Chapter 7 Cross Loading
For the rest of the day, after the early morning attack, the whole American fleet was on high alert for any renewed attacks. The key in defeating this attack had been the US Destroyer, she had first defeated the attack of the small craft and then chased down the retreating craft with her 3inch and 5inch cannons blazing away. Any craft that was flying the black flag was blown out of the water without waiting for them to fire back at the on-rushing warship. The destroyer and the up gunned minesweeper were not known to have that much armor, but that was only when you compared them to other warships. They had very hard hulls when you compared them to any fishing boat made in this part of the world.
The anchored diving support boat used in the attack against the Americans would have been captured, but someone had decided that firing a pair of RPGs at two thousand tons of warship was a good idea. The RPGs didn’t have the range, and both fell well short of the US warship. The same was not true of the warship’s larger, sea tested weapons that were used against the diving support boat. A pair of 76mm HE rounds showed them, well the ones that survived, the error of their ways of shooting at the US Navy.
Two men were pulled out of a nearby rubber life raft by the Edwards, but another man was not saved in time from the sinking vessel. Until that day no one had ever thought that a shark would attack a rubber raft, much less a raft with a person sitting in it. It was only something that you might have seen in a movie or heard as a “fish story” in a seaside bar. Many times, Mother Nature can be so much stranger than what the film industry or film critics could make or accept something like that as a viable scene that people would pay to see. It just goes to show you that some people need to get out more and see the real world.
The bridge and forward gun crew on the Edwards saw a Great White shark come up out of the water and take a huge bite out of one side of the bright pink rubber tube needed to keep someone out of the water. And within seconds the unlucky man was in the water with the huge hungry or just a very angry predator. By the time the Destroyer’s ready whale boat made it to that location there was nothing left to save. A message was sent back to the rest of the fleet to not conduct any more diving ops. Not with this number of sharks in a feeding frenzy in the local area that seemed to be happy to bite anything on the off chance that it might be tasty. A school of bull sharks was bad enough, but soon Great Whites, Tigers, and Great Hammer Heads were seen in the local area by ship’s lookouts.
The two recovered enemy personnel from the dive support boat were very talkative, after seeing what had happened to their crewmate in his small raft. The crew of the US warship didn’t even have to threaten to put the men back into the water to get them to become very, if not too, talkative for the American’s tastes. They were more than willing to tell the people that had saved their lives where their home base was located. They were even ready to talk about what was left to defend it, at least to the best of their knowledge. With this new information on hand, the USS Edwards charged off to make sure this nest of pirates was not going to be a threat to anyone for the foreseeable future. At least they could make sure that it was passive for at least the near future to any passerby. It is very hard to be a pirate on the open waters of the Indian Ocean, when you don’t have any boats that can make it more than a few miles out into the open waters of these seas.
LTCR Moore was a little disappointed when they made it around the head waters of the reported small port the attack had been launched from. It was a fourth-rate hole in the island, even compared to what was “the new normal” of even WW III South African pirate ports. With this being such a letdown to attack. LTCR Moore changed her attack plans on the fly. They could not use too many 5inch shells in any combat action, and there was not much in this port worth the use of 127mm rounds. Even the more easily to replace 3inch shells were rarely used after the first ten rounds had been used on this port that was barely worth that lordly name.
To save ammunition and barrel wear, both important things for a captain to have to worry about at this time. The ship’s master sent a heavy weapons team onto the beach with handheld weapons and enough explosives to put the few remaining small fishing boats into low orbit if you looked at one of them cross-eyed. This team left only the boats that were about the size of the Edward’s own whale boat without damage on the beach. You had to give the locals a way to feed themselves, or they would just become more desperate pirates. And the last thing this world needed, and more so in this part of the world, was a set of more desperate pirates.
LTCR Moore’s teams didn’t run into anyone while they went about their job of doing the wrecking business around the port and attached village. It was like the town had put every warm body into the attack on the recovery operations. The Captain of the warship didn’t believe that for a single second. She had the two recovered survivors from the attack that were singing for all they were worth, and so Moore had a very good idea of the number of fighters left behind.
