by T I WADE
Being a man of means, he already had three passports, one Chinese, one American, and one British, all with his photo in them with different Chinese names. The first bus out of town was going north. It wasn’t that he really wanted to go north, but it was the first bus out of town and it was heading into San Jose, Costa Rica and could hitch him up with points even further north.
Mo Wang didn’t really know where to go, but he had heard nice things about Honduras, and an island called Roatán just off the coast of Honduras, where one of Lee Wang’s aunts had moved years earlier. It sounded better living on a small island than on the more dangerous mainland. He had enough money to last him the rest of his life, and he could start all over again, maybe becoming a fisherman, or a chicken farmer—something simple.
*****
The chairman hadn’t thought or cared about Mo Wang for a couple of days. He had more urgent things to do, like go over the battle plans with his ship’s captains and the several colonels on board the ships to make sure that the attack was successful.
The Chinese fighters had completed several take-offs and landings on the carrier deck and only one aircraft had been destroyed so far. The pilot had missed the catch-rope across the deck and the aircraft had fallen over the end of the ship, taking a couple of soldiers manning an anti-aircraft gun with him.
The attack team rarely left the meeting room during the two days of restocking and the 24 hours it took all ten large ships to travel through all the Panama Canal locks one-by-one. Being extremely large ships, it took far longer than usual, and the aircraft carrier—a pretty small one compared to the more modern carriers—fit through with inches to spare.
Once they were done and Mo Wang was many miles away from them, they set a course for the western edge of the island of Puerto Rico, and from there they cruised due north, 200 miles off the American shore, and aimed straight for New York Harbor seven days sailing in front of them.
*****
Preston and his team spent a couple of days flying and practiced firing their guns at a firing range they could use at Quantico, the only place around that had an area big enough to be able to use their aircraft’s guns and rockets. Several trucks and other useless modern military vehicles had been placed around the open-ground firing range, and slowly they got better at precise aiming.
They had to be good, because they would be the fighter cover for the troops on the highways fighting the Chinese soldiers once they got out of the airports. They practiced flying very close to each other in case they needed to give a few fingers to the Chinese pilots in the 747s, telling them where to go and escorting them into land.
The weather turned very cold and snow fell for three days, grounding just about everybody except the daily incoming flight from the Middle East going into Newark’s cleared runways. The 747s had to land on clean runways and the engineers, with more and more electrical generators coming online now, had Newark’s directional systems and landing systems working as well as before the catastrophe.
They had already used many of the new Chinese electrical parts, and the engineering teams realized that even though they had tons of electrical parts, many would not work until some sort of electrical power station came online. The first thing they would do once the attack was over, was to see if they could get the closest nuclear reactors up and running again and a simple power grid established—at least around areas of New York. But until then, they would be using over 1,000 military field generators, getting only the necessary electrical equipment powered up. Nobody really knew what would be the first area to repair.
The snowstorm dropped three feet of snow into the region, and only the three runways and disembarkation areas around the aprons were cleared to continuously allow the aircraft in. The enemy soldiers could fight their way through the snow drifts, as far as the American forces were concerned. Why make it easy for them? Colonel Patterson was hoping that they did not come in with snow camouflage, but it didn’t really matter with 30,000 troops now filling every window, rooftop, or any other place they could see the highways, as well as dozens of minor and side roads from the three airports into the harbor area.
The harbor area and coastline around New York Harbor looked untouched. The heavy snow helped to hide the 53 155mm howitzers. Three more had arrived from a New York Army base and the 40 105mm howitzers placed on either side of the entranceway, were camouflaged, and with the fresh snow, now invisible to any shipping arriving under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.
Another 40 105mm howitzers had been placed on five large river barges, pulled by two working tugboats into the area a mile in from the bridge, tied together and placed horizontally to look like an island.
Every gun had been camouflaged, and two of the now three destroyers had entered New York Harbor sailing under the bridge, and their lookouts with powerful binoculars could not see one gun placement.
In addition to the howitzers, there were well over 100 large mortar teams in placements around the area—several on and around the area of the bridge that were not expected to fall if the middle span was detonated. Several of the Mutts, jeeps, and even other vehicles had been placed on the roofs of buildings nearby, loaded with armor-piercing rockets that hopefully would be accurate enough to knock out any smaller guns aboard the ships.
Colonel Patterson was told by Colonel Grady that even if the biggest guns could not get through the modern hardened armor of the ships, they certainly could destroy the upper infrastructure of the warships if they concentrated on those areas. Fifty anti-aircraft cannons had been placed slightly further out from the shorelines, and their main task was to protect the bigger guns from the air. The Chinese fighters would have to go through a wall of flying steel to destroy the bigger guns, as the satellite-guided munitions under their wings would be useless in this fight. They had lost all of their guidance systems, since Lee and Carlos now controlled the satellites.
