by T I WADE
“So you are a rich man, Antonio. I don’t need to pay you, just give you houses to clean out once we win the fight,” suggested Manuel.
“None of the men need your money, Señor, just a nice piece of land or a nice big American house to live in and people to work the lands for food. Just like in the old days in Mexico—people to work while I drink Tequila, Señor Calderón; people to be servants, nothing more!” Antonio smiled.
From all three people, it was the same story; the army had moved the remaining people north to areas of safety. It didn’t sound like very many were still alive from the stories the three men told. That meant that he could easily take over a good piece of Texas without a big fight.
Manuel knew that he would someday come up against the might of the U.S. military, but it didn’t seem that there were very many. Surely they were still stuck in Iraq and other places in the world. Also during his entire operation in Mexico he hadn’t been attacked by one American aircraft. Maybe they didn’t have any more than the Mexican military and he still had 30-odd ground-to-air missiles to surprise them.
He felt pretty confident about taking over Texas and declaring it his own country. His uncle had told him that it used to be one of the twenty biggest economies in the world, and that alone could make the Calderón family nearly invincible.
“OK, guys, we take over everything between here and San Antonio,” declared Manuel that evening. “Me and my brothers and our main army leave at dawn tomorrow morning and we will travel fast on I-35 directly into San Antonio. Carlos Sanchez, you attack Corpus Christie and then go southwards to Brownsville and McAllen with your men. Kill all military you see and then attack and ransack any military barracks for weapons and equipment. There should be lots of ammo around for you to arm your men. Leave any civilians alone and let any Latino men join you who want to. Grow, Carlos Sanchez; grow as big as you can. Force any man who speaks Spanish to join your army. No gringos or black men, we can’t trust them. Don’t kill the farmers, we will need food in our new country of Texas, amigo. Once you have the area controlled by your men, leave two thousand men in each of the three cities, heavily armed under disciplined leaders. I will wait for you for one week after I attack San Antonio and then I will attack Houston. I want to make Houston our new capital. It’s big and a good place to fight the Americans when they come. Carlos, you must find every vehicle that works and get your men to look for food as you move, or your army will grow hungry. Comprehend?”
Carlos Sanchez nodded his head and gave orders to his men to get ready to move out. He wanted to be moving down the dual carriage highway towards Corpus Christie by dawn.
“Remember, Carlos Sanchez, your men will need food. You are not going to find any food in the cities, the best place to find food is in army barracks or places that are defended. There is no law and order in this country, no such crime as murder just the crime of survival. Alberto will give you three of the radios I captured from the Mexican army. I will keep a radio team at the edge of my army and always on a hill. That means you can talk to me once you are within one hundred miles of me and my men.”
There wasn’t much sleep that night. It took a lot of work and organization to move an army of men. All the leaders and commanders got trucks packed, munitions counted, fuel dispensed and by dawn the next day the two highways out of Laredo were full of men and trucks heading away from Laredo.
Carlos Sanchez, with most of his men already stationed further out of the city of Laredo, left first on a different highway due east to the Calderón armies.
The weather was blustery and overcast, the winds from the south, and rain squalls hit from behind as Manuel led his mobile army of 25,000 men north on I-35. His 3,000 vehicles, mostly jeeps and civilian cars, and Mexican military troop carriers pulling the fuel tankers, covered both sides of the highway northwards for twenty miles, and they managed a good speed of ten miles an hour. His vehicles included three old Mack U.S. army trucks pulling fuel tankers, captured from the U.S. National Guard base in Laredo.
Alberto’s army of 25,000 men was crammed into 2,000 mostly slower military and civilian trucks of all sizes. He had found several dozen old trucks with flatbed trailers, and the hundreds of vehicles started the journey an hour after Manuel’s group disappeared over the horizon.
Pedro’s much larger army was next and was due to leave immediately after Alberto’s last vehicles left. He only had 40 percent of his 60,000 men in vehicles and most of his men had to walk.
All three armies had several hundred men on horseback who rode out a couple of miles on each side of the highway in case of surprise flanking attacks. They were also there to ransack farms, ordered to leave any civilians or farmers alive, but take any food, fuel, vehicles or horses they could find.
The last army of 25,000 was to leave the next day on foot under the command of Pedro’s second-in-command, leaving the last 15,000 men to guard Laredo and search every inch of the town for food and any vehicles with fuel. Manuel had decided to leave a relay radio station every fifty miles along the road, on a hilltop. They had several extra radios, ransacked from the Mexican army, and would need communications if and when attacked by American soldiers.
For three hours Manuel and his army surged forward covering 20 miles an hour. The highway was clear with many crashed or non-working vehicles neatly moved and placed on the sides of the two stretches of asphalt. They saw no one and it was as if they were the only people on earth.
Manuel thought that they certainly weren’t expected yet and they could get into San Antonio in a surprise attack. He had a list of military installations he needed to engage and could not understand the American logic; one military base covered nearly the whole city. There were two Air Force bases and an Army Base, Fort Houston.
