No Higher Honor (17 page)

THE
ROBERTS
FINALLY
got the fuel it needed during a pit stop in Djibouti, a port city on the Horn of Africa that had long been used by the French as a base for naval operations in the Middle East. As boatswain's mates tightened the mooring lines and hauled fuel hoses aboard, John Preston and some mates wandered onto the pier for a look around.

A small crowd was picking apart a bundle of used rags the engine-man had tossed over the rail. Brightly colored T-shirts—reds and blues and oranges—went quickly; green and brown clothes were left behind in the hot sun.
¹⁴
A small boy was hawking souvenir trinkets, so the fire controlman pulled out a one-dollar bill. The young merchant's eyes went wide, and he dug in his pockets and produced a little pile of coins and notes. “What are you trying to do?” Preston asked, and then realized that the dollar was more than the kid could change. The sailor told him to keep it. Stranger still was the sight of cattle being hoisted aboard a nearby ship by their necks. He watched as the animals made horrible sounds and expired in midair. Back under way, Preston chalked up his short visit to Africa as a turning point: his ship was far from home.

The captain of the
Roberts
was beginning to get that feeling as well. As the frigate sailed up the Yemeni coast, Rinn had received a sobering message from an old friend, now the captain of a minesweeper in the Gulf. U.S. forces were starting to find mines in the main shipping channel, the message said. If the
Roberts
were unlucky enough to discover one, the preferred course of action was to call the commander of the navy's Middle East Force and hope there was an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team available. You could also shoot a mine, the message said, but far from detonating the device, bullets usually just pierced its buoyancy tanks. The weapon would sink, still live, into the shadows of the shallow sea.

On 11 February, one month after departing American waters, DesRon 22 squadronmates anchored off Fujairah, a United Arab Emirates port city on the Gulf of Oman. Four U.S. ships were waiting for them: three frigates and a cruiser heading home.
Roberts
paired off with USS
Elrod
(FFG 55), and for three hours, the frigates' officers shared charts, documents, and advice. After a relatively calm January, the situation in the Gulf was turning for the worse.

Iran was starting to flex long-dormant aerial muscles. Many of its U.S. –built aircraft, purchased during the shah's reign and grounded after the revolution by a U.S.–led embargo on spare parts, were returning to the skies, thanks in part to the White House's Iran-Contra shipments of war materiel.
¹⁵
In early February a Phantom fired two missiles at a Liberian tanker in the Gulf, the first such attack in more than two years. They missed. But days later, Iranian pilots shot down three Iraqi fighter jets over the southern Gulf.
¹⁶

There were no deconfliction protocols to keep Iranian forces from firing accidentally on American warships. For that matter, the deconfliction agreement with Iraq was hardly foolproof. On 12 February an Iraqi Tu-16 Badger streaked toward the USS
Chandler
(DDG 996), ignoring the destroyer's increasingly frantic wave-off calls. The skipper put a Standard missile on the rail, set the CWIS to auto-fire mode, and, as a last-ditch warning, popped a pair of defensive flares that burned white-hot arcs in the night sky. The Soviet-built bomber veered away—and fired two missiles that streaked off to explode somewhere in the darkness. Had the Iraqi been aiming at the
Chandler
and its convoy before it veered off? No one knew. For U.S. warships in the Gulf, the implications were clear: every airborne radar blip should be considered armed and dangerous.
¹⁷

The
Elrod
passed along more than charts and advice. The
Roberts
took aboard Stinger antiaircraft missiles and two junior sailors trained to launch the shoulder-fired heat-seeking weapons. Stingers had gained fame in Afghanistan, where the mujahideen had used them to bring down Soviet helicopters. In the Gulf, they might provide a last-ditch shield against air attack.
¹⁸
The
Roberts
also took on rolled mats made of Kevlar, the bulletproof synthetic fiber. Like most small warships,
Perrys
carried little armor, and the rug-sized mats were hung around various vital equipment spaces to provide a thin but welcome layer of protection.
¹⁹

