No Higher Honor (29 page)

Rinn stopped. His officers were staring at him.

“We don't have ‘flooding' in AMR 3,” someone said. “AMR 3 is gone!”

The captain said, “You're telling me my other main engineering space is gone? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” they said.
⁷

Rinn stepped out onto the bridge wing and looked aft. Smoke was still pouring from the stack and the cracks in the deck. The sun was getting
low on the horizon. Something was bothering him, something tickling the back of his mind, telling him he'd forgotten something important.

He decided to take another look around the ship. Down on the mess deck, the floor was covered with glass shards. The sight of the soda vending machine reminded him that the ship was out of drinking water. He told someone from the supply department to open up the machine and distribute the cans to thirsty sailors.

Then Rinn headed aft. As he picked his way through the midships passageway, steaming hot water dripped on his bellcap and flowed down the bulkhead. It was the runoff from the fire hoses two levels above him, heated by the deck plates. Water was pouring into the stack, but also running across the deck, draining through the gaps down into the hull.
This is an odd situation
, he thought.
Water above me, fire below
.

On his previous tour of the ship, Rinn had walked onto the flight deck and pulled aside Boatswain's Mate 2nd Class Kim Sandle. A member of the flight-quarters team, Sandle had nearly been decapitated by the helo's flexing rotor blades during the mine blast. Rinn had a vital task for the serious young sailor. The ship's number, 58, was painted on the side of the ship about four feet below the flight deck and—under normal conditions—about nine above the waterline. The ship was riding low, and Rinn had told Sandle to watch the number. He wanted to know just how bad things got.

Now the captain pulled the nearest phone from its hook and called the poop deck.

“Where's the water?” he asked Sandle.

“I don't know,” the boatswain replied.

This ticked Rinn off.
I gave him a direct order and he can't tell me where the water is?

“The reason I can't tell you the relationship of the numbers to the water,” the petty officer said, “is because they're underneath the water, Captain.”

This was surprising.
They said there wasn't any flooding in the main storeroom. Is there water in some space, some void I don't know about?

“Sandle, how bad is it?”

“Captain, if I get down on my hands and knees on the poop deck, I can put my hand in the water.”

Rinn looked down at his shoes, wet with seawater.

Something came back to him. It was a lesson as old as the
Normandie
and as recent as the
Stark
, concisely stated in Eric Sorensen's little blue DC handbook: “One of the hazards of fighting a fire aboard a ship is that it is possible to sink the ship while putting out the fire.”

Rinn realized with a shock that his damage control teams were putting ton after ton of seawater into the skin of his heavily damaged frigate.
We're sinking ourselves!

The captain charged back up to the bridge. It was 5:23
PM
, about thirty-five minutes after the explosion. He ordered the quartermaster to make a note in the deck log: the captain orders the cessation of fire-fighting efforts aboard the ship.

Before the sentence was two seconds out of his mouth, Rinn felt a hand clamp onto his arm. It was the XO: “Can I talk to you on the bridge wing?”

Eckelberry waited until the pair was out of easy earshot of the rest of the bridge team. Then he said, “Have you lost your mind? What are you doing?”

Rinn said, “No, we don't have to worry about the fire. In a little while, we're going to be underwater and the fires won't matter anymore. We've got to stop putting water into the skin of the ship. We've got to hold back on that until we can get control of the flooding.”

Eckelberry relented, rogered, and stepped back inside. Soon, the word was going out over the 1MC: stop fighting the fires until further notice. The ship's survival depended on the damage control team down in Auxiliary Machine Room 2.

AMR 2 WAS
beginning to look like the mine had blown up the ship's laundry instead of the engine room. Along with a small pile of mattresses, there were pale blue-striped sheets and pillows, plus random items of clothing. But more orthodox damage control gear was also making its way down the ladders. Ford and his team were especially grateful to get metal shoring beams. By placing one end of the adjustable beams against something sturdy, they found they could extend the other to—finally—hold soft patches in place. When they ran out of extendable beams, they called for wooden four-by-fours and handsaws. The results weren't the textbook examples of shoring they'd
completed in Guantanamo training, but things were moving too rapidly for perfect carpentry.

