Carnifex

sun. Undaunted by the machine guns ostentatiously trained on it, it had flown twice around the Dos Lindas before settling down to a marked spot on the rear deck. There it was met by a small party of escorts and brought down to CIC to meet the skipper.

* * *

Fosa shook hands; Kurita bowed slightly. The Haarlemers introduced themselves as Ms. Klasina Frank and her administrative assistant, Christian Verdonk. Frank seemed extremely pale and rather plump, quite in contrast to the very deeply tanned and athletic-looking Verdonk.

Both Haarlemers' faces were guardedly friendly as Fosa led them through a tour of the ship. He took them through the five decks of the ship's tower, then down to the deck encircling the hangar and finally down to the hangar deck itself where he'd assembled one company of Cazadors and a roughly equal number of ship and air crew. Frank and Verdonk walked the line, following Fosa. He didn't lead them down each rank.

Later, over a cordial but not overly friendly lunch in Fosa's quarters, which meal the visitors barely touched, the skipper explained, 'We cannot guarantee you protection. You understand this? The most we can do is try, within reason, to conform our deployments to the passage of your company's ships, to come as quickly as possible, if we are in practical range, if one of your ships is attacked, and to station small parties of Cazadors on some of your ships as they make the passage. In theory, we are capable of conducting rescue operations, but as a practical matter, we've never really been able to rescue any crew once they were taken to shore. I doubt we ever shall be able to.'

'Hartog Shipping understands this,' Ms Frank said, looking up from her uneaten rehydrated pork chops. Shrugging, she added, 'We are not paying so much that we could ask for more. As long as you will be willing to go to the aid of ships as you are able, or let one shelter under your wings at need, this is enough.'

6/1/468 AC, Hajipur, Sind

Ownership of Hartog Shipping was an interesting subject. Indeed, it was so interesting that a not inconsiderable portion of the both Federated States intelligence and investigative assets, with a healthy assist from Yamatan Imperial Intelligence, had gone into trying to determine just who owned the company, and others like it. Between ships owned but leased elsewhere, and some of those passing through four or five or, in one case, even nine nominal leasers before being leased back, plus shadow corporations, secret stock ownership, and front organizations, it had never proven possible to determine ownership of the company to any degree of certainty. This was actually normal.

Mustafa didn't have that problem. He knew who owned Hartog. For all practical purposes, he did. At least he had a controlling interest.

For the most part, he exercised no control. Rather, he left it to the company management to keep the affair solvent. He had, however, intervened to the extent of having two of the company's lesser assets filled with thoroughly reliable, even fanatical, Salafi skippers and crew. He had also intervened to obtain the company's sailing schedule, then passed that on to Abdulahi in Xamar so that the latter could attack a few Hartog vessels. This was a necessary cover for what was to follow.

The chosen ship, the Hendrik Hoogaboom, was an older, dry-bulk cargo carrier of roughly sixty-eight hundred tons capacity. Measuring one hundred and two meters in length at the waterline, and just under eighteen in beam, she was of a perfect size for her chosen task. Indeed, she was not really very well suited anymore for her designed task, being more or less uneconomical to run. Neither Mustafa nor Hartog Shipping would much miss the Hoogaboom once she'd completed her mission.

The first step had been recertification of the hull and engines. The engines were a problem, having been rather poorly maintained for some years in an effort to eke out something like a profit from Hoogaboom's operations. Fortunately, Hajipur was a full-service port, albeit a small one, and its facilities and workers were more than capable of rebuilding the engines.

The hull itself was fine. The hold, however, was more problematic. The ship was not double hulled and was, of course, completely unarmored. This would never do.

The mixed Hindu and Moslem workers of Hajipur were able to fix that as well. Inside, they built up a large bunker of two centimeter steel plates. The bunker would be sufficient to contain approximately two thousand tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in pelletized form. It was also leakproof.

Within the bunker a series of pipes with blow out perforations were assembled and welded into position. The workers were told that the pipes were part of a fire suppression system, designed to pump pressurized steam into the hold should the cargo ever catch fire. This seemed reasonable to them. The real purpose of the pipes was to spread an explosion quickly.

A number of additional armoring jobs were added on, though none of these were explained to the welding crew. Above, on the rear-sitting superstructure, the bridge had double layers of two centimeter steel added. Down below, a second bridge—almost a simple CIC—was built up with more steel plates. Video cameras were installed around the ship and linked to batteries of monitors both on the bridge and below, in CIC.

In between, flush with the main deck, two boxes were built, each just large enough for a two man machine gun crew. Machine guns in those boxes, firing through the forward-facing ports cut in the bulkhead, could sweep the main deck with machine gun fire should there be a boarding. Some other, similar, steel boxes were welded in to port and starboard, with similar firing ports cut. Between the size and shape of the boxes, the welders winked knowingly at each other, presuming that the mission of the Hoogaboom was going to be piracy suppression. They'd heard grisly stories of both the pirates and their enemies, the 'Christian' mercenaries, operating off the Xamar coast.

The stern was changed as well, two sets of davits being added. These were considerably larger than the normal life boats would account for. They looked like near twins of those mounted on the Harpy Eagle for the patrol boats. The Hajipur crew bought them off of a passenger liner sitting at the breakers down the coast. Two surplus special operations boats were to be fitted as soon as they were delivered by a private company in Anglia which had them.

The bow of the ship was heavily reinforced with armor plate and the intervening space filled with conexes, themselves filled with a mix of sand, Styrofoam packaging peanuts, and sheet metal. The conexes had been filled elsewhere and then moved by rail to Hajipur on Sind's excellent rail system. Further conexes lined the side of the ship from just below the water line to just above the central armored bunker.

There were limits, though, to the modifications that could safely and wisely be made. Some form of cannon anti-aircraft defense, for example, would have been nice. On the other hand, it would also have been more obvious. Worse, training the gunners would have been extremely obvious. The ship made do with half a dozen shoulder-fired anti-aircraft gunners, each with several missiles apiece. Similarly, torpedoes were right out and cruise missiles too problematic.

On the bridge, standing besides the ship's captain and future martyr to the cause, Abdul Aziz sighed with satisfaction. The Hoogaboom's rebuilt engines barely strained as the ship left the tugs that had guided it out into the dredged channel that led to the sea.

'Three more stops,' The captain said. 'And then one more on the way to Paradise.'

'I'll be leaving with the next stop, Captain,' said Abdul Aziz. 'I must report back to Mustafa.'

18/1/468 AC, The Base, Kashmir

Three men, Mustafa, Nur al- Deen, and Abdul Aziz, walked the trails within the fortress. There came from the north the steady crackle of small arms fire as the mujahadin practiced marksmanship. For the most part the practice was a wasted effort. Yet it had one great virtue. In any group there are always exceptions. The marksmanship training program, useless as it was to train any appreciable number of decent shots, was still absolutely critical to identifying the rare naturally superb shot for further, more useful, training. Federated States Army, Taurans, and even the Legion had had occasional cause to curse those rare genuine marksmen the Salafis now fielded.

Along with the rifle and machine gun fire, the din was frequently punctuated with much larger blasts as others among the holy warriors were trained in the intricacies of combat demolitions, booby traps, and other improvised explosive devices.

Mortars, too, could be heard as their crews practiced this simplest of the artillery arts. These, though, fired from outside the perimeter of the fortress and directed their fires even further away. It might have been more effective to fire from inside at targets outside. In