in the galley.
²⁸

IN CENTRAL CONTROL
a grating sound had drawn Walker's eyes to Bent's. Then
wa-WHAM!
The explosion threw everyone in CCS into the air. To Walker it felt like the worst car accident he'd ever been in. He picked himself off the deck, and his eyes flew to the engine gauges. The temperature for the gas turbine modules was skyrocketing. Fire! The chief hit switches to fill the turbine enclosures with the flame-suppressing Halon gas. Nothing happened. Within seconds, the enclosure sensors were reporting temperatures beyond two thousand degrees.

Then the propulsion control console died, all seven feet of it. From below the waist to the overhead, lights went out, gauges fell to zero, and indicators slumped behind glass shields. Walker spun around to the electrical control panel. It, too, was mostly dead, though some lights still flickered.
What the hell was the matter?
The consoles were designed to survive a total power failure; they were hooked to a battery pack in the main engine room. No juice from the uninterruptible power supply system meant there was something going seriously wrong under their feet. “Holy shit,” said Walker, Bent, and Wallingford, more or less simultaneously.

Without the control consoles, the CCS team was blind. They had spent thousands of hours mastering prescriptions for confronting hundreds of engineering emergencies. They had proven at Gitmo and since that they could diagnose almost any problem by studying the panels and could fix many of them by manipulating their controls. But those troubleshooting recipes proceeded from the assumption that the panels would provide vital information and control. They had never trained for a scenario in which their central diagnostic device disappeared.
²⁹

FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS
of high explosive had detonated within twenty yards of Alex Perez's seat. Faster than thought, superheated gases filled the main engine room and vented up the stack. The sea rushed in through the truck-sized hole in the hull, rising to the upper-level catwalk in an
eyeblink. The gas turbine enclosures became cockeyed islands in a burning oil slick. In an instant, Perez's well-ordered engine room had become a dark and surreal hole lit by flame.

Perez missed his one-second introduction to hell, because the initial blast knocked him out and flipped him off the catwalk. He plunged into a maelstrom of black water. Somehow, he bobbed to the surface. When he regained consciousness, the chief found himself under the upper-level grate—the very thing he'd been standing on a moment ago. He was trapped by mangled railings and compressors and other gear. Only a few inches of space remained between the burning water and the grate. When he gasped for breath, a superhot mist of smoke and burning oil and seawater scorched his lungs. “One minute I was sitting at the console and the next, it was all dark and I was down below,” Perez said later. “I thought I was lost. It was all dark, and all I could see was the fire from the burning engine. I thought I was going to drown.” Fighting the pain from his damaged throat, he began to yell for help.
³⁰

TWO OTHER ENGINEERS
had already gotten out of the engine room. The blast had surrounded Dave Burbine in a roaring bonfire, the loudest thing he'd ever heard. The engineer had a dim glimpse of lower-level machinery embedded in the overhead, and he vaguely wondered whether the reduction gear's sheer bulk had saved his life. He grabbed Wayne Smith by the shirt, dragged him out the hatch and across a passageway, and stepped into Central Control.

The injured engineers' appearance momentarily quieted the growing pandemonium in the engineering space. Everyone turned to stare at them. Burbine looked down at himself. His fuel-soaked dungaree shirt was in tatters. Chunks of raw flesh were hanging from his arms. He could barely see, and when he ran his fingers through his hair, it came off in clumps. “I'm hurt bad,” Burbine told Walker.

The chief stared back. Gobbets of flesh were peeling off a burned face that looked like it belonged in a horror movie. It took Walker a moment to recognize the young petty officer he'd known for five years.

Burbine remembers Walker telling him to take a seat on a nearby table, and everything would be okay. So he sat, dribbling fuel over engineering logbooks. He had a queer sensation of air pockets in his pants,
so he took them off and watched the skin bubble on his charred legs. There was no pain. The chief remembers putting it a bit differently: “Dave, there's not a fucking thing I can do for you right now, so just get in the corner and shut up.” Walker felt like everything was happening at once. Smoke from the engine room was wafting through the door. None of the closed-circuit communications to the bridge seemed to be working.