After the boats were taken care of, the ground team burned all but one of the piers and one boat house in this hell hole. When they could not find anything close to the water line, the shore team started to pull out. This place didn’t even have a real light house worth the name, so what they did have to perform this safety measure was left alone by the Americans. The Captain of the warship wanted to make a point, but she didn’t want to make them more desperate. Desperate people tended to do desperate things, and that was the last thing she wanted or needed dropped at her feet. That had been a hard lesson to learn not just for her and her crew, but what was left of the US Navy in these waters had to learn.
As the warship was pulling back out into open water, LTCR Moore started making notes on the mission today. If she was not already worried about the top weight of her warship? Moore might have asked for a “real” landing boat and the right gear to get it in and out of the water to be added to her ship. After all it was not like she was going to be needing her aft mounted helicopter pad anytime soon. If they didn’t find more parts, she was pretty certain that she would never see a helicopter working off her deck ever again. She would just have to run this idea through her staff, just to make sure she had not missed anything major. This type of fighting might be about all the US Navy in this part of the world would be able to perform.
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When the powerful warship returned to the mostly anchored fleet she was charged with protecting, her mistress called for a meeting to be held for the key leaders. This was the second major attack on this operation, and Moore wanted more than just a short briefing sent in code over the radio to give her a breakdown of what happened to each of the other ships now under her protection and command. She needed information, a lot of it, and she had to be sure that she was not losing anything in transmission. She could not make, if not the right decision, at least make one that was the least bad of all the options that Moore and her staff might come up with.
LTCR Moore looked around the room and her eyes stopped on Richard. By now she had to really think to remember that he was ex-army and not a lifelong member of the sea. “Richard, how are the divers?”
Richard gave a slight nod to the eye lock of the red-haired woman. “None were killed, but we have four that are hurt in one way or the other. All of those that were hurt were on the shallow water teams. Casualties might have been higher for those on that team, but they were able to get to the deep-water teams lift cage. From there they were able to keep the sharks at more than arm’s length until the predators lost hyperactive attention. The dive master wants to use a full up shark cage for a while, and he wants to somehow use them for both types of our diving teams. He says that there are two that he can slap together with what he has on hand. They won’t be perfect shark cages, but it will be something to help along with some long spears used by the divers against any other sharks. This is going to slow things down more than a little bit. Me? I would not want to be in the water for months after the last shark was seen. The Divers seem okay going back in, as long as they have something to defend themselves with.” Richard thought that all of those divers were just brain damaged due to someone slipping something in their air tanks. He had not been joking when he had said that he would not get into the water until a month had passed since the last shark sightings.
Richard gave a shudder that he could not hide, and he picked back up on his briefing. His mouth started running without his mental filter working. “The dive master has already talked to the divers, and they all agreed to go back into the water at our commands. You navy types have something wrong in your brains, if you ask me.”
The water in this local area of the ocean had turned colors after the school of sharks had been drawn to the battle under the waves. They had attacked everyone and everything as they went into a massive feeding frenzy that National Geographic would have loved to have witnessed from hundreds of feet in the air. The water had not turned red, but it had noticeably turned colors to those looking down into it from a surface vessel. The US supported shallow water dive teams had not wholeheartedly taken to using any spear guns. Before today the shark swarm had always been deep in the water and not one of those moving garbage disposals had been seen close to the water’s surface while they had been supporting this recovery operation.
Well, that is until someone decided to have a battle in the water column that sounded the dinner bell. The deep-water team did have these weapons, with each diver also packing four spear bolts on each of their legs and some even had a pair of bolts strapped onto at least one arm. Richard thought that they even had a dozen bolts attached to the open part of the lifting cage before this battle. Those bolts had turned out to have been needed, but only three had been used against sharks. Those were the ones that would not take the “push away” while all of the whole two diving teams had hung onto the mostly open lift cage sharing air from the deep diver’s lines. Later many of those divers would report about a metal rain of slowly falling ragged metal in the water column.
