“Pops, this is Sheriff Porter from Llano County.”
“Joe, what the hell is going on out there? I can’t reach anyone!” Pops said.
“We just received a call from the ranch’s breakfast crew that smoke is coming from the ranch, and the guard shack and entrance are leveled. They were pretty hysterical,” said Porter. “I am en route with all my crew. I should reach the ranch in less than twenty minutes. We are driving over a hundred to get there.”
“That’s not good,” Pops said, “not good at all. Damn. Please hurry, Sheriff. I’ve got two Apaches coming that way from Austin. Don’t shoot at ’em, Joe. The bad guys are beating a path to the Gulf and to the Mexican border by air.”
“Roger that, Pops.”
The next fifteen minutes created one of the most excruciating waits of Pops’ entire life. Finally the call came in.
“Pops, we’re here,” said Sheriff Porter. “I don’t have good news. They’ve got the governor. There are casualties. I’ve got dead troopers. Sir, all four of your Rangers here are dead. We’ve got hysterical staff members, and there’s blood everywhere, including in the governor’s bedroom. We have several injuries but nobody seems to be seriously wounded. We dispatched ambulances when we headed this way,” said the distraught sheriff.
“Sweet Jesus… is there anyone there from the governor’s staff that is coherent enough you can put on the line?” asked Pops.
“Pops, they just found Maj. Gen. Conroy. He is lying by his bed in one of the guesthouses with a single gunshot wound to the forehead.”
“Mother… I should have stayed there!”
The sheriff handed the phone to Lt. Gov. Foster’s chief of staff.
“Kendall here.”
“Rory, this is Younger. What the hell happened?”
“Pops, they hit us a few hours ago while we were sleeping. There was no warning. They came in helicopters, and they weren’t here to negotiate. Foster and his wife were wounded. They have them and Weaver.”
“Where’s Gov. Cooper, Rory?”
“Pops, I don’t know. Nobody that’s left here saw him during or after the raid, but his bedroom has blood all over it. They must have hustled him and Lyndsey into the first chopper without us seeing them. It was chaotic here. I’ve asked everyone and nobody saw them.”
“Did all the choppers leave at the same time?”
“No, one left with their wounded first. I know for a fact they had the Fosters on that chopper, but I can’t say the governor was on the same one.”
“Think hard, Kendall!” implored Pops.
“Two more choppers arrived as they rounded us all up. They took everything—phones, papers, laptops, briefcases, guns—everything. That’s why we couldn’t call anyone.”
“How long were they there after the first chopper lifted off? Think, Kendall! This is critical!”
“At least twenty minutes, Pops. I saw them all take off. They didn’t have any of our staff on those four choppers. I’m sure of that.”
“Rory, are you absolutely sure?”
“No doubt about it, Pops.”
“Okay, Rory, thanks. The sheriff and deputies are there to assist. We have two Apaches close to the ranch. Let everyone know they’re ours because everyone there understandably might have some trepidation seeing another couple of choppers coming over the ranch.”
“What are we going to do, Pops?”
“I’ve got to get back to the folks at Lackland. Godspeed, Kendall. If anyone finds anything out about the governor, call me immediately!”
When Pops cleared the line, his call went back to the line holding with Lackland’s commander
“Younger here. Okay, listen carefully. That chopper headed to the Gulf likely has the governor, lieutenant governor, their wives and Weaver. Do not engage that chopper. Do you understand?”
“Roger, Pops. They will only tail, but they have to stay far enough back to be free of the F-15 air-to-air missiles—at least seventy-five miles but probably more. Those birds are protecting that chopper. What’s the order for the pilot heading to the four southbound choppers? He’ll be on them very, very soon.”
A few uneasy seconds of silence followed.
“Sir, what are my instructions to the pilot?” the commander asked again.
“Blow them the hell out of the sky!” Pops said in his patented Texas drawl.
“Engage? Is that affirmative?”
“I said blow them out of the sky!” yelled Pops.
“Sir, I’m not sure if he will be able to intercept and engage them before they hit Mexican airspace, if that is their escape plan.”
