by T I WADE
Marie walked over to the group; the men rose and pulled up a seat for her. A fresh round of drinks was called for from an Air Force waiter; the cooks and bar personnel were on loan from Seymour Johnson for the occasion.
“Go on,” Carlos prompted Mo.
“I suggested to the general and admiral that I could get you Americans in there and we could airlift all the parts back here in return for allowing me to live here in the United States and have ownership of the ship I arrived with,” continued Mo.
“And General Patterson OK’d that?” asked Preston.
“It seems so,” Mo replied. “Preston, I would like to place the ship close by here and go fishing. Do you know of a place where I could be based and I could supply you with good fresh fish when you wanted?”
“Now, that sounds like a plan,” replied Preston, rubbing his hands together. “I’m sure we will need fish in the near future. Martie and I love fresh fish and I’ve always wanted to try my hand fishing off Cape Hatteras in the Gulf Stream. Ocracoke is the closest American town to the warm Gulf Stream on the whole East Coast. I believe the Gulf Stream is only 30 miles from land. I’ve just never had much time to do it.”
“As you know, and Lee will verify, we Chinese love fresh fish as much as anybody else in Asia. It is our staple diet,” continued Mo, with Lee nodding his agreement.
“It would certainly be a blessing to have fresh fish,” Lee added. “I do not like these military rations very much.” His wife nodded her agreement to that.
“The small village of Ocracoke on the Outer Banks would be a good place to locate,” suggested Preston. “It has an airfield just outside the town. Martie and I have flown there several times since we‘ve had our aircraft. The harbor is strong and secure, and I’m sure the town must be deserted. I don’t know about hurricanes in the summer, but no place on the southern East Coast is safe from July to November. Ocracoke will be a good place.”
“Then I will arrange with the general to visit the town,” answered Mo.
“Do you know what parts we could find at this storage depot?” Carlos asked Mo.
“A larger range of what was onboard the transporter when you captured it,” replied Mo. “More military parts as well as complete radar, sonar and even several dozen complete aircraft engines. I assumed when I saw them that they were parts for the fleet of Boeings to keep them flying. The warehouse is double the size of the largest warehouses I saw at your Air Force base yesterday.”
The drinks arrived and silence reigned as many sipped the just delivered libations. The conversation turned towards Beatrice and Marie. Beatrice told her story and then Marie followed with hers. Everyone got very interested when she told them about her trip into New York a few days earlier.
“You’ve been back to Manhattan, Marie?” asked Carlos.
“Yes. Once he and the admiral had finished grilling Mo, I asked General Patterson if I could go to New York to search for my husband. We lived between Central Park and Madison Avenue on East 73rd Street. He was reluctant at first, but we ladies usually get our way. The next day we flew in a helicopter into a military base south of Central Park, somewhere on the Avenue of Americas. The army had set up this whole building as a base camp and we landed on top on the building’s helipad. The heat was not operating in the building, but certain rooms had gas heaters to keep the dozens of men warm. The basement was frozen but they kept many vehicles down there, mostly street sweepers, jeeps and a few small bulldozers. This area of the City, including the area around Central Park, had been cleared and was under complete lockdown. We went up Avenue of Americas in a jeep with two other jeeps in front and behind as protection. I’ve never seen New York so empty. There was nothing moving. There were no cars for people to hide behind. Whole streets had been cleared of everything movable and even cleaned with the street sweepers. Nobody could move without being seen.”
“Where have they moved everything?” asked Carlos.
“I was told that cranes were brought in to load every vehicle onto military trucks and move them into massive open areas outside Manhattan. They moved everything: cars, taxi cabs, even trucks and buses,” replied Marie. “We got to 52nd Street and I saw Central Park. It still had a foot or more of snow on it. The sergeant driving the jeep told the general and me that it had been totally cleared and this was only recent snow. There was nobody to be seen. A picture of beauty Central Park was, as we drove by. We drove up Fifth Avenue to 73rd Street; there was still absolutely nobody to be seen. The streets were empty and it looked like a movie stage, or even a make-believe ghost town. The sergeant said that wild dogs still roamed the park at night and several soldiers had been attacked recently. They are dealing with the problem and the dog number problem is lessening. We finally got to my street. I’ve never seen my street so clean and neatly empty in all the years we have lived there. Our apartment is on an upper floor and we had to wait an hour for somebody to find the keys for the building.
“Finally another jeep arrived with two military policemen who unlocked the front door to the building. Inside the smell was bad; stale air mixed with the stench of death. I’m sure that the smell would have been worse if the weather was warmer; it was a few degrees above freezing. The entrance was sort of clean and it looked like it was shut down for Christmas or something. We climbed the stairs to my floor. In the stairwell it stank of urine, dirty bodies and the smell of death. The temperature was in the forties, but the stairwell felt as if it were freezing. We finally got to our apartment and it took the military policeman several minutes to find the keys to our door. He opened it and General Patterson went in first to make sure it was safe. The stink was disgusting. It was horrible; inside, the apartment had been ransacked and broken. I’m sure many people had tracked through as the carpets were literally black from hundreds of dirty feet. I could hardly recognize the place we have lived for over a decade. The entire 5,000 square feet of our apartment was filthy and not one piece of our beautiful furniture was in one piece. I went to our main bedroom and found blackened, bloody sheets and what looked like old blood everywhere. It was disgusting, the smell awful. Nobody was there, nor was anything of value left, or any information to search for my husband.”
