by T I WADE
“Well General Strong, that’s good enough for me, sir. I can have my soldiers ready and out of our gates in six to eight hours. I aim to make four stops at other Army bases close to our route to increase our convoy before we reach Fort Bragg. I think that I can reach Fort Bragg in 48 to 60 hours, depending on how long the bases take to get their men ready.”
“Tell them to head north up I-95. You can clear the way, and with less traffic, they should catch up with you. Also remember, Colonel, its cold up there. Take every luxury you can to keep warm and all the food you can carry. You can stay at my place on your way up. The address is on this piece of paper. I will give you this letter dated four days ago from the president, and this is your authority to commandeer everything you can on your way to my location. Once you get close to Fort Bragg, use our frequency. I’ve also written it on this letter, and if you need supplies I will try and get a C-130 to land close to you. I suggest that you move a bulldozer or two out right now to start clearing a route for your men. The highways are congested with over-turned tractor trailers.”
“I forgot that we have an old tractor trailer carrying a bulldozer,” added the colonel. “The tractor itself has an armored front and steel fender to clear a pathway and the dozer can be pulled off to clear larger trucks. I’ll get them kitted up and out within the hour.”
After a few more minutes of discussion, Preston walked outside and hitched a ride with the colonel in one of the old jeeps back to his P-38, which was being guarded by a couple of armed soldiers. They shook hands, and Preston started the aircraft, much to the delight of the dozen military onlookers. He taxied as far down the road as he could, turned around, and completed his final checks. It was a well-paved piece of asphalt about 200 feet shorter than his airfield. Luckily, there were no buildings to get over at the end, only a 4-foot high fence surrounding a sports field.
Just to make sure, he gunned both engines before releasing the brakes and sped down the road, past the onlookers halfway down, and left the road 100 feet before the fence. He pulled the stick back hard and went high and fast to get out of the building area before turning his aircraft back towards I-20 East and bringing his engine revs down a notch.
He landed back on the road 20 minutes later where the famer had cleared enough space to get pretty close to the burned-out vehicles. He had only been away two hours, and already the fires were out and there were several soldiers carrying dead bodies and equipment as he turned the aircraft around and closed down the engines. He got a situation report from a Marine lieutenant and was handed three unharmed satellite cell phones.
The lieutenant went through the list of injured. They had one dead soldier and three slightly wounded men. On the enemy’s side there were nine injured. The two medics had done their best, but seven of them had already died. Two were still alive, but they were not sure they would make it through the rest of the day.
So, his final count was two still alive, 143 bodies and 51 sets of Chinese boots. His men had done a full sweep and had found several more dead bodies, but nobody alive. There were 50 vehicles, of which two still worked but had flat tires. Thirty-three were blackened remains, and 17 had given up a little merchandise here and there. There was very little equipment that wasn’t damaged. The farmer on the tractor came up and smiled, his job done. Preston was about to thank him when he heard the unmistakable sound of a C-130 coming in.
It came from the east at 500 feet and very low. Preston asked for a radio and called up to the aircraft as it flew overhead.
“Hi, Preston, Jennifer here. I’ve come to take some boys up north. Buck and Mike are two hours behind me and I have a doctor and three medics on board. I’ve got to head up north to help with a big fight up there.”
“There is enough room to land here. A kind farmer has cleared 700 yards on both sides of the highway for us, and I suggest you come in on the other side of the P-38. Over.”
She did, and let the engines shut down before getting out and coming over. She was introduced to the excited old farmer and then the tired Marines, who were excited that they were going with her to New York. Tired or not, they certainly didn’t want to miss any action. They would need every soldier up there.
There was a problem with the dead enemy bodies here though. The farmer spoke up and told them that he and the townsfolk had enough old equipment to dig a mass grave and that a communal grave just off the road was as good a place as any.
