The Gulf (2 page)

The steel main deck separated the airframe and the warhead. The fuselage rebounded from it and split apart. Its fragments scythed through the waist of the ship: staterooms, fan rooms, wardroom, and sick bay. Its sustainer disintegrated, scattering chunks of the solid fuel, burning at 3,200 degrees and containing its own oxygen, behind the flying metal.

The steel-cased warhead had been designed to penetrate the armor of a Soviet
Kynda
-class cruiser. It continued through the main deck into the engineering spaces. In main control, a chief warrant and two enginemen were blown into the electrical control panel as the warhead passed through. It continued out the port bulkhead and entered the main machinery space. It passed over the number-two boiler, shearing steam and feedwater lines, penetrated another deck, went through five feet of beef in a chill-storage locker, and detonated ten feet below the waterline in shaft alley number one.

*   *   *

The officer of the deck was looking aft when the missile hit. He saw no flash, no explosion, felt only a quiver beneath his feet and then the
wham
of a solid hit. Black smoke burst out of the uptakes, followed by fire and pieces of burning insulation. A low rumble came from aft.

There was a sudden eerie whir, descending the scale. The intake blowers, gyros, ventilators, all wound downward into a silence more disquieting than sound. Suddenly, he could hear the lazy slap of flags, could hear yelling and the pounding of feet aft. The frigate, losing way through the water, leaned gently to port.

“Captain's on the bridge!”

The lieutenant spun to face him. “We've lost power, sir,” he said. “Lost propulsion, radio—”

“Still got sound-powered comms?”

“Yessir,” said the phone talker.

“Call main control.”

“They don't answer, sir, DC central's been calling them.”

“Okay. Keep the lookouts alert. If you see another one coming in, use the manual toggle to fire the rest of the chaff.” The CO pressed the intercom lever, but it was dead. “I'm going aft, see what we got.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get one of the battery-powered radios going. See if you can raise somebody, get the word out we've been hit. Give them our position and ask them to pass it to MIDEASTFOR on three-oh-two point five. Keep your head, think slow, do what needs doing. I'll get us out of this.”

“Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant again, looking after him.

*   *   *

The 250 pounds of explosive in the warhead had blown a chunk of the ship's hull plating outward, below the waterline. Now the warm Gulf poured in. In the engine room, just above, superheated steam had displaced the air. Main Control no longer existed. No one was alive there.

In engineering berthing, four men had been changing linens and waxing the decks. They had all gone through a blindfolded escape drill the week before. This was all that saved them when the lights went out and the compartment suddenly filled with flying flame.

The location of the hit, midships angling down, providentially missed most of the areas where the crew concentrated during general quarters. But some men had lingered for a few seconds, over bug juice on the mess decks, over coffee in the chiefs' quarters, over doughnuts in the wardroom or at their desks over paperwork. These men died or now lay unconscious, their lungs filling with smoke.

The others, belowdecks in the feeble glow of battle lanterns, squatted or stood awaiting orders. In every man's mind, the desire to bolt for open air struggled with his training and the duty to stay at his station.

A few bolted. Most stayed. Gradually, over sound-powered circuits and by word of mouth, it filtered through the ship. They'd been hit amidships, the engine room was knocked out, and they had a fire to fight—a big fire.

The men in the damage-control lockers had been dressing out when the missile struck. Repair Two was twenty feet aft of the explosion and their door was jammed shut by buckled steel. They cooked to death over the next fifteen minutes. The two other teams simply continued their routine, though now their hearts speeded up. They rolled down their sleeves, pulled their socks over their pants legs, and buttoned the collars of their dungaree shirts. They struggled into OBAs, clumsy rubber-and-metal breathing devices, slapped green cans into them, and pulled tabs to light off the oxygen candles. They buckled on steel helmets, then grabbed their tools and lines and lights and began groping toward the growing roar of the fire.

