by T I WADE
There were many words of thanks and best wishes as everybody rose and the departing president got ready to leave.
Twenty minutes later, Preston watched as the AC-130 left the airfield, with Sally flying, a full crew, and Buck aboard as a passenger to fly the president back to the White House, if need be, from the air base. The ambassador, Manuel, and the three bodyguards were also aboard, since the ambassador wanted to get back to his staff at the embassy to sort out their safe passage south for the remainder of the winter. Preston felt that the president actually wanted to stay and be part of the action here, and he was pretty sure that the Commander-in Chief would be back pretty quickly. The president was that kind of a leader.
Preston turned off the runway lights and switched his focus to preparing for the incoming attack.
Chapter 5
The First Attack
As detailed in all military textbooks, just before dawn is the best time of day to attack an enemy camp. In the book “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu describes how attacking at that hour has an immediate benefit for the attackers. The writing also states that surprise is a key element and, unfortunately, you cannot tell if surprise has been achieved until you actually attack the enemy camp.
Surprise was not to be on this cold morning in North Carolina. The convoy of Chinese men from New York, with no lights and travelling under blackout conditions, passed the outer point of the Air Force troops at 5:30 am. They had driven slowly and quietly, undetected by anybody, and with the airfield’s coordinates on their maps, they followed US 64 west.
The Air Force troops on guard were cold and frustrated with the weather, and were ready for anything to happen. Better to be in a hot fight than lying around under cold, damp plastic bivouacs and trying to get some sleep while others were on guard.
“Highway Vanguard to base, we have incoming,” whispered the dozens of radios around the airstrip, and everyone moved, stretched, and prepared themselves for their part in the drama.
“Ten vehicles, one man standing up through the sun roof with shoulder unit in each of first four vehicles, no gas masks, around 40 enemy, looks like four to a vehicle, traveling west at about 10 miles an hour. ETA to the turn-off, three minutes. We are about to move towards the feeder road. Have fun. Out.”
“Forest checkpoint, here. Ten vehicles about to turn into the farm road, but have stopped,” whispered the guard post on the other side of the road in the trees to the private road entrance off the feeder road, several minutes later. “They are discussing something. It sounds foreign from here. They are grouped together and I think planning their next move. One has a flashlight and they have a map out on a hood. I can see automatic weapons, and shoulder rocket launchers in each vehicle. It looks like one man in each vehicle has a rocket launcher, modern RPGs by their silhouettes, and all the other men seem to be armed with AK-47s. They have 30 round ‘banana’ magazines strapped back-to-back. They are ready to fight. Boy, these night goggles are good! Now they are pointing a flashlight down the dirt road and they have a second flashlight directly lighting up our fancy new private airport sign. The one who looks like the commander just got into the front vehicle and is standing through the sunroof. He has the shoulder rocket launcher ready. I confirm now that they all look Chinese, or Asian at least. A second car is moving into position next to the first one. It looks like they are planning to come down the farm road two-by-two. Now, eight vehicles have moved into position two abreast and the last two are positioning themselves to block off the road in front of us. They have turned around 180 degrees and are facing us. Over.”
There was silence as everyone waited. The winter night was pretty dark at 5:30 am in the Carolinas. “They are rolling slowly, eight vehicles in pairs coming your way, and about to turn the corner. You should have them visual in a second. First four vehicles have shoulder units at the ready and are standing out of the sun roofs. They have just put the lights on the two forward vehicles. They are now out of sight and, we are ready to terminate the last two vehicles once you guys get things started. Out.”
“Roger, Forest Checkpoint. We have the visual. You can go ahead once we have daylight from the flares. Out,” stated Sergeant Perry in charge of the ambush. Preston recognized his voice.
Preston had climbed up the stairs of his fire tower to join the two machine guns up there, and he was handed bits of cotton wool and showed via hand movements how to plug his ears. He was handed an M4 and directed to stand back in the corner where he could see everything. Preston also had a radio on his back. He had taken the one from the house since everybody had been moved into the hangar.
He saw faint lights approaching on the road and knew they would come into view in about 100 feet. “Snipers look for and bead on four men standing up through the roof of the first four cabs,” whispered Sergeant Perry. “You will have two seconds from my command to take out the four men holding the shoulder units before the flares ruin your night vision. I will give commands for snipers to fire and then for flares. Listen to my commands, men, we need prompt action here. All men behind forward barricade with me crawl to the edges to get out of a potential blast, slow and silent now. Do you have sights on the four men, snipers?”
“We have sights on three, the fourth is down very low and we can’t get a good shot. The vehicle in front of his is in the way. Over.”
“Those on left side of barricade and those on left side of tower, I want both of you to aim into the second vehicles and terminate them once the flares light up. We have ten seconds until they see our barricade. Get ready,” whispered the sergeant into his radio, and time began to slow down as the truck lights closed in on the barricade in the dark.
Preston watched as the black shapes of the vehicles came into view a couple of hundred feet away.
Very slowly, the eight vehicles came into the ambush zone, and the lights suddenly flickered onto high beam as their dimmed lights lit up the wooden tables facing the attackers. In the glow of the headlamps, the barricade really did look like a make-shift civilian barricade.
