Front Burner (22 page)

Sensing disaster, I ordered Chris to immediately wake the crew, man the repair lockers, and put the ship back on emergency footing. Everyone sprang into action, but suddenly the ship was thrust into darkness when gas turbine generator 3, the only source of the electric power we had,
tripped offline. It was 0305 and main engine room 2 was flooding. In darkness, USS
Cole
started to sink next to the pier.

The generator had been running since our arrival in Aden. There was no way to get fuel to the tanks of gas turbine generator 1 up forward in auxiliary machinery room 1, and the engineers were still trying to figure out why number 2, in main engine room 2, would not run. But the number 3 generator's inner workings had not been left undamaged by the explosion. Metal particles and shavings found in its lubricating oil showed that, while the generator had kept running so far, it was only a matter of time before it would seize up. Now we thought that moment had come. The failure left the main drainage system incapable of pumping out floodwater, and if main engine room 2 flooded, as main engine room 1 and the other spaces had earlier, the ship was going to go down to the bottom of the harbor.

We were enveloped in darkness. Flashlight beams bounced off the bulkheads and decks as people yelled back and forth. I made my way to the central control station, and heard from Debbie that the engineers had found that the generator had simply run out of fuel, burning more than it should have because of the damage it had sustained.

But the ship's gas turbine engines and generators required high-pressure air, at 3,000 psi, to start. We now had no power to operate the high-pressure air compressors on the ship even if they were usable. But there was enough high-pressure air stored in air flasks in the ship to give the engineers three chances to restart the generator.

Half an hour after the shutdown, they made their first attempt. It failed. An hour later, a second try: failure again. Water was flowing almost unabated into main engine room 2, endangering the very fuel-oil transfer and purification units we needed to keep the generator running. If they became submerged, nobody knew whether they would keep operating.

The damage control teams rushed into action with an alternative: P-100 diesel-operated portable pumps, rigged up to pump water out of the lower level of the engine room up to the first discharge port in the side of the ship that a hose could reach. Failure again. The pump, set up in the starboard
passageway, was not powerful enough to lift water from the lower flooded levels to the passageway. As the leading uninjured damage control expert on the ship, Damage Controlman First Class Robert Morger thought the engineers could overcome that shortcoming by connecting two P-100 pumps in series, one from the bilges to the engine room's midlevel and the second from there to the discharge port. Yet again, failure. Our $1 billion ship was in mortal peril for the lack of a spare part that probably would have cost only a few dollars—a coupling adapter to connect the three-inch discharge pipe from one pump to the two-and-a-half-inch suction pipe of the second pump. The Navy had not foreseen that P-100 pumps would ever have to be connected in series; no such part was carried on board
Cole
or any other ship. The general workshop, with welding equipment that might have been used to make one, had been completely destroyed.

Even so, there was one more chance to restart the generator with high-pressure air. The engineers suspected that trapped air in the fuel system was the root problem. With only a limited number of access points, the engineers picked the highest and most accessible fuel piping coupling to the generator, disconnected the fittings, and slowly bled what they hoped was all the entrapped air out of the system. At around 0600 Sunday morning, Debbie and her engineering team gathered in the control station for the last and final attempt. With the push of a button, high-pressure air was applied to the starter, and the generator rapidly wound up almost to the point where it should have ignited the fuel, fell 50 rpm short, and slowly wound back to a stop.

We still had a long shot. The 250-kilowatt diesel generator brought out to the refueling pier, near the middle of the ship, now became a critically needed emergency backup and our last, best hope. It had worked well enough in a test on Saturday. Several engineers quickly checked its systems and pressed the start button—after numerous tries, failure again.

By this point, the sun was rising over the harbor as we faced another hot, humid day. Floodwaters were flowing into the ship and there seemed to be nothing we could do to stop them.

