No Higher Honor (23 page)

So what was going on in the central Gulf? Rinn had received no warning about mines nor a recommended Q-route—a swept and safe course. He put in a call about it to Middle East Force, but received no reply. Long after it might have helped, he learned that the minesweepers were responding to a CIA report of Iranian mines in the vicinity.
⁵¹

P
erched on his metal chair, Bobby F. Gibson leaned into the slip-stream. The sun was lowering behind the nineteen-year-old lookout, and the seaman peered through the light afternoon haze.

The
Roberts
was running at twenty-five knots, about as fast as it could go on one turbine. The ship was hurrying toward a rendezvous with the oiler
San Jose
, which would top off the frigate's fuel reserves. For the moment, there were no tankers to herd, no armed raiders to ward off in this calm central region of the Gulf. There was time, it seemed, to enjoy a moment's calm and a cooling breeze that belied the eighty-seven-degree air.

But when Gibson raised his binoculars, the lenses showed a floating object, and then two more. Perhaps the dolphins were back? But the black shapes were just sitting there on the surface, a few hundred yards off the starboard bow. He studied them in the magnified circle of the binoculars. There were protuberances on their round tops. The lookout pressed a button on his sound-powered phones and spoke into the mouthpiece.

Down in the captain's stateroom, Rinn was reviewing menus with Kevin Ford. The chief cook had planned a steak-and-lobster dinner for the following night, a small celebration of the deployment's halfway mark. The phone rang, and Rinn pulled the heavy handset from its bracket. It was Lt. Bob Firehammer, the officer of the deck. He had taken Gibson's report, then ordered the helmsman to stop the ship. Firehammer began to tell the skipper about the floating objects. But Rinn could already feel the ship shuddering to a halt, and he hung up before the lieutenant could finish. Two quick right turns, and he was scaling the ladder to the bridge.
It's not mines
, the captain told himself.
It's sheep floating upside down, or trash bags
.

Rinn took up binoculars and focused them through the windscreen. The shapes were perhaps six hundred yards away. They were shiny. Unencrusted with marine growth. Horned. “Holy shit,” he said. “Those
are
mines.”

The bridge, always quiet, had gone silent. The sounds of wind and waves drifted through open hatches. Deep within, a gas turbine spun idly, its humming diffused to the edge of consciousness. Someone scratched a pencilled note; it was 1639, what civilians call 4:39
PM
. The ship's position was 26 degrees, 22.5 minutes north; 52 degrees, 18.4 minutes east, halfway between Qatar and Iran.

Out on the wing, Dan Nicholson bent to the big-eyes, the spindle-mounted binoculars built to identify ships on the horizon. The quartermaster examined the black spheres through the two-foot barrels.
Whoa, this is real—big time!
Nicholson thought.

Beside him, a shutter clicked. Tom Reinert, the chief gunner, was snapping photos through a telephoto lens. Someone whispered, wondering whether the ship should try to sink the mines with gunfire.
¹

Reinert already had it sorted it out. You could shoot mines a mile or more distant with the 76-mm deck gun. Out to a thousand yards or so, you'd use the 25-mm chain gun, and the .50-caliber machine gun if they were really close.
These look like candidates for the .50-cal
, the gunner thought.
²

Rinn called down to CIC. Fire Controlman 1st Class Matt Shannon was flipping through his radar modes, trying to pick the mines out of the surface clutter for a gunnery fix. Van Hook was standing watch as tactical action officer. “Get on the radio to
Coronado,”
Rinn told the chief engineer. The Middle East Force had explosive ordnance teams to deactivate or destroy the mines; they would also warn the rest of the fleet to stand clear.

Then Rinn paused to think. His ship didn't seem to be in immediate danger. It had stopped short of the line of the three visible mines. His options were nevertheless limited. He could not simply freeze the ship in place. For all the virtues of gas turbines and auxiliary propulsion units, they did not turn the frigate into a hovering helicopter. Nor was the anchor much help. A ship moored at sea moves with the wind and water like a tethered balloon, not a car with a parking brake. In
any case, Rinn dared not drop the anchor for fear of setting something off.

