No Higher Honor (24 page)

That sounded like a good idea to Walker. On the fifth deck, the lowest one, you could look past your boots to the half-inch steel skin of the ship. With mines about, it only made sense to get everyone up to higher ground. Walker rotated a switch and spoke into the 2JV, a sound-powered communications circuit. The 2JV carried his voice to the sailors in the engine room and machinery spaces. “Why don't you all come up from the lower levels,” he said.
¹¹
Those few words would save lives.

Walker rechecked his panels, then picked up a phone and told CIC that the frigate's engineering plant was ready for battle.
Okay, we all know something bad's out there, and we're all here in this nice little steel room
, Walker thought.
¹²
The minutes ticked by.

ELSEWHERE IN THE
main spaces, the rest of the engineers had taken their stations. Directly below Bent in AMR 3, Engineman 1st Class Mark Dejno had watched his own control panels as the chief electrician brought diesel generator number four to life. Three spaces forward, a trio of men had assembled in AMR 1. One was Gas Turbine Technician 2nd Class Randy Tatum, who had recently written to the Nebraska newspaper. Another was Mike Tilley, the wisecracking junior engineman from Missouri, and the third was Fireman Joe Baker, who had just pulled on shorts and T-shirt for a bit of weightlifting when the GQ call came. As Baker skinned back into dungarees, a familiar ball of fear had gathered in his gut. He'd felt it back in Newport, that first day aboard ship, when he'd learned that the
Roberts
was destined for the Gulf.

On Walker's order to evacuate the lower levels, the three men climbed up a ladder to the refrigeration deck. The sailors perched on steel cans, keeping up a stream of chatter to hide their nerves. “Our ship doesn't hit mines; that's what happens to other ships,” someone said. The smell of frost and cold cardboard drifted from a walk-in refrigerator. Baker remembers a moment of calm after the banter ran out—“still, like the moment the sun peeks over the horizon on a cool spring morning,” he wrote.
¹³

Down in the main engine room, Gas Turbine Systems Technician 3rd Class Dave Burbine had answered the call to general quarters by snaking his way down a ladder and squeezing between the gas turbine modules.
The twenty-three-year-old from Westerly, Rhode Island, settled onto a tiny platform and donned sound-powered phones. Wedged under the upper-level grate, below the waterline, and between two hot and humming steel boxes, Burbine's seat was about as claustrophobic a duty station as the
Roberts
offered. Adding insult to inconvenience, the job was redundancy personified. He manned a small joystick that could control the pitch of the ship's sixteen-foot propeller, but he'd be called upon only if both the bridge and Central Control lost their ability to do it.

When Walker passed the word to move up a level, Burbine was only too happy to comply—not because of any particular foreboding, but rather because hours of drills had rendered him thoroughly sick of perching on the small square of metal. He set down his headphones and clambered to the upper grate, where he met fellow gas turbine tech Fireman Wayne Smith. Amid the roaring blast of a cool-air vent, the engineers leaned against compressed-air reservoirs and watched the massive reduction gear turn slowly beneath their feet.
¹⁴

Chief Alex Perez stood at the engine room's local control panel, about twenty feet farther into the compartment. An expert in the care and feeding of the frigate's big turbines, the thirty-eight-year-old from Los Angeles led Burbine, Smith, and a few other junior engineers with ready knowledge and a firm touch.
¹⁵
Perez checked on his guys, making sure they were up on the grate, and surveyed his panel, which indicated a fully functional propulsion plant.

All preparations made, Perez had a moment to think of his wife, Mary. A month earlier he had waved to Kevin Ford's camera, offering a hand-lettered sign—“Hi, Mary!”—and a fleshy smile under a bushy mustache. Now she was starting her day back in Rhode Island, tending preparations for the evening's Halfway Day dinner. Presently, Perez thought he heard a faint rasp, metal scraping on metal.
¹⁶

FOUR MINUTES AFTER
Rinn called general quarters, all stations reported ready. It was time for a choice. Hold steady? Move? The fates of two hundred lives and an American warship rested on his decision. Centuries of naval tradition and the command star on Rinn's right breast said the choice was his alone. Two thoughts came to him, shining clear and bright:
he could drive that ship as well as anyone, and his well-trained crew could handle anything he could. He pondered a moment more, alone, seeking no counsel. He made his choice.
I gotta get out of here
.

