Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival

by T I WADE

  For two hours he told them what they should know. That America, Europe and the rest of the world was in bad trouble. He explained to them why their cell phones, Internet, laptop computers and many electric gadgets in the house weren’t working. The radio and televisions in each bedroom and the lounge were dead. A couple of the kitchen units didn’t work, but the oven was gas, and the old fridges and freezer were working.

  He found a very good and expensive bottle of whiskey in the liquor cabinet half full and had poured himself and the two older ladies a good amount as they sat and listened to him.

  He told them about how nothing worked anymore around the world, that three nuclear explosions in China had blasted Taiwan, Beijing and Hong Kong off the face of the earth, that America was slowly dying, as was Europe and the rest of the first world countries. He told them that he had communications with others in the United States and he was thinking about traveling there. How, he still didn’t know but even on this little island they were on, life was about to get uncomfortable as food stocks emptied and gasoline dried up to run the electricity systems and the fishing boats.

  Madame de Bonnet’s face went white when he explained that life in Paris and New York wasn’t there anymore. “How do you mean life just doesn’t exist in Paris and New York?” she asked.

  “Imagine the outside temperatures in both the cities Madame,” he explained carefully. Sub-zero temperatures with possible snow on the ground, no?” They all nodded. “In both cities where millions of people live in accommodations with no heat, no electricity, no food other than what they had stored on New Year’s Eve, no water reaching the high apartments, or even the houses, no sanitary sewers working. Do I need to go on?”

  “Surely the police and fire brigades are helping the people?” asked one of the young twins, her face shocked.

  “There is absolutely nothing working,” Mo replied trying to make the ladies understand. “There are no vehicles running and that includes emergency vehicles, unless they are over thirty years old, like the old Japanese minivan we arrived here with. In America and France, the police, firemen and doctors and nurses are in the same predicament as the rest of the people.” Both older ladies took a large swig of their whiskeys at the same time.

  “That’s why that horrible German lady arrived in that old taxi four days ago,” suggested Beatrice. “She’s the type that wouldn’t be seen dead in anything but her fancy new Mercedes.”

  “So, if what you say is true, then I have a good chance that my husband is dead?” Madame De Bonnet asked, looking Mo in the eyes. He nodded silently. She put her head down and her daughters began crying. Mo left the room and went to sit and enjoy the hot sun by the pool, letting the truth sink in. They needed time to themselves and they would come out when ready. He fell asleep in the sun, hearing small waves lapping at the beach below him.

  The beach was in a protected small bay which kept any larger swells out. He awoke to the sun going down over the mainland and there wasn’t a boat to be seen on the calm waters. The second lady, Beatrice was sitting on the sun loungers a few feet away and looking at the sunset, a glass of wine in her hand.

  “How do you know all of this, Mr. Wang?” she asked, looking out at the sinking sun, in her thick French accent.

  “I was part of it, Madame,” he replied. “There was going to be an attack on the United States by the company I used to work for in China. I did not want any part of it and left the attack convoy as it passed through the Panama Canal on its way to New York.”

  “One Chinese company has caused all this and was going to attack the United States?” she asked, not really believing what he was saying.

  “A powerful company, Zedong Electronics, spent thirty years planning this attack, Madame. They crippled the entire world when they terminated all the billions of electronic parts and devices they made. They produced all the iPhones and iPads for Apple, for example. They produced all the parts for the world’s cell phones, computers, car engine-management systems and all the modern parts for the world’s armies. They produced parts for the German lady’s Mercedes and for every electronic machine that doesn’t work in this house and on this island. They didn’t produce the electronic parts for the machines that do still work. It’s as simple as that.”

  “But I don’t have an iPhone, I have a Blackberry and it doesn’t work,” she said.

  “Every modern cell phone in the world doesn’t work anymore, every cell phone in the world is totally useless,” he replied.

  “Then how can you know about the world if your cell phone doesn’t work either, Mr. Wang?” she asked, getting angry.

  “Because I have three of only 500 satellite phones that still do work, Madame. Zedong Electronics needed communications to attack the world and these phones are the only communications left on the entire planet. I believe that your French president, if he is still alive, will have one soon. I found out that the attack on America was beaten off by the American forces, the attackers were killed and all these phones are now being distributed to the world’s leaders. I have direct communications to people in America and even the American President. I just don’t know his number.”

  “Ridiculous!” she stammered. “You are saying that the whole world has lost civilization?”

  “Yes, Madame, that is what I’m saying and soon the bad people everywhere will need to survive and they will take the law into their own hands. That was the original plan formed by my superiors. This little island is probably one of the safer places right now. That’s why I came here, to visit my niece and find a place to hide.” She put her head in her hands and began weeping. Mo looked towards the last remnants of the setting sun and let her be.

  Dinner was a silent affair that night; the five girls were visibly upset and ignored the messenger of bad news.

  They had lived the easy, carefree lives of people with money and once their security blanket against everything bad in life had been pulled away, their reactions were normal. Mo Wang, apart from being one of the top engineers in China in his day, was also one who had studied psychology all his younger life, had a degree in it and understood human behavior enough to be noticed by the Supreme Commander. That was why he had been pulled out of the engineering laboratories and into sourcing and training recruits back at the beginning of Zedong Electronics in the early 1980s.