The longer the ship hung around, the greater the danger would become. With sunset less than two hours away, spotting other mines would soon become all but impossible. Worse, the frigate would be a sitting duck for warplanes and surface craft. No, sticking around was hardly an option.

So, which way to safety? The visible mines were sitting off the starboard bow, and the way directly ahead appeared to be clear. But it would be folly to move forward, or even to try a sharp turn to port. Moored mines, when laid correctly, float below the water's surface. Who knew why these three were riding so high? Maybe their anchors were sitting on top of some underwater boulder. Maybe whoever dropped them off eventually found the proper length for the mooring cables. The rest of the string—or strings—could well be underwater.

This was truly disturbing, Rinn thought.
We may not be on the periphery of these things. We may be in the middle of them
. That alone was enough to scuttle the idea of shooting their way out. Even if the visible mines blew up or went to the bottom, there was no telling where the others might be. There was also the danger of sympathetic or noise-triggered detonation. It occurred to Rinn that for all the courses the navy provided to prospective commanding officers, none addressed the problem of withdrawing from a minefield. In the end, only one choice made sense: back up. The captain stepped onto the bridge wing and leaned over the port railing. The ship's wake pointed stick-straight toward the northwest horizon. It would be no easy thing to retrace that path, which was already fading into a faint bubbly scum.

Backing a single-screw, single-rudder frigate was more complicated than it sounded. Water flowed unpredictably around the blunt stern, and a backing ship could easily wander off course. Rinn had long known about this sticky spot in the frigate's operating envelope. During the long days off Cuba last summer, he and several of his officers had experimented with backing techniques, practicing while the Gitmo instructors were elsewhere. Now he would put his findings to the test.

The next move was all but automatic. Rinn lifted the silver microphone and thumbed its button. The 1MC loudspeaker system carried his words to every compartment in the ship. “This is the captain. We've spotted
some mines,” he said. “I want everyone to set Condition Zebra [maximum compartmentalization] and go to your general quarters stations.” There would be no GQ alarm, he said. The dark shapes had the horns of simple contact mines, but there was no way to know whether they could also be triggered by sound, or the approach of a steel hull. “Move calmly and quietly,” Rinn said.
³

TWO HUNDRED SAILORS
streamed about the ship, moving forward in the starboard passageways, aft in the port ones, dogging hatches, tugging at their clothing, reporting to their stations. The call had roused Signalman Mike Roberts from the television in the crew's berthing space and filled him with instant dread. The absence of the battle-stations alarm was eerie enough, but the skipper
never
called GQ himself.
⁴

Rinn's call pried Lester Chaffin from his rack, where the electrician's mate first class was sifting through family snapshots and looking forward to the evening meal. A native of Huntington, West Virginia, Chaffin had abandoned a grocery-stocking job to accept the navy's promise of free education and travel. He pulled on a flash hood as he headed for the deck, where he chatted with the leader of Repair Locker 5. To Chaffin, the situation didn't feel much different from other false alarms about an ominous something-or-other.
⁵

Chris Pond, who was flushed from the chow line, was less blasé than annoyed.
Another drill
, the hull tech thought.
I'm going to miss dinner
. Rolling down his sleeves and buttoning his shirt to the neck, Pond joined his team at the forward repair locker, Repair 2, under the forecastle. Then the 1MC instructed all hands to fan out around the ship and take extra OBA canisters with them. Pond and a few others wandered forward to the missile magazine.
⁶

The call had awoken Rick Raymond a half hour into his post-duty slumber. Like the rest of the CIC team, Raymond had been standing watches in two sections: six hours on, six off. Shaking off the fatigue, the operations specialist-cum-hoseman pulled on coveralls and headed forward to Repair 2. The locker leader, Senior Chief Boatswain's Mate George Frost, was spreading his crew out to reduce the chance of a mine getting everyone at once, and Raymond wound up near sick bay. He walked in to chat with Hospitalman 1st Class James Lambert. The corpsman
was still sweaty from a workout on the ship's stationary bike. Lambert was also working on his enlisted surface warfare qualification, so he and Raymond chewed over some test-prep questions.

