Last Stand: Turning the Tide (Book 4)

by William H. Weber

  Chapter 7

  The air-raid sirens began blaring again as John and Murphy helped Jerry fill the final weather balloon.

  “Reese,” John called out. “Find Billy Ray and tell him to get the Cessna ready.”

  “With those things flying around?”

  Almost in response, AA fire erupted from the roofs of the nearby buildings.

  “Just do it.”

  Hopping into the Humvee, Reese sped away, heading for the airplane hangar where Billy Ray had sheltered the Cessna.

  The balloons were attached to wire cables that were in turn connected to a stainless-steel ring jutting up from the ground. This was the same place from which Jerry had launched countless balloons in the past, although John was sure he’d never sent this kind of payload aloft.

  A giant explosion nearly knocked them off their feet as the Uranium Processing Facility went up in a massive fireball.

  “Once we get this warhead attached,” John told Murphy, “I suggest you make a beeline for that train.” Bristling with anti-aircraft defenses, the locomotive was the scientist’s best chance of escape.

  Murphy didn’t argue.

  “All right, let’s finish this.”

  The three men seated the warhead into the cradle and secured the cables to each of the shackles. The procedure was similar to the way a Chinook helicopter used a towing cable to move vehicles and heavy artillery.

  “How much longer on that balloon?” John shouted. Already in the distance was the sound of Chinese tanks engaging Porter’s forces on the complex’s perimeter.

  “Almost there,” Jerry replied.

  John knelt beside the warhead. “All right, let’s arm this thing.”

  Murphy nodded and went ahead. The sound of battle nearby was growing louder. Just then Reese appeared.

  “Billy Ray and the Cessna should be here any minute.”

  John tried to control his breathing. This was when they were at their most vulnerable.

  “I think it’s time you catch that train,” he told Murphy, whose red hair and pale skin were smeared with streaks of grease and dirt.

  Murphy held out a hand and John shook it. “Good luck.”

  John nodded. “Give General Dempsey our best.”

  The scientist got into the Humvee and sped away right as the final balloon was completed.

  “I hope you boys said your prayers this morning,” John told them, his hand on the release.

  Reese grinned while Jerry stood stiffly, sweating like a hog, his lips slightly parted as he glared at John’s index finger.

  “Here goes nothing.” John released the clasp. A clang rang out as it let loose and the balloons jerked into the air, lifting the warhead beneath it. All three men watched it rise, heading for the thick cloud cover. Once there, it would be safe from the enemy fighters circling around.

  The AA guns continued to spray streaks of fire into the sky. Beneath that came another sound, one they’d become all too familiar with. Billy Ray’s Cessna. The plane emerged from behind a row of buildings, pushing toward the runway. Reese was still watching the balloon rise when an artillery shell struck a nearby water tower. Three hundred yards away, the silhouettes of enemy troops appeared. Soon rounds were impacting all around them.

  “That’s our cue,” John said, gathering Jerry and Reese together and ushering them toward the Cessna. He grabbed Jerry’s arm to pull him forward right as the man’s legs gave out. More bullets dinged off the storage shed as they hit the ground. With chaos all around him, John struggled to assess whether Jerry had been hit. Then John found a small hole in his shirt and an exit wound in his back the size of a child’s fist. It had severed his spine, killing him instantly. Jerry’s eyes were still open and John closed them.

  Reese looked over.

  “He’s dead.” John scanned over to where the fire had come from and found at least a platoon-size group heading their way. “Buy us some time,” John told Reese.

  “That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said all day,” Reese quipped, swinging his Barrett around and flipping up the lens covers.

  He dropped to the ground, estimating the enemy’s range at around three hundred yards. With a few careful clicks he adjusted his scope and set to work.

  The first shot hit the target’s shoulder and took his arm off. He made another tweak, adjusting for wind speed, found his next target, steadied his breath and squeezed. The rifle cracked and jerked back as a Chinese soldier three hundred meters out was struck an inch below his throat.

  “Most folks think snipers go for headshots, but most of the time that isn’t necessary. Especially when you’re firing a .50 cal round. Personally, I aim for the sternum.” He fired twice more, killing both targets. “The real problem with a Barrett no one likes to talk about is that it kicks up a ton of dust. Risks giving away your position.” An enemy poked his head around the edge of the groundwater treatment facility. “I see you, little buddy,” Reese said, sending a round in his face. “That was a headshot, but see, I didn’t have a choice.”

  Billy Ray was close enough now and John tapped Reese. “Enough showboating,” John said sternly. “Time to move.”

  A few well-placed shots could often have a devastating effect on enemy morale, especially when they weren’t sure where the fire was coming from or couldn’t match its surgical accuracy.

  Reese clambered up and grabbed his rifle as both men sprinted for the Cessna. Thankfully, a handful of buildings blocked their escape, but if the Chinese began flanking them, they might be caught out in the open.

  Billy Ray had the Cessna pointed into the wind, away from the incoming Chinese troops. The pilot leaned over and opened the passenger door for John.

  “You like to cut it close, don’t you?”

  “Did you miss us?” John asked, climbing aboard.