I saw Debbie standing alone near the starboard topside shelter with no one around. “How are you doing?” I asked. Utter disappointment was written across her face. “Captain, I just don't know what to do. We've tried everything and I can't get anything to run.” I told her I had every confidence in her and walked away to give her the time and space she needed to pull herself together and get back to fighting to save the ship.

At about 0730 Sunday, after several hours of poring over technical specifications and architectural drawings of the ship, Chris and Debbie came to me with a new idea. A P-100 pump operating on the second level of the flooded engine room could pump water from the bottom and over the side at that level—if we cut a hole in the side of the ship, that is, because there were no discharge ports that low in the hull. They thought we could do that with our portable exothermic cutting unit, a device the Navy had adopted as a replacement for heavier and bulker oxy-acetylene cutting torches. The portable unit could be set up rapidly and cut metal at temperatures well over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Do it,” I said. “Just make sure we measure not once, not twice, but three times, and take the list of the ship into account. If we start cutting and it's below the waterline, we'll be screwed.”

Hull Technician Second Class Chris Regal, whom Fireman Jeremy Stewart had implored to “save the ship” after he was rescued from the galley, was the most experienced welder in the crew, and volunteered to do the job. With other members of his division, he set up a portable exothermic cutting torch near the exposed hull and marked the section to cut. Donning his protective gear, Regal picked up the torch and tried to strike a spark. Nothing happened. The batteries were dead. Once again, it seemed that if anything could go wrong it would. We were apparently out of options again. USS
Cole
continued to sink next to the pier.

“Captain, I'm not sure what else we can do at this point,” the XO told me after reporting this latest setback to me on the quarterdeck. Looking him squarely in the eye, I told him, “XO, we have over two hundred able-bodied sailors on this ship. I want every one of them to find a bucket. Line them up going down into main two and if we have to use a bucket brigade
for the next two hours until I can get a portable torch from
Hawes
or
Donald Cook
and we can make those cuts, that's what we'll do.
We are not going to lose this ship.
”

By word of mouth, the order energized the crew. Everyone swung into motion and the ship seemed to come to life as sailors rushed about the ship gathering buckets and staging them near the entrance to the engine room. By now the floodwaters were four feet over the deck plates in the lower level, and vital equipment needed to get the generator running again was partially or completely submerged. After taking about fifteen minutes to get organized, the crew had established a line that ran from the flight deck, into the starboard side passageway, and down the ladders to the lower level of the engine room. Soon bucket after bucket of water was being handed up and dumped over the side. We were saving our ship.

In what seemed like only a few minutes, a boat from
Donald Cook
raced into the harbor and loudly throttled to a stop at the refueling pier with not one but two portable torches, which were raced aboard
Cole
and straight to the engine room.

The bucket brigade cleared out of the space, and with the smell of the fuel that was mixed with the floodwater heavy in the air, Regal began to make his cut. Slowly and methodically, he cut through the half-inch thick hull plate, making one six-by-twelve-inch cut about a foot above the waterline. Once the steel had cooled to the touch, a P-100 pump was moved into position, rigged, and started.

Floodwaters from the engine room began flowing out the discharge port. Within minutes, the engineers were able to report to me in the central control station that the water level was holding steady but had already flooded to four feet over the deckplates in the lower level of the space. While the level was not going down, it was no longer rising and covering any more equipment. To my enormous relief, it also meant the ship was no longer sinking.

I was sitting at the damage control console, across from the ship diagrams where we had plotted the initial explosion and aftermath of the attack, and I was alone. The space was dark and empty except for the morning
sunlight shining hotly through the open watertight scuttle that was right above me. It was about 0830 Sunday morning. Sitting there, I suddenly found myself unable to move. My head drifted closer to my chest. Everything went dark.

I had not slept for over seventy-two hours since docking in Aden. For two nights, I had allowed Chris and Master Chief Parlier to sleep, thinking that I would wake them when I needed some rest. But waking them had never been an option I allowed myself to think about exercising. Now, paralyzed by exhaustion, I found myself overtaken by sleep without warning.

