The Battle for Houston...The Aftermath Read online

  He would have to use the fleet of C-130s until the troop return was completed. He began to realize that it was going to take weeks to get out of here, and he didn’t want to hang around that long. The general remembered that the first flight of C-130s should still be in Japan and he headed for the surface where he could satellite phone Misawa.

  The C-130s at Misawa were about to head off to Elmendorf when he reached the commander of the base. It was still early; dawn was rearing its head over the eastern horizon.

  General Patterson told the colonel to load up the 1,600 Marines tightly into the C-130s; they should take 110 men with only basic equipment and squashed into each aircraft. That should free up five of the aircraft. The general told the commander to return the extra aircraft to Harbin. He also gave orders for the flight crews of the C-130s going into Elmendorf to offload the Marines at Edwards Air Force Base temporarily, and then return to Harbin via Elmendorf. General Patterson needed to return the tankers to Harbin once they had air-refueled the outgoing aircraft on their long flight into Elmendorf. Instead of going into Elmendorf, the tankers were to return to Misawa, refuel themselves and then head back here to Harbin.

  General Patterson wanted these valuable attack helicopters transferred, and one helicopter with dismantled rotor blades could just fit into the cargo hold of a C-130. With the 16 C-130s still on the apron and the five returning aircraft, he could load all of the remaining choppers; 17 in one flight stateside, and the four extra aircraft loaded with their valuable air-to-ground missiles. That would leave the transporter for the electronic supplies.

  He, Preston, and Mo Wang then checked the silos again and made sure everything was safe. He didn’t like guarding a missile with so much destructive power; and he ordered a couple Air Force nuclear engineers who had worked on the American versions of this type of missile to make sure that if it was launched, it would never deliver an active warhead. General Patterson anticipated that he might come across this problem and had brought the two specialists with him. He already knew that there was a fourth Pakistani missile which needed to be terminated, forever.

  They left the base with the eleven still-operational troop carriers behind the jeep and, under Mo’s guidance, headed to the city of Harbin. There were few people around, and those who did see the convoy must have been shocked to see U.S. soldiers driving around in local Chinese military trucks.

  They drove for 30 minutes and found the airfield. It was as the Marines had left it, stated Lieutenant Colonel Clarke who had returned with the general. He had been stationed here for two days waiting for the attack.

  The large warehouse was off to one side and was surrounded by a type of high fence normally found around a prison. The gate was not guarded, and the two large entrance gates had large padlocks and several signs saying that anybody entering would likely end up dead.

  It didn’t take long to open the gates, and they drove up to the large aircraft hangar doors. Preston noted that a C-130 or several of them could be stored in this one large hangar. He was wrong; it was totally empty, except for three more Z-10 Helicopters parked there, totally alone, and looking rather small in the large space. He radioed Major Wong who was in the air with the first transfer that he needed to collect another three helicopters here and the group then left for the factory.

  It was another 20 minute drive to the factory through more densely populated areas, and through the built-up areas the convoy really got interesting stares.

  This time the factory gates did have two armed guards—security guards, not soldiers— guarding them. The general drove up and waited for them to open the gate. It was a weird scene; two security guards standing there, one phoning into the main office that there just happened to be a convoy of 12 Chinese military vehicles full of American soldiers.

  It seemed that nobody believed him; a third guard, their superior, walked over to check out the story.

  “Mo, tell him who you are and to allow us in, or we will just drive through the closed gates and declare war on this establishment,” stated General Patterson sitting in the front seat of the jeep. Mo did and, shaking his head, the third soldier got onto the phone to relay the latest demands.

  A few seconds later a man in command gave orders to the two security men who opened the gates to allow the convoy to drive through. Once through and in front of the main office, the Marines erupted out of the trucks to make a perimeter defense for the general still in the jeep. There was still no opposition.

  Again the general just sat there with Mo and Preston waiting for something to happen. A single, older man in a smart civilian suit exited the main swing doors to what looked like the front office building in front of a much larger factory complex. He walked up to the jeep and bowed deeply.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked simply in Chinese.

  “I am Mo Wang. I was on the Politburo of Zedong Electronics under Chairman Chunqiao. The Chairman is dead, and so are Zedong Electronics and its Politburo. These men would like to see the working of your factory, and what it makes.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about the death of our beloved CEO and president,” the Chinese man replied bowing again. “Since it now seems that I am in charge, or maybe it is you, Comrade Wang, who is in charge. I would be honored if you completed a tour of our facility. We are the only operational complex and factory left in Harbin with electricity and the only operational factory left in China I believe.” Once General Patterson was told what the man had said, he climbed out of the jeep, the man bowing to him as well. “Honorable General, I also speak perfect English, I received my doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering at MIT in Boston twenty years ago.”

  That shocked General Patterson who quickly regained his composure. “So you know U.S. military uniforms, then?” he asked.

  “Yes, I spent a month stationed at your McGuire Air Force base on the East Coast studying the principals of military helicopter flight and engineering.”