  “I thought I was gonna have to hop on that train,” Billy Ray said, checking to make sure both men were in. “Where’s Jerry?”

  John shook his head.

  Billy Ray buried the throttle. “That’s a real shame,” he said. “Didn’t know him more than a couple hours, but already I could tell he was a good guy.” Buildings sped by as they picked up speed and lifted off, careful to keep low and away from the anti-aircraft fire. Below them, the AA crews on the buildings were leaving their positions and running for the train as it slowly began pulling away.

  The plane banked left, toward Oneida, toward home, and John glanced back just in time to see the balloon disappear into the clouds.

  “So, Colonel,” Reese said, that unlit cigarette back between his teeth. “What are the odds this crazy plan of yours is gonna work?”

  John gritted his teeth. Rising at a thousand feet per minute, the balloon would reach the optimum altitude in a little over two and a half hours. But it wasn’t a question of whether he wanted the plan to work. The fate of the country depended on it.

  Chapter 8

  Not long after John and the others fled from Oak Ridge, the Supreme Commander of Chinese and North Korean forces, General Wei Liang, was attending his mid-afternoon briefing on the war’s progress.

  Tall and broad-faced, General Liang struck an imposing figure. It didn’t matter that he preferred to keep his military hat on to hide his bald head, a condition far less common in Asia than it was in the Western world. Nor did it matter that the few scraps of hair he had left had long ago gone from a dusty grey to pearl white.

  His current field headquarters was a humble series of buildings at Berry Field Air National Guard Base near Nashville. General Liang had come from an equally humble background. The son of a poor carpenter, and one of four siblings, he’d started out on the bottom rung. Now, at the ripe old age of sixty-four, he’d spent a lifetime clawing his way through the PLA ranks, waging far more battles against his political rivals than actual military engagements.

  His ethnic Han background had helped open a few doors, no doubt. But being able to trace his roots back to the third-century-B.C. Han dynasty had only greased
the wheels for his entry into the Xinyang Infantry School. A major-general before he was fifty, he’d led the 20th Army to enforce martial law in Beijing to suppress the Tiananmen Square protests.

  His best years still lay ahead of him. When what remained of the United States was at last conquered, he would be installed as military governor, not unlike Dwight D. Eisenhower after Germany’s defeat following World War II.

  Although his reverence for Western military leaders seemed odd to some in the Communist Party, General Liang was quick to point out that the PLA itself was largely modeled after the United States’ armed forces. Perhaps the most striking area where they differed was the initiative and flexibility demonstrated by their American counterparts. Chinese soldiers were taught to follow orders without question. Western troops were given a greater range of freedom and input when it came to planning and implementing operations. The word ‘why’ was simply not in a Chinese or North Korean soldier’s vocabulary. As a result, American battlefield commanders from generals down to squad leaders were able to assess an ever-changing environment and make decisions on the fly.

  The recent stubborn resistance they’d encountered at a small town north of Knoxville called Oneida was a case in point. Units that had nearly been destroyed a few days prior had managed to reform and fend off multiple attacks. The EMP blast, launched secretly from a Chinese sub along the western US shoreline months before, might have crippled the enemy’s command and control infrastructure along with their ability to coordinate troops, but many of the pockets of resistance they’d encountered on their push eastward had proved harder to defeat than expected.

  Setbacks aside, China was closing in on its final objectives and that was exactly what Colonel Li Keqiang, head of military intelligence, was telling them in his briefing. The scale of their achievement still surprised General Liang. Like Japan in December of 1941, they’d managed to launch a sneak attack American military planners had been too arrogant to believe was even possible. But the EMP, spectacular as it was, had only been the first part of a well-coordinated attack. With the simultaneous destruction of US military satellites and missile silos as well as Washington itself, the Eastern Alliance had taken the bold step Japan had failed to more than seventy years before.

  To the Western nations, an invasion of Taiwan would have been seen as a likely precursor to conflict with America and that was precisely why they’d decided to save that for after the sleeping giant was put to bed once and for all.

  But Colonel Li Keqiang’s cheerful briefing didn’t address a far more serious concern—the current naval war being waged in the Pacific. Chinese codebreakers knew that when word of the EMP finally reached American fleets sailing around the world, some had sought shelter in allied ports in order to re-establish communication with home and determine the best strategic course of action. Others that were caught out in the open as they rushed back had been hit with nuclear weapons and destroyed.

  By some unfortunate stroke of luck, the US 3rd and 7th Fleets happened to be in Sydney and Melbourne harbors respectively at the time and escaped the worst of it. According to Chinese intelligence reports, US liaisons at Pine Gap had quickly organized high-level talks with the governments of Australia and New Zealand. Both countries had thrown in, offering support and combat vessels in a bid to take back the Pacific. Thankfully for the Eastern Alliance, Russian counter-submarine warfare had meant only three nuclear missiles had been fired from the sea, destroying St Petersburg, Nanjing and Shanghai. That the capitals of all three Eastern Alliance nations had been spared was a testament to Russia’s ability to intercept the US boomers in time. Thus the need to knock the United States out of the war as soon as possible. Once that was accomplished, the handful of her allies who’d rushed to her side would inevitably withdraw from the conflict.