“Colonel, I don’t care if that pilot has to follow those choppers to the end of hell. Take ’em out now! Do you understand?”
“Roger that, sir.”
Chapter 14
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
~ Cornelius Tacitus (55-117 AD)
Roman Senator
Twenty-nine year-old Texas Air National Guard pilot Lt. Cmdr. Danny Hendrix asked the colonel twice to repeat his orders. Hendrix was a reserve pilot who had gone through the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets, followed by U.S. Navy flight training, then decided not to re-up for active duty and had just moved into the reserves. The young man had never flown a single minute of actual combat.
Loaded with six “beyond visual” Sparrow air-to-air radar-guided missiles, the Texas F-16 Falcon was fully capable of taking the Blackhawks out from 75 miles away.
Radar on the Blackhawks picked up the streaking Texas F-16, causing the flight operation commander to order a maneuver for the choppers to spread out to make it more difficult for the F-16 to target. The Blackhawks changed to four different headings.
The Blackhawks were inviting targets for the F-16 Falcon air-to-air missiles. Primarily used for ground assault operations and rescue, Blackhawks aren’t equipped with long-range missiles. These four had two Stinger-mounted missile launchers onboard, but their range was in the hundreds of yards to approximately three miles—certainly no match for the F-16. Stingers are typically shoulder-mounted as they are small and have limited range, but these had been fitted to Blackhawks for Iraq.
Hendrix’s F-16 was nicknamed “Yellow Rose” and was painted with a sexy, long dark-haired Hispanic woman with a low-cut flowered hacienda dress hiked up on her thighs and cowboy boots. The female image clung to a long-stemmed yellow rose like it was a strip bar stage pole. The image was just below the canopy on both sides of the fuselage.
The F-16 locked onto the first two targets as the young lieutenant commander radioed Lackland once more.
“Locked on targets. Confirm orders,” radioed Hendrix nervously. For a split second, his mind wandered. After all his training, his first combat mission was over his Texas homeland.
“Engage, engage, engage,” radioed the reply from Lackland. The Blackhawks’ electronic systems, sensing the F-16 radar lock, began sounding alarms inside the cockpit. The openness of the interior of the choppers allowed anyone close enough to witness the panic that had suddenly engulfed the cockpit.
In a very few choreographed seconds, the radar-guided Sparrow missile was released. It dropped a few feet from the right wing of the Yellow Rose, fired its initial burner stage, then sped forward quickly at Mach 3 speed.
“Locked on target one. Releasing for target two.”
“Incoming missile!!! Incoming! Fire off chaff!” screamed the co-pilot of Santa Anna Three, referring to aluminum pieces fired from the rear to throw off radar-guided missiles.
“No change of missile’s course! Not working, sir!” yelled the co-pilot.
“More chaff! Chaff off!” responded the Blackhawk’s captain.
In their panic, the Blackhawk pilots shot off the chaff too soon to distract radar guidance of the missile. “Two miles and gaining!”
Six-and-a-half miles from the Rio Grande, the Sparrow slammed into Santa Anna Three traveling one thousand feet in the air. The explosion and fireball lit up the new
dawn sky for miles as hundreds of glowing pieces of the chopper cartwheeled to the ground like an Independence Day fireworks show. Twenty-seven seconds later, the second Blackhawk, Santa Anna Four, was demolished in the same manner.
“Target one down!!! Target two down!!” radioed Hendrix, too hyped on adrenaline to realize he had just instantly killed more than twenty people with two pushes of a button from his cockpit.
The pilots of the two other Blackhawks heard the radio communications just before the missiles hit.
“Santa Anna Command, two Blackhawks down. I repeat, Two Blackhawks down!” shouted the pilot from Santa Anna Two.
“Drop altitude to three hundred feet. Get over Mexican airspace, Commander!” yelled radio control from the carrier.
“Roger, command, we are now over Mexican airspace, proceeding to hen house.”
“Command, this is Santa Anna Five, confirming we are also over Mexican airspace and five miles from hen house.”
“Roger, Five, proceed as planned.”