  “Well, I’m very impressed with your Zhi-10; I haven’t had the pleasure to fly one yet, but they seem a pretty neat machine,” replied the general.

  “They should be, General,” the man replied. “They are a well upgraded copy of your first American Apache designs with more modern Russian production ideas.”

  The general realized that he had just hit the lottery; a fully working engineering factory that he would have the pleasure to take piece-by-piece back to California.

  “Would you like the opportunity to return to my country?” the general asked simply.

  “That would be an honor,” the man replied. “I never liked my superiors in Nanjing and regretted being forced to hand over the 50-year old company my father started, for nothing. As long as I can take my family and my workers and their families, if they want to join me, I would enjoy working with others in your country.”

  “How many people do you have working for you?” General Patterson asked.

  “In total, 4,500 men and women, from design engineers to assembly technicians; we even forge many of our own metals and alloys here at our factory.”

  “How many people in total would you need to transport?”

  “General, I will need to check with my personnel, but if everybody wanted to go with their families, I would say around 25,000 people,” answered the man.

  “If you can show me why I would want to move that many people I will get on the phone right here and begin the airlift of your entire factory, its machines and its people over to Silicon Valley in California.”

  Within 30 minutes of arriving, General Patterson was on the satellite phone to the U.S. president asking him permission to hold all troop flights for a week and get every flying machine in here to begin transporting equipment into California. The president wasn’t happy until he was told of the R-36M Russian missile pointing at his very office and he then relented. Although over ninety percent of the troops had already returned, he had so far not kept his word to the American people about troop numbers and withdrawals during the current
year; one more reschedule wouldn’t really make any difference.

  General Patterson had seen what he had wanted to see. This company made things, electronics, from scratch. There were over a dozen modern, big and heavy machines making things so small he needed a microscope to see the parts. There were two completed Z-10 helicopters close to completion and another two in the building stage. There were also two of the mobile ground-missile launchers on the building blocks, and they also made the entire missile itself, including its electronic control parts and guidance systems in-house.

  For Michael Roebels, and the other engineers and technicians in California, it would save them years in designing and in making these parts; they could be redesigned to do a hundred different tasks, not run a helicopter or a missile launcher, but maybe liven up the electrical grid or an operating theater in a hospital, and many other important systems the USA needed right now.

  General Patterson, Preston, and even Mo Wang were stunned by the treasure trove they had just stumbled upon.

  Within an hour the general had phoned Andrews and told all the base commanders, until further notice, to halt the 747s still bringing troops home, leave only one aircraft to airlift any needed supplies to the men, and, fly them all into one location: Ramstein in Germany. He also instructed them to protect the U.S. base there and bring its allotted 600 troops home on its return flight.

  He then gave orders for the entire fleet of 747s to refuel and fly the Arctic route to Harbin. One was to stop at Travis and pick up three hundred engineers and technicians to help the Chinese in Harbin dismantle and pick up every piece of equipment on the two bases and the factory. The troop transporters could truck everything to the airfield immediately. He phoned Michael Roebels, who was spending the day at Silicon Valley, and ordered him to get 300 men ready for pickup.

  It was a whirlwind of activity for that hour. Preston was swept away by how fast the general worked and directed the Air Force personnel to organize themselves to get to China to collect needed electronic equipment. He was still touring the plant a few minutes after the call to Andrews when the general’s phone rang.

  General Patterson listened for a few seconds and his face went white with anger. He put the phone down and looked at the ground for a second before telling the several people around him what the conversation was about; the President of the United States had just told him there had been an attack from the southern border and San Antonio, Texas had been taken by an enemy army of what they believed to be a large number of armed civilians.

  “Shit!” he stated to nobody. “Mo Wang, Lieutenant Colonel Clarke,” he stated to Mo and the Marine major. “I need to get back ASAP. It looks like we are in trouble, and I’m needed back there. Preston, Lieutenant Colonel Clarke, you are coming with me. We will take Blue Moon and Easy Girl back to Misawa and I will have to figure out this new problem in the air. Now I know how General Allen felt trying to keep up with all this dammed new stuff happening all at once. Major, leave your second-in-command here and Mo Wang, you will be our person in charge to pack up and get all this stuff stateside.”

  Mo nodded, glad to be part of the system of trust.

  Chapter 3

  Houston – May-June

  General Patterson was told by the president that there were perhaps as many as 50,000 men in the civilian army that had attacked San Antonio. The base commander had estimated far more, hundreds of thousands, and by the time word got to General Patterson in China the suggestions had increased to 300,000.

  The number wasn’t that far from accurate. Once the several bases had been overrun in San Antonio, and Manuel had no opposition to fight on the fourth day, word got out that there was a foreign army taking over Texas; and the numbers of armed men had already increased by 20,000 to 170,000. Manuel had lost several hundred men at the three bases. The Americans had fought hard; and once they understood the magnitude of the attack, they fought like madmen.