Orders barked out from the lead truck as engines revved and the first two trucks began to accelerate to rush the tables with their lights now on high beam. Preston could see the men’s silhouettes standing waist high out of the cabs, and both men raised their rocket launchers to fire at the tables. They were 40 feet from the barricade with all eight vehicles in view when the radios came alive.
“Snipers, fire!” ordered the Sergeant. “Flares, fire! Rear team fire at the last two vehicles facing you, now!” were his second and third orders as the snipers opened fire, hitting the men as the two front targets fired their rockets. One rocket went straight into the middle of the tables disintegrating the middle table, blowing the remains several feet into the air, and opening a hole in the three rows of sandbags, which flew in all directions. The second rocket angled off into the air over the barricade, the man was hit by the sniper fire a split second before he pulled the trigger and the rocket flew into a bush further down the road and harmlessly blew up.
The flares suddenly lit up the sky, and several machine guns immediately opened up, deafening Preston’s protected ears and opening the third and fourth trucks like cans of sardines as a steady line of tracer rounds from two directions rocked both trucks up and down. The man standing in the sunroof and his rocket quickly disappeared back into the cab.
All the vehicle doors opened as the flares illuminated the dark roadway like daylight, and men flew out in all directions, hitting the ground as hundreds of rounds poured into the ambush area from three directions, mowing down everything in their path.
Within seconds, the eight trucks began to look like twisted pieces of metal. “Armored car—fire down the middle space in between the vehicles–now! Men are hiding in between the vehicles,” shouted Sergeant Perry into his handset. ”Ambush squad—aim low, aim for the tires and anybody hiding underneath the eight vehicles.”
The second truck in the second row blew up, and the blast enveloped the truck in fr
ont of it and it blew up as well. The area turned lighter than day as continuous fire poured into the “kill zone.” Several of the enemy tried and succeeded to get into the forest on the other side of the road before the rest of them went down. A couple of men disappeared into the trees. “Ambush area, ambush area—cease fire, cease fire!” shouted the sergeant. Apart from the two trucks on fire and machine gun fire from the armored car at the end of the farm road, the area went silent.
It had taken less than 30 seconds and the attack was over. “Team behind the barricade, keep low, move forward slowly and in a line, there could be wounded. Secure the area.” Preston watched as a dozen men slid forward over the sandbags and tables. Two shots rang out and the shooter was immediately silenced. Silence also reigned down the road as the radio squawked again.
“Check all bodies. Need number count. Pull them out and away from the vehicles in case they blow. Snipers in the forest—I believe you have two or three coming your way. I want clean kills. Await my orders to move. Forest Checkpoint, what’s cooking?”
“Forest Checkpoint—both trucks immobile—no moving bodies. We believe two Charlies still alive and heading towards Highway Vanguard group. Over.”
“Highway Vanguard here. We roger that—we are ready for them. The road to the highway is secure and we will clear from our end. Over.”
“Forest Checkpoint,” continued Sergeant Patterson. “Stay put in case we have more issues coming your way. To all parties—we have ‘friendlies’ in the kill zone. Do not fire! They will be clearing the road towards you. Forest Checkpoint—I repeat, hold your fire.”
“Forest Checkpoint. We copy that.”
“Highway Vanguard, did you copy last message? A couple of possible ‘Charlies’ coming your way. Over,” continued the sergeant as they heard more shooting from the burning trucks.
“Highway Vanguard. We copied that and our guys with night sights are searching for them now.”
“All Forest Snipers—try and keep your shots high. I’m going in to secure the ambush zone and then work towards the main road. Medic section, we have wounded. I need stretchers immediately,” continued the sergeant over the radio.
The firing had stopped, and Preston climbed down from the fire tower and headed for the entrance gate to his farm. Several soldiers and the doctor ran past carrying stretchers and he ran with them to the gate, and then around the corner down the dirt road towards the barrier.
It was a mess. The fires from three vehicles glowed behind silhouettes of soldiers pulling bodies away from them. He got to the barrier, where he was halted by a soldier.
“Their tanks are going to go up at any second, sir. The sergeant said nobody past this point.”
The medics had already picked up two American soldiers and one of the Chinese men, who had an arm missing and several bullet wounds in his legs. Two more stretchers arrived as gun shots were heard deep in the forest. Carlos arrived a few seconds later, and they both watched as bodies and body parts were pulled out of the surrounding undergrowth. The troops moved forward as another flare lit up the sky and they saw half a dozen soldiers with Sergeant Perry halfway down the road. They were on each side of the road, bent over, running a couple of yards and then stopping in a crouch. They were slowly cleaning and checking the area for enemy.
Automatic fire suddenly erupted from the forest several yards in front of them, and the men dove into the ditches as a fire fight ensued. The first vehicle’s tank blew up as the men were still scrambling to pull bodies away from the rear vehicles and one man went down. There were soldiers searching through the trucks at the back as the front truck went up with a loud boom and they scurried away from the fourth row as the whole line of mutilated trucks began to catch fire.
