No Higher Honor (18 page)

Once again, a fire controlman's finger waited near the release stud. Rinn continued to issue orders through the tactical action officer, as CIC
doctrine prescribed and as the
Roberts
had always practiced. But the captain moved over to stand behind the enlisted man's shoulder. Rinn wanted no misunderstandings and no accidents.

The
Roberts
was allowed to fire if fired upon, but could not take the first shot without authorization from Middle East Force headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Rinn told a radioman to call in. When the command ship answered, the
Roberts
requested permission to fire. “Wait one,” the answer came back.

The green blip of the mystery plane drew closer to the center of the radar operator's round screen. Seconds ticked by. The captain weighed his options. Shoot blindly? Or risk sharing the
Stark
's fate?

The radio crackled again. “That's an American aircraft,” the Middle East Force radio operator announced.

The frigate held its fire as the plane approached. An awful moment passed. The plane rumbled overhead and continued south.
²⁷

The aircraft turned out to be part of Eager Glacier, the CIA's secret effort to gather intelligence on Iran using U-2 spy planes, small business jets, and even helicopters.
²⁸
Every U.S. warship that arrived in the Gulf was supposed to get a secret message describing the operation, but the
Roberts
had not yet received it. The spy plane's pilot had detected the frigate's radar, but decided to handle things by calling his boss, who called his boss, and so on up the chain of command until the message started coming back down through the navy. The decision nearly cost the intel pilot his life.

“That guy was lucky,” said Raymond, the operations specialist. “I will never forget the look on Commander Rinn's face: ‘Oooo, that was a close one.' He was happy we all did our job. And he was, I think, just as nervous as everybody else was—pride and nervousness at the same time. Everything worked fine.

“After that, we watched everything more closely. It could be monotonous, especially to a young crew, but now, everybody paid a lot of attention. This was not the Med or the Atlantic.”
²⁹

For those who had somehow failed to get the picture, the ship's executive officer, Lt. Cdr. John Eckelberry, spelled things out in the Plan of the Day, the photocopied sheet of schedules, reminders, and instructions that got tacked up in the ship's workspaces every morning. “From now
on, we are minutes or seconds from combat,” the XO wrote. “Each man on SBR is responsible for his own battle gear.” This included helmet or hat, long-sleeved shirt or jacket, life vest, gas mask and filters, and flash hood. “Keep it with you or at your GQ station. You may wear it on your hip or keep it with you as you work and sleep.” And don't forget ship's policy on personal cassette recorders, Eckelberry reminded them: only one ear at a time, and never on watch.
³⁰

The
Roberts
captain and crew had passed a test—hardly their first, and certainly not their last. Their first day in the Gulf showed just what kind of steel nerves would be required in the next few months.

T
he
Roberts
had been scheduled to go on to Kuwait with the convoy, but a change of orders turned it around and sent it hustling back out of the strait. It was part of duty in the Gulf: plans changed, and not infrequently or with much notice. The frigate headed to the Gulf of Oman's “K-Mart parking lot,” where it met up with the USS
Coronado
(AGF 11), a command ship dispatched from San Diego for duty as the Middle East Force (MEF) flagship. Under cover of darkness, the frigate shepherded the converted amphibious landing ship into the Gulf. An Iranian P-3 Orion—a slow, deadly U.S.–built patrol plane—came nosing southward, and the
Roberts
hit it with a blaze of tracking radar. “Have a nice day,” the pilot radioed, turning away.
¹

The U.S. ships tied up at Bahrain, and the next day Rear Adm. Anthony A. Less helicoptered out to the frigate. Less had taken charge of U.S. operations in the region only a month earlier, but he was no rookie. From September through December 1987, Less had commanded the
Missouri
battleship group in the Gulf and the
Ranger
carrier group just outside it.

The MEF commander thanked the
Roberts
crew for delivering his command ship, but he had a more serious purpose as well. He described the missions they could expect over the next four months and the rules for carrying them out. Less informed his listeners that Gulf duty offered two basic types of operations. One was escorting convoys, and they already had some experience with that. The other was patrolling specific areas. In the waterway's northern reaches, the frigate would protect the special-operations barges that were tamping down Iranian attacks. To the east, it would track the Iranian warships and powerboats that swarmed near the Hormuz bottleneck. In the center—well, nothing much
had happened in the Gulf's belly since the
Iran Ajr
had been caught laying mines there.