  It was not possible for 3,000 men to fight 50,000 and, within several hours, the fighting had ended at the bases called Joint Command San Antonio. Then they cleared the smaller National Guard base and several other bases and storage facilities around the city. Manuel was lucky that at the time he had attacked, there wasn’t one military aircraft in the whole of Texas that could fly. He didn’t know that all the Texas-based aircraft were further north on food duty, or over in Japan and China.

  Manuel’s next problem was what to do with the 900 captured Americans. Killing the enemy whilst in battle was part of war, but to murder nearly 1,000 captured men and women by firing squads was far above the nastiness of even the Calderón Cartel. His men had done well losing only several hundred to over 2,000 American dead.

  He couldn’t stop his men playing with the female soldiers, that was part of the spoils of war; but it took a day, his fifth day in America, to decide what to do with the prisoners once he had given the order for the men to leave the women alone.

  “Alberto, we must let them go. We can send them out in their underwear and boots and tell them they have 24 hours to get going. They should scamper north like cattle, and hopefully we never see them again.”

  “I think we should just shoot them all, or they will head to other bases and join forces,” replied Alberto.

  “Less than a thousand soldiers, already beaten in battle, will not be our problem in the future, Alberto,” added Manuel. “We have grown by thousands just in the last few days, and if we keep growing at this rate, we could have more men than the whole American army soon. That, my brother is not impossible! Where are their aircraft? Their fancy fighting Marines and Special Forces? Where are their parachutists? Everywhere in the world except where they need them: here. We saw more aircraft in Mexico, and shot all of them down! Alberto, just in case, we, the Calderón Cartel should not be accused of mass murder.”

  Slowly Alberto agreed. The prisoners had already been collected from the several bases where they had waved their white flags and were encamped at Lackland Air Force Base.

  Later that day and just before dusk, they stripped the soldiers of their uniforms and burned the lot. The prisoners, 848 men and the 69 women, who had suffered the brutality of the men, were driven out of the base like cattle, dressed in underwear, hats and boots, and told they would be hunted down, starting in 24 hours. The soldiers knew what that meant and, helping limping and injured soldiers, they hobbled off and scattered like leaves in the wind, much to the men’s laughter and merriment. He gave his men the rest of the day off and the next day to rest

  The next morning, May 14th, Manuel left San Antonio and headed towards Houston leaving 10,000 men with enough captured American MRE rations and food at Lackland to keep the base intact. The men had orders to empty the other bases of vital equipment and raze the bases to the ground. They had found a couple of dozen old military troop carriers, a dozen jeeps, and several artillery pieces which they took with them.

  Manuel also left his army with far more than they needed to defend themselves. He also had his men destroy the quantities of U.S. Air Force modern fighter jets, bombers, and dozens of useless modern attack helicopters on the airfields. Manuel’s men found a couple of 707 tankers at Randolph and blew them up. Fort Houston experienced the same treatment, except the weapons of destruction were furniture and gallons of aviation gasoline which was no good for Manuel’s transport, but excellent for setting the base on fire.

  Massive black clouds of smoke began erupting out of San Antonio, a couple of hours after they left the base. It would give notice to anybody who could see them that the invading army was not afraid of the Americans knowing that they were there.

  Radio communications between the Sanchez Cartel in Corpus Christi and Manuel was constantly relayed, and Manuel heard that they also had captured Corpus Christi. Carlos Sanchez had killed every one of the 300 American soldiers found there, loaded important food and gas supplies, and departed with part of the city burning.

  The Sanchez Cartel was to travel northeast and meet Manuel on I-10,
halfway to Houston.

  * * *

  By this time General Patterson was landing at Edwards in California. It had taken him only six hours to get airborne out of Harbin, and over the aircraft’s radio he gave instructions to his men remaining in China. He had waited for the five C-130s to return; the 16 others were already loaded with the first rotor-less helicopters. The five C-130s from Misawa took less than two hours to load the last helicopter and 200 of the 600 cases of missiles in the other four aircraft.

  He refueled in Misawa, organized and checked on weather from Carlos’s satellite for the long and heavy flight into Elmendorf, and took off in a heavy rain storm from the south, knowing that the 18 C-130s, two Gunships and seven tankers would have tailwinds for at least the first couple of hours to help them get the range into Alaska. It was touch and go with the heavy choppers aboard.

  On board, General Patterson acted much like General Allen had done before him. He contemplated every fact, and then phoned people to get their input and give orders.

  No, nobody knew what was happening in San Antonio. No, there were absolutely no flyable aircraft in the whole of Texas. Even the Laughlin Air Force Base commander said that he had nothing flyable. Everything was north feeding people. The commander had 3,000 men on the base and had heard over his satellite phone about the attacks 200 miles to his east in San Antonio. No, he would not go and see what was going on. He had 3,000 men versus hundreds of thousands. He was going to stand and defend his base and wanted backup.

  It was same at Dyess, Goodfellow and Shepherd Air Force Bases in the rest of Texas. There were less than 12,000 men at these three bases, no flyable aircraft and nobody knew who the attacking army was.

  General Patterson’s brain was working as fast as it could while the pilots flew northwards enjoying a 50-knot tailwind for the first three hours. They would make it.