Reboot

“We can’t blow them up,” I said.

“Why not?” asked Dutch.

“Because they’ve been kidnapping children. There could be hundreds of them,” said William.

Eyebrows went up all around the table.

“Then we have to kidnap them back,” added Chenoweh. He’d stayed relatively quiet during the discussion. Possibly needing more time to wrap his brain around all this. Chenoweh was a native American. He was lean and tight, and looked more like a history professor than a navy captain. He wore little round glasses like John Lennon. He went on:

“We are vastly outnumbered, but this ship is extremely powerful. We have to figure out a way to get the kids out and then eliminate the perpetrators, or at least put them out of commission.“

“Why don’t we just give them a good thrashing and send them off back home?” asked Sark.

“Because if we let them off too easy, they’ll just build up again and keep doing what they’ve been doing. Then they’ll end up back on Tetepare. No doubt,” I said. “When traffic dries up in their neighborhood, they’ll hit our island. It’s not that far away.”

“François said we could expect up to a hundred children over there, maybe more. So the first thing to do is to watch them, get as close as possible to get information on their routines and figure out how to get in there. This ship is a fantastic weapon and it’s stealthy, invisible to radar, but it’s visible from very far away,” added Dutch.

“How do you approach an enemy on the water without being seen?” I asked.

“Only one way,” answered Chenoweh. “At night. And we’ll have to use the dinghies.”

The plan was to send two small boats at 3am, hopefully on a moonless night to reconnoiter their camp. We didn’t know anything. We only had a vague idea of their position on the water. But where was their home base? We’d have to find out.

“Will they have radar?” I asked.

“Probably,” said Dutch. “We do. And we already know they have a ton of boats, so some of them have radar and they certainly know how to get power to operate them. They won’t be able to see this ship with their radar though. But we need to use very small boats for the approach. We can storm in with the Independence when the kids are secured.”

“Is there no other way then killing them all?” asked Nicks.

“If we leave them alive, they’ll keep killing innocent people and stealing children and training them to do the same later on. I think these people have lost their right to suck air. Is everyone ok with that?” asked Dutch.

Grimm nods all around. Anyway, we couldn’t figure out another way. We couldn’t take them prisoner, we couldn’t rehabilitate them and we couldn’t trick them into leaving. That would just give the problem to someone else.

“Well, maybe there is a way,” I began. “What if we disable them enough so that they choose another way to make a living?”

“Yes,” said Johanna. “I like that.” She beamed at me.

“You’d have to completely destroy their fleet. Leave nothing. Discourage them from this line of work,” said Chenoweh. “Force them back to land-based activities. Though I doubt they’ll be volunteering at the soup kitchen, at least they’d have to attack people who have a better chance of defending themselves. They must have a home base on land somewhere nearby. Supporters, backers, families.”

“How close can we go with the Independence? And what kind of damage can it do?” I asked.

“In the middle of the night we can get pretty close,” said Chenoweh. Two or three kilometers. We do the rest by dinghy. The Independence just had a major radar capability boost via the small SPY-1F AEGIS system and other radar upgrades, and is currently armed with torpedo tubes, anti-ship missiles and vertical-launch system (VLS) cells.”

“Sounds mean.”

“Definitely. We carry twenty-four Hellfire missiles in our Surface-to-surface Missile Module (SSMM), but there might be too much collateral damage so we’ll use the railgun. More surgical. The electromagnetic railgun is smaller than a conventional cannon. It can fire a projectile up to 4,600 mph, or around Mach six.. It can hit a target over one hundred nautical miles away.

“I never heard of a railgun. How does it work?” I asked.

“It works by storing power generated from an external source, like a ship, for several seconds. After the weapon is brimming with some thirty-two mega joules of energy, its capacitors send an electric pulse down two long rails, one negatively charged and one positively charged, generating an electromagnetic field that fires the projectile along the two rails. The 25-pound projectile is a non-explosive bullet filled with tungsten pellets inside an aluminum alloy casing, or sabot, that falls away after the projectile leaves the barrel. It is possible to aim the weapon with GPS. We’ll then stick around for a while and finish off whoever shows up afterwards. They’ll have no ships left. Grounded pirates. I think your people will then be safe for years.”

“How do we get all those kids out of there without alerting the pirates?” asked Johanna.

“Ok. I have an idea about that. Please have a look and then tell me what you think.” I said. And they all came closer around the table to listen. Johanna came next to me. She smelled like lavender.