Vice Admiral Rogers had his only three old submarines tied up at the old wharf by Battery Weed, less than 1,000 feet inside the harbor from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. They were to dive and sit close to the harbor floor at about 50 feet, and literally send as many torpedoes as possible in the direction of the aircraft carrier once it entered the kill zone and then aim for the rest of the military ships.
The three submarines had simple wire-guided torpedoes that were 30 years old, but they could still pack a punch and sink a ship, especially an aircraft carrier built in the Ukraine. The vice admiral reckoned that at least 18 to 24 torpedoes could be launched before the submarines were taken out and hopefully only by the fighters, but at 50 feet in murky waters, they would be totally invisible from the air. The Navy had worked out a system of aiming the torpedoes from a command center above the submarines on the battery, since the submarines would be firing blind.
Two of the destroyers were hidden from view at the Staten Island ferry terminal, and they would be positioned behind larger ships where they could sneak out and attack anything coming deeper into the harbor.
The older destroyers didn’t stand a chance against the more modern Chinese ships, but they could get off several shots if they fired first, and the closeness of the battle would guarantee hits on the foreign vessels. The third destroyer was hidden behind the back end of Manhattan Beach Park, and once the attacking ships entered under the bridge it would sail at full speed behind them to close off the entrance and take up her battle stations from outside the harbor bridge.
*****
Carlos wasn’t working with Lee much anymore. Both Maggie and Buck had joined Lee in his place, both as good and knowledgeable as Carlos in the software field of electronics. Maggie was now Lee’s assistant, and Buck was helping most of the time since he wasn’t flying Air Force One around. The president had been told to stay home, stay away from the war. This arena was for soldiers, not politicians.
Barbara worked long hours flying Lady Dandy, often with the help of Martie or Preston when they had spare time at night, and she helped ferry in soldiers, am
mo, projectiles, and mortars from the surrounding Army and Marine bases as the bases received phones for communication and the commanders could give a list of what their armories had.
The snowstorm had given everybody a good two days of rest, something they were all desperate for, and now they were a little behind in setting up the circus of all circuses—The Invasion of the USA.
*****
“I see them! I have found the ships!” Lee Wang ran out on the 19th day of January, three days before the assumed day of attack. Carlos, Preston and several others ran into the communications building at McGuire to see what Lee was so excited about. There they were, the minute dots that could barely be seen by the naked eye, 500 miles offshore just south of Jacksonville, Florida. The ten specks were steaming in a direction which would bring them straight into New York Harbor.
Lee, with Carlos’s permission, had moved Navistar P’s orbit from the central USA and had positioned the satellite directly above Birmingham, Alabama. He had also brought the satellite’s orbit above earth down by 100 miles to get a wider and closer viewing range, and now they could see the ten dots with small wakes behind them as they sailed into the Atlantic area.
The ships couldn’t be seen on the Chinese satellite feed and the satellites hadn’t been touched in case the enemy might be alerted by the movement. Lee didn’t think that the enemy actually knew they didn’t have control of the satellites any more. Maybe the only satellite control center had been at Zedong Headquarters.
“It looks like they are doing about 20 knots,” observed Vice Admiral Rogers once he had studied the computer screen for a couple of minutes. “That gives us two days. I think we need to bring our plan forward by 24 hours.”
“Are we ready with our plan of defense?” Preston asked Colonel Patterson, who had just walked in and was quickly briefed by Carlos. He had arrived late the night before and had gotten several hours of sleep for the first time in days.
“Yes, I think so,” he replied. “There’s not much more to do. The next flights in from Kabul are due in another four hours. I think that we should unload, refuel, and fly ten of the 747s into Seymour Johnson to have their seats removed and get our larger food-distribution plan started a day early. Seven of the bigger, more southern cities in the Pacific Time Zone have clear runways. Five of the passenger aircraft can go straight into Edwards and can begin distributing supplies into Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
“The others can go into our supply bases in Texas and cover Dallas, Houston, Santé Fe, Denver, and Salt Lake, if their runways are clear. The 747 transporter is going to deliver food into Chicago, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia for the next three days, but it will take another ten hours to clear Chicago’s runway. They only have three bulldozers working. Once we have more aircraft, we can get them onto the Baghdad and Kabul routes and have another couple left over for supply runs out of Texas. We received word a couple of days ago about a very large Army food-storage warehouse at one of the bases in Texas, from the colonel who arrived with the Texas convoy, and he made me promise to distribute the food supplies in and around Texas. I want to fly three new 747s into that base as soon as we have them.”
“What about the defense perimeter?” asked Vice Admiral Rogers.
“All ready and a day early is even better,” continued Colonel Patterson. ”It will save the troops from getting cold and bored. We will be short one flight of 6,000 troops, but we now have close to 85,000 soldiers on the ground in and around the airports, the harbor, and on every street and window overlooking possible escape routes from the highways. We are ready to delay the arriving troops. Over 190 mobile-command radios are now operational, every gun team is patched in, and every platoon or company of men, guns or ships can be given immediate firing orders. Or they can just stay tuned to the running commentary from our spotters around the highways, or be ready in the harbor area for Phase Two. We even have a radio on top of the Statue of Liberty, wired directly into my Harbor Command Center on top of the south tower of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The bridge explosives are in place. Gentlemen, we are as ready as we could ever be.”