Preston told Jennifer about his luck with the Army base and the movement of troops beginning in a few hours from Anniston. He asked the farmer if he could give the two confiscated phones to Colonel Grady, who would be coming through in seven to ten hours, if he left written instructions for how the phone should be used. The farmer replied that they would dig the communal hole and then wait for the Army to show up.
A quick note was written, including Preston’s new cell phone number and General Allen’s, which he got from Jennifer. He then wrote down the instructions on how to use the phone, to always state the two words ‘Allen Key’ when starting to speak, and explaining why not to answer if the red number called. Both phones were from the batch the lieutenant had given him and still had full battery life. A charger had been found unharmed in one of the trucks and Preston also left that for the Army commander. It had a vehicle-lighter attachment and the phone could be charged while driving. He told the colonel to call General Allen when he got it and provide him with a sitrep.
The men were piling up all the workable weapons in the C-130. The two injured Chinese were also loaded, the new medics looking after them as well as the injured Americans. The dead American soldier was lifted into the C-130 with the remaining troops.
Jennifer took off to the west 15 minutes later and Preston waited for her to climb away. He waved goodbye to the nice old farmer, who saluted him as he gunned the engines for departure.
“With Americans like that, this country will certainly survive,” he thought to himself, and as he flew over the bridge spanning the highway, he felt good and had hope for the future for the first time in several days.
He beat Jennifer in by 30 minutes after telling Buck and Mike to turn back. They were half an hour out from the farm when they turned back and reached the airstrip together. Preston had radioed Martie earlier, and she was just taking off from Robins Air Force Base and on her way home—she was an hour out and had enough fuel.
It was 4:00 pm and an hour before dark, when Martie came in and Jennifer went out, saying “Hi” as they passed each other in flight. The wind was coming from the south, and Preston noticed that landing was from the north for the first time this year. He hoped the winds were the winds of change. Somehow, he knew that this day had been a real victory for the United States. Now it was all up to General Allen. Hopefully, he would cut off the head of the “serpent” in the next 24 hours. America had certainly just cut off the tail.
Chapter 13
‘Z’ Day 7 – China Attacked
At the exact moment that Preston was thinking about General Allen, the general had been in Japan for 20 minutes. Carlos, before he packed up to leave, had guided General Patterson and his aircraft into an overcast Japan. Luckily, the overcast conditions were only ranging about 20 miles offshore, but during the night Carlos had changed the three aircraft’s course three times as they flew over the ocean for the second half of their 12-hour flight. Carlos and Lee needed to be set up at McGuire within four hours to help guide General Allen and Lee’s wife into mainland China.
The first half of the trip had been easy. They had followed the Alaskan islands in a southwest direction from Anchorage, with the Bering Sea on the left and the Pacific Ocean on the right. They had passed over Atukan and Unalaska four hours into the flight, the infrared scanners and the antiquated but working 100-mile radar systems onboard the gunships giving them eerie views of the islands 29,000 feet below them. After five hours, they needed to head away from the land as it began to stretch in a west-northwest direction and towards Russia. For the next sev
eral hours, they needed Carlos to guide them.
All the way through the flight, General Allen, with his cell phone permanently on charge from the flight deck, made and received calls. For the first few hours, it was Major Patterson giving him sitreps, and by the time they left the last islands on their radar and infrared scanners behind, the fight was over and it sounded like they had their first prize—an intercontinental aircraft to ferry troops back to the States. He had given orders to get it checked out, refueled, and ready to meet him either in Ramstein, Germany, or at their main Air Force base in Turkey. General Allen wanted to move troops away from all front lines immediately and get them into safer areas.
He managed a couple of hours of sleep before they were scheduled to call Carlos again and get their latest position in relation to a line they had drawn on a map. He called Carlos at the appointed time, got all the aircrafts’ transponders switched on for several seconds, and within minutes Carlos was telling them that they were over 100 miles off their line to the south. They changed flight direction, and everyone not doing anything went back to sleep.