LTCR Moore had a tight lip look on her face at Richard’s report. “I don’t want our people in the water until they are ready, and they can be safe to someone else’s satisfaction. I don’t care if they all want to get back in just their suits. If they see a swarm of sharks or anything that looks off? They are to be pulled out as safely as possible.” Moore had been raised early in her career about why the military had to undergo safety briefings and she didn’t want to be the cause for the writing of a new one. Then again, she didn’t fear sharks, but she also was not one to want to go swimming with one.
Denise spent the next half hour going over the battle with the local “captain” and made sure that the story of the huge shark that had gone after an inflatable raft for its juicy filled center was being passed around. After that story was passed along, Moore’s staff started their brief with the start of the battle near the rest of the fleet, and then ended with the setting fire to most of the small port. The end of the meeting covered Moore’s idea on getting some of the items they found back to Mombasa without risking the whole recovery mission as it had been first planned.
LTCR Moore ordered the cargo teams and captains to get together and start shifting some of the cargo around to best fit her “new plan”. The LCU and the LST would be leaving in less than two days to start the trip back to Mombasa at their best safe speed. The close escort for them would be the MCM Patriot and the three-inch twin mounts on the larger LST. All of those craft were very slow when compared to the rest of the fleet, and if all of them had to pull out in a hurry? Those three ships would slow the rest of the fleet down. The only ship that had been under Richard’s command that would not be heading back to home base was the diving support ship. That converted tug was faster than the LCU when it was empty, much less how fast a fully loaded LCU could wallow around in the waters of the open ocean.
Moore also wanted the two lift /landing ships to carry as wide of range of the recovered items as they could. But only if they were not too overloaded or if the send items were somethings that the larger ships could better transport that distance. Moore felt it was time that her most at-risk ships should leave this area, and they could take part of the gold mine that they had found off this island. The one thing that had not been brought up? It was that the sunken vessel had been one of the ships that the Edwards had been charged with protecting on that last convoy. The Edwards might not have been able to save the crew or the now wrecked ship, but now its cargo was going to be useful for at least part of the people that had been counting on her safe visit to port just a few years ago.
Richard was not happy with this turn of events taking place in this meeting. This all had been his idea in the first place. He was the one that had spent all of that time to find this sunken ship, and then he had been the one to put his reputation on the line to get a plan together to come all of the way out here. Now Moore was taking over, and he was going home with his hat in hand. Richard was barely able to keep his temper until the meeting room had cleared of those with gold on their tunics. Richard had now realized that he was changing into a leader of sailors and out of his cover as just a ground pounding NCO with too much power at his fingertips.
When the hatch closed behind the last member of the meeting and Richard and Denise were alone, he could not help but speak out. “Why are you kicking me out? This was my mission!! I should be here until the end.” Richard stopped when he saw the look and just before he put his own foot in his mouth up to the knee.
Denise looked levelly at the man with anger in his eyes, and her own eyes were on fire that matched her red hair. “Richard, you knew this was going to happen. In fact, I was to send your ass home as soon as I got here. It was my idea to keep you here as my second in command, but now we have to look at the bigger pitcher.”
Richard made a sour look and he huffed, but he could feel the heat leaving him. “Yea, I know. It was what I had guessed. Still, I thought that in the last meeting that I was staying until the end of this mission. I want to see this operation through. I’m not worried about the money! I just want to make sure that we get it done the right way and we get my crew home.” It was at that second that he realized that he meant every person on every ship that was on this task and not just the Savior and the LCU.
Denise Moore visibly relaxed and put her long legs up on the desk and rocked back in her high-backed office chair. “I know, and that was why I wanted you to stay and see what it was like to work with larger ships. High command wants you to start heading back, and they feel that it would be better all-around and not just for the operation out here. I think that there are some people back “home” that want to “see” what you found. And after they get to really see it, then they want to start working on getting some of this stuff you pulled out to the boys and girls on the sharp end of the stick. This last attack just pushed them over the edge to directly order me to send you and some of the items back to our home port for evaluation and testing by the shore teams.”
Moore let her chin drop and gave the man a look. “Richard, they asked for you by name to come back to port with “samples”. Otherwise, you would still be running the Savior, her divers, and still be the mission’s second in command if I had anything to say about it.” As the person in charge of the most capable US Navy warship on this continent, she had a lot more power than anyone of her rank had before the TDM.
