No Higher Honor (26 page)

No one even knew where any friendly ships were. Those they had escorted to Kuwait were far behind; those they were rushing to meet had started their day at the Gulf's mouth. Not that it mattered much; no one was going to come help them in a minefield.

FLASHLIGHT IN HAND
, Robert Bent picked his way forward from Central Control, heading for AMR 2 to see what he could do about the generators. Like his captain, the chief electrician was viscerally attuned to the vibrations and noises of his ship. A ventilation fan that cut out for a moment could wake him from sleep. When the ship's power died, Bent felt as if his own heart had stopped. A ship without juice was a dead ship. As he left Central Control, smoke in the U-shaped passageway stopped him short. It was pouring from an engine room hatch popped open by the blast. A noise like an animal's cry drew his attention.

Bent stepped through the hatch and pointed his flashlight through the acrid haze. The cramped engine room had become a phantasmagoria of tortured metal painted in flickering firelight. Glowing embers pocked blackened surfaces. He played the light through the grating beneath his feet, where he should have seen his panel's batteries and other gear. Instead, black water lapped a foot below his boots.

Following the cries, Bent found Gas Turbine 2nd Class Larry Welch not far from the hatch. The engineer was disoriented and badly burned. Bent reached to help his shipmate, and Welch's blackened skin sloughed off in his hands. Taking a better grip, Bent helped his shipmate stagger out of the engine room and aft to Repair Locker 3.
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Meanwhile, twenty feet farther into the engine room, Alex Perez's strength began to ebb.

IN THE REFRIGERATOR
deck above Auxiliary Machine Room 1, the explosion came as a deafening roar. The shock flung Baker, Tatum, and Tilley into the air, but they landed on their feet. Even the steel cans they'd been sitting on settled softly back onto the deck. For a moment, the sailors stared at each other, befuddled. Then their training kicked in. A breath of smoke drifted up through the hatch, and the three men pulled emergency
breathing devices from wall racks. Tatum, the senior man in the space, got everyone moving.

Baker headed off to check the nearby electrical switchboard, while Tatum and Tilley descended the ladder into AMR 1, a low-ceilinged space about thirty feet square. The door to generator number one had popped open, and smoke drifted from ventilation ducts in its enclosure. The big engine inside sat idle; this was the one that had oversped and shut down just moments before the mine hit. Air conditioning whirred in the vents. The loudspeaker barked; someone reported that the mine had hit someplace aft, and that the ship was on fire. The two engineers knew their duty: start that generator.

The entire engineering department had practiced a mass conflagration scenario just the previous week, and Chief Bent had drilled it into their heads: if you lose touch with Central Control, make sure you get your generator back online. Fire pumps, drainage systems, ventilation, all depended on electricity. In an emergency, the ship needed all the juice it could get. Redundancy was key; who knew what was going on with the other generators?

Tatum hollered up through a hatch to Gas Turbine Systems Technician 2nd Class Tom Wagner, who opened the circuit breakers on the local switchboard. Wagner stripped his board, isolating generator number one from the ship's electrical grid for startup, and disconnected everything except the lights.

Meanwhile, Tilley squeezed into the soundproofed enclosure that surrounded the generator. The machinery inside left little room to move; the generator was powered by a turbocharged, intercooled sixteen-cylinder Detroit Diesel engine the size of a Volkswagen minibus. The engineman spotted the reason for the earlier malfunction: a cracked control plug in the engine's mechanical governor. Tilley figured he could manage the speed of the hulking diesel manually, but he wanted confirmation from Central Control. “My mind went blank. Would it run without that part? Of course it would, wouldn't it?” the engineman recalled.

Tatum tried four times to call CCS, but the 2JV line was dead. Seconds later, the lights dimmed and went out. Tatum and Tilley scrabbled for the square yellow flashlights called battle lanterns. In the darkness, Wagner yelled down to flip their sound-powered phone's rotary switch
to 5JV, the electrician's circuit. Tilley called back, telling him to pass the word to Central Control that they were going to restart the engine. The phone buzzed. It was Walker, telling the other switchboard operators to strip their own boards. If Tilley managed to get his generator going, the chief didn't want the grid going down again because of damaged cables and electrical shorts.