It was weird, flying over pure blackness and having only one person in the world to talk to, several thousand miles away, who could give them accurate information on where they were.
Two hours later, they did the same and this time they were only 20 miles off course. The winds from the north must have must have lessened. At this point, seven hours into the flight, they decided to add 1,500 gallons into each gunship from the tanker. It took an nearly an hour to get both aircraft refueled, and half the fuel was used during the refueling period, but it got them 275 miles closer to their targets. Once this fuel was used up, they started small electrical gravity feed pump motors that pumped the stored fuel from the soft bladders in their holds into the fuselage fuel tanks, which in turn pumped any excess up and into the wing tanks. That took another hour, and by the time they were finished, they expected to land in just three more hours.
Two hours later, they phoned Carlos and got a third location report. This time it looked like they were 40 miles north of their line into Misawa Air Force Base and 400 miles away from Japan. The area around the base was also overcast, and it could be snowing. They were 100 miles behind schedule and it was going to be tight on fuel.
Then General Allen got a call. The call was not from the red number, but an American voice with a southern drawl called up and said, “Allen Key.”
“Name and location?” asked the General.
“Grady, Army, State-Alpha Lima (AL),” was the reply.
“Nice to hear from you, Mr. Grady. What can I do for you this cold winter evening?” the general asked.
“Got this phone from a Mr. Strong, sir,” Grady answered. “He told me to contact you when I got it and give you a sitrep.”
“Well, get on with it, Mr. Grady. I assume you know who you are talking to. I don’t, yet.”
“Allen Key, we are heading due east on I-20 in the direction of Bragg. I have 700 men in 22 trucks. We are towing five 155mm howitzers and ten 105mm howitzers, tons of ammo, and I estimate we will find more men and materials at four more Alpha-Lima bases on our way to November-Charlie (NC), where Preston lives. Did you copy?” asked the colonel.
“Roger that, Grady. Best news I’ve heard all day. What is your end station?”
“November-Yankee (NY) in six days, I hope,” Grady replied.
“We are going to need you Army guys. You’ve seen what the Alpha-Foxtrot (Air Force) boys are working with. The November (Navy) boys are even worse off than us, with four or five boats that can’t even catch fish. Anyway, I’m heading to the other side of the world. When you get to Preston’s, I want at least 100 big guns, 10,000 buddies, and I don’t care if they have to walk to November-Yankee, just get them there. I hope to be there a day or two after you and I’ll buy you a beer, Mr. Grady. Good luck. Out.” He signed off as he heard his radio operator trying to contact the Air Force base 350 miles in front of them.
It took several minutes, but every person aboard the three aircraft was very relieved to finally hear a voice respond from somewhere in front of them. After several codes and two-way communication was exchanged, information was received. The weather wasn’t bad. Cloud height was at 3,000 feet above ground with a very light snow. Wind was from the northwest at five to ten and the temperature was 32 degrees. The runway was clear. They had had no traffic for a week but they did have flares to help the general land. The landing lights were operational with several generators and the runway slightly slippery, but it would be checked out and cleared with their one working bulldozer by the time they got there.
General Allen called Carlos, thanked him for saving all of their lives, and for providing radio communications, and told him that he was free to head up to McGuire. There was already a C-130 flying down to get him, and he had four hours to get there and set up his equipment in case the general needed help flying into South Korea.
Twenty minutes later, the three 130s lowered themselves to 3,000 feet and began to pass under the cloud layer. Visibility was about ten miles and they hoped to see the flares or at least be heard from the ground. Ten miles out, they saw flares through the infrared scanning systems and they quickly brought the three aircraft to the correct course and began their landing checks. The two gunships would go in first, and then the tanker, who could still get to Korea without refueling.
The bright and welcomed landing lights formed into two lines in front of them, and with less than 30 minutes of flying time left in their tanks, they went in and touched ground for the first time in 12.5 hours.