Less moved on to the rules of engagement. The
Roberts
was there to protect U.S.–flagged ships and enforce their right of free passage in international waters. Attacks on U.S. shipping were to be repelled, by deadly force if necessary. But assaults on foreign ships were a different matter. The rules forbade firing to defend anything without an American flag. This guidance came down from the White House, which was hip-deep in conflicting regional policies yet still hoped to avoid open hostilities. These rules could put U.S. sailors and aircrews in helpless witness to assaults on unarmed mariners. Even the rescue of foreigners was discouraged, though
Elrod
had wangled permission to take aboard two dozen survivors of a Christmas Day gunboat attack.

But Less noted that there was a gray area between shooting and standing idly, and he pushed his skippers to explore it. There was little the U.S. ships could do about Iraq's air attacks on unarmed merchants. But a clever and determined captain might harass Iranian forces without drawing undue international attention. The admiral summed up the situation like this: “Hey, guys, we're at war, the threat's always there. We'll support you to the hilt. In the meantime, protect your ship, protect your crew. Make sure we stifle and stymie anything that's going on in this area. You've got radars, you've got systems, you're looking at ships that are less than friendly. Don't let 'em lay mines; don't let 'em attack friendly shipping. The rest of the time, you're going to get assignments on what ship you're escorting and where you're going. Carry out your duties. That's essentially it. You're big guys now; pay attention.”
²

Rinn was delighted with this policy. He interpreted it as “distract and bother, but don't get the U.S. Navy in an embarrassing position.” Like most American skippers, the captain of the
Roberts
regarded his Iranian counterparts as murderous bullies. It gave him great pleasure to think of breaking up an attack and “ruining an Iranian skipper's day.” He and his ship had done this once already.

IT HAD HAPPENED
during the
Coronado
mission. Somewhere west of the Sirri oil fields, the
Roberts
's surface radar picked up an interesting pattern of blips. Rinn had ordered his SH-60 helicopter into the air for a closer
look, and within a half hour, the aviators confirmed his suspicions: an Iranian frigate was stalking a U.S. tanker.

Rinn left the
Coronado
in the care of a nearby British destroyer, fired up his gas turbines, and headed off to investigate. Presently, the Iranian ship appeared over the horizon; the
Roberts
closed the gap. A lookout identified the ship from the name painted on its stern:
Alvand
.

The
Alvand
was one of Iran's four
Sa'am
-class frigates. Built for the shah by British shipwright Vosper, the 311-foot
Sa'ams
were the most potent warships in the Iranian fleet. Each of the 1,540-ton vessels packed a 114-mm naval gun on the forecastle, a pair of 35-mm machine guns, and a triple-canister launcher for Sea Killer antiship missiles.
³
Like the
Perry
frigates, the
Sa'ams
were swift, nimble ships propelled by gas turbines. The
Roberts
would soon become intimately familiar with their capabilities.

By the looks of things, the Iranian captain was maneuvering to fire on the tanker. The
Roberts
pressed on, pulling to within a mile or so of
Alvand
's stern. The Iranian seemed to hesitate, and then punched his own engines. The
Roberts
turned with him, and a dogfight in two dimensions was on.

The ships turned this way and that, jockeying for tactical advantage. It was a form of contention as old as triremes and as modern as the jet turbines that screamed in the frigates' engine rooms. Each commander strove to keep his ship where his weapons could strike the enemy, while keeping the enemy from doing the same.

Advancing technology had not rendered this a simple game, and naval warfare remained as much an intellectual challenge as a duel of horsepower and caliber. Though captains no longer sought the wind for motive power, the sea still harbored rocks and shoals and currents. And the shipboard introduction of electronics and rocketry brought their own constraints. An effective ship turned to keep its radio masts from blocking its fire-control radar beams and maintained sufficient distance from its prey to allow a missile to arm in flight. The wind itself was far from irrelevant. A stiff breeze could affect the accuracy of gunfire and missiles. It could even turn defensive antimissile flares, whose magnesium cores burned at thousands of degrees, into a hazard for an unlucky ship.