Rinn was grateful for everything the
Elrod
could provide. When the turnover was complete, the ships weighed anchor and moved off, each crew bidding the other farewell from the rails. Then it was time for DesRon 22 to split up. Dyer passed out awards for the transit to the Gulf, pronouncing
Roberts
the winner of the gunnery and shiphandling contests as well as “Top Hand,” the best overall performer. He bestowed a
Redman Tobacco ball cap upon Palmer, who cherished it as a prized possession. Dyer also sent a cap to Rinn, who secretly believed his crew deserved the other two titles as well, and was being denied them to salve the feelings of the other ships' crew members.
²⁰

On 13 February the
Roberts
arrived in the Earnest Will convoy assembly area, which encompassed miles and miles of open water in the Gulf of Oman. Commercial and naval ships of every nationality and every description milled about, some searching for their assigned escorts, others seeking shelter in any group they could find. Wags dubbed the area “the K-Mart parking lot.”
²¹

The
Roberts
dropped anchor for the night just a few hundred yards from a Soviet
Udaloy
-class cruiser, spitting distance in naval terms. The next morning, the cruiser's helicopter buzzed the frigate. Several U.S. sailors waved; the Soviet pilot returned the gesture. Preston, on deck, entertained the fleeting thought that the superpowers had spent billions of dollars and rubles for nothing. But a furious Rinn leaned out from the bridge wing and yelled at the .50-caliber gunners, who jumped to point their weapons at the enemy aircraft.
²²
It was time to get serious. Two years of exercises would not compare in danger and stress to the frigate's first day in the Gulf.

SIMPLY GETTING INTO
the shallow sea was a dicey proposition. The two-hundred-mile Strait of Hormuz was a classic naval choke point. The waterway squeezed past the Iranian mainland, narrowing to thirty-six miles as it made a hairpin turn around the Omani Peninsula. Its inbound and outbound shipping channels were narrower still: only two miles wide, separated by a two-mile “median strip.”

A trip through the strait took a ship past Iranian air bases and naval stations, radar installations and powerboat havens. Perhaps even more ominous was the “Silkworm envelope,” the swath of water covered by Iranian missile batteries. A Chinese copy of the Soviet radar-guided Styx, the Silkworm could sink a warship from forty miles away. Iran had never launched one in the strait, and the Reagan administration had publicly vowed to wipe the batteries from the earth if they did. But in the northern Gulf, a Silkworm had blinded the American captain of the
Sea Isle City
. And the Iranians had proven they didn't need missiles to wage their
naval war. The burnt-out ship carcasses that lined the strait offered silent testimony to that.

In the early hours of 14 February 1988, the
Roberts
rounded up the two reflagged Kuwaiti ships that would form its convoy. One was MV
Townsend
, a 294,700-ton oil products carrier; the other, a 46,700-ton liquefied natural gas ship renamed
Gas Princess
. They were soon joined by the
Chandler
, which was fresh from its nerve-rattling encounter with the Iraqi Badger. Together, they formed the convoy designated EW88011, the eleventh Earnest Will escort mission of the year.
²³

They would not go alone into the strait. Overhead, an E-2 Hawkeye surveyed the airspace with its dorsal radar saucer, while an EA-6B Prowler electronic attack jet sniffed for the telltale emissions of enemy missiles. Some miles away, A-6 Intruder attack jets and F-14 Tomcat fighters circled over the Gulf of Oman, standing by to render aid.

To deal with any small Iranian ships, the convoy would have the temporary aid of a pair of Mk III patrol boats, the sixty-four-foot mainstays of barge operations at the Gulf's other end. A pair of oceangoing tugboats would lead the way, trolling for mines with half-inch steel cables festooned with bits of gear. Guided by small fins, the cables stretched behind the tugs in a fifty-yard “V” that trailed some feet below the surface. Their steel blades, rigged with explosive charges, were designed to snip a mine's tether, allowing it to bob to the surface and be destroyed. The navy had hired the tugs from the Kuwaiti Oil Transport Company in the wake of
Bridgeton
's mining. The ersatz minesweepers had found no mines at all in nine months, and their plodding progress limited the convoy's speed through the strait to about eight knots. Nevertheless, no convoy commander liked getting under way without them.
²⁴

Just before dawn, the
Roberts
fired up both gas turbines and went to general quarters. Down in CIC, the radar operators took note of their surroundings; there was an Iranian frigate lurking off the nearby Ras Shuratah shoal, and an Iranian C-130 airlifter on patrol far ahead.
²⁵
The warships shepherded their reflagged charges past the lighthouse on Didimar, the canted hunk of rock that marked the beginning of the Strait of Hormuz. The transit would take nine hours.