“Have you checked the computer registers of all the identified people?” asked Preston.
“I’ll get to that,” replied Marie. “I checked our daughters’ rooms and it was the same. A window had been broken and the hole was letting in cold air. There was one place left to search, in my husband’s study. Here the destruction was really bad; it was as if a really bad fight had happened. On the rear wall we had a safe that was virtually impossible to see or find, and it is not electronically operated, it works by hand pressure only. It was made by a company in Monaco, France and is the most expensive safe in the world. It is operated with a hair pin. I found the very small hole in the wall where we open the safe and I pressed a hair pin into the hole. The general was amazed to see a safe door open in the smooth wall. Inside was a letter from my husband stating that on January the seventh, he had run out of food and that he needed to go out into the streets with screaming and dying people everywhere and find something to eat. He couldn’t wait any longer and said he would try to get out to the Hamptons where we had friends and wait for me. Also inside the safe were most of our valuables—money, property papers and several pieces of my jewelry. I took all those and wrote on the back of the note that I was in Washington, at Andrews Air Force Base, and he should look for me there, and returned the note to the empty safe. It was a horrible experience and I never want to see Manhattan again, or New York for that matter!”
Chapter 19
Calderón and Mexico – April
For a week Manuel and Alberto waited for word from anybody that their army of nearly 100,000 men was heading north. Unfortunately, with their backpack radios they could only get a maximum of fifty to sixty miles of range.
After the first week of April he sent Alberto and three jeeps south to find his men, or at least
get into contact with any of the Venezuelan aircraft promised by his Venezuelan partner, Victor, to back them up as far as the southern Mexican border.
Twice Manuel had sent scouts across the border into Mexico only to find thousands of soldiers waiting several miles inland and all roads ambushed and waiting for their return. Manuel didn’t know how long the Mexican soldiers would stay there before giving up on the banditos returning, but now it was nothing more than a waiting game for both sides.
There were several Guatemalan soldiers manning the border crossing but they had disappeared as soon as the rush southwards had arrived. Some had approached and asked to join up, and in the last week his troops had grown by a dozen or two.
One of the men told him about a local army garrison thirty miles towards the coast and Manuel sent 500 men to check it out and reinforce themselves with arms and ammunition.
They had returned without a fight. The Guatemalan soldiers there numbered less than a hundred and Manuel’s men strong-armed the Guatemalans to open their storage depot and literally emptied it of everything in there. The several extra troop carriers returned, their frames creaking under the weight of the supplies and their heavy fuel tankers that had been filled. Several commandeered Guatemalan troop carriers also arrived, filled to capacity, as well as a couple of jeeps and two old armored cars, proudly presented to Manuel and Alberto by their new drivers.
Manuel realized that he was tempting fate and he could be attacked from both sides of the border, but he hoped his army would arrive soon. Then he would be top dog in the area.
Alberto left and Manuel stayed where he was. There were several small villages nearby to entertain his men and they needed a little fun and drinking. Manuel didn’t really care what his men did to the locals. Most of his commanders were reasonable men and would control their ranks so that there wasn’t a local uprising against them.
His was a guerilla war, a war where winners didn’t take any prisoners and both sides would execute captives without feeling or remorse. It was the way of the jungle, and he was equally prepared to win battles or lose them, probably losing his life if he was ever caught; but being caught would be the last alternative.
It took another week before an aircraft appeared a Venezuelan aircraft, dropped supplies by parachute and radioed that his army was now three days away and his brothers were together.
Manuel sent another scouting patrol into Mexico to see if the army was still there. His men returned two days later reporting that yes, the army was still there.
The news wasn’t good, but neither was it too bad. His men had scouted from the hills around the large camp. They counted approximately 15,000 men, a dozen tanks and two dozen armored vehicles. There were enough vehicles for only two thirds of the army and, from tire tracks, it looked like several dozen vehicles had already left the camp and headed north.
A day later his men finally arrived, numbering 87,000. They had thousands of vehicles of numerous sorts, even Chinese troop carriers and personnel vehicles, dozens of them.
Manuel was happy to see his other brother, Pedro, and immediately ordered the newcomers to find space and camp. There was little danger with so many men.
Pedro was tired; he had travelled fourteen hours a day since leaving the Panama Canal. They had ransacked any fuel stations on the way, been attacked by soldiers in Honduras and Guatemala and hadn’t even stopped while battles raged. The attacks had cost him many men, but had given him arms, fuel and fresh vehicles to continue north. At times his convoy had stretched out over two hundred miles and his army had crept forward like a centipede.