For more than three hours the ships wheeled around each other, matching wits and machinery. Their chessboard was measured in miles,
yet at times the two crews were just a few hundred yards apart, their machine gunners nearly eyeball to eyeball. In this duel the
Roberts
enjoyed a distinct advantage over the
Alvand
. The American ship could hit targets in most of a 360-degree circle, thanks to its forecastle-mounted missile launcher and 76-mm gun amidships. But the Iranian ship had a far narrower field of fire, because the U.S.-led arms embargo had deprived it of missiles.
⁴

Around 7:30
PM
, the Iranian captain decided he'd had enough. The
Alvand
broke off and retired to the northeast. The tanker, a Greek ship named
Tandis
, sailed on unmolested. The
Roberts
rejoined the
Coronado
and escorted the command ship safely to Bahrain.

Rinn was exultant. Turning away high-speed jets was tense, but beating the pants off another skipper—well, that was just plain fun. “No easy kill tonight,” he wrote to his brother. “Crew on a high—captain's got balls!!”
⁵

The
Roberts
's first tangle with an Iranian warship had gone well. But it would not be the last, and eventually, the Iranians would come after the
Roberts
two at a time.

THE ISLAND OF
Abu Musa sits near the main shipping channel in the eastern Gulf, where the three-square-mile chunk of rock dominates the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's Pasdaran paramilitaries had seized the disputed island early in the war—it was also claimed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—and established a radar station and harbor facilities for more than a dozen armed Boghammar powerboats. Aided by radar pickets on two oil platforms to the west, the speedboat crews had little difficulty homing in on slow-moving merchant ships.
⁶
When the tanker war heated up, the waters around Abu Musa became perilous.
⁷

Less was doing his best to fix that. He kept a warship or two on patrol in the area, where they could track Iranian ships, assist the convoys that passed by, and break up attacks. The admiral dispatched the
Roberts
to Abu Musa—and, unknowingly, toward a rematch with
Alvand
.

The frigate's first patrol mission began with a poor omen. Once clear of the harbor, Rinn had his gunners fire a few rounds from each of the ship's guns. It was an old habit, intended as much to clear liberty-induced cobwebs from sailors' heads as to ensure the guns were working. The
25-mm and .50-cals worked fine, rattling slugs into the water, but the 76-mm main gun jammed. “Lousy time for gun casualty,” Rinn wrote.
⁸

The gunners' mates investigated, pulling cowlings from the complicated mechanism that drew the two-foot shells from a rotating magazine. One of the guide rails had bent. There were no spares aboard. Someone summoned Chief Dave Walker from his haunt in engineering. Walker was no expert on the 76-mm gun, but he had a knack with broken machines, and he climbed up to have a look. After some inspection, he fetched a towel rod from the chiefs' quarters and carefully bent it to mimic the damaged part. When he put it in place, the shells rode into place like clockwork. The jury-rigged solution broke all sorts of regulations, Walker acknowledged later, “but we were in the combat zone, and it had to be fixed.”
⁹

Once on station near Abu Musa, Rinn made a beeline for an Iranian oiler named
Bushehr
. The five-thousand-ton oiler served as mother ship to Pasdaran powerboats and as a picket in the shipping channel. The
Roberts
approached the larger ship, allowing the Iranians to study its gun and missile launcher through binoculars. He wanted the Iranian captain to think hard before starting anything violent. “Now we know each other,” Rinn wrote to his brother.

Some hours after dawn, the radar operators on the
Roberts
spotted a warship beyond the northern horizon, and Rinn sent the Seahawk for a closer look. It was the
Alvand
, and its skipper was apparently still smarting from his recent encounter with the
Roberts
. As the SH-60 hove into view, the Iranian commander silenced his radios and radars, turned his bow toward the American frigate, and accelerated to twenty knots. Rinn sent his crew to general quarters and cranked up his own gas turbines. The warships approached each other in a forty-knot game of naval chicken.