Engineman Dejno, who had been standing watch in AMR 3, limped battered and burned into Central Control. He reported that a wall of fire had swept through the auxiliary machine room, followed by a wave of water that had filled the space nearly to its overhead. That meant there was fire and seawater a few feet directly below the engineers' feet.

Other damage reports were trickling in by voice and by sound-powered phone. Behind the propulsion panel, in the corner called DC Central, a petty officer was drawing symbols onto laminated deck diagrams, assembling a grease-pencil map of the damage. The reports seemed to confirm what Walker had guessed: the main engine room was inundated, flooded nearly to the upper deck, gone. That likely meant that the gas turbines were out of commission. It also meant the ship had lost the flasks of high-pressure air that restarted the ship's electrical generators. That was bad news indeed.

The list of things Walker thought he knew was as dismaying as it was short. The ship was on fire and dead in the water. The electrical control board still stood dark and mute, and the power grid seemed to be going south in a hurry. The number one generator was dead, thanks to the mysterious automatic override just after the call to battle stations. Number four was underwater in AMR 3. Number two had died soon after the blast, the victim of sheared and short-circuited cables now sitting in saltwater. Number three struggled gamely on. But the electrical demands of an entire wounded ship would soon overwhelm it. Walker knew this: if he lost those generators, the ship was doomed.

Fingers flying across his panel, Electrician Bent tripped bus breakers and twisted remote governors, trying to save what was left of the dying power grid. It was no use. Five minutes after the mine blast, the ship's electrical system browned out. All over the
Roberts
, the lights went dark. Radios shut down. Fans stilled. Pumps stopped. The ship had a backup
lighting system that was supposed to activate if the power failed. But generator number three was still putting out a feeble current, good for nothing—but just powerful enough to keep the emergency lights from clicking on.
³¹

An unaccustomed silence filled the spaces. Throughout the hull, there were only the shouts of sailors and the noise of equipment being dragged from repair lockers. And every so often, an unearthly metallic groan came from deep within the wounded frigate.

ON THE BRIDGE
, Rinn was looking for answers. Fiery debris was drifting down around the ship. Electrical power had died. There was nothing on his instrument panels to tell him what happened. There was nothing that told him what needed to be done. But his mind raced with questions.
How many casualties do I have? How bad are they? What's damaged? What's the status of the engineering plant?
Just about the only thing he knew for certain was that the sun was going down, and pretty soon they were going to have to save the ship in the dark.

Injury reports started coming in. A handful of crew members were down, hurt, burned. There was a fire in the stack. It looked like the superstructure was cracked in several places. Someone called up to say the main engine room had totally flooded. That didn't sound right to Rinn. How could the biggest space on the ship flood so fast? Another call, this one from the flight deck, reported that the helicopter had taken some sort of damage. Fluid was pouring out of one of its engines. Rinn donned sound-powered phones and called Palmer in CIC.
How are my combat systems? What have we got?
The answer came back:
We got nothing, really. No surface-search radar, no radios
.
³²

The captain told the combat systems officer to cut the radar out of the ship's power system so it wouldn't drag on the grid as the engineers worked to bring it back up. If they couldn't get electricity back, the ship was going to sink whether it came under attack or not. Still, this turned the frigate from a sitting duck into a deaf and blind one. The
Roberts
crew members' knowledge of the ship's surroundings shrunk to the horizon. They lost track of the
Sa'am
frigate that had been lurking some thirty miles to the north and the Iranian P-3 that had dogged them all the way from Kuwait. Neither ship nor plane had acted threateningly, but the
lookouts had spotted antiship missiles under the P-3's wings. Without the radar, there was no way to tell whether the pilot had turned to attack.