Somewhere in the madness, someone had noticed that diesel number three was running out of lube oil. The fluid cooled the diesel; without it, the engine would soon overheat and fail.
⁸
There wasn't time to diagnose the ailment; they settled for symptomatic treatment. The sailor rigged up a hand pump and hoses, connecting the nearby lube-oil tank to the diesel's filling port, and took turns cranking away at the pump. Joe Baker, who had found his way down into AMR 2 after Tilley got his diesel running, took one of the first shifts. The diesel's appetite for lube oil had turned voracious. Gallon after gallon of oil flowed from the tank to the engine, propelled by the arms of one sailor after another. It would be hours before they discovered that the diesel wasn't burning the oil; it was just flowing out a crack in the bottom of the engine block.

Light smoke wafted through the air; more hoses and eductors came down the ladder. Ford and crew raced to set them up. About a half hour after the mine blast, they got one of the perijets working, which was a big help. The suction began to pull water from the bilge.

They had also rigged two P-250 pumps—the extra pair the crew had scrounged up in Newport. Small knots of sailors had lugged them down to the lower deck, and now they were helping to turn the tide. The pumps and perijets were sucking up a combined 750 gallons a minute and sending it overboard through a discharge fitting. But the noise, added to the roar of the diesels, was almost overpowering. Ford dispatched Alan Sepelyak, a junior sailor, to sick bay for more earplugs.

And meanwhile, the team had finally stanched most of the major gushers in the bulkhead. Water was still leaking in, but no faster than it was flowing back out through drainage pipes and hoses. About 5:25
PM
, Ford sent word to DC Central that the water level in AMR 2 was six inches below the deck plates and holding there.

Ford, Frank, Fridley, Jackson, and Raymond, with the help of dozens of their shipmates, had kept the
Roberts
's serious wounds from turning into mortal ones. Now the crew could return to fighting the infection of fire.

AGONIZING MINUTES FOLLOWED
Rinn's order to stop pouring water on the fire. The hose teams atop the deckhouse watched the smoke pour unchallenged from the stack. The minutes ticked along like hours.

The deck was getting hot, very hot. Rubber-soled boots began to stick to the metal plates. Some men just stepped out of their melted footwear and left them adhered to the deck as they high-stepped away to fetch new shoes.

One of them, a chubby sailor who'd never managed to pass his damage control test, rushed past Rinn, then stopped and turned around in his stocking feet. “Captain, does this mean I'm DC-qualified?”

The skipper smiled. “No,” he said.

“Damn,” the sailor said, and hurried on.

About ten minutes passed, and finally the good news about AMR 2 arrived from DC Central. What was more, pumps had been set up near the main engine room and AMR 3, and the water levels had stabilized there as well. The captain lifted the ban on fighting the fires. The hose teams needed no urging to get back to work.

Rinn's mind was still on the weight of the ship. He had ordered some other things thrown overboard. A helicopter engine had already been tossed out and the position marked for salvage later. The water was only 150 feet deep here; divers should be able to bring it up, once the EOD guys cleared the mines. Rinn wondered what else might go.
Maybe we should jettison the torpedoes along with the shells?
⁹

Then he started having second thoughts about the entire notion of tossing ammo overboard. In the first place, it seemed too much like giving up, and that was the wrong signal to send to his crew. And second, if they did save the ship, it was going to be a monumental headache to explain where all the ammunition had gone. The men had already transferred thirty-four rounds, plus one charge designed to clear a jammed gun, from the ship's magazine to the briny deep. Rinn sent word down to Reinert: stop throwing the shells away—stack 'em on the forecastle instead. The gunner passed the word for more men and added them to the bucket brigade. The line of sailors grew, made a left turn on the quarterdeck, and stretched forward through the breakwater to the forecastle. About forty crew members were now working to clear the magazine, one-fifth of the souls on board the
Roberts
.
¹⁰

SOON AFTER AMR 2
reported things under control, Rinn received another bit of good news from Lt. Cdr. Tim Matthews, the senior officer of the
Roberts
's air detachment: the ship's helicopter might soon be ready to fly.

Matthews had been powering up the Seahawk from the left cockpit seat when the flight deck surged upward beneath him. His instrument panel lit up in red, and the engine shut down. Liquid gushed from the turbine. But when the ship's motion subsided, the helo was still clamped tightly to the deck.