He wasn’t worried, he had a big army and it seemed he wasn’t expected. He decided just to take one at a time.
It was impossible to hide so many men from prying eyes but there was no need to stop and regroup. His three armies were moving and within six hours his group reached the outskirts of San Antonio. Manuel wanted to attack the first base at dawn to get a foothold in the city. He found two small municipal airports on his map and he decided to aim for Castroville Municipal Airport; Alberto would overnight at the Devine Municipal Airport several miles further out of the city and directly on I-35.
To get to the Castroville airport, Manuel’s men needed to leave the Interstate, and he picked a couple of side roads to get his large number of vehicles through. This took time and he arrived just before dark.
If the people who had lived down these small roads were still there, they would have seen hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles, much like rush hour traffic, moving on the narrow roads in front of their rural houses.
There were no people to be seen. Manuel thought he saw a person watching them here and there, and he had seen several men drive or ride up to their group of men on horseback and get in line to help the cause.
Now that they had reached the limits of rural living, he could see what the men who had travelled overland to join his army had told him back in Laredo.
There were no houses without damage. Most were broken down blackened ruins where once families lived. There were wild-looking and barking dogs everywhere; and his men wanted to shoot them from the vehicles, but orders had been given for silent travel. Every shopping center or strip mall he passed was nothing but broken bricks and blackened ruins. The only thing that he saw which looked undamaged was one McDonalds sign on the corner of a strip mall. He saw the famous sign, but he couldn’t see where the McDonalds had stood. The whole strip mall was nothing more than blackened rubble.
The airfield was small, but at least there was enough room to park many of his trucks on the asphalt runway and taxiway in long lines. There was one empty hangar which still had its structure undamaged, and he turned it into his overnight headquarters.
Manuel radioed Alberto and was told that he too had reached his airfield and would set up camp. He would
be the backup army for Manuel, who didn’t want to show anybody watching, the size of his forces just yet.
Pedro’s army was still twenty-odd miles behind and was to camp in a town called Pearsall. There they found several men, who were waiting to join their army. They had accumulated around a thousand cans of food from several unoccupied houses; the food would only feed a small part of the army, but they and their rations were welcomed. Pedro set up camp in the whole town, his men taking ruined houses for their overnight accommodations.
Here they were far enough away from listening ears to solve the growing dog-barking problem and many animals met with quick deaths before the rest decided to retreat and head out of the danger area.
Carlos Sanchez had told him that he thought San Antonio had no more than three thousand American soldiers guarding the town, but he didn’t know where they were based. He anticipated a thousand in each of the three bases.
Early the next morning, May 10th, Manuel’s army cut hundreds of openings into the perimeter wire around Lackland Air Force Base while Alberto’s army continued up I-35 into the center of the city and towards Fort Houston, the second base on his list. His men were to divide into two groups, one half attacking Fort Houston while the other half headed to Randolph Air Force Base a couple of miles further east.
It was impossible to take the whole city by surprise, but Manuel’s armies needed to take over the bases and make sure that the food supplies and anything else they could scrounge out of the bases wasn’t destroyed by the Americans.
At exactly 06:30 Manuel’s army attacked the installations at Lackland. In hordes his men spread out, shooting anybody who fired back at them. There were good defenses, but not good enough to repel an army of 25,000 men and slowly the firing ceased as American soldiers who weren’t immediately shot surrendered their stations. It wasn’t worth fighting when you saw thousands of enemy advancing at you.
By 07:30 hours Fort Houston was attacked and much the same happened there. At 08:15, Randolph Air Force Base was attacked and, with only a couple of hundred men defending this base, the battle was over within 30 minutes with many of the still sleeping soldiers either shot in their beds or taken prisoner.
At all three bases, the radio areas were hit first. Unfortunately for the attacking armies, at Randolph the commander had a satellite phone connection and called the president telling him of the attack by thousands of civilians. One of Alberto’s men saw the man on the phone, quickly put a couple of bullets through his head, and then crushed the satellite phone with the butt of his AK 47.
At the other end of the phone, the President of the United States heard the gunshots, heard the Air Force Commander grunt sharply and then fall. The last thing he heard was somebody shouting orders in Spanish and then the phone went dead, and his face went white.
“Where the hell is Randolph Air Force Base?” he thought to himself and immediately got on the phone to Carlos to find out if he knew, tell him what he had heard, and find out where the video satellite was focused because he wanted it to focus on the area where the base was situated.
Carlos also didn’t know where Randolph was so the president immediately phoned General Patterson in China. He got the answer that it was Joint Command in San Antonio, Texas, and a now pissed-off General Patterson would be back as soon as possible.
Chapter 2
Flight from China – May
Colonel Patterson headed downwards to the underground level stepping over three bodies his grenade must have taken out. There were lights, and he carefully stepped into an empty corridor which smelled badly of explosives. He backed into the stairwell and watched a line of guys looking at him from the stairs above.