Hendrix had no time to dwell on what just happened as his advanced training had taken over like muscle memory. He banked the Yellow Rose sharply to the east, pulling several Gs.
“Confirm orders, sir. Two more bogeys on radar but they just crossed Mexican airspace.”
“Lt. Cmdr. Hendrix, this is Lackland command. You are to follow those choppers and take them out. Do you understand?”
“Sir, confirm they are in Mexico. You want me to engage in Mexico? Please confirm.”
“That is a roger, son! Engage until you have eliminated. I repeat, engage until you have eliminated!” ordered the agitated commander.
Hendrix took a deep breath. “Engage until downed. Confirmed. Roger.”
The Mexican air force had been put on alert when permission was granted to the Johnson administration to allow the Blackhawks to operate freely in Mexican airspace for Operation Santa Anna. The ranking air force generals vehemently disagreed with the order from the Mexican El Presidente to allow the operation to take place. The generals talked among themselves in the twenty-four hours leading up to Operation Santa Anna, wondering what deal El Presidente had made with Johnson to allow such a breach of Mexican sovereignty. Surely, some special deal was made, and the generals’ distrust of El Presidente only added to the drama.
The F-16 was still streaking toward Mexico in hot pursuit of the two choppers that just cleared Texas airspace. Apparently, that got the Mexican air force sufficiently concerned that they immediately scrambled three F-5 jets. The control tower at Piedras Negras continued to attempt to radio the F-16 in English. “This is a warning. Do not enter Mexican sovereign airspace,” came the order in broken English.
“Sir, I’m getting radio communications from Mexico warning me not to enter their airspace. Please confirm orders.”
“Hendrix, Mexico obviously assisted in this raid. Texans have been killed. We just learned Maj. Gen. Conroy was one of them. Your orders stand. Engage.”
“Roger. Engage if necessary over Mexican airspace. Do I respond to the Mexican radio messages?”
“Hendrix, tell them whatever the hell you want—but down those damned choppers!” yelled the Lackland commander.
“Roger.”
Santa Anna Five had cleared the Rio Grande and was now only two minutes from the Mexican border town airport. The Yellow Rose had just crossed the Rio Grande and was gaining on the chopper quickly.
“One chopper is off radar. It must have landed. I will engage airborne chopper but it’s approaching populated area,” the pilot radioed.
“Confirm. Engage.”
“Fire. Missile away.”
The pilots onboard Santa Anna Five had mistakenly figured they were out of harm’s way upon entering Mexican airspace.
“Incoming! Crap, he’s still on us!”
That was the last radio transmission from the Blackhawk as the missile struck with the same effect as the previous missile but, with the chopper only a few hundred feet above the ground, there was not enough altitude for the grandiose fireworks display. The chopper burst into a fireball, dropping like a lead balloon on fire. It crashed on a Mexican federal highway just a mile short of the airport.
“Target down! Target down! One left, but he must be on the ground!”
“Go find him! He’s got to be at the airport! Take him out if you can minimize collateral damage!”
“There he is! He’s on the ground! Rotors are still turning!”
“Take him out, Hendrix!” came the orders.
With the chopper on the ground, Hendrix had to switch armament. He was now too close to the chopper for a Sparrow to be effective and he had no way to contain collateral damage to civilians.
“Switching to cannons,” he radioed.
The Yellow Rose banked hard to the right and dove toward the airport and the Blackhawk with its rotors slowing. Hendrix flipped his cannons to the fire position. As he dove in less than three hundred feet from the tarmac, the Vulcan six-barrel Gatling-style cannons lit up the Blackhawk with tracer rounds. In less than fifteen seconds, the chopper was strafed with over two hundred rounds and burst into flames. As Hendrix pulled up, the fuel tanks on the Blackhawk exploded, creating a fireball mushroom explosion shooting up into the new morning Mexican sky.
All of the federal agents managed to get out of the Blackhawk before the chopper was strafed.
“Rose, Del Rio indicating you’ve got three Mexican bogeys with a heading of three five zero traveling at Mach I. Divert now to heading of zero six zero, range thirty-one miles. Get out of Mexico, son,” radioed Lackland command urgently.
