No Higher Honor (27 page)

Copeland began to move down the catwalk, peering through the smoke, kicking at the grates. A few steps past Perez, he felt something give. He rammed a screwdriver under one of the J-bolts and yanked on it. It moved. He called to Bent and Cowan, and the three men tugged the grate free.

Now Perez had an escape route, an odyssey of three yards. He would have to duck under the fouled seawater and swim through catwalk supports and cableways to get to the opening. It would have been no easy task for an uninjured man, and Perez was badly hurt. Second-degree burns covered some 40 percent of his body. His eyes were filled with diesel fuel. In the initial fall, he had bruised a lung and fractured three vertebrae.

Perez took a deep and painful breath and dropped beneath the surface. Feeling his way through the submerged wreckage, the chief pulled himself hand over hand toward his shipmates, who beckoned with their battle lanterns and bellowed encouragement.

Eternal seconds dragged by. Then Perez surfaced. His three rescuers pulled him from the water, wrapped their arms around him, and helped the injured chief hobble toward Repair Locker 3.
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Their shipmate had endured a quarter of an hour in burning water. His injuries were far more severe than the ship's corpsman could treat. If Perez were to have a chance at survival, he had to get off the
Roberts
.

ON THE BRIDGE
, damage reports were coming in faster. Water was pouring through the fractured engine room bulkhead into AMR 2. There was a report of seawater in AMR 3, the aft machinery room—again, the words were something like “totally flooded”—and Rinn still couldn't bring himself to believe it. But some minutes after the blast, the captain was beginning to add up the clues that arrived from around his battered ship. He imagined the hole in the hull, picturing it about the size of a home stereo. He was off by about two orders of magnitude, but his visions helped. He began assembling a mental picture of the ship and its systems and its people.
If that's what happened, here's what we can do about it . . .

At least the muster reports were reassuring. Every single member of the crew was alive, even the sailors in the engine room, which seemed like some kind of miracle. And word was also arriving of the DC efforts starting up around the ship. Hose teams were moving out inside the ship
and atop the superstructure, some following the leads from Rassler and the CCS engineers, others simply reacting to the flames before their eyes. In the main storeroom, aft of AMR 3, a shoring team was sawing up beams to hold the rear bulkhead steady. Down in AMR 2, a patching team was attacking the leaky bulkhead. But there was still too much Rinn didn't know.

When word arrived from Central Control that the power had stabilized, the captain ordered Palmer to turn the surface-search radar back on and told him to get working on the fire control radar. A few minutes later, Palmer reported that fire control was back up as well, and the ship could once again track targets.
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Rinn told him to call the pilot of the Iranian P-3. “Make him understand that if he comes near us, we're going to shoot him down,” he said.

It was far from clear whether
Roberts
could back up that threat. Palmer ordered the gunners to power up the 76-mm mount, and the automatic feeder loaded rounds without a hitch, which was a good sign. But there was no easy way to diagnose hidden damage, the kind that might cause the gun to blow up if fired. Moreover, the 76-mm turret and the fire control radar sat on opposite sides of the crack in the superstructure. Shooting from a misaligned radar would be like aiming a rifle at arm's length. Could the ship actually hit anything?

This, and a thousand other questions, told Rinn he needed to see things for himself. It wasn't an easy decision. In battle, a skipper generally belonged on the bridge or in CIC, where target data flowed and where a captain could communicate with his crew and to his own commanders.
⁶
But the current problems had far more to do with things inside the ship, so the radars and other sensors were useless. And the reports coming over the sound-powered phone could tell him only so much. Rinn told the .50-cal gunners on the bridge wing to keep a sharp eye on the horizon, gave the deck to Eckelberry, and headed below.
⁷

In CCS, Walker told Rinn that the main thing he worried about was the short circuits that might kick another generator or two offline. Without high-pressure air—the flasks had been destroyed in the main engine room—there might be no way to get them back up and running. On his way out, Rinn stopped by Burbine, who was shivering from his burns. “Captain, are we going to be okay?”

“We're going to be okay,” the CO told his shipmate. “We're going to get you out of here.”