In a small space behind the pilothouse, fire controlman John Preston hunkered down among the cases of electronic radar equipment and stared
at the new Kevlar mats on the bulkheads. This was his regular general quarters station, a cramped and air-conditioned space where he fixed the occasional balky piece of gear. It was a fine place to ride out drills, close enough to the bridge to eavesdrop, but Preston usually longed to be in CIC manning a console instead of stuck up top playing Maytag repairman.

Not this time. For once, Preston was relieved to let someone else do the job. The lives of all his shipmates might well depend on the fire controlman on duty. “It may have been a cowardly reaction to the massive responsibility of protecting the ship, but I also knew that I would be sitting on those consoles later on and would have my share of worries,” he wrote.

But by the time the convoy emerged in the Persian Gulf, Preston decided the trip wasn't any better in the radar shack: “Staying at general quarters for half the day, puckered up, thinking a Silkworm missile might have your name on it.”
²⁶

Action soon picked up. The ships' aerial escort headed back to their aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. Not coincidentally, the
Roberts
's radar soon picked up a pair of aircraft barreling south from Iran. In CIC the electronic-warfare operator bent to his scope. His computer digested the planes' electronic emissions and spit out a verdict: two hulking F-4 Phantom fighter jets.

The
Roberts
's CIC team had practiced this scenario a hundred times. They had shot down scores of ghosts in the Point Loma simulators and had honed their skill against U.S. Air Force fighters off the coast of Massachusetts. Now, for the first time, it was real. The air traffic controller issued the standard radio call: “Unknown aircraft, you are approaching a U.S. Navy warship. Divert your course immediately.” He received no response.

Rinn sent the ship to general quarters. The deep synthetic
bong-bong-bong
of the GQ alarm sent sailors scurrying around the ship, pulling on brown flash hoods and tucking pants into socks. Within minutes, the ship was ready for battle.

The captain ordered a missile readied for action. On the forecastle, the ten-ton launcher performed its mechanical dance, whirling to accept the white Standard missile that whisked onto the launch rail. Then the captain told the tactical action officer to illuminate the Phantoms with
tracking radar. This was the modern naval equivalent of brandishing a sword.

Like many warships of the day, the
Roberts
carried two kinds of air-defense sensors. The long-range SPS-49(V)5 antenna revolved on its mast just abaft the pilothouse, sweeping a powerful electromagnetic beam through a dozen circles a minute. The ship's 1970s-era computer gathered up the faint echoes from an airborne fuselage and displayed range, speed, and heading. But for altitude data, and for the frequent pulses required for accurate gunnery, the ship carried two short-range tracking sensors: an egg-shaped pod atop the pilothouse and a stubby dish amidships. These radars pulsed several times a second, fast enough to guide a missile or the 76-mm shells from the ship's gun. To shoot down a plane, therefore, an operations specialist found it with the air-search radar and then locked it up with a tracking radar. A fire controlman would confirm the lock, and, upon the captain's order, depress the weapons-release button.

Every pilot of a jet-age fighter knew when he'd been painted by fire control radar. Cockpit instruments sounded gently when brushed by search beams, but beeped urgently when hit with tracking frequencies. The noise told the pilot that a fire controlman's thumb hovered over the missile-release button.

The Phantoms closed to a distance of twenty-one miles, just seconds away by missile flight. Then they veered off. The
Roberts
and its wards sailed on into a gathering thunderstorm.

Later in the night, the frigate's radar operator called out another contact. A single aircraft approached from the north. As before, radio calls went unanswered. But this time, the plane's emissions mystified the electronic-warfare operator.

For the third time in a day, the ship went to general quarters. Rinn studied the radar screen and ordered a missile onto the rail. “Lock him up,” he told the tactical action officer. But the electronic warning that had turned away the Iranian F-4s had no effect on this mystery plane. Ignoring the radar blasts and the urgent calls from the
Roberts
's air traffic controller, the aircraft bore in from the north.