by T I WADE
With warmer than usual Gulf water for May, and the cold air sent southwards by the cold front, the 300 mile wide hurricane with no name stalled a hundred miles off the coast of Port Arthur, Texas.
The cold front was strong; the two mighty weather patterns equaled each other for three days and stayed stationary fighting a battle one would lose.
Over time and still over warm water, the hurricane’s winds slowly diminished to ninety miles an hour and the cold front, still a stable air mass, picked away at the storm’s strength and warmth.
Meanwhile, weather over Houston was lousy with heavy wind and rain bands hitting the area from east to west in gusts of a hundred miles an hour. In this weather very few could stay dry and if they were dry, they stayed where they were.
* * *
Manuel was worried. He did not like having all of his men in one basket, at the airport, and constantly had men go outside and check the weather. Every time they returned with the same answer; nothing had changed.
The Seals had returned to the terminal and had been ordered by Manuel’s men to find a corner and wait out the storm. Manuel had eyed their gifts with thanks, and he had allowed them to stay in his terminal.
The rest of the Seal team had returned to the railway yard and located enclosed rail cars which kept them dry for the next 48 hours while the storm raged outside.
The temperature wasn’t cold, it hovered just over sixty-five degrees, which was cold for southern Texas, but not cold enough to bring down vital body temperatures.
* * *
General Patterson and the other two generals couldn’t do much more than monitor troop movements and fly men into Kansas, far enough away from the storm to still have sunshine and low winds.
The soldiers heading into the Houston area from Fort Bliss felt the storm’s strength first; they hunkered down in their vehicles and the wind and rain increased as they drove closer at a good twenty-five miles an hour. They entered the Houston Beltway area and prepared to set up camp in buildings until the storm abated slightly.
The group from El Paso was twelve hours behind and had just entered the far reaching bands of Hurricane No-Name.
* * *
North Carolina weather was hot and beautiful, and Preston understood the children’s wishes for a swimming pool. Nobody could figure out how to actually build one, and the first trial was a simple hole in the ground, dug by a back-hoe which was a dismal failure; the water just disappeared.
One of the technical sergeants remembered seeing several pallets of bags of cement and, on the second day, hitched a ride on a passing C-130 going into Seymour Johnson from Andrews to go and see if the bags were still in storage. He arrived back the next day in a C-130 with fifty bags of cement on two pallets and the soldiers and kids set about turning the hole into a shallow circular pool thirty feet across and five feet deep at the center.
There were still several bags of cement left over from installing floor slabs in the new buildings and, with a cement mixer, the kids and a couple of the female adults began the fun of becoming dirty and laying a six-inch thick cement layer from one end of the hole to the other.
Preston was amused at the antics of the builders. Every now and again a mud throwing fight would break out as several smoothed the dirt in readiness for the cement; often it was Little Beth or Clint who started the fights.
Preston was going over his Mustang and P-38 Lightning with several Air Force technicians and mechanics flown in from Andrews and Carlos and Martie, now rested, were doing the same. Carlos was often on the phone to Mo Wang in Harbin and Lee Wang still working at The Cube.
It was fascinating what Mo Wang was finding in the storage areas, as well as packing up the factory for transportation.
It seemed to Preston that Mo and Carlos had put away their differences and were working together. Lee didn’t have much to do but watch the satellite slowly change orbits, and he estimated three more days until the first visuals of western Texas.
Preston called two people during his visit to the farm. On his second day at home, his first call was to General Patterson asking for an update on the weather over Houston. He was told that nothing had changed and that the Hurricane Hunters had estimated forty-eight more hours before anything would change. He could stay a third day.
The second call was to Michael Roebels who was in Silicon Valley, using over 3,000 military engineers and civilian scientists to exchange new parts and spares arriving from Harbin, and installing them into the nearest hospital to connect the 300-bed facility to the now-working local Silicon Valley electrical grid. He told Preston that they expected to have the first civilian hospital fully operational, including all operating rooms and ICU units, within forty-eight hours, and then he could send out several teams to direct power and setup other hospitals. A small nuclear power station in the San Francisco area was now under power and would be at full capacity within a month.
Preston told him that it was certainly good news and reminded Martie’s father that they had a nuclear power station within twenty miles of the farm. Michael Roebels replied that all the planning was already done across the country, and that they would have enough electrical parts and spares for ten small operational grids across the U.S.; Preston’s area was fifth in-line for the revitalization of a fifty-mile wide power grid.
Martie was feeling better and called her father every day to find how he was doing. Michael Roebels was a busy man; Mo Wang was sending in so many parts that all they could do was to offload the aircraft, categorize the parts on each pallet and send them into storage warehouses until they were needed.
He was enjoying his work and had hundreds of electrical engineers in ten teams working on designing and building new product. He had listened to his daughter, and set up plans to rebuild several hybrid cars found scattered around the streets and highways. One team was turning them into purely electric cars; they worked well, had a top speed of 40 miles an hour and a charge powerful enough for 160 miles.