Tatum and Tilley played their flashlights across the generator's control panel. Under normal circumstances, they would kick-start the giant diesel with a push of a button on the panel. That would turn the engine over with a blast of high-pressure air from compressors in the main engine room. But the panel was as dead as the fluorescent tubes above their heads. They punched the start button anyway, more out of desperation than anything else. No dice.

Tilley was about as junior an engineman as the navy had, but he knew the next step, and he did not particularly want to take it. Each diesel had a backup air flask for just such a situation. To use it, an engineman wedged himself into the enclosure and pushed a plunger to open the air passage. Engineers called it the “suicide start.” “You have to stand on top of it and push down on the plunger,” Walker recalled. “Of course, you're on this sixteen-cylinder great big huge turbocharged intercooled diesel, and it's the last place you want to be at.”

Tilley yelled back up to Wagner, asking him whether he could start the engine with a cracked governor. “If I go in there and push the button, is it going to just run away on me? Am I going to get a piston upside my head, or is it going to be okay?” he recalled.

Wagner passed the questions along to CCS.

“Tom said, ‘I can't do it; we're not supposed to do it this way!'” Walker recalled. “I said, ‘Just fucking do it.' I had to get power back to the ship.”

Wagner passed the word to Tilley, who took a deep breath and said, “Okay, fine.”

Flashlight in hand, Tilley opened the door, walked in, and shut it behind him. The enclosure was about twenty feet by ten feet, with an overhead he could reach up and touch. The gray engine block loomed in the darkness. Tilley climbed up onto it, avoiding the cables and tubes that kept the beast running, and worked the air and fuel valves.

The junior sailor put his hand on the plunger, and winced. It had to be done, he told himself. His ship had struck a mine, fires were burning somewhere, and the electricity was out. He did not know about the floods that were swallowing the other three engineering spaces. But he knew this: he had to start this engine, or his ship and everyone on it might die.

Tilley pushed the manual override button and brought the plunger down. Air rushed past his face. The engine roared to life. The sailor tensed as the noise built around him—and began to relax when the rpms settled at their customary howling pitch. The manual governor was holding. He opened the enclosure door and hollered up to the switchboard operator.

Wagner checked his gauges. The generator was pumping out alternating current at fifty-seven cycles per second, three short of the sixty hertz the ship needed. He yelled back to Tilley. The engineman looked around for a wrench to adjust the governor. The nearest toolbox was just a few feet away—in a padlocked workbench. Tatum broke off the lock with a single blow.

Tilley turned an adjustment bolt until Wagner was satisfied. Then the switchboard operator flipped a switch, routing power into the grid. The lights came back on. Ten minutes had passed since the mine blast.
³⁴

I
n DC Central, Ens. Ken Rassler could begin to read a rough outline of the ship's condition in the grease marks scratched on his deck charts. To Rassler, Sorensen's successor as damage control assistant, the picture wasn't particularly encouraging.

Ten minutes after the blast, the
Roberts
was dead in the water, its gas turbines damaged beyond recovery. The engine room was flooded to its upper level, AMR 3 to the overhead—spaces that totaled nearly one-fifth of the ship's length. The amount of seawater already inside the ship would cover a tennis court to a depth of sixteen feet. More was coming in every second. There were fires in both compartments, and probably in other spaces as well. Smoke was pouring from the exhaust stack. The deckhouse had cracked in two places, and the aft end of the helicopter hangars had come loose from its foundation on the main deck.

Thanks to Tilley, Rassler was no longer doing his job in the dark. But three other generators were still offline. One of them was inundated in AMR 3, along with a pair of fire pumps, desalinators, and water chillers that cooled internal spaces and combat systems. The other two generators were in AMR 2, where the seawater was several feet high and rising.
¹
If the ship were to survive, someone would have to stop that flow.