He and his men were allowed to camp and sleep for two days. A meeting between the brothers was held all day on the following day.
“It was a total surprise to find the Chinese army at the canal,” he explained to Manuel and Alberto, as well as a dozen of their commanders. “They must have been given orders to defend the stupid river at all costs, because they fought like mad dogs, never giving up an inch of ground. We had better fighting tactics than they had, but they held a defensive position and sometimes it took days to kill them for these unimportant positions. They were well equipped with the latest weapons, and we captured many mortars, artillery pieces, heat-seeking ground missiles and ground-to-air missiles. We have a truck-load of missiles. Manuel, I think we must have as modern weapons as any army in America. Unfortunately, their GPS guided missiles for some reason don’t work and we left them, dozens of them.”
“How did you beat them and how many men did they have?” asked Manuel.
“We realized that if we didn’t destroy the whole army, they might continue to attack us as we continued north. It seemed that their main task was to control the river, so I placed 50,000 men on each side of the river on the western end and attacked the entire length until we reached the eastern end on the coast. It took us three weeks to cover about 30 miles. At one point we were down to one mile a day. I believe we killed around 12,000 Chinese, but nobody really counted. We just kept attacking and killing. I knew you would want us to head north as fast as we could, so as soon as we reached the eastern shore, we immediately counted our men, fueled up our vehicles and headed north. We gathered weapons and trucks as we attacked each of their command centers or camps. I gave exact orders to try and not fire on the vehicles as they are very new and very modern.”
“How many men did you lose?” asked Alberto.
“They were dug in and we were the attackers,” continued Pedro. “We got into a system but during the first few days we lost over 3,000 men. We had no time to bury them as the fighting never seemed to stop. Once we got into a rhythm of attacking from their flanks first, followed by a direct attack, our numbers of dead decreased significantly. I believe that we lost nearly 21,000 men in those three weeks, but we have picked up over 5,000 new soldiers on our march north. We even have several women who are fighting alongside their husbands and have their older children armed with weapons.
So what is your troop count, Pedro?” asked Manuel.
“Around 87,000 out of the 102,000 I started with,” replied Pedro blankly.
“An unfortunate occurrence,” responded Manuel. “There was no way we knew the Chinese army had taken control of the canal. Also they might get mad about the loss of their men, but who would they blame? They don’t know that we are the Calderón Cartel and I doubt they would follow us so far north. We had better look out for more soldiers when we return. We are going to have to recruit hard to get our numbers back to over 100,000; a number I think will give us a chance in America. When we get there, I’m hoping to double our numbers by recruiting the gangsters and families we do business with, but we cannot contact them until we reach the Rio Grande. Come my brothers, let us spend a day counting our weapons, ammunition and then go and destroy the Mexican army once and for all.”
Three days later, the Mexican army was attacked from three sides at dawn. Manuel expected that the Mexican Air Force would provide air support and he wanted to do as much damage as possible before any attack aircraft appeared. The first attack lasted two hours before the Mexican army, having heavy losses, began to retreat northward along same roads Manuel and Alberto had retreated south on only a couple of weeks earlier.
As the sun rose over the horizon the Calderón brothers attacked with everything they had to throw at the encamped army. Over 200 mortars, 150 Chinese missile launchers and 100 other forms of rocketry rained down on the waking troops. Within the first 30 minutes over three thousand bombs and rockets pockmarked the ten hilly acres where the Mexican soldiers were encamped.
Then there was a pause as the invading troops were organized to charge the enemy camp’s southern border. Twenty thousand men rushed in to the Mexican camp only a couple of hundred yards away which Manuel, Alberto and Pedro learned was still well dug in for an attack.
Several dozen dug-in machine gun posts erupted with rapid fire and several tanks and dozens of armored vehicles ensured that the invading forces got no further than the oute
r perimeter set with razor wire.
A second attack of 10,000 men from Pedro’s forces then charged in from the western side of the camp while the first attackers retreated back to the safety of the dunes, and mortars began pounding the machine gun positions.
A third attack went in from the eastern side twenty minutes later, as the second attack was repelled by the Mexicans with heavy losses on both sides. Then, another attack was ordered from the south where the Mexican machine guns had taken a beating. This time both attack forces reached further into the camp, but were again beaten back by an inner-group of machine gun nests.
“The commander of this army was well disciplined in the art of war,” stated Manuel to Alberto, seeing everything from a camouflaged position 800 yards behind their forward troops.
“We still have enough mortar bombs for another attack,” replied Alberto looking at their retreating forces through high-powered Chinese binoculars.
“The inner-machine gun posts are heavily fortified,” replied Manuel. “Our mortars are not doing much damage. I think an attack from all three sides and a mortar barrage onto the machine gun nests will help our men get through. They have also backed up their armor to the northern area and I think will fire on us if we don’t attack again soon. Alberto, tell the mortar teams to keep their bombs away from any ammo dumps they can see. Tell them not to aim for them, or any vehicles, we will need to resupply once this battle is over.”
