Free No Higher Honor by Bradley Peniston Page B

of its engines. Rinn donned sound-powered phones and called Palmer in CIC. How are my combat systems? What have we got? The answer came back: We got nothing, really. No surface-search radar, no radios . 32
    The captain told the combat systems officer to cut the radar out of the ship’s power system so it wouldn’t drag on the grid as the engineers worked to bring it back up. If they couldn’t get electricity back, the ship was going to sink whether it came under attack or not. Still, this turned the frigate from a sitting duck into a deaf and blind one. The Roberts crew members’ knowledge of the ship’s surroundings shrunk to the horizon. They lost track of the Sa’am frigate that had been lurking some thirty miles to the north and the Iranian P-3 that had dogged them all the way from Kuwait. Neither ship nor plane had acted threateningly, but thelookouts had spotted antiship missiles under the P-3’s wings. Without the radar, there was no way to tell whether the pilot had turned to attack.
    No one even knew where any friendly ships were. Those they had escorted to Kuwait were far behind; those they were rushing to meet had started their day at the Gulf’s mouth. Not that it mattered much; no one was going to come help them in a minefield.
    FLASHLIGHT IN HAND , Robert Bent picked his way forward from Central Control, heading for AMR 2 to see what he could do about the generators. Like his captain, the chief electrician was viscerally attuned to the vibrations and noises of his ship. A ventilation fan that cut out for a moment could wake him from sleep. When the ship’s power died, Bent felt as if his own heart had stopped. A ship without juice was a dead ship. As he left Central Control, smoke in the U-shaped passageway stopped him short. It was pouring from an engine room hatch popped open by the blast. A noise like an animal’s cry drew his attention.
    Bent stepped through the hatch and pointed his flashlight through the acrid haze. The cramped engine room had become a phantasmagoria of tortured metal painted in flickering firelight. Glowing embers pocked blackened surfaces. He played the light through the grating beneath his feet, where he should have seen his panel’s batteries and other gear. Instead, black water lapped a foot below his boots.
    Following the cries, Bent found Gas Turbine 2nd Class Larry Welch not far from the hatch. The engineer was disoriented and badly burned. Bent reached to help his shipmate, and Welch’s blackened skin sloughed off in his hands. Taking a better grip, Bent helped his shipmate stagger out of the engine room and aft to Repair Locker 3. 33
    Meanwhile, twenty feet farther into the engine room, Alex Perez’s strength began to ebb.
    IN THE REFRIGERATOR deck above Auxiliary Machine Room 1, the explosion came as a deafening roar. The shock flung Baker, Tatum, and Tilley into the air, but they landed on their feet. Even the steel cans they’d been sitting on settled softly back onto the deck. For a moment, the sailors stared at each other, befuddled. Then their training kicked in. A breath of smoke drifted up through the hatch, and the three men pulled emergencybreathing devices from wall racks. Tatum, the senior man in the space, got everyone moving.
    Baker headed off to check the nearby electrical switchboard, while Tatum and Tilley descended the ladder into AMR 1, a low-ceilinged space about thirty feet square. The door to generator number one had popped open, and smoke drifted from ventilation ducts in its enclosure. The big engine inside sat idle; this was the one that had oversped and shut down just moments before the mine hit. Air conditioning whirred in the vents. The loudspeaker barked; someone reported that the mine had hit someplace aft, and that the ship was on fire. The two engineers knew their duty: start that generator.
    The entire engineering department had practiced a mass conflagration scenario just the previous week,