Richard didn’t know what to say for long seconds. He had a few ideas on why he had been ordered back home, but not one of those ideas were what this woman had just told him. That quiet did not last, and his mouth went to work without his brain filter working for a critical second. “Oh, Denise!! I knew you cared! So how about dinner?”
LTCR Moore dropped her legs from her desktop so fast her long legs were a blur, and her eyes were flashing fire again. “No, and you’re lucky that I can’t strike someone upside the head that I am in command of. At least not without getting called on the carpet by my boss.” That was not a 100 percent true statement, but it was close.
Then one side of her lips turned up in something no one would ever call a smile, and her voice was like ice. “But if someone touches me? I can have them keel hauled, and I will not so much as have to report in uniform to my next line supervisor about that action. Care to try your luck, Richard?” The tone was as cold as space. She had to deal with men disrespecting and making passes at her while on the clock even before she had joined the active military.
For once Richard didn’t say or do something that would push anyone’s “activate fight” button. He gave a slight negative head shake, and this got a more normal smile from the senior officer. She let out a snort. “I didn’t think so, you’re not always dumb. So, what do you think we will be able to get done, referencing this salvage operation?”
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At first light all of the divers assigned to this operation were heading back into the water. A large cage was slapped together with some spot welding and extra clamps and then tied between two small ships boats. This cage along with as many spear guns and extra throwing bolts on hand made the shallow water diver team very willing to be encumbered. They would be able to quickly get into the shark cage or onto the two ship’s boats that were not made out of rubber. Those two boats also came with a pair of crewmembers armed with high powered rifles standing watch over them. This was seen as a lot safer than the air-filled rafts and zodiacs that they had been using. The Deep Water Team still went down in the same lift, but now it looked like a metal skeleton mushroom. Also, now there was more than enough room for all of the divers to be behind metal bars only eight inches apart while they were in that lift.
More than a few people and not all of them were divers, were very relieved when not one shark was seen by any of the ship’s lookouts, and the divers. The underwater teams went to work just a little faster than might have been safe after reaching the work areas. For the first time they were going to be using a new skill set. The deep divers had a diamond cable saw that was used for the first time on the wrecked ship’s upper works. Soon every crane in the fleet was being used to pull “items” out of the sea. It might have been fully exposed combat vehicles, shipping containers, or just parts of the ship many feet long and wide coming up.
Before everyone started the workday the NCO’s took charge of the situation before anyone got hurt. They all were advised that this was going to be a maximum safe effort in case of another attack by pirates or just people who wanted to take something from them. Then an hour was spent on going over what types of actions they should take if attacked. The attacks were graded by levels that went from lone small fishing boats with two shooters and going all the way up in threat to old school soviet raiders that had not been seen for a few years now.
Very soon, the USS Boulder’s vehicle bay was filled, so anything that the heavy crane on the bow brought up was at first held on the forward part of the ship before being moved through the vessels super structure to be held on the flat aft passed the twin smokestacks. The Savior’s cranes pulled up smaller loads to be held on the LCU for shipment back to Mombasa. The deck crews on all of the ships were working as fast as they could. And thanks to the crew on the mine sweeper in the ROV, they were pulling up a lot of things just in the general area, which might or might not be useful in the end. About all that the crews on those ships did know, was that this was going to be the cleanest part of the ocean in this part of the world.
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There were only a few hours of light left when the LCU 1619 and the LST USS Boulder slide in and sandwich the much larger USS Mauna Kea between the two smaller US navy ships. The heavy cranes on the old ammunition supply ship went to work shifting cargo between all of the three ships. Without access to a large dock or good pier in a harbor to do the work, this was harder than it really needed to be. They would need to work almost throughout the whole night to get a lot of the cargo shifted around the three vessels to meet the Task Force commander’s plan and intent.
