No Higher Honor by Bradley Peniston

Author:Bradley Peniston [Peniston, Bradley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612512778
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

CHAPTER TEN

Rising Water

In DC Central, Ens. Ken Rassler could begin to read a rough outline of the ship’s condition in the grease marks scratched on his deck charts. To Rassler, Sorensen’s successor as damage control assistant, the picture wasn’t particularly encouraging.

Ten minutes after the blast, the Roberts was dead in the water, its gas turbines damaged beyond recovery. The engine room was flooded to its upper level, AMR 3 to the overhead—spaces that totaled nearly one-fifth of the ship’s length. The amount of seawater already inside the ship would cover a tennis court to a depth of sixteen feet. More was coming in every second. There were fires in both compartments, and probably in other spaces as well. Smoke was pouring from the exhaust stack. The deckhouse had cracked in two places, and the aft end of the helicopter hangars had come loose from its foundation on the main deck.

Thanks to Tilley, Rassler was no longer doing his job in the dark. But three other generators were still offline. One of them was inundated in AMR 3, along with a pair of fire pumps, desalinators, and water chillers that cooled internal spaces and combat systems. The other two generators were in AMR 2, where the seawater was several feet high and rising.1 If the ship were to survive, someone would have to stop that flow.

Around the corner in Central Control, Walker was trying to resurrect his electrical control panel. He had been delighted when the power came back on, but juice was useless unless he could route it to fire pumps and whatever else needed it. For that he needed a working console. The chief turned to Wallingford, who had taken Bent’s place as watch electrician. The younger man was flipping switches, trying to bring the dead panel back to life.

“Chief, it’s all fucked up,” Wallingford said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Wally, I don’t give a fuck what you do, but you better get that thing running again.”

“You got any ideas?”

Walker looked around. He hoped the console wasn’t actually damaged, but rather had simply been cut off from its electrical supply when the engine room flooded. His eyes landed on the floor buffer, a fluffy-footed instrument the sailors loved to hate.

“Yes,” Walker said. “You see that buffer over there? Cut the fucking cord off that buffer.”

The chief explained his idea: take a fifty-foot length and strip the leads, producing a long extension cord. Next, find a connection to the panel’s power supply by severing its cable to the now-useless battery pack. Twist the buffer cord and battery lead together. Now you’ve got a console with a handy plug-in cord. Start trying 120-volt outlets until you find one that works.

“We can do that?”

“Fucking right we can do that,” Walker said. “Nobody’s down here to tell us we can’t.” Moments later, lights rippled across the electrical control console.

It was one small step, but Walker’s head was still spinning. The damage was far beyond anything he’d seen before, beyond even the sadistic imaginations of Gitmo instructors.

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