He didn’t want to leave the surface, but he knew that the Marines would follow his orders and fight until there was no more opposition. What worried him down here was not only meeting the enemy but coming face to face with American soldiers who shot first and asked questions later.
There was nothing else to do, but bite the bullet and go forward. He grabbed his third grenade and slung his M-16 over his shoulder and took his pistol out of its holster.
He looked back into the empty corridor and decided that to the right was the correct way to proceed and it should take him towards the rear of the base. He silently headed to the next left hand corner and peeked around it. Again the short corridor was empty and it turned right again twenty feet ahead. Also there were two doors on either side of the corridor.
The general reached the next corner and peeked around. It opened into a large cavern, but he couldn’t see anything past the entrance. He nodded to the Marines to open the side doors and they loudly crashed the doors open.
“Who’s there!” shouted an American voice from the cavern around the corner. “Show yourselves or we send in grenades, we have dozens of guys, so make my day!”
“U.S. soldiers, Air Force and Marines checking out these doors,” shouted out General Patterson and he peeked around the corner to see three Chinese-American Marines dressed in red army uniforms ready to blow his head off. “OK men, it’s me, General Patterson. We are checking these doors.”
“Um, sorry, Sir!” stated one Marine as the general showed himself and the three men saluted. “You shouldn’t be doing this special work; it’s far too dangerous down here. We are making sure no enemy pass this point. We have several other squads guarding other entry points so you’d better let us guide you. Those doors were locked and we didn’t bother to open them, it would have made too much noise.
“Two store rooms with cleaning equipment,” added the Marine captain coming around the corner. Again the three men saluted.
“We heard you guys blasting the hell out of the enemy up there,” continued the Chinese-American Marine sergeant taking off his Red Army outerwear to show his U.S. camouflage. “I suppose we can get rid of this borrowed gear,” and he and his two men discarded the enemy clothing. “Unfortunately we have had only a little fishing down here, caught only three fish since you guys arrived. Come see.”
The general followed him and found three Chinese soldiers tied up and gagged. One had the rank of major and the other two looked like sergeants. General Patterson asked the Marine to take off the major’s gag and he ordered Major Wong to ask the man if the man knew where Colonel Zhing was.
“He was blown up and killed on the wall sir,” Major Wong translated, getting a quick answer out of the man. “This man is his second in command.”
“Ask him why he was coming underground,” commanded the general.
“There are systems to activate if they were ever attacked and with the colonel dead it was his duty to make sure that the underground sections were closed and made secure. Unfortunately, it seems that he was too late and he can’t understand where these soldiers came from.”
“Ask him if he would like to guide us to the main area. If not we can find it ourselves and then we won’t need him and I will shoot him,” stated General Patterson raising his pistol towards the man.
The major immediately agreed to show them around, and the Marine sergeant stated that he would go on ahead and make sure the other men wouldn’t shoot first. They still had their issued dog whistles which would warn the others of their approach.
They were still only twenty feet underground, and they could hear that the battle above them was dying down.
Two men pulled the major up on his feet and tied a rope around his arms. He had been well frisked and only had his tunic, shirt and trousers on. His shoes and the rest of his equipment were in a pile with the other men’s clothing and weapons several feet away.
With the sergeant leading, they slowly moved forward, the Chinese major several feet behind him and the general behind the major with his pistol in his back. The underground room, with unpainted cement on all four sides, was empty of people. In the middle were several 50-gallon drums of what looked like gasoline and several large wooden boxes on pallets.
The room looked much like the armory at the airfield and again th
ere was the same green button Preston had found on the opposite wall in the airfield’s armory. Actually there were three of them across the rear wall, not just one in the middle.
General Patterson wanted one of the boxes inspected and two soldiers got to work opening the closest one of five. Inside was what looked like spare parts for the helicopters. Looking around carefully he noticed an elevator door, painted grey, on the side of the room. He wanted to use it to go up and check what was happening above but thought it was a little premature and he might get his head blown off by both his men and the enemy, so he postponed his rise to the surface.
“Have your men gone through this section yet?” the general asked the sergeant.
“No, Sir. We have been using that other door over there only,” he stated pointing to a second open door on the front wall and to their left. “It leads to some offices and sleeping areas. We didn’t realize that those buttons would open doors; we thought they were for the elevator or something.”
General Patterson asked the sergeant and Major Wong to push the buttons to the outside doors first. This time thick wooden hallway doors opened, nothing happened and the general told the major to push the middle door.
The major pushed the button and waited. A larger ten-foot by ten-foot concrete door opened in the wall and showed a cavern behind, which was in darkness.
“Sergeant, go find some of your men, we’ll wait here. I want these two smaller doors guarded while we inspect the cavern behind the large door,” ordered the general. They waited and a few minutes later several more Marines arrived. “I want one of you with a whistle to come with me. I can’t hear it, but you guys can. Major Wong, ask our captive what is behind that large door.” The conversation was quite long.