The Advisor
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: I've been advised I don't own Castle. Rating: K Time: Shortly after Battle Group Castle.
"Lastly there is the Outback. None of the colonies along the Ambrosian coast control any land more than fifty to seventy-five miles inland. But people who are unhappy with their lives can and will head inland and with a bit of luck, survive. Some are subsistence farmers, some and hunters and gatherers, and some prey on anyone weaker that they come across. There are probably only a few thousand spread over God knows how many square miles, so we won't worry about them."
"I'm not sure that what you want done requires a full colonel to command." Kate said. She knew her husband well enough to know he'd want to ask the same question but didn't want to offend Sir James by suggesting he was making a mistake.
"Oh, as far as we're concerned, we don't really need a full colonel to advise these people. However, the commander of the Saint George Navy is a Rear Admiral Tomas Paredes. Family came from Cuba originally, I believe. He apparently felt it would be undignified for him to take advice from say a mere Aerospace Force major. But he can take advice from a renowned mercenary colonel."
"Does the fact that my husband is renowned increase our pay?" Kate said with a smile.
Sir James laughed.
"If it were up to me the answer would be yes, but our political masters decide what the pay rates are."
"How many people from my own unit can I take with me?" Rick asked.
"We plan to start the Saint Georgians off small. We'll combine four of their platoons into one company, so that'll be a bit over one hundred people. Say, twenty-five of your people."
"Say, thirty?" Kate countered, before Rick could accept.
"Thirty it is. Your surface navy team will be under a Commander James since the Saint Georgians have more boats than anything else. They'll number twenty people and your Aerospace Force advisors will be led by a Major Howland. They'll be doing more evaluating what Saint George needs than advising any changes since the aerospace craft we have in mind are more sophisticated than anything they're used to."
"Do either of you have any questions for me? My aide, Wilkinson, will provide you with travel details and such."
Rick and Kate exchanged glances.
"No questions." They said in unison.
"Then good luck and good hunting."
From forty thousand feet, you could see for some 245 miles on the planet Edo. Not enough to see all of Saint George, and certainly not all of the inhabited part of Ambrosia, but you could see a lot.
Colonel Rick Castle sat just behind the flight crew on a Saint Georgian Navy patrol aircraft. Next to him was Major Howland. They were getting their first trip above the planet.
Rick asked a question that had interested him from the time yesterday when he accepted the ride on the twin engine aircraft.
"Why isn't the plane armed?" he asked over the intercom.
Major Howland answered.
"This aircraft, we can't call it an aerospace craft, was built for civilian service. That means that you make nice, easy turns and dives so as not to upset the passengers or shake up the cargo. But, if someone shoots a missile at you, you'll want to turn as hard as you can without the wings coming off and dive as fast as you can. That means you have to beef up the airframe, which makes the ship heavier. That makes it slower, uses more fuel and decreases the range."
Howland pointed to the consoles behind them.
"Originally, this ship had a nice little navigation radar and a pretty simple communications system. To make it into a patrol plane, they added air search and surface search radars as well as infrared scanners and night vision devices. We also have an electronic warfare suite to confuse the bad guys' radar and IR scanners, as well as a comm system to contact other aircraft, surface ships and ground pounders. To get all of that weight off the ground, they had to install more powerful engines, and all of this causes it to use more fuel, go slower and not as far. We could hang a rocket or two on it, I suppose, but hitting anything with a rocket would be chancy unless we put in a targeting system which would…"
"Make the plane heavier." Rick finished.
Before Rick could say anything else, the pilot interrupted.
"Sirs, we're coming up on a blonde seal shearing. We'll be there in about four minutes. Look at monitor alpha on your right and you'll see it."
The two off-world officers crowded around the monitor and watched the scene far below.
"The camera is stabilized, and we have pretty good magnification, sir." The console operator told Castle. "What you see is as if you're about fifty feet above the ground." He waited a second and then, "There. You can just see the herd moving towards the shearers. No one really knows, but we think that since the blonde hair only grows during mating season that the males are still sexually excited and having their hair shorn gets them off somehow."
"Wouldn't do a thing for me." Howland said.
But Castle watched as one seal after another pushed to a shearer and was shorn, then ambled away and seemed to go to sleep.
"Are they in any danger from hijackers?" Castle asked.
"No." The operator said. "We're too far from the mainland. "But others we'll be covering today will be in danger if anyone is raiding."
They headed towards the mainland and flew quietly for another two hours.