A second team was using parts from China to build new vehicle recharging stations, and once the small electrical grid became live around Silicon Valley, they would start distributing several of them around the area. They needed to work on ramping up the charge rate and decreasing the charge time, and figured out that four to five hours would be needed to get a vehicle fully charged for a second 160 mile range.
Martie laughed at this idea, told her father what Preston had asked General Patterson for—the three 747s—and suggested to her father that he build the recharging stations next to motels and then upgrade all the overnight accommodations in California and go into the motel business. “We’ll leave the car charger on for you!” got a good laugh from her father.
* * *
Manuel had had enough of sitting around for three solid days, and every hour meant that the Americans could attack them at any moment. Manuel Calderón didn’t like having his men at the airport and finally, the next morning, May 22nd, three days before the satellite would be over the area, one of his men stated that he felt there was less power in the wind, and the rain seemed not to be penetrating the terminal building as it had done the day before.
“Get me my commanders!” he ordered men close to him. “I want vehicles ready in 30 minutes, packed and moving out. It’s time to leave this lousy dammed airport and this crappy Houston weather!”
* * *
The first U.S. Army units had arrived several hours earlier and were setting up their howitzers a couple miles south of the airport.
The second group from El Paso was still a couple of hours away. Travel had been slow going, sometimes the wind so strong that drivers of the Mutts thought that their jeeps could be swept up and turned over. They had been drenched by the pelting rain for the last twenty-four hours, and all the vehicles had stopped a couple of times over underpasses to refuel and heat a quick meal.
The 12,000 Marines were ready and positioned across a ten-mile strip, on and between two major highways running north. With winds sti
ll topping 80 miles an hour, visibility was down to less than a hundred yards, and the men had dug in around the five exits leading north from the airport area. They were not that heavily armed, but had a dozen large mortars on each of the roads north as well as several machine-gun nests built behind wet and dripping sandbags, which the men had filled over the three days they had nothing to do apart from trying to keep dry. Many of the defensive positions were in second-story windows of broken houses, with open firing positions to the roads. Several positions were even a couple hundred yards away from the roads and under gas station roofs or any other overhangs, where it was drier than being directly under the pelting rain.
An AC-130 gunship, Easy Girl, was at 5,000 feet, fifty miles north of their position and had been circling for the last twelve hours, with a second gunship, Pave Pronto, flying south to take over guard duty. The men would be happy to be relieved as it had been a lousy flight; bumpy and stomach wrenching for twelve solid hours.
* * *
Charlie Meyers sat with his men in a corner of the expansive terminal and out of the way for the last three days. He was asleep when Lieutenant Paul nudged him awake and whispered that orders were being shouted out a couple of hundred feet from them at the command table.
Awake in an instant, he immediately got up and headed over to the command table where men were slowly gathering. He was smaller than Paul and would be less conspicuous.
“Luiz, get all the large troop vehicles loaded first,” shouted Manuel, giving orders at a rapid rate. “Have the fifty trucks returned with our third load of food from Corpus Christi?”
“No, Señor, they are expected in about three hours,” shouted Luiz.
“Luiz, I want the most recent American ration packs loaded on the drier trucks. The men can sit on top of the food and help keep it dry. We are not coming back here. I want somebody to go and tell Pedro to stay here and wait for the food trucks and then head north behind us!”
“I can do that, Señor!” shouted Charlie instinctively now only several yards from Manuel and the growing group.
“Charlie Manéz… Montano… Mendoza, or whatever your name is, go and tell my brother Pedro to get ready to move out, but tell him he is to wait for the trucks from Corpus Christi!”
“Si, Señor!” Charlie shouted back and promptly headed for the rear door where he and the Seals had initially come into the building. The other eleven men were already heading for the same exit.
“Charlie, tell Pedro that his brother wants him and only him. Walk back towards this building and we will hide in the area and grab him,” whispered Lieutenant Paul meeting Charlie at the exit. He had heard the orders given.
“My sentiments exactly, amigo Paul, I’ll go alone so that Pedro doesn’t feel threatened!” Charlie replied not halting his stride, and he walked out of the building alone, the others not wanting to make their exits noticeable.
“Señor Pedro, Señor Pedro, your brother is very ill and wants you immediately,” stated Charlie ten minutes later, walking up to the man who was the same height and who looked him straight in the eyes. “He wants to move out and told me to tell you to order your commanders to get ready. You must wait for the food trucks arriving in three hours before you leave the airport. Pedro, he is not well puking everywhere, and I think you had better get the orders directly from him, yourself!”
“Diego! Costa! Miguel! Antonio! Jorge! Get your men up and ready. We are moving out in three hours. Philippe! Come with me, we are wanted by Manuel!” and without even noticing or thanking the messenger, he picked up an AK 47 and headed for the door Charlie had just walked through into the rear terminal. A massive bear of a man nearly seven feet tall, followed Pedro with a machine gun and several belts of ammo slung over his shoulder.
