Chapter 21: Contact With the Enemy and Final Weapons Tuning

Well, it was inevitable, now that I look back on it. We were a big juicy target if you knew where to look. We set out from Eidenburgh to Liverpool where we loaded up, then traveled down to the big ports in Vigo, northern Spain. A big cruiser kept edging up on us, first through our ten mile zone, then through our five mile zone. At two miles they tried to take us out with a stinger. The rolling motion of their deck threw them off far enough so that the stinger didn't get a lock. I activated the point defense system, tapped the image of their boat three times, confirmed and that was it. A starstreak didn't leave much. Once the three penetrators hit the hull, the annular (ring-shaped) explosive charges pretty well shattered everything down to the waterline. The penetrators kept going and, well, broken glasses don't hold water. Most of our crew didn't even know that we'd been in combat. I didn't tell 'em, either.

Just before we docked in Vigo another group, or the second wave of the same group, tried again. Just before we warped into dock, the CIC console went 'beep! beep! beep!'. It slewed the fordeck minigun around and blew the hell out of a big van close to the slip, which promptly and enthusiastically blew the fuck out of the dock. It was 'back all screws to clear water' and a quick call to the Harbormaster.

Without that CIC we'd have been toast. Someone had trained it to profile for IEDs and truck bombs. That one came out of left field. We dropped our cargo up north at the national docks, where our containers were moved off onto a train car and went--somewhere.

I had a feeling that we still had a hole in our tactical profile. I sent an email to the Commander of the Hawaiian naval yards requesting a combat profile analysis be run. I had a feeling that a little 60mm mortar would fill a hole in our defensive screen. A servomotor-aimed near-vertical bomb delivery system would go a long ways towards negating the defenses of any attackers using local structures such as walls or other vessels to hide behind. We were often found in tight quarters making deliveries in crowded ports. A pinpoint HE delivery option could spell the difference between our success and failure.

The staff said no. The computer analysis said yes! The thirty cals were uder-powered when countering an armored close-in attack. I bought two U.S. M224 60-mm Mortars. One was a spare. I wanted to get the electrically-driven aiming system and control lines were run at the closest naval ship-yard. It was going to take up a big portion of my bedroom, but I could live with that.

The twenty-four cases of HE rounds, however, were a bit too much. We changed the plans around, and re-purposed the third duty officer's quarters. A little dumbwaiter was built into the roof to transport the ammo cases to the roof-top loader. It would take a two-man team to operate the mortar in combat, an upper and lower ammo handler. James was the low man in the watch rotation. He was pretty pissy for a while, after he lost his stateroom, until I raised his pay by a thousand dollars a month and found him a comparable bunk on the mid-deck.

I put it to the six guys that batted clean-up. Which one was supercargo? Which one was wiling to quit? Gus was tired of finding himself in a new time zone every time he go out of his bunk. The job wasn't all it was cracked up to be as far as he was concerned, and he was willing to say goodbye. We gave him a decent send-off party, a good separation bonus and it was 'Vaya con Dios'.

James scrubbed the hell out of the place and made it his own. The staterooms were all built the same size so he wasn't shorted any cubic. The other guys had to work a bit harder on the average, but it was nothing like the shit that they'd had to put up with in the service. The equipment was better, the food was better, the hours were better, the bunks were better and the company was better. No pissy little martinet was breathing down your neck. We didn't even have 'white tornado' parties--we hired it done! (White Tornado party = all-hands cleaning detail with a full inspection)