  The table ate slowly and no wine was offered with the meal. The girls kept their eyes down, absorbed in their own thoughts.

  The next day was the same, except Madame De Bonnet asked Mo to call her by her first name, Marie. He asked her to call him by his first name as well, and asked how he could get to town. He wanted to check out supplies in the stores for the rest of the stay. She asked if he could drive and he said he was not a good driver, never owned a car in China and used public transport all his life. He didn’t tell her that he had been chauffeured wherever he needed to go for the last two decades.

  Beatrice De Loy also suggested that the visitor call her by her first name. It looked like they would be house mates for a few weeks to come; he was paying their way and friendliness was not an expensive commodity.

  “Mo, I could drive you home from town,” Beatrice suggested. “There are cars to rent in town; we had one for a few weeks and they have our information, but would not take our credit cards anymore. They couldn’t get them approved. The antiquated telephone system works and we could get Pedro, the minicab driver to pick us up.” Mo agreed and thirty minutes later the old blue minivan honked at the large iron front gates. Mo, Beatrice and her daughter Virginie walked out to meet Pedro the driver and they were whisked into town.

  They were silent on the drive in, even the driver was silent. The daughter had not yet said a word to Mo and kept her head down, or looked outside the cab. He realized that she didn’t know what to do or say to the new man who had just arrived out of nowhere and now lived in the same house.

  The stores had few shoppers, mostly locals. The fish market was the busiest place in town. Here boats
were coming in, mostly old fishing boats with the day’s catch.

  Mo asked Pedro to park, told him that he was hired for the day and to help them carry their purchases. Fish had always been Mo’s favorite.

  There were small and large fish, fresh off the boats. He recognized many, only knowing their names in Chinese and he decided that a rental car wasn’t needed if Pedro and his minivan were always available.

  He saw a couple of nice-sized fish: one looked like a small tuna of about fifteen to twenty pounds. He asked Pedro which he thought was the best fish to eat and the taxi driver agreed that the small tuna he was looking at as well as a King Fish next to the tuna—a game fish—were both excellent to eat. Beatrice stated that they had a grill on the porch by the pool and each of the fish would make half a dozen meals. He asked for both of them to be bagged, and purchased a large slab of meat from a far larger tuna.

  “There is a second, smaller working freezer in the laundry room,” she stated to Mo. “It still works, but is currently empty. We could use that to store more fish.”

  The slab he asked to be cut into steaks and it weighed in at forty pounds by the time it was cut and bagged. There was a fresh octopus also on the market table. It was quite large and steamed octopus was Mo’s favorite meal. He purchased the octopus and again asked it to be cut up by the fisherman into edible portions. The bill came to close to $500 and Mo received a few local notes in change and the four of them, plus the extremely happy fisherman, carried the more than a dozen large shopping bags to the rear door of the minivan.

  Next stop was the produce market. Here they bought a large variety of vegetables and salads. The bill was far less and Pedro, the driver paid for it in local currency since Mo needed to exchange money. The third stop was a bank which was open; here Mo exchanged a hundred dollar bill into local currency, paid the driver what he was owed and the final stop was the only supermarket in town.

  The shelves were mostly empty. There were several large twenty pound bags of rice, which Mo packed into the first shopping trolley. He then packed in the several cuts of beef and pork that remained, several commercial tins of beans, tomatoes and anything else which looked edible and paid for the four trolleys at checkout. All the beer and wine was gone and Pedro said that there was another smaller store along the shore road which still might have stocks on their shelves.

  It took an hour to get back to the villa, unpack everything, and then Mo and Pedro by themselves headed out to check on all the stores on the island. Pedro told him that the whole coast road was about 70 miles long and there were three or four stops where they could find a store.

  “Are there any guns to purchase on the island?’ Mo asked the driver going down the dip past the Villa and into new territory.

  “No guns legal on island,” Pedro replied in his broken English. “Farmers have shotguns sometimes for protection of farm animals, but I heard that the big boat has guns on it.”

  Mo asked which boat he was talking about and found out that it was the yacht moored at the villa. It sounded like the villa owner was in a business authorities might want to question, pretty normal in China. He asked if there was a shotgun he could buy and Pedro took him to a farm several miles down the road. They drove off the tarred road on a dirt strip for a mile and came to an old farmhouse with several children on the porch looking at them.

  “My father’s house, our family house,” Pedro told Mo. An introduction was made and Pedro told the older man who came out to meet them, in Spanish, what Mo wanted. He was guided back into the house to a back office and was shown three pretty new shotguns and an old American hand gun, a .45 caliber World War II piece in perfect condition.

  “Like you, Senor Mo, we need money to buy fish, so my father is happy to sell a shotgun to you. He has three boxes of shotgun ammunition and you can have it all for two hundred dollars.”