Four hours later, fully fueled and totally out of the salmon they had brought with them, they took off and headed on their 3-hour trip to Osan, South Korea 840 miles away. It had taken an extra two hours for the tanker to suck the fuel out of the dead tanker trucks, transfer the fuel to the gunships, and then take on her full load. While they were being refueled, the men stationed there had emptied the Misawa Air Force Base’s armored bunker of all the 105mm HE rounds, which amounted to 120 projectiles per gunship. General Allen knew that there would be more in South Korea, but he wanted to go in with twice the ammunition he would normally have on board.
Fresh pilots had taken over the flying duties. The relieved pilots got a couple of hours of sleep, and the general started thinking about these old birds. They had been flying for nearly 40 years, had gone through several wars, and still they just flew and flew and flew. A third gunship was expected to be located at Osan, and the Japanese bases, now behind them, had absolutely nothing flying. At least they had used their clean and readied runway for a few landings and take offs.
Three hours later, the radio operator got into contact with Osan. They were flying low, at less than 1,000 feet to stay out of any North Korean coastal radar systems and again, they were guided in with flares, before their infrared scanners found the operating runway lights.
There were heavy, pulsating bursts of light through the thin snow on the horizon to the north, and it looked like there was military conflict around Seoul, 40 miles north of the Air Force base they were flying into. The pilots could very faintly see large lights, which meant that large buildings must be on fire.
They landed in an inch of snow and the weather was beginning to close in around this part of Asia. They couldn’t waste any time getting over to China.
Osan was a large base that included the 51st Fighter Wing and the 7th Air Force. The base had two generals and five colonels who were waiting for him with fuel tanker and generators as they drew up to the hangar. Refueling would only take 30 minutes, due to the short haul from Misawa, and the general asked about ‘Easy Girl’. To his relief, she was ready and operational, had a full crew and just needed to be topped off and armed. She was in a hangar and the brass gave orders to have her brought out and for her crew to get ready. General Allen asked for two back-up pilots and they were found. The only working jeep and one old troop transporter were started up, and his armaments crew drove out to the
underground bunker to load all the ammunition they needed.
“Gentlemen,” Pete Allen spoke to a two-star general, a one-star general, three colonels and seven majors as they all stood about the aircraft. “I need a sitrep about the fighting to the north, and in return I can fill you in on our worldwide problems. I will need some coffee and whatever you have to eat, as will my men. We have been flying now for 24 hours. I want to get out of here within two hours—my AC-130 weapons chief will fill your guys in on what we need.”
They went into a large and relatively warm conference room. Several men had obviously been sleeping in here, and the room was immediately cleared for the meeting.
“Okay, so tell me what happened here at Osan,” the general asked Base Commander General Hal Whitelaw.
“I assume you know everything went dark here at 1400 hours on January 1st,“ replied General Whitelaw.
“Actually, midnight East Coast time was what the perpetrators were aiming for,” General Allen replied. “It was dark, freezing and we believe that at least 10 million North Americans are already dead or dying.” The men around the table looked at him, many with their mouths open and white faces.
“We had the usual 20 defense fighters and five armed bombers up, as well as eight C-17s on their way to Misawa,” continued General Whitelaw. “We had three Stratotankers about 300 miles out in different directions, and we lost the lot. Not one aircraft made it back to base. Even the two Apache helicopters patrolling 30 miles north of here just disappeared as the radar went down and all of our millions of electrical components just stopped working. We are sitting here with 400 pieces of junk that used to be called aircraft, and one Vietnam-era AC-130 gunship, two old operational F-4 Falcons, and three Vietnam-era Bell helicopters. How did this happen, Pete, and when is somebody going to turn the power on again?”
“Never guys—or not for a long time. All the Chinese-made electronic gadgets and parts worldwide—billions of them, trillions of them, I don’t know how many—were all built to fail and there are no spares or replacements until we set up new manufacturing facilities. These parts were made by the same company—Zedong Electronics.”