He picked up the 1MC again. “I can see our wake,” he told the crew. “I'm pretty certain we can back down.” The captain dispatched officers to back up the enlisted lookouts. Firehammer went out to stand on the starboard wing, opposite the captain, while Eckelberry and the junior officer of the deck, Ens. Michael Infranco, headed aft to the hangar roof. It was time to move.

Rinn ordered the auxiliary propulsion units (APUs) deployed and angled to power the ship aft. Several decks down, Electrician Kolynitis toggled a switch, and the pods dropped into position.
¹⁷
The captain told the bridge helmsman to put the rudder hard left and ordered engines back one-third. This turned the shaft at ten revolutions a minute—just enough, he hoped, to keep a wash over the rudder and the stern in place. Then he ordered power to the APUs, and the ship began to move backward.

Less than ten minutes had elapsed since Gibson, the forward lookout, had called up to the bridge to report the first sighting of mines. Now the
Roberts
was backing away from danger, with trusted shipmates keeping close eyes out for new black, bobbing forms. Rinn was not terribly worried. After all, he reckoned, they had spotted the one out front, and stopped with hundreds of yards to spare.
We're going to get out
, he thought.
¹⁸
He was wrong.

DESIGNED IN 1908
for Tsar Nicholas II, the M-08/39 naval mine remains a marvel of cost-effective weaponry. It consists of a three-foot black sphere perched atop a heavy cylinder, like a tennis ball on a tin can. The sphere contains 253 pounds of the high explosive called trinitrotoluene, or TNT, and flotation voids to make it buoyant. The squat cylinder holds 360 feet of mooring cable and a 700-pound slug of iron.
¹⁹

Laying an M-08 is a relatively simple matter of taking a depth sounding, setting the cable length, and sliding the mine overboard. The iron anchor settles on the sea floor, and the buoyant sphere floats up to the end of its tether. Tide and current notwithstanding, the ball floats about a dozen feet beneath the waves—deep enough to be invisible, shallow enough to strike a passing ship.

The buoyant globe is studded with five triggering devices, called “Hertz horns” after their nineteenth-century German inventor. Each is roughly the size and shape of a fat sausage and holds a glass ampoule of battery acid. When one of these lead-foil horns is crushed against a ship's hull, the acid drains into a wet cell, whose electrical charge ignites a detonator, which touches off several hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene.

The material products of a TNT explosion are humdrum: nitrogen gas, carbon monoxide, water, and soot. Ounce for ounce, the pale yellow solid releases less energy than burning gasoline or even sugar. It is the blinding speed of its combustion that does the violence. When TNT detonates underwater, it disassociates within milliseconds into a bubble of gas. This bubble displaces water, sending a shockwave racing away at supersonic speed. The bubble, heated to thousands of degrees and pressurized to thousands of atmospheres, expands just behind the shockwave, driving water before it like a battering ram.

This one-two punch—shockwave followed by bubble—alone can cripple a ship. But under certain conditions, the punishment can go on for several more seconds. If the gas bubble doesn't pierce the ocean surface, it will collapse under the sea's weight and then re-expand to deal a new blow. In a shallow sea like the Persian Gulf, the shockwave may bounce off the channel floor and return to strike again. Even if a ship survives the initial shocks, this whipping action can break its keel, as a terrier snaps a rabbit's neck.

And finally, if the gas bubble finds an outlet—say, a hole in a battered hull—it vents. The weight of the surrounding seawater forces the super-hot vapors through the opening, like a burst steam pipe letting loose with the fires of hell itself.

NO ONE SAW
the mine that got the
Samuel B. Roberts
. This particular weapon had been laid with more skill, or perhaps luck, than the three visible off the bow. The mine's anchor sat on the silt floor, some 250 feet down. Its steel tether had unreeled just enough to keep the buoyant sphere below the Gulf's opaque surface, riding just a bit higher than the frigate's sixteen-foot draft.