The frigate was equipped with a RAST (Recovery, Assist, Securing, and Traversing) system, a movable winch built to draw helicopters onto heaving decks in bad weather. Matthews liked to use it as a safety belt when his helo was out on deck. This habit had probably saved half a dozen lives. Untethered, the helo could have tipped over. Its spinning rotors could have tilted into the deck and shattered into deadly shards. The helo itself may well have rolled off the deck and into the sea, taking Matthews, his copilot, and the enlisted aircrewman with it.

What actually happened was nearly just as hazardous. The blades had flexed, their tips whirling to within a yard of the deck, narrowly missing Sandle and the rest of the flight deck crew.

The pilot had shut down his battered bird and climbed out. His maintainers surrounded the aircraft, scrutinizing it for evidence of damage. There was almost no conceivable way that a helicopter subjected to such a blow would soon fly. There was too much that might have broken—engines, transmission, flight controls. The working hypothesis on the liquid was that a fuel line had severed, possibly flooding the engine with JP-8 jet fuel. Even the landing gear, which had absorbed most of the shock, might collapse if tested again.

But a half hour later the aviation mechanics gave Matthews a surprising verdict: odd as it sounded, they couldn't find anything that looked too broken to fly. They'd replaced some leaking seals in the tail rotor and tightened the fittings on a pump that was oozing hydraulic fluid, but if the aviation commander wanted to ignore training, instincts, and rule-book, the helo looked good to go.
¹¹

It was hard to beat a helo pilot for the propensity to see disaster at every turn. The job demanded it. A helicopter, it was said, was less an
aircraft than ten thousand parts flying in tight formation. The potential for harm multiplied when such an aerodynamically unstable flying machine operated from a tiny moving platform at sea.

So when Matthews approached Rinn around 5:30
PM
, the captain was surprised to hear the lieutenant commander ask for permission to fly. Rinn wasn't initially inclined to approve. If the helo went into the drink, no one could save its crew.

Matthews proposed that he take things in stages: power the helo up. Then try hovering. Then orbit the ship a time or two before finally landing to load the wounded men.

Rinn recognized the risk. But he also had sailors who were going to die unless they could get off the ship. The captain sent the crew to flight quarters and told Matthews to call when he was ready to go.
¹²

ECKELBERRY HAD TURNED
the bridge into a backup DC Central, plotting the damage control effort on the chart table with the aid of Yeoman 1st Class Paul Hass. It was standard practice to duplicate the engineers' record keeping on the bridge; a second perspective on the problem was always a good idea. But the executive officer had elevated the concept to include occasional broadcasts to the entire crew over the 1MC. These kept everyone informed about the DC effort, where the problem areas were, and most important, who needed help. Eckelberry, for example, had helped round up sailors to empty the 76-mm magazine and had urged otherwise unoccupied sailors to get down to AMR 2 and lend Ford a hand.

Some minutes after the bucket brigade had started sending 76-mm shells to the forecastle, Eckelberry caught the impossibly incongruous sounds of rock music. He stepped out to the bridge wing and looked down. Neat cordwood stacks of shells had begun to take shape between the deckhouse and the missile launcher. Someone had plugged in a portable cassette player and cranked it up. “It was almost comical,” the XO recalled. “Ship's on fire, sinking aft, these guys are moving ammunition out of a hot magazine and they've got a boom box playing music on the forecastle. It was one of those things where you stop, and your jaw drops, and you say, ‘I'm in Fantasyland.'”

Eckelberry also helped direct the movement of injured sailors to various first-aid stations established by the ship's corpsman, Hospitalman
1st Class James Lambert. A tall, lean man, Lambert was the closest thing the ship had to a physician. Inevitably, everyone called him Doc. Two months earlier, Ford's video camera had caught him in the galley, wearing a deadpan expression and a white turtleneck emblazoned with a red cross. “Here's bread,” the corpsman informed the camera, placing a loaf in the automatic slicer, “and it goes in here, and the lever goes down, and here's the finished product: sliced bread. So, kids, if you ever wondered, now you know where sliced bread comes from. It comes from the Persian Gulf.”