Then about halfway between midnight and sunrise, after the cargo teams made a mistake that sent four of them to the infirmary with non-life-threatening injuries. The other two larger vessel Navy captains thought that the loading was not safe for the small ships to continue. Still, it was a mission that had to be done so it was by order of Richard and backed up by the Flagship that the loading continued. A little before the sun raised again over the blue waters of the Indian Ocean. The three cargo ships had split apart once more, and all three cargo handling crews were able to get some much needed rest and minor first aid. The crews of the USS Bolder and the much smaller LCU were ordered to stand down to only a security watch and minimum anchor watch.
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Two days later Richard looked out the forward window of the command center of the vessel that was offset to one side of the LCU. By all rights Richard could have claimed the larger USS Boulder to be his “flagship”, but that was just “to Navy” for him to currently have to deal with. Besides, Richard still had some issues with the command team on that larger ship. So why rock the boat any more than was currently necessary? They would make it back to the home port in good time, so it was not worth his effort to try to fix those command and leadership issues to “his” satisfaction.
The little and slow 3 ships convoy made their way North at a steady 8 knots after leaving the area of the salvage operations. The going was very slow, but it was a steady pace in the open ocean moving at as near a straight line as the navigators could manage. The LCU might have been at one time used as a pirate group’s mother ship while they were working in the open ocean, but that didn’t mean that she could make a good turn of speed. At least not if it was compared to what was called “normal” for ocean going vessels of the US navy. That had been why it had been carried most of the way to the work site by the Boulder in the first place. It also didn’t mean that she road in the open waters of this part of the Indian Ocean very well. This time the Boulder did not have room for her to be carried on the deck thanks to all of the recovered items filling every space not needed for safety or crew use. Now she was just pushing her way through the waves under her own power, and the little convoy was making its way north with just a little help from the current trade winds.
Robert looked aft out of the side mounted bridge at the rear most cargo area in the open well deck of the 41m long vessel. The object of his attention was an old deuce and a half that had clearly seen better days and might still end up under a recycler’s torch when they got to Mombasa. Richard very much doubted that it would see use again, other than for a spare parts source. But it did have a turret ring mounted over what was left of the passenger seat in the cab of the cargo truck. That heavy weapons mount had been made to work…… at least it was currently workish. That ring mount had one of the LCU’s crew manning the M2 heavy machine gun sent over from the USS Boulder from its Marine landing forces weapons lockers. There was a crewwoman currently holding the butterfly handles and her partner was scanning the local waters for any threats with their also recovered and repaired field glasses.
After looking towards where the ring gunner was scanning and not seeing anything he could only give a headshake. Now Richard looked forward towards the ramp bow and saw the stack of fuel that the LCU was going to need. There were six huge rubber wheels like fuel drums and other large containers taking up the whole bow area of the blunt nosed vessel. That area currently had a little over three times the “normal” load of fuel for this type of craft. Or it would have, if not after every crew duty shift the LCU’s fuel tanks were topped off from that fuel cargo in the well deck. If they used all of that stored fuel? And the math had said that something like that would happen if they ran into a steady head wind. Then the LCU would have to close onto the back of the LST, and the larger ship would lift those empty fuel containers off to be refilled from the larger ship’s own tanks and reloaded on to the well deck. If the weather got too bad, all but a small crew would be picked up by the Boulder and held until the weather cleared. There was more than a small chance that the smaller and fully loaded LCU might sink in heavy enough seas. And even loaded as she was, she was not worth losing all of her highly trained crew.
They should not need to do this, just like they should not need to have the extra firepower on the aft of the small ship. Still, they were carrying a lot of cargo that was clearly visible on the LCU’s deck to anyone that might get close enough. These were not safe waters even before the start of WW III. But that was also why this 3 ships convoy had four 76mm cannons, many machineguns, and automatic grenade launchers spread out among them. They were carrying a veritable gold mine on two of these three vessels, and they wanted to keep as much of it as they could.
Richard had to smile as he took one of the few seats on the “bridge” of the LCU, and he lifted up his mug to take a long sip of his coffee and watched the crew work around him. At least they still had access to very good coffee in this part of the world. And as long as they had that, Richard was happy with the world…… Well also just as long as someone was not shooting at him, then he was happy.
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