“Don’t say anything about that to anyone, David. I’ll make it work,” Shake smiled and tapped at his temple, “but I need to do some pensiamento, verdad?”
“Si, senor. Buena suerte.”
Colonel Benevidez decided to go down to the village and spend the night after their evening meal which gave Shake time and privacy to work out how he was going to fire the big mortars semi-effectively without sights. Around 2200, working by candlelight, pouring over maps and scribbling furiously on scraps of paper, he had devised what he thought was a workable method. He would lay the base piece for deflection using a lensatic compass to point the mortar basically along the computed gun-target line. At this point, he’d consult the range charts, select the number of propellant increments required to push the rou