“That means we could expect visitors anytime after dawn tomorrow,” added the vice admiral.
“Correct,” replied the colonel. “I want all fighter aircraft in the air from here to McGuire as soon as the first incoming 747 aircraft touches down. The aircraft with the least range will take off last. The F-4s will only take off once the first empty 747 aircraft are back in the air. The incoming troops will see nobody, apart from the expected Chinese engineers with our pilots refueling the aircraft and smuggling themselves on board each one. Can we trust the Chinese engineers to play their parts, Lee?”
“Yes, I believe so,” replied Lee who, with his wife and daughter, had spoken to each man one at a time and had offered whatever the man wanted to get him on their side. Only seven of the 100 engineers had not sounded happy about defecting and another ten had been suspect. The others had welcomed the opportunity as long as they could go back and bring out as many family members as they wished once the contest had been decided. The 17 engineers that were still suspect had been placed under guard at JFK where Majors Wong and Chong were already in place to assist with the refueling and become the new pilots of two of the incoming aircraft.
Lee was to be flown into La Guardia to help with Chinese communications at the third airport. There were only ten Chinese engineers there due to Colonel Patterson’s belief that with their reduced flight size, the chairman might only use the two closest airports instead of all three airports.
*****
Colonel Patterson was right. Twenty-three hours later, and two hours before dawn on a cloudy but cold morning, several aircraft entered the edge of the old, most powerful radar screen on Blue Moon, which was circling over McGuire at 5,000 feet to get the maximum information out of her radar capabilities.
The aircraft, in a long line, were arriving in from the north and were over Prince Edward Island, 1,000 miles from New York. It would still take the aircraft two hours to reach New York, but radio messages went out over the vast mobile communication system and hundreds of truck and car engines started and landing lights at the three airports’ repaired electronics and aircraft-directional systems came alive to guide the aircraft in. It took only one radio message from Blue Moon, who immediately prepared to land, to warn everybody.
America got ready for its invasion.
Colonel Patterson had decided to monitor proceedings from Newark’s control tower and he had two other Marine majors who would be in command of the battles, if there were any, at the other two airports. Newark Liberty International Airport was much closer to the harbor area, and these incoming troops had to be taken out quicker than those from the other two airports. Twenty-five thousand troops were in hiding around Newark airport alone, all the way from the airport to the Bayonne side of the Newark Bay Bridge, which was the major ambush site for this section of the attack.
The Newark Bay Bridge was nearly 10,000 feet long. The invading troops, or the majority of them, would have to walk across it. Once they were trapped on the long bridge, they could be attacked from the air at both ends, and hopefully made to surrender if they wanted to survive.
Dozens of heavy machine guns were hidden in the buildings nearest to the Bayonne end of the bridge, and teams were ready to carry them into place and cut off the two empty stretches of highway on the bridge. With more heavy machine guns camouflaged on the other end, the only hope for the Chinese soldiers would be to jump into the freezing water, which would mean certain death.
Everyone got into position and waited. Preston climbed into his P-38 because at the last minute Colonel Patterson had asked him to be air cover for the Newark Bridge and be airborne to strafe the bridge, hopefully to help scare the invaders into surrendering quickly.
Another Air Force pilot was to fly his P-51 and with Martie and Carlos, they were ready to help guide the refueled and airborne enemy-flown 747s in
to McGuire if they couldn’t get the American pilots aboard.
Blue Moon quickly landed and got off the radar screen. The incoming 747 pilots might have seen her, and all the fighter aircraft waited. They didn’t want to show up on the incoming aircraft’s radar and scare them into landing somewhere else. Even after such a long flight from China, they still had reserves of fuel to land somewhere else in the United States, even as far south as the Caribbean islands.
It took over an hour before the lead aircraft showed up on the less-powerful radar screens in the airports, and the air traffic towers from different airports watched as the 23 blips on the screen slowly came closer and began to merge into two different lines.
Thirty minutes later they were just over 100 miles out and the aircraft slowly turned into long final approaches to both JFK and Newark, just as Colonel Patterson had hoped for.
Just in case some of the aircraft could peel off and still go into La Guardia, he waited until they were 20 miles out before telling all the troops at La Guardia who had access to motorized transport to get aboard and head over to JFK. It would take them an hour, but at least 1,000 more men driving in to assist the 20,000 troops already in place on the roads out of JFK would help if need be.
As the sun rose over the horizon, a small sliver of light between the ocean and the lower cloud layers, the silhouetted shapes of aircraft could be seen by nearly everybody as they glided in, a mile apart, into the two airports—ten coming in from the northeast into JFK and 11 from the southeast into Newark.
It didn’t look like any would change direction towards La Guardia and the waiting became long and slow for the airport soldiers. It was still very cold and the air around them was totally silent of noise.