  General Liang’s attention returned to his current surroundings. Generators around Berry Field provided power and lights for laptops and sensitive equipment brought over from China following the EMP strike. The screen of his laptop moved to the final PowerPoint slide as Colonel Li Keqiang ended his presentation with a quote.

  If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

  “That’s Sun Tzu,” Colonel Guo Fenghui whispered in Liang’s ear. He was a thin man with boundless energy who was the most competent of Liang’s four aides.

  “Keqiang sure likes to be poetic, doesn’t he?” The general’s mind was still on the struggle to maintain control of the Pacific. “We must begin increasing production in our slave labor camps. If our supply lines over the Pacific are severed, we could be in trouble. I’ve got a Cuban cigar in the desk drawer of my office I’m saving for the day we announce our victory and I intend to smoke it.”

  Guo Fenghui nodded thoughtfully. “I’m confident you will, sir. As for production, we can utilize captured equipment for now since production in the camps is only starting to come online―”

  Suddenly the briefing room went dark. But it wasn’t only the lights that had gone out. Every laptop in the room was also dead. Shortly after came the sound of a thunderous explosion. A breathless major charged into the conference room, flashlight in hand, telling them a transport plane coming in to land had just fallen from the sky. He kept mumbling about the blinding flash he’d seen on the horizon right as the electrical equipment had shorted.

  General Wei Liang didn’t need to hear any more to understand what was going on. The far-fetched American plan Phoenix had warned them about, the very one they’d tried to thwart by pushing up their attack on Oak Ridge, had somehow succeeded and the war raging in the Pacific was the least of his worries.

  Chapter 9

  A ragged line of American slave laborers trudged from the farmers’ fields that lay adjacent to the North Korean concentration camp near Jonesboro. Guards, their AKs fixed with bayonets and at the ready, kept a watchful eye as the column made its way back to the razor-wire fence line.

  Once they arrived, the metal gates would be opened, allowing them to enter. If anyone tried to run, they’d be shot dead, something Brandon had seen with his own eyes. A mother and her young daughter had tried to sprint for the drainage ditches that cut through each field like trenches on a First World War battlefield. In theory, once the slave labor force made its way back into the camp, the two would follow those ditches until they reached the St. Francis forest nearby.

  One of the North Korean guards, a pug-faced man wearing a dark green uniform and a flat-topped cap, had leveled his AK and fired without a single warning. Two shots had broken the late-afternoon silence. Neither the woman nor the little girl had made a sound as they tumbled to the ground.

  The pug-faced guard shouted something in Korean Brandon didn’t understand, but the proud smile on his face said enough. He was bragging to his guard friends about his marksmanship and the sight made Brandon long for an AK of his own so he could put one into that ugly face.

  That had happened days ago. Brandon couldn’t say how many, since there was no real way to keep track. Once they’d began the back-breaking work they’d been sent here to perform―in this case cultivating crops for the North Korean and Chinese forces―hours, days and weeks began to lose their meaning. But after the murder of that woman and her daughter, Brandon had seen a host of similar atrocities, many too vile to mention. Without a doubt, his dreams would be haunted for years to come. If, that was, he ever managed to leave this place.

  Those were the discordant thoughts flitting through Brandon’s head when a flash of blinding light in the sky caught his attention. Many of the prisoners and guards stopped and watched it for a moment, many shielding their eyes. It seemed to hang there forever before gradually fading. What could that have been? Had Knoxville been hit with a nuke?

  Another thing which tended to dull in this place was one’s cardinal sens
e. It wasn’t until he’d made himself a rudimentary sun compass that he’d realized home was in a completely different direction.

  The process had been simple enough. First one planted an eighteen-inch stick in the ground. Then every ten to fifteen minutes, smaller sticks would mark the top of the shadow from the larger one as the sun slowly traversed the sky. After recording three or four points, a distinct east-west line would begin to appear. With the knowledge that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, it then became simple to get a rough sense of each compass point. Since then, he’d understood that beyond the St. Francis forest lay his family and home.

  Next to Brandon as they stumbled back toward camp was an exhausted and even thinner-looking Gregory.

  Shortly after arriving, they’d been processed by a series of rough camp guards, stripped of their clothing and given sturdy brown trousers and a matching tunic. They slept in long prisoner barracks filled with bunk beds stacked four high and maybe a hundred deep. No one bothered to count. When they did eat, it was generally a watery broth with cabbage leaves and rice. They ate everything they were given, no matter how vile, as well as the few dwindling plants Brandon managed to forage here and there when the guards weren’t looking. With the labor they were doing on a daily basis, they weren’t getting nearly enough calories. A few among them had already died from starvation. Others’ skeletal forms struggled against the heavy fabric of the prison uniforms they wore. These, Brandon figured, must have been part of the first group sent to the camp when it was being built.

  Like a funeral procession, they made their way through the gate and into the central courtyard, where they lined up for a head count. The North Koreans wanted to make sure no one escaped this place and Brandon was left to wonder what they feared more, losing manpower or word of their atrocities getting out.