The actual truth was that he was crazy, but he wanted to keep that a secret for the time being. The proof of his lunacy was that you'd have to be crazy to try what he was about to.
"Ortega where are you, you sorry son of a sea cook?" Flynn growled out.
"Right behind you dog." Ortega said succinctly.
Flynn smiled grimly, "Break out the children."
Ortega left on the double as Flynn chuckled to himself. The Captain was going to be so mad! He was going to completely miss out on doing the honors that now fell upon Flynn as interim Captain.
Flynn watched as Ortega ran forward with a bar and began prying the deck boards up on either side of the ship's prowl. He grimaced at the sight of the splintering wood, but it couldn't be helped. The Celestia's Prize didn't have much seaworthy time left anyway, Flynn acknowledged darkly, as he glanced down at the fuel gauge.
Glancing back up he saw that Ortega had done well at removing the decking, not that he ever intended on giving Ortega any praise for it. No, he liked to egg on the Mexican, as much as possible, but there was no denying that Ortega was an excellent sailor despite his derogatory comments to the contrary.
Ortega was at the hoist and he flipped the manual control over to divert the hydraulic power over to a secondary hoist apparatus that rose up out of the two shattered sections of the deck. As the twin secondary hoists rose they carried along their burden with them, which for all the world looked like a nondescript section of pipe.
It was a pipe with a purpose though. The twin pipes to either side of the front of the ship were makeshift torpedo tubes and they were loaded. The tubes themselves along with the hydraulic hoist mechanisms were custom-made by none other than himself.
The only part of the process he hadn't built were the torpedoes. They were Russian-made.
Four years earlier the Captain had been salvaging a cruise liner that had run aground on a shallow coral reef, when on a dive he'd discovered a second wreck in close proximity to the first. An antiquated Soviet attack sub had run afoul of the same reef in the past and had one side of it completely sheared off.
The torpedoes had been among the debris littering the floor of the ocean near the sub. The Captain had brought them aboard but had decided they would be a too hot ticket of an item to sell, as he didn't traffic in weapons. He'd kept them though and devised this ingenious defensive system, which Flynn had been only too willing to construct.