The Mexican F-5s that had been scrambled from Monterrey as a result of the Yellow Rose’s engagement of the Blackhawks, were older Northrup Falcon models no longer used by American military but, if he got within their outdated missiles’ range (twenty-two miles), they could be lethal. The Falcons carried four air-to-air missiles each, so the Rose would need to outrun them or launch its Sparrows from a greater range outside twenty-two miles.
Since the Rose only had three air-to-air missiles left, there was no room for error and best just to get out of Dodge. Surely, the F-5 Falcons wouldn’t pursue Hendrix into Texas air space, still considered U.S. air space by Washington, D.C. and Mexico.
Chapter 15
“Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to society, to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.”
~ Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Playwright & Author of “Atlas Shrugged”
Hendrix had all three Mexican bogeys now tracking on his radar.
“Lackland, clear of the Rio Grande,” he radioed to command.
“Del Rio indicates bogeys have not changed heading or speed and are ten miles from border. Keep your head up, Rose. Do not engage unless they cross into Texas airspace or unless they engage.”
“Roger, command.”
Hendrix watched radar intensely as the three F-5s never slowed, racing across the Texas-Mexico border. It’s one thing to be chasing down slower Blackhawks fleeing in the opposite direction. It’s quite another to potentially conduct air-to-air combat outnumbered three to one.
“U.S. pilot, this is the Mexican air force. We hereby command you to return to Mexican airspace, land your aircraft at Piedras Negras, and surrender for your incursion and crimes in Mexico!” ordered a Mexican pilot in barely intelligible English.
“U.S. pilot, do you copy? Do you copy?”
“This is Lt. Cmdr. Danny Hendrix of the Texas Air Guard. This ain’t no U.S. fighter.”
“Señor, if you do not change your heading and return immediately, you will be shot down.”
“Señor, I ain’t going nowhere, but you are! “
Hendrix pulled the stick back swiftly to the southwest as he b
anked hard, heading directly in the direction of the incoming Mexican F-5s, almost blacking out from the g-force generated.
“Very wise decision, Señor pilot. Adjust to heading cero dos cuatro (zero two four).”
“Like hell, amigo! You have exactly fifteen seconds to change your heading back to where you came from!” answered Hendrix.
“Mexican air force pilots, you are in Texas airspace. Return to Mexico now!” commanded the radio voice from Lackland.
“Hendrix—missiles launched!” shrieked Lackland.
“Roger, command. Permission to down these aircraft!”
“Permission granted, Rose! Del Rio indicates Mexican missiles at twenty-eight miles but gaining quickly. Take evasive actions now!”
The Rose was speeding toward the incoming missiles at Mach 1.6 while the three Mexican air-to-air missiles were closing the gap quickly at over Mach 2. Hendrix only had seconds, not minutes, to evade the missiles.
Lackland command had a decision to make and only seconds to make it. The other Texas F-16, tailing the Blackhawk to the Truman, was almost to the Gulf. Precious minutes would be lost waiting for that aircraft to aid Hendrix.
“Rose, we are turning Cochise to your heading immediately.”
“I’ve got ’em, Lackland! These Mexican birds are going to be Texas toast!”
Hendrix pulled the Rose into a steep climb and then began taking evasive actions that strained the structural limits of the multi-million dollar aircraft and the pilot’s consciousness from the strain of g-forces as the three incoming missiles closed quickly.
“Chaff away. Chaff away.”
At Lackland, command sat at the speaker phone set up on a folding table to communicate with both Del Rio and Laredo air traffic controls. It was obvious the commander was irritated at dealing with civilian controllers, but he was doing a good job keeping his cool so as not to excite the tower’s staff members who were now calling in details on a highly fluid air-to-air combat situation. Their assistance would be critical to keep Lt. Cmdr. Hendrix alive.
The first missile hit the chaff and exploded less than two hundred yards away, rocking the Rose but not causing any damage. The second missile was diverted by the explosion and lost radar contact with Hendrix’s F-16.
A State of Treason Page 13