  “How much is the pistol?” Mo asked. The older man did not seem to want to be relieved of his pride and joy, but relented and brought out a dozen boxes of .45 caliber Remington ammo, years old and looked Mo straight in the face. He stated something in Spanish to his son and his son translated $500 to Mo including everything that was on the old desk. Mo paid the man six one-hundred-dollar bills understanding that the poor man, several years older than he, was losing something of value to him. He had also realized that this amount of money would mean a lot more to this family than to him.

  The old man bowed and thanked Mo Wang for his generosity and Pedro and Mo gathered up the two weapons, put the ammo in three plastic bags and left the villa.

  For three hours they searched for more provisions, Mo thinking the whole afternoon about the yacht at the villa’s pier. Slowly a plan was coming to him.

  They filled the minivan mostly in West End, the second largest town on the island, as well as several other out of the way locations, with everything they could find which would have a decent shelf life, Mo paid out another thousand dollars and the overloaded minivan slowly made its way back to the villa. This time all five girls helped unload the provisions and Mo kept the weapons out of sight.

  Once they were finished he paid Pedro with the last hundred-dollar bill in his wallet, showed him the empty wallet and explained to the happy driver that his money was now spent, that he wasn’t worth robbing in the future, and closed the gates behind the departing vehicle. He never trusted anybody who knew he had money.

  Chapter 8

  Yuma

  March brought slightly warmer weather for the first half of the month. The day after the two-day meeting at Preston Airfield, Oliver and Puppy made their usual rounds of the runway before dawn. Hundreds of new smells from many humans they didn’t know penetrated the areas where aircraft had stood the day before. The entire airfield was empty of aircraft, except for Sally’s little two-seat jet with its unusual camouflage design, looking slightly lonely. All the other visitors including Carlos had headed off, mostly north to Andrews and McGuire to resume their jobs.

  The hangar was closed down tight to keep out the cold wind from the north which was keeping temperatures to a degree or two over freezing. To the dogs it didn’t matter as they sniffed everything until the area was checked and analyzed.

  Preston, his head still a little thick from two nights of partying, worked himself awake and headed to the kitchen to make coffee.

  Over breakfast an hour later, Martie and Preston, joined by Maggie and Sally from the hangar, discussed what they wanted to do. Will and the Smart kids had already hitched a ride home with the Edwards Base Commander in a C-130 loaded with three new John Deere lawn tractors for the kids to turn into generators, and a Colombian baking oven for bakery needs on the base.

  “Since our trusty Sergeant Perry has returned for the umpteenth time and is scheduled to stay for at least another week, Martie, I think we should join Sally and Maggie and fly into Yuma early tomorrow and see some different countryside for a change. What do you think?” asked Preston.

  “Yippee!” responded Martie. “Then we can fly north and visit my father and Grandpa at the wine farm.

  “Where are you planning to refuel?” Preston asked Sally.

  “First, McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas,” answered Sally factually. “I can just make it if my tanks are full and if the extra drop tanks are also completely full, and if Maggie and I don’t breathe too hard, and if we have no head wind,” she somewhat sarcastically replied. “I also want the Super Tweet serviced and totally checked over from tip to tail by U.S. Air Force personnel before I feel completely safe to fly this Colombian Air Force jet any further; that will take about seven hours. Then we can head over to Hill Air Force Base, which is the same distance. We could stay the night with Carlos in Salt Lake City and then head straight down into Yuma the next morning, the shortest stretch. What about you, Little Beth? Are you able to fly on these longer flights?” asked Sally.

  “It’s too far for me. I’m happy to stay with Sergeant Perry, Oliver and Puppy,” Little Beth explained seriously. “Martie an
d I have already spoken about long flights, and Uncle Carlos or Uncle Buck can take me in their bigger planes when they go. Uncle Buck’s big plane has a toilet I can use.”

  “Little Beth is just as happy here and her best friend is Sergeant Perry,” added Martie. “They spend a lot of time together. The poor man had a daughter Beth’s age, until she and her mother died in a car crash in 2009.”

  “He says that I’m as nice as his real daughter was, and he misses her a lot,” Little Beth added seriously. “He needs me and Puppy to look after him.”

  Early the next morning, March 7th, as the two dogs returned and declared the airfield safe, the hangar door rolled open. Outside, Sally and Maggie pre-inspected their A-37 Super Tweet for flight. Maggie was quickly learning the hundreds of checks required to get a jet airborne, far more than a propeller aircraft. Also she would be flying most of the way in the right-side seat. This long trip would certainly add to her instruction time and who better than one of her best friends to be instructor? Martie was totally jealous.

  The plan was to adopt a low cruise speed across the country of 300 knots, or about 325 miles an hour, to conserve fuel, which would be a medium to high cruise speed for the Mustangs. The Mustangs, also equipped with permanent drop fuel tanks under the wings, had a third further reach than the jet, and could easily make McConnell Air Force Base and then Hill in Salt Lake City. Each leg would take four hours and Sally would have about a twenty-minute fuel reserve in her tanks.

  It was windier than the previous days. Their tanks filled to capacity, the two Mustangs warmed up their engines, headed to the northern end of the airfield and took off to the south, directly over a grey and windswept Jordan Lake, white caps breaking the surface of the water below them.