"We got one." The pilot announced. "Distress call from sea grass harvester Bonnie Lass, just off Simkin's Key. We're headed there."
"Any patrol boats in the area?" Castle asked.
"The closest is PC Two Three and it's thirty-one miles away. With its top speed at fifteen knots, it'll take two hours to get to the Bonnie Lass. We'll have them in sight in three minutes."
Once they had the two ships in sight, the patrol plane orbited to the south of them.
"We're not going straight at them?" Castle asked.
"No, sir. From her looks, that's a hijacker out of Free Land. They buy MANPADS, man portable air defense systems and aren't afraid to shoot them at us."
The two mercenary officers looked at the monitor as one of the console operators explained what they were seeing.
"The bulky looking ship is the Bonnie Lass. The long slender one next to her is the hijacker." The console operator spoke to someone else. "Dave, we got any ID on the hijacker?"
"I've got a 98% match with our old friend Speedy Dan. He'll do twenty-eight knots easy and he's about forty miles from the mouth of Kropotkin River. He'll make it easy."
"Looks like they're starting to make their getaway. We'll have to…Missile. Missile! Break right, deploy flares and window!"
The plane banked sharply and dove for the ocean, far below. On the monitor, Castle could see flares launched to distract the missile if it were infrared homing, and aluminum chaff, or window, to confuse any radar seeker head on the missile. They were rewarded with an explosion about a mile behind them.
"How the hell soon can you people get us some combat aircraft?" The pilot yelled over the increased whine of the engines.
Howland answered.
"We can get you some purpose-built patrol planes and exchange them on a one for one basis with your current aircraft, but it'll be another month before the request gets back home, a month to build them and two months to get them here and then you'll have to be trained on them and that'll take maybe another two months."
"They'll be armed?" The pilot asked.
"Nice, long-range missiles."
"What about fighter bombers?" The copilot asked.
"We're negotiating with your government for a squadron of JT 19 aircraft. They're really just advanced trainers for an aerospace force, but they'll do Mach 1.8, and their ceiling is over 75,000 feet. Depending on the loadout, it'll carry about 13,000 pounds of ordnance."
"How long before we see them?"
"Depends on the negotiations."
"What's at the mouth of this Kropotkin River?" Castle asked.
"There's a settlement of about fifteen thousand anarchists. They have a commune there that specializes in defending the area. They have anti-aircraft and anti-shipping missiles. In addition, just about everyone in the town is a member of some militia or another. And none of them feel the least bit responsible for what Speedy Dan and his friends do. To them, it's our problem, not theirs."
"I bet seven and a half tons of ordnance would change their minds." Howland said.
"Why do you call that ship Speedy Dan?" Castle asked.
"It's the ship's radio call sign. We're pretty sure that there's two or three separate crews that take her out. One commune owns her and loans her out in exchange for a cut of the profits."
"It'll be a while before we can do anything from the air about Free Land and they might not even be first in line given some of the other hijackers." Howland said. "You have any ideas, Colonel?"
"If I had my battalion here, I could do a lot. But all we have now is a bunch of Saint George platoons we're trying to form into a company sized unit. It'll be a while before they're ready for a serious raid."
But Castle thought about it.
"It's about lunchtime, Colonel. How about a sandwich? We'll be headed north for a while and then back to base in about four hours."
"Lunch is fine." Castle replied.
Three days later, Castle, Kate Beckett and Sergeant Major Saava, the Tarkai senior NCO of Battle Group Castle, were standing in a training area that was covered with brush, short trees and grasses of various kinds.
The Tarkai were a non-human race, and many had volunteered to serve with Colonel Castle. They were long limbed and thick bodied, covered in fur that varied from black to light grey. They had small noses and external ears and rather large front teeth. Because of their excellent senses, especially sight, hearing and sense of smell, they were very valuable as scouts and reconnaissance troops.
They were watching a group of ten Saint Georgian soldiers who were hoping to be selected to be a member of a two-man sniper team planned for the company. The men were dug in but watching the scrub in front of them. Somewhere out there were two Tarkai snipers. The Saint Georgians' job was to spot them and shoot them with a low power laser attached to their rifles. A hit by the laser would automatically turn off the snipers' rifles. If the snipers hit the Saint Georgians, the same would happen to their rifles.
If a soldier from the late 21st or early 22nd century was to somehow come forward in time some two centuries, he'd find the weapons in use little different than in his day. When the great powers of Earth, Russia, China and the United States had formed to Triple Alliance to run Earth and its nearer and richer colonies, the so-called Core, they had made some changes.
TBC