Down in CIC, Van Hook had spent several frustrating minutes attempting to establish a clear radio link to the
Coronado
. When he finally got through, the Middle East Force staff officers had offered two instructions: “Put your helicopter in the air to keep an eye on the mines,” and “don't get any closer to them.” Van Hook relayed this up to the bridge. Rinn rolled his eyes at the latter advice, but the first part sounded sensible enough. He called the officer in charge of the helicopter detachment, Lt. Cdr. Tim Matthews, and told him to prep the Seahawk for launch.
⁷

The word was passed to set flight quarters, and sailors assembled in the hangar and flight deck. Hull Technician 2nd Class Ted Johnson turned out in the bulky silver flame-retardant “hotsuit” of the crash-and-rescue team. Johnson squatted on a toolbox in the port hangar, chatting with one of the enlisted aircrew. On the other side of the hangar door, the helo crew ran through the preflight checklist.

In the radar shack behind the bridge, John Preston perched on a bench, straining at his sound-powered headphones for clues about the situation. The fire controlman grasped for soothing thoughts.
Everything is going to be all right, because we're on the mighty
Samuel B. Roberts
and Commander Rinn is going to save the day for us again
. He longed to stick his head out of his windowless room for a look around, and thought about the engineers far below in their cramped machinery rooms:
I wonder whether this is what they feel like.
⁸

DAVE WALKER, THE
ship's gas turbine chief and all-around Mr. Fixit, was heading forward for some chow after his four-hour watch when the GQ call came. Walker turned around and went back to Central Control Station (CCS), the ship's engineering nerve center.

The other engineers were already prepping the ship for battle, twisting knobs and punching buttons on the floor-to-ceiling control panels that divided the space. The panels, covered in dials and gauges and switches, stretched from the yellow-flecked linoleum up to the cable runs above. They sent electronic commands to equipment around the ship, and described conditions in blinking lights.

Most of the equipment they monitored was in the four main engineering spaces under Walker's feet, noisy and crowded compartments where sailors wore earplugs and hollered to make themselves understood. Engineers called them the “main spaces,” or simply “the hole.”

The forwardmost was Auxiliary Machine Room 1 (AMR 1), which held a pair of fuel tanks and one of the frigate's four diesel-powered electrical generators. Immediately aft of AMR 1, and twice its size, was AMR 2, which held two of the big generators, plus fuel pumps, air conditioners, and two of the ship's five fire pumps. Next came the main engine room. This was the biggest space in the frigate and yet one of its most packed, thanks to a capacious pair of fuel tanks and the truck-sized soundproofed enclosures that held the gas turbines. Finally, there was AMR 3, which held one generator and the ship's freshwater distillers directly below Central Control.

Walker watched as Gas Turbine Systems Technician 1st Class Michael Wallingford manipulated the main propulsion panel. One deck down, the starboard gas turbine rumbled to life. Walker flipped a switch, sending throttle control to the helmsman on the bridge, and then lifted a heavy brass-rimmed handset. “Bridge, CCS. Second turbine's up; you have program control.”
⁹

Behind Walker and Wallingford was another tall panel, lined with L-shaped circuit-breaker handles like a stand of fiddlehead ferns. It sketched the state of the ship's electrical grid in lights and indicator gauges. Two of the four generators were already online, pumping out a thousand kilowatts apiece. But general-quarters doctrine prescribed one more, and so Chief Electrician's Mate Robert C. Bent was working through the start-up sequence for generator number one in AMR 1.

As the hulking diesel powered up, Bent watched the tachometer needle, which tracked the engine's shaft speed. The needle shot past the red line, a light flared, and an automatic safety override shut the engine down at 1,800 rpm. That was odd. Walker sent Electrician's Mate 1st Class Jim Whitley to investigate. Bent flipped switches to bring up generator number four instead.
¹⁰

Then the chief electrician called Electrician's Mate 2nd Class John Kolynitis, who was in the auxiliary propulsion room waiting to lower
the outboard motors into the water. Bent told Kolynitis to seek higher ground after the pods were in the water.