Back in CIC, Rinn put in a call to the
Coronado
. He'd radioed the Middle East Force flagship once already since the mine blast. The conversation had been brief, because he didn't have much to say:
We've hit a mine, no reports of any deaths, damage to the ship unclear
. This time Admiral Less came on the line. The news that
Roberts had
stumbled onto a minefield had reached the Middle East Force commander as he'd walked in the door of his small house outside Manama. His chief of staff reported that Rinn was about to start backing down the
Roberts
's wake. “He's the captain,” Less responded, “and that sounds as if that's as good as you can probably do in a situation like that.” The admiral had raced back to the
Coronado
through sun-baked city streets.
⁸

Now, some twenty minutes after the mine detonation, Less asked for a status report. Rinn told him things were not looking particularly good. The engine room was gone and there was flooding in AMR 3. But he said all his primary combat systems were operational, and the ship was ready to defend itself.

But, Rinn told the admiral, he was going to need medevac helicopters, and fast. The
Roberts
's SH-60 had been knocked out, and there were more burn cases than the ship's corpsman could handle. The clock was ticking on the Golden Hour, and people were going to go into shock.

Less told him help was on the way, in the form of the amphibious transport dock USS
Trenton
(LPD 14) and its marine helicopters. Rinn rogered and hung up.
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THE FIGHT TO
save
AMR
2 had begun within minutes of the mine blast. The phone buzzed in Repair Locker 2, and Senior Chief Frost, the locker leader and ship's senior enlisted sailor, picked it up. While he talked, Rick Raymond and other members of Repair 2 waited in the starboard passageway.
Is there another mine out there, ready to explode?
Raymond wondered. The half-inch hull plates had never seemed so thin.
¹⁰

Frost hung up. The call was from DC Central, which needed someone to confirm a report of flooding in the auxiliary machine space. The job properly belonged to Repair Locker 5, but most of that team was already up on the deckhouse laying out hose and getting ready to fight
the stack fire. Others were rescuing Chief Perez; still others had been injured in the blast.

Frost sent five of his men down to check it out. The team was led by Kevin Ford and included Rick Raymond, Mess Specialist 1st Class Scott Frank, Radioman 2nd Class Gary Jackson, and Dick Fridley, the boatswain's mate first class. They scooped some DC gear from their locker—mallets, wooden plugs, wedges—and headed out. They trooped through the mess room, swung open a soundproofed door, and headed down a ladder.
¹¹

Thirty feet long, AMR 2 was one of the bigger spaces on the ship, a two-deck compartment only slightly smaller than the engine room. Much of the space was taken up by the soundproofed enclosures that held generators numbers two and three. There was plenty of other gear as well: chilled-water circulators, fuel filters, and most crucially, two of the ship's fire pumps.

The upper deck looked okay to Ford and his team, so they headed down a second ladder. They expected to see the ochre-painted bilge stringers several feet below the deck plates. Instead, there was only black water, six inches under their boots. But the sight of flooded bilges could not compare with the shock of seeing water pouring from holes in the aft bulkhead. The steel plates that separated AMR 2 from the inundated main engine room had buckled inward. Water was pouring from a half dozen cracks and punctures. Several holes were the size of basketballs. This forty-five-foot stretch of battered steel, obstructed by pipes, equipment, and the two generator enclosures, would become the front line in the battle to save the
Roberts
.

Raymond stepped past the pumps and panels that protruded like islands from the flooded bilges. He took aim at a two-inch split seam, wrestled a wooden wedge into the gushing water, and began pounding it into place with a mallet. This was standard DC technique; Raymond had done this dozens of times in the Buttercup. But the steel bulkhead responded in a way he'd never seen in the simulator. It split again, opening a new gusher about a foot above the original hole. The words of an instructor came back to him: “It only splits like that when there's a ton of water behind the bulkhead.”
Just how bad is it in here?
Raymond wondered.
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Next to him, Ford was wrestling with another hole. The awkward, cramped space made his job far tougher than anything the simulator had ever thrown at him. The punctures and splits were obscured, hidden behind water pipes, fuel valves, and electrical junction boxes.