Behind them, other men unrolled hoses and spun brass caps off the ship's firemain. A little water spurted out, then stopped. The fire pumps were driven by steam and the single firemain was ruptured in three places. The team leaders hesitated. One grabbed a CO
2
canister and tried it on a burning cord of solid fuel. The propellant dimmed for a moment, then blazed up again when the extinguisher hissed empty.

Above them, on the flight deck, other men worked desperately to prime and start gasoline-powered pumps. In a few minutes, they began to buzz, like lawn mowers on a suburban Saturday morning.

Meanwhile the fire gathered strength. Fuel tanks, paint storerooms, helicopter fuel, lubricants, wooden shoring, vinyl tile on decks, insulation, the very paint on the bulkheads, all ignited. Above the main deck, the frigate's structure was aluminum, not steel, and it began to soften, like chocolate on a hot day. Furniture, bunks, carpets, cabinets full of paper reached flash point and burst suddenly into flame. And above that, as the overheads sagged and split apart, the heat licked upward toward the torpedo room and the helicopter hangar on the 01 level.

*   *   *

In DC central, eighty feet forward of the hit and the fire, the damage-control officer, an ensign from Lubbock, Texas, looked at the first reports from his investigators. He had to deal with both fire and flooding. He knew it was impossible to extinguish the burning propellant, as he would a normal fire. He now decided to try to slow its lateral spread by venting heat upward. Holes at frames 100 and 125 might channel the fire around the torpedo room. For a while, at least. Control of the flooding would have to wait. He scribbled notes and handed them to grimy, scared-looking messengers.

*   *   *

Deep in the ship, the hoses went rigid at last, fed by the portable pumps. The nozzlemen from Repair Five began shuffling forward, walking under a blast of water mist from applicators held by the number-two men.

They walked into a white hell. Through the eyepieces of their masks, they could see the flame-outlined sag of cables drooping from the overheads, ready to snag them. The overheads were on fire. The tile decks were on fire, and though they quenched when water hit them, they reignited as soon as it boiled off. The air was impenetrable with smoke and steam.

The team leader, advancing with his men, screamed as the heat penetrated his dungarees. The cotton did not flame or melt. The nylon jockey shorts beneath did, shriveling, fusing to his skin. The nozzleman ran with him. The second man on the hose did not. He moved up, pulled the bail back to release a blast of water, and began edging forward again, into the smoke and growing heat.

They came to a watertight door, closed and dogged when the ship went to general quarters. The number-two man smashed a porthole to get it open. Fire leapt out, melted his mask, and burned his hair and his face off. The number-three man stepped up and ripped his breathing bags open on a whetted shard of steel. He staggered back, sucking hot smoke instead of oxygen. The number-four man took his place and played the hose over the door, the stream spitting and boiling, then stuck it through the porthole. He left it there for a minute, then banged the dogs free and yanked the door open. The applicator man and the hose man followed him in.

The furnace beyond had been the crew's mess. Now the vinyl chairs and Formica tables glowed yellow deep in the smoke. Pieces of the missile engine were still burning like white flares. The rails of the serving line glowed a soft neon red. Above their heads, liquid copper dripped from cable runs. On the deck, bodies burned with the smoky orange of grease fires. The flames roared hollowly all around them. The three men felt their clothes catch fire. The rubber of their OBAs began to smoke. The nozzleman hesitated. Something heavy crashed through the overhead to his left.

He began backing out. But when they tried to retreat, they found an aluminum ladder had melted over the hatchway.

*   *   *

No one had anticipated the need to cut through the deck. The men ordered to do it hoped the special tools for getting pilots out of burning helicopters would work, but they bounced off. At last, the biggest began swinging fire axes. Each blow made only a dent, but gradually they hewed out foot-wide gaps. Like small volcanoes, each hole vented a jet of mingled flame and smoke straight up into the air.

In the helo hangar, three of the aircrewmen struggled with their machine. The tires had melted and it wouldn't roll. At last they abandoned it, and ran aft as the explosive charges on the sonobuoys began popping, sending metal pinging and whirring after them.

