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pulled a heavy black handset from a gray box beneath the windscreen. One deck down, its twin rang in the captain’s L-shaped cabin.
    Rinn had been going over the week’s menu with Kevin Ford, the ship’s head cook. It was 14 April, which meant tomorrow would be the halfway point of the deployment, and Ford had planned a steak and lobster dinner to celebrate. The captain objected to a certain item that seemed to be coming up a lot lately. “C’mon, Chief, not so much spinach, huh?” Ford just grinned; he was not above tweaking his commanding officer with a surfeit of the green leafy vegetable.
    Rinn knew something was happening the moment the ship began to back down. He had commanded this ship since it was an inanimate pile of steel on a Maine riverbank, and he felt every vibration as if it were his own body. He answered the phone, and in almost the same movement was out the door and up the ladder to the bridge. Through the door to the bridge wing, the floating black forms were clearly visible less than half a mile away—three of them, lined up. Those are mines , Rinn thought.
    In a minefield the only clear path to safety was the wake. The captain was an excellent shiphandler, by instinct and by years at sea, but backing a frigate wasn’t easy. It was hydrodynamically akin to throwing a paper airplane backward. Rinn gripped the rail and gazed aft to the palewhite stripe that stretched back to clear water. The ship began to creep backward, powered by a pair of electric outboard motors customarily used for docking in safe harbor. Moments went by. We’re going to get out , he told himself. There were those, later, who imagined they heard a scrape of metal on metal.
    The explosion grabbed the frigate and shook it from stem to stern. The ship flexed, flipping Gibson backward out of his chair. Superhot gases rushed through a hole in the hull, setting fires at the ship’s very core. A wall of seawater followed within seconds, ripping open fuel tanks and flooding the engine room. Far above, a ball of flame erupted from the ship’s stack, and fiery chunks of debris rained down on the deck. With reflexes imbued by thousands of hours of drills, sailors rushed to pull hoses from bulkhead racks. But when they pulled the levers on the heavy brass nozzles, mere trickles came out. Somewhere under their feet, something was very wrong.
    It would take Rinn and his crew hours to add up all the clues, but the news they gathered early on wasn’t good. The main engine room and another capacious engineering space were inundated with oil-slicked water, and a third compartment was filling rapidly. Lose that one, and the frigate would likely plunge to the bottom of the Gulf. The Samuel B. Roberts was flooding, on fire, surrounded by sharks and sea snakes, alone in a minefield in a sea at war. Its crew was fighting for their lives. But they faced the battle well prepared, well led, and with a sturdy ship beneath their feet. The outcome of the next few hours would, in no small part, be determined by events that began many years before.

CHAPTER FIVE
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Putting to Sea
    A s spring 1985 turned to summer in Norfolk, the members of the Roberts ’s precommissioning detachment wrapped up their individual studies and began to depart for the collective training that would meld them into a fighting crew. The combat systems team headed out to learn the art of modern naval warfare at a ridge-top facility overlooking San Diego Harbor. Among them was John Preston, a fire controlman third class. Sailors came from all over, but Preston’s story was fairly typical of the Roberts ’s junior personnel; he had been drawn to the navy, somewhat reluctantly, as an escape from a humdrum existence.
    Preston had grown up in Craig, Colorado, population eight thousand, and developed a nineteen-year-old’s dread of growing old there. Finished with high school, and with no money for college, Preston was working a