Nothing happened for the first few seconds after the warship backed over the black sphere. The frigate's hull sloped down from the stern,
reaching its full draft about one-third of the way toward the bow. As the ship moved backward, the mine missed the rudder, screw, and the skeg that stiffened the aft part of the hull. The mine may have been pushed off momentarily by the stern's “bow wave”; it may even have bumped the ship a few times without hitting any of its five triggers.
²⁰

But luck for the
Roberts
ran out about 4:50
PM
. A lead-foil horn crumpled against a half-inch hull plate. Chemicals mixed, generating an electrical charge. An eighth of a ton of TNT violently transformed into heat and vapor and soot. The shockwave hit the ship at frame 276—two-thirds of the way down the 445-foot hull, as measured from the bow—and just four feet to port of the centerline.
²¹
The blast lifted the entire ship at the point of impact, and the stern rose a few feet more than the bow. The stress was more than the keel could endure.

The keel and the main deck were the source of a frigate's structural strength. Bound together by relatively light bulkheads and stringers, they gave the ship the longitudinal stiffness of a seagoing I-beam. This structure, which had ridden unbowed through a Mediterranean gale and a Gulf
shamal
, could not cope with the lightning-fast loads imposed by the mine blast. For a moment, the frigate flexed around the point of impact. The main deck acquired a slight convexity, like a far-off hilltop or the curve of the earth. Then the ship flexed back. Bow and stern snapped up. The motion cracked the aluminum deckhouse in three places. Six feet of hangar came loose from the main deck.

The shock rippled through the ship. It cracked the mounts for both fire control antennae, dumped cooling water into a radar equipment cabinet, broke the ship's photocopier, and shattered the sneeze guard on the mess deck's salad bar. Directly above the impact point, the main deck bent, and stayed bent. The keel failed entirely: at the hull's lowest point, a twelve-foot section of HY-80 steel beam curled away like a pipe cleaner. And yet the mine had just begun to wreak its damage on the ship.

The gas bubble came hard on the heels of the shockwave. It is unclear which one pierced the hull plates. It was the bubble, however, that enlarged the hole to the size of a delivery truck and injected scalding vapors into the ship's main engine room. A fireball filled the space, instantly converting millions of dollars of precision-engineered machinery
into flaming junk. The gas turbines came off their mountings, flooding their enclosures with fuel. The blast tore open a pair of ten-thousand-gallon fuel tanks and a trio of oil sumps. An aviation-fuel line vaporized, spewing its volatile contents around the space. Atomized diesel and other petroleum distillates sprayed about, bursting into flame as they touched down on red-hot steel.

Still expanding, the fireball blew out the rubber gasket that surrounded the propeller shaft in the aft bulkhead. Scorching gases rushed through the two-foot, ring-shaped gap, filling AMR 3 with a wall of flame. The blast opened seams and punched basketball-sized holes in the forward bulkhead as well. But the rest of the hull plates held tight, sealing the force of the explosion inside the engine room. The pressure continued to grow as the gas bubble, still heated to hundreds of degrees, sought release.

A second later, it found an escape route. A rent opened in the starboard exhaust plenum, the five-foot-wide duct that carried the waste products of turbine combustion up four decks and into the atmosphere. The bubble forced its way into the duct. Superhot gases vented up through the ship, setting fires along the way, and burst out of the exhaust stack. The result was a hundred-foot eruption of fire and lagging and the flaming detritus of a wrecked propulsion plant.
²²

Far below, the engine room was now open to the sea. Seawater rushed through the twenty-five-foot hole. In seconds, the ship's largest space was flooded to the waterline. The water flowed aft through the shredded shaft gasket, filling AMR 3 almost to the overhead. Then it sluiced forward through the riddled bulkhead and began to flood AMR 2. Within minutes, some eighteen hundred tons of seawater sloshed in the ship's belly.
²³
This put a dangerous new load on the main deck. Every passing wave caused it to flex, like a soda can bent and rebent. Eventually, it might come apart, and if that happened, the ship would break up and sink.

Sorensen had taught his sailors that the
Perry
frigate was a three-compartment ship, but he had secretly wondered whether that was still true after all the extra weight that had been added over the course of the class's design. Now, with the loss of the keel, the three-compartment claim was even more suspect. With two large spaces gone and a third filling up, no one knew how much more the ship could take.