Just forward of them, the torpedomen, exercising their own initiative, had begun jettisoning their Mark 46s as soon as they realized the fire was gnawing its way up below them. They had enough compressed air in ready flasks to fire them over the side, but it was a slow process. They first had to move each weapon to the tube with chain hoists and dollies, by hand, without power. They had five torpedoes left when the paint on the deck ignited and they had to clear the compartment. They ran, screaming as the deck by the vent holes burned through the soles of their boots.

*   *   *

The captain stood on the flight deck. Between him and the bridge was a smoking mass of superstructure with flame spewing out of the 02 level. The pumps whined at full speed around him.

One of the torpedomen pounded by him. The captain caught him by the arm and asked him an urgent question. The man's face was blistered. He shook his head violently, held up five fingers.

The captain looked around, at the sea.

The ship lay sagging to port in the center of a blue emptiness. Some distance off to the east was the purple cloud of a small island. Beyond that was Iran. To starboard, the water was oily and speckled with floating debris. He thought he saw a body, but it could have been something else. The ship, still with way on, moved slowly past it. More debris took its place. The oil gentled the waves. Beyond that was empty sea, but he knew that farther off, maybe fifty miles, was the coast of Saudi Arabia.

The captain wanted to go forward. He wanted to regain his bridge, and he wanted to go to damage-control central, where the battle against fire and flooding was being coordinated. It didn't look like he could make it on the main deck, though. Below, it would be even worse.

“Chief.”

“Sir.”

“Take one of these pumps forward. Get water on those torpedoes.”

Both of them knew what this order meant. The chief nodded and turned away. He shouted to two men to grab pump and hoses and follow him.

At last the captain took a deep breath and sprinted down the starboard side. The heat staggered him and he blundered through the blazing remains of the whaleboat with his hands over his face. For a moment, he thought he would die. Then he was in clear air again, slapping at his uniform pants. They were a new polyester the Navy had approved in place of cotton. They were sharp-looking, permanent press, but now they shriveled and burst into flame. He got them off, pulling off flesh with the burning fabric, and climbed back to the bridge.

The officer of the deck looked glad to see him. “Were you able to raise anybody?” the captain asked him.

“Got a Belgian freighter. She's putting out a Mayday for us. Sir, we have high-temp alarms in the hangar, torpedo stowage, main control—”

“I know.”

The ship groaned and clattered under their feet, settling farther to port. The captain pulled out a phone and talked briefly with the damage-control officer, then put it back. “The engine spaces are flooding,” he said softly, as if to himself. “The fire's right over them. I can't get portable pumps down there. The bilge pumps are electric. And I can't run the submersibles without power or the eductors without firemain pressure.”

“We can dewater with P-250s.”

“Not fast enough. I think we've got a big hole down there.” He looked to port. “This class won't stay afloat with the engine spaces flooded. How deep is it here?”

“Six hundred feet, sir,” said the quartermaster.

“I hope they saved a fucking lot of money on this ship,” said the captain softly.

“DC central reports: team from Repair Five has been forced back by fire.”

The first torpedo cooked off then, mowing down the pump crews on the flight deck. The secondary conning station made a somersault in the air and plunged down on the burning gig. The captain rose from an instinctive crouch, looking aft. The flames occupied the entire midships now. The frigate gave a lurch and slid farther over to port. It was now listing perhaps forty degrees and was noticeably lower in the water aft.

“All this from one missile,” said the lieutenant.

“One missile,” said the captain.

“Whose was it? What kind was it? Soviet?”

“No,” said the captain. “It was a Harpoon. One of ours.”

He took a last deep breath, then picked up the phone again. “DC central, Bridge. This is Captain Shaker. Bring your people out on deck. Yes. Get them all up from below.” To the lieutenant, he said, “How far away you figure this freighter is?”

“About twenty miles, coming north, toward us.”

“Call them back. Ask them to render assistance.”

“We're not going to leave her, sir?”

“I may have to,” said the captain. He looked back along the length of the ship again. A second torpedo went off, blowing shattered Plexiglas past him; he ducked back just in time. A huge mushroom of inky smoke stuffed with red fire rose above the listing destroyer.