Around the corner in Central Control, Walker was trying to resurrect his electrical control panel. He had been delighted when the power came back on, but juice was useless unless he could route it to fire pumps and whatever else needed it. For that he needed a working console. The chief turned to Wallingford, who had taken Bent's place as watch electrician. The younger man was flipping switches, trying to bring the dead panel back to life.

“Chief, it's all fucked up,” Wallingford said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Wally, I don't give a fuck what you do, but you better get that thing running again.”

“You got any ideas?”

Walker looked around. He hoped the console wasn't actually damaged, but rather had simply been cut off from its electrical supply when the engine room flooded. His eyes landed on the floor buffer, a fluffy-footed instrument the sailors loved to hate.

“Yes,” Walker said. “You see that buffer over there? Cut the fucking cord off that buffer.”

The chief explained his idea: take a fifty-foot length and strip the leads, producing a long extension cord. Next, find a connection to the panel's power supply by severing its cable to the now-useless battery pack. Twist the buffer cord and battery lead together. Now you've got a console with a handy plug-in cord. Start trying 120-volt outlets until you find one that works.

“We can do that?”

“Fucking right we can do that,” Walker said. “Nobody's down here to tell us we can't.” Moments later, lights rippled across the electrical control console.

It was one small step, but Walker's head was still spinning. The damage was far beyond anything he'd seen before, beyond even the sadistic imaginations of Gitmo instructors. The chief paused, unsure. His eye fell on a red, well-thumbed three-ring binder, and he pulled it from the shelf. This was the master light-off checklist, the MLOC, or “em-loc.” It listed the sequences of steps that would get the ship's systems running, enumerating in endless detail just how to start the power plant—in short, it was a recipe book for bringing a ship to life. Walker had used it and its cousins thousands of times, every time he readied a ship to leave its pier.

Amid the chaos of a crippled ship, the binder was a lifesaver. As Walker scanned its pages, his mind cleared. To get the radars to work, he needed to get air conditioning back online. Air conditioning required compressors and dehydrators. Those required electrical power, which required generators and switchboards.

The chief took a few moments to organize his plan and then began to dispatch his shipmates on repair missions.
²
Within just a few minutes, both of the generators in AMR 2 were back online. Number two came up first; after a quick repair job on a malfunctioning circuit breaker, number three started pumping out electricity as well. Soon one, then two, then three fire pumps started up. Fifteen minutes after the mine blast, seawater began to flow into the hoses atop the deckhouse.
³

BENT HAD LEFT
Central Control a few minutes earlier, just after the power came back on. Smoke was still drifting into the space from the engine room hatch, and the electrician had stepped across the passageway to close it. But as he moved to seal off the doorway, he heard another call for help.

For a second time, Bent ventured into the smoky engine room. The explosion had shattered every lightbulb in the space, so he picked his way onto the catwalk with his flashlight. He followed the yelling, and realized with a shock that a shipmate was trapped under the floor grate. It was Perez, badly burned but still struggling for his life.

Bent could see the chief's oil-soaked head and hands through the grate. He dropped to his knees and tugged at the metal lattice. It did not budge. He searched for the bolts that anchored the grate to its metal frame, looking for exposed nuts that might come off with a wrench. To his dismay, he found only J-shaped bolts that could not be loosened from above. Bent knew he needed more help.

Leaving Perez, the electrician hurried to Repair Locker 3. He rounded up Chief Engineman George Cowan and Electrician's Mate 2nd Class Ed Copeland. The crowbar was gone from the locker, but they grabbed an armful of other tools and headed back to the engine room. They flicked on battle lanterns, the battery-powered lamps that resembled small yellow lunchboxes, and began to attack the grate. Nothing worked. Their bolt cutter's jaws could get no purchase on the smooth metal loops of the J-bolts. The three rescuers passed a succession of wrenches to Perez—all the wrong size. They tried a few ineffective whacks with a sledgehammer. And the fuel-drenched surroundings were hardly the place to use the blowtorch. “We were scared the place was going to blow. You could see the burning embers, hear all kind of weird noises,” Bent said later.