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” Charlie thought to himself smiling at the size of the man. He also noticed that the weapon was loaded, cocked and ready for use. “Pedro is still limping and is walking slowly, his injuries must be hurting,” Charlie noticed, as he followed the two men who had completely ignored him. “Being ignored is a beautiful thing!”
The weather was still pretty bad; the wind was howling and the rain drenching. Charlie put his head down, rapped his waterproof poncho around himself and followed the two men out the door.
It was an 800-yard walk back to the rear of the northern terminals where he knew there would be guards and men running around getting personnel and machinery ready to move. He walked a few steps behind the big man and watched for movement coming out of the visibility curtain a hundred feet in front.
Charlie noticed three figures merge out of the drenching rain as they walked forward. They were standing still in their path, and one seemed to be gesturing to the other two, turning and pointing in different directions.
Pedro and Philippe headed off at a tangent to bypass the men. The one who was gesturing saw the three men approaching and shouted at them in an insulting way to walk over to him. Who were they?
“And who are you to order me around, amigo?” asked Pedro nastily walking up to the bad-mannered man who, Charlie noticed, was Lieutenant Paul.
“Your worst nightmare, Pedro Calderón,” laughed Lieutenant Paul as he swung the Glock Seal-Issue 21 and silencer he was hiding under his poncho and connected Pedro’s head with its butt, hard. The surprised man dropped and didn’t see two long, sharp and deadly knife blades enter the slow moving Philippe, one in the neck and one underneath his ribcage, as the two men next to Paul did their job.
Paul shouted and three more men ran out of the visibility curtain and grabbed hold of the bodies before they hit the ground. Charlie had Philippe’s trigger finger in his strong hand, and it had snapped at the same time the knives had gone in.
The bigger man was heavy and it took all three of the men to drag his body, still upright, off into the shadows of a building. The unconscious Pedro was easier, and three more men ran out to take him away. Paul and Charlie were left standing next to a pool of blood which the rain was diluting by the second. They decided that peeing into the puddle would help color the blood as two men they didn’t recognize ran up from the direction of Pedro’s terminal.
“You have to piss everywhere, you dogs?” admonished the front men running up from the northern terminal. “Where is Pedro? We have heard from the trucks, they are still five hours away, the weather is bad, worse than yesterday on the highway, and the drivers thought they saw an American jeep on the road going the other way. We need to give him the new information immed—” as three rounds from Charlie’s silenced Glock hit the man, still mouthing his next word, right between the eyes and at point blank range. The sound of the shots were as dull as a twig snapping and Paul whistled for backup as Charlie terminated the second man; three light taps with his trigger finger and four more men ran up and dragged the bodies away before more blood had to be diluted with pee.
“Charlie, you go back inside and tell Manuel that Pedro is in the toilet. He is sick or something and he should come. Maybe we could be lucky again.”
“I did that old trick to get Pedro. Twice in one day is a little too much to ask,” smiled Charlie Meyers. “But what the hell; it could be my lucky day!”
“I’ll get four men to take Señor Pedro to our team outside the wire, and the rest can hide these bodies somewhere safe. The men can tell Clarke that they could see some action pretty soon and I’ll wait behind the terminal for your exit.
“Señor Manuel, Señor Manuel! Señor Pedro is puking outside the last terminal,” stated Charlie “His man, Philippe, says that he has a high temperature and needs a doctor!” Charlie was working on his best Oscar-winning performance to date when he reached the table. While he was shouting at Manuel, he even pushed several men who were around the map out of the way to get his message of urgency across. One happened to be Alberto, who slapped the bad-mannered “Panamanian” across the head hard for his bad attitude as he stood next to him.
“Mierda! Pedro is always slowing me down. Alberto
, I’m heading out right now. Go and see what is wrong with Pedro then get your men on the move. Wrap him up in blankets and tell Diego and Costa to take over his command, and tell them to wait for the trucks. Also tell them that we will all meet in Huntsville, about fifty miles north of here. We will spend the night there.”
Alberto slapped three men on the heads, like he had done to Charlie, turned and they followed him to the rear entrance. “He had better be very sick, Charlie Panamanian, or you are going to feel sicker than he is!” he stated to Charlie angrily, as Charlie got into step next to him and was immediately pushed out of the way by Alberto’s three men behind him as they reached the exit door, pushed it open for Alberto to walk through, and Charlie slipped out behind them.
He still had seven .45 caliber rounds in his Glock; leaning forward and pulling the poncho over his body, he grabbed the Glock in his belt and pulled it out in his left hand to wet the silencer in the rain, while grabbing his Bowie-style knife hilt, his favorite weapon of choice, in his right hand. He couldn’t take all four men silently, but he knew there would be help out there. He also reminded himself that Alberto needed to be taken alive, and he would grab for Alberto first.
The weather had cleared slightly and the visibility was a little better. There was still a curtain of cloud and rain around the group as they passed outside the area of moving vehicles and men running everywhere; they reached halfway when Charlie saw several men coming towards them from the terminal in front of where Pedro was supposed to be. He could not recognize the men, but Alberto did and began giving orders.