Raymond lay down atop an electrical distribution panel and reached down behind it to get to another leak. When he got up, Jackson was staring at him. “I didn't want to tell you, but that thing was smoking,” Raymond recalled Jackson saying. “I was just waiting for you to get electrocuted.”

Soon, there was more bad news from the number two generator enclosure. The blast had shoved the aft bulkhead upward, opening splits as it bowed. Water was spurting onto the diesel's engine block.

The sailors hammered away, but the wooden plugs weren't working. In desperation they looked around for other materials, softer ones that would be less likely to cause new holes. In other ships they might have found rags floating up from the bilges, but the
Roberts was
kept too clean for that. So they began to tear off their clothes—chambray shirts, white hats, even their coveralls—and stuffed those in the holes. The water spit some of them right out, but others stuck.

It was several minutes before anyone outside AMR 2 knew how bad things were getting in the ship's second-biggest space. Damage control doctrine called for one man in the repair party to don a pair of sound-powered phones and keep in touch with DC Central, but Ford and his team were too busy for that. It was too noisy for the phones anyway; the sailors were shouting just to hear one another. The big diesels were still roaring along, their soundproof doors open while Ford's team battled the flooding. The aural assault of thirty-two cylinders was almost too much to bear.

Nevertheless, a steady stream of shipmates was soon flowing into AMR 2's crowded space. At first they had joined Ford's team at the aft bulkhead and lent a hand in plugging the leaks. But the chief cook soon found that the extra pluggers were more trouble than they were worth; everyone kept tripping over one another in the narrow spaces between the equipment.
¹³
But there was certainly plenty else for them to do. Lt. (jg) John Sims, the main propulsion assistant, had arrived to help direct traffic. He assigned some sailors to ferry status reports to DC Central. Others
he asked to fetch equipment: wooden and metal shoring beams to buttress the damaged bulkhead, gas-powered pumps and drainage hoses. It was time to start getting some of the rising seawater out of the bilge.

Within minutes, several sailors had rigged a pair of eductors, the two-foot pipelike devices that used pressurized water to generate suction. The supply hoses ran from nearby fireplugs; the wastewater hoses snaked up two levels from the bilge, across the mess deck, and out to a discharge fitting in the hull. But the eductors required water pressure to work—and at that moment, none of the ship's fire pumps was operating. Two of five were underwater; the others had shut down with the electrical brownout. The sailors waited anxiously for the Central Control engineers to restabilize the electrical grid.
¹⁴

They did not wait long. The eductors and hoses had been rigged no more than a minute when one fire pump, then the other, hummed to life just ten feet from the aft bulkhead. Seawater filled the
Roberts
's eight-inch fire mains, branching into the feeder pipes that carried it to dozens of fireplugs around the ship. The water pressurized the hoses of the fire teams who waited atop the deckhouse. Dials showed the pressure at 150 pounds per square inch, right on target.

In AMR 2, water flowed into eductors. Their intakes burped and began to suck dark liquid from the bilges. Fifteen minutes after water had begun to flood the engineering spaces, the
Roberts
crew was starting to pump it off the ship. But all the eductors on board wouldn't keep the water from rising if the DC teams couldn't get some patches on the gushing holes. Ford realized that none of the hard patches they had been forming were going to work. And the shirts and coveralls were simply too small to stanch the flow. He needed something bigger. What, on a ship, was big and soft?

The cook had an idea. He picked a couple of the extra guys, told them to go get pillows and mattresses. And he added a kicker, intended to take the edge off the rising tension: Ford told them to go get the bedding off their chiefs' racks.

The sailors returned several minutes later with broad smiles and several blue foam mattresses. Raymond emerged from the generator enclosure, folded one of the six-foot cushions in half, and carried it back in. He pushed the three-foot foam square at a corner leak and wedged it into
place with a four-by-four-foot beam. Water was still flowing vigorously down the bulkhead, but at least it wasn't splashing on the diesel. Raymond rounded out the patch with a couple of pillows someone had carried down the ladder. It wasn't pretty, and it didn't even stop the leak, but it fixed one problem, and that was progress. But seawater was still coming in faster than they were pumping it out.
¹⁵