“Preston, get us all your fire extinguishers and all the water containers you have! We need to stop the brush from catching fire. All soldiers not clearing and still in the ambush zone must go and help bring water,” shouted Sergeant Perry, running back to the barricade. There was a mass run towards the airport. Preston had 600 feet of garden hose he used to wash down the runway when it got dusty, and it was still connected to the nearest faucet to the road. The pipe would make it about halfway to the gate, if it went straight through the brush.
It took a couple of minutes to get the garden hose into position as close to the fire as possible with water gushing out of the end. Several men ran forward with fire extinguishers and plastic buckets collected from the medic tent and elsewhere.
A human chain was made from the end of the hose, and full buckets of water started moving from man to man and then were carried by more men down the farm road to the burning trucks.
For the next 20 minutes, they worked hard pouring water into the wooded areas that had several fires blazing. The fire extinguishers had dealt with the vehicles, smothering the flames pretty quickly as several men aimed their extinguishers onto the fires from several directions.
The heavy effort managed to stop five of the vehicles from going up in flames, and as dawn broke an hour later, troops were still walking in from the outer areas dragging a body here and there to add to the row of bodies by the barricade.
The sun broke over the trees to the east, dense smoke still filled the surrounding area and a slight breeze started pushing it southward. Preston and Carlos, as well as the rest of the water team, were tired and finally sitting around the barricade, eyeing the dead bodies of the enemy. The road was soaked with a mixture of foam from the extinguishers and the hundreds of gallons of water they had poured onto the immediate area. Both sides of the dirt road had puddles of water that was tinged a reddish color from all the blood. “Carlos, Preston,” a dirty-faced and hatless Sergeant Perry walked up to them. “We have everything that we’ve taken from the attackers piled up further back on the road. We have pieced together 39 bodies plus the one injured in the medical tent. We have two dead of our own and three wounded, and the medical staff is taking care of them. Would you like to come and inspect the equipment we found in the vehicles and see what is important?”
They walked past the bodies and body parts the soldiers were already placing in black trash bags for disposal.
“I don’t think their mothers would recognize any of them. Maybe Lee Wang might,” suggested Carlos. “Sergeant, could you send a radio message to the hangar and have Lee Wang escorted down here?”
Lee arrived five minutes later. By that time, they had concluded that all 39 bodies were Chinese. The rear of the last two trucks still facing the opposite way were full of food and water and one truck—an old Ford V8— had obviously served as an armory. It housed several rockets for the shoulder units, six cases of hand grenades, and several boxes of 7.62 cal, AK-47 ammunition protected in a steel, coffin-like box. They had been lucky that it hadn’t exploded, or there would have been far more causalities and fire damage.
“Lee,” Carlos asked the Chinese man when he arrived. “Do these men look like Chinese soldiers? Do you recognize any of them?” Slowly Lee looked at the bloody and bloodless remains of every man. He stopped at one of the first ones.
“This is Bo Lee Tang, I think. That one, the older man about 50 years old next to him, was Mi Jo. Bo Lee Tang was an American-dressed Chinese policeman on the island where I studied. It looks like him. Bo was only about 18 when I saw him last. He was part of the security detail on the island that kept the discipline and who told us to go home once we had had too much to drink in the American bars. I liked him because when he was off duty he was one of the worst drinkers, and tried to introduce me to American whiskey. He liked it so much that he had a small bottle of American whiskey tattooed on his right shoulder.”
Several soldiers stripped off the sweater and shirt from the body, and a small tattoo of Jack Daniels stared back at them. “The other man was head of the guard detachment for the block we lived in. He rang the bell at 4:00 am in the courtyard every morning for us to get up. He has certainly aged since I last saw him.”
“I believe he was the comma
nder,” the sergeant added.
They continued on, and Lee did not recognize any more. Many were much younger and would have been babies when he left China, he explained to the men around him.
Then they got to the weapons and other items the men had carried with them. “We searched every pocket in their clothing and every corner of every vehicle we could, including the two on the main road,” continued the Sergeant. “Our men have secured the whole area. The forest snipers killed three and the last two enemies were taken out by the Highway snipers. Once the sun is up, we will do a sweep of the entire area as far out as the Forest Snipers, and two groups will walk out in both directions along the feeder road searching for any dead or injured. I don’t believe we have missed any.”
They all looked down at the mass of equipment. Many of the shoulder rocket launchers, and there were eight of them, were twisted broken metal. “There are three in good working order,” observed one of the soldiers looking over them. Many of the AK-47s were also bits of twisted metal. “We have five usable AK-47s, sir,” he added. “They are very modern, no more than two years old, and have the skeleton-steel shoulder butt versus the old solid-steel and wooden ones. Here are their personal electronic gadgets.”
Carlos and Lee found what they were looking for in the pile of equipment—satellite telephones.
“These are American satellite phones,” Carlos identified one as he picked it up. “I have the civilian version of these, the Iridium 9505a. These phones are the 9505c military version. Do you recognize this phone, Sergeant?” Carlos asked, and it didn’t take long for the man to recognize it.
“I was issued one of these two months ago on a training mission when we were down in Georgia,” he replied. “Before we left Seymour Johnson three days ago, we tried to activate all the units we have in our supply closet, but every one of them was dead. How come this one works?”