Yet only an hour later, my body was screaming at me to wake up. It felt as if a truck had run over me. I was still alone. I felt personally embarrassed, and angry at myself for leaving the ship and crew vulnerable even for an hour, and I went out into the sunlight of the flight deck to find Chris and Debbie to give me an update.

The bucket brigade and temporary pumps had held the floodwaters at bay. Debbie and her engineers were still racking their brains to find a way to restart the ship's working gas-turbine generator with high-pressure air and reactivate the main drainage system, so that we could fully pump out the flooded engine and machinery rooms. At 1000, the engineers told me that they had put their heads together with the crack Navy divers of Detachment Alpha who had flown in the day before, and come up with an imaginative way to produce a new supply of high-pressure air. By jury-rigging fittings from their diving gear, they could take our two shipboard self-contained breathing apparatus chargers, useful in an emergency to refill firefighting breathing bottles, to get air from the two compressors they had set up on the flight deck to the ship's high-pressure air system and the air flasks that could restart the generator. Could something designed to supply emergency air for shipboard firefighting equipment be effective in restarting a powerful turbine generator supplying electricity to an entire ship?

The engineers and the divers said it could. The portable pumps could produce pressure of 5,000 psi. After spending over an hour tracing system lines, the engineers and Warrant Officer Perna and his divers found a gauge
line that, with the jury-rigged fittings, could be hooked up to the air hoses running down through a watertight hatch on the flight deck into the generator room. If they could refill one of the flasks, they estimated that they could try again to restart the generator in about twelve hours.

Around 1030, the compressors started and HP air slowly started to fill the flasks. A bit longer than twelve hours later, at five minutes after midnight Monday morning, the engineers shot compressor starter air from the recharged air flask into the generator. As if there had never been a problem, gas turbine generator 3 smoothly restarted, electrical power was applied to the switchboard, and one by one, pumps and equipment came online and, within minutes, pumped main engine room 2 dry.

It had been a long and tense twenty-one hours. The crew had performed flawlessly under trying and unnerving conditions. They had weathered poor sanitation, an absence of operable toilets on the ship, and no ventilation. There had been an outbreak of abdominal cramps and diarrhea. Several crew members had become dehydrated. In response, Chief Moser instructed the crew to use bottled water to wash their hands and faces before handling or eating food. Those measures, plus Imodium and Ciprofloxacin, brought things under control before we had a crisis on our hands. Illness still affected a number of the crew, but they had persevered. They had kept the ship from sinking.

They were not going to give up the ship—their ship.

I
T WAS 0530 WHEN THE ALARM next to my head began once again to beep incessantly, not even four hours since my collapse onto the flight deck in a horizontal pile of flesh and bones. Slowly and with the hazy blur from lack of sleep, the reality sunk in that it was now Monday morning, day four after the attack. The steady high-pitched whine of the generator in the background was still the most comforting noise in the world. Given the implications of its silence, everyone had slept better knowing it was running, providing us with power, and keeping us afloat. But now it was time to get up and start the day.

Over the past three days, the Navy, Department of Defense, and other branches of the U.S. government had deployed a series of people and organizations into Aden. Across the globe, the ripple effects from the attack were being felt, especially in the Middle East where the threat level was raised to Threat Condition Delta, meaning another attack could be imminent. Almost every ship deployed overseas across the world sortied out of port, and security at every military base was markedly and visibly increased.

Less than twenty-four hours after the attack, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh Shelton, U.S. Army, ordered the creation of Joint Task Force (JTF) Determined Response to coordinate the U.S.
government response to the attack. Rear Admiral Mark “Lobster” Fitzgerald, U.S. Navy, the Deputy Commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, was designated to head up the new organization. He was immediately dispatched to Aden to take charge of the many disparate groups and organize them to provide support to
Cole
without overwhelming the ship and crew.