The New Madrid Run

by Michael Reisig

  It had been a little over two hours since the men had left. Christina was in the living room, trying to concentrate on a book. Todd and Ra lay in front of her on the floor. The dog and the boy were almost inseparable these days, but it was obvious that Todd was also fidgety, and worried. He carried the added burden of not being able to voice his concerns and exorcize his fears. He kept it all inside of him, but his eyes showed his anxiety. She looked down at him.

  “They’ll be all right, Todd. He’ll be back soon.” Todd looked up at her, his soft blue eyes pleading with her to be right. Just then she heard shouting outside—and rifle fire.

  Travis’ mountain could be approached only from the roadway side. The back side of the property dropped off sharply in an incline of jagged granite outcroppings surrounded by the loose soil of the mountainside. It afforded a spectacular view of the valley, but access was difficult. The woods around the front of the house had been cleared, leaving a field with a driveway to the main road in the center. The cleared area was just over a hundred yards square. Forest wrapped the edges of the field, the densest part facing the house where the driveway ran through and out to the road.

  Reynolds’ men had reconnoitered the property and recognized their limitations. A frontal assault was their only option. It offered easy access and cover up to the field in front of the house. The convoy stopped on the main road and Reynolds sent in a squad to determine the immediate situation at the homestead. Rockford was furious when they returned with the report that the van was gone and the only ones who appeared to be there were the old man and the Latin, who were working on something in the yard, and the woman and a boy, seen through the windows of the house.

  The colonel snapped around. “What the hell is this, Reynolds? Where are your goddamned intelligence people?”

  Reynolds shrugged his shoulders. “All I know, Colonel, is that at five a.m. this morning, they were all still there, sleeping. That was the last report I got.”

  “Well, the ones we wanted are gone,” the colonel shouted, then paused for composure. “Okay, all right. We’ll just make the best of the situation. Actually, this may work out better. This bunch will be easy to deal with. We’ll take ’em, then come back for the others. Split up the men. Send in two squads, one on each side of the road in the forested area. Once everyone is hidden in the woods at the periphery of the clearing, rush the compound. From the corners of the field, where the forest ends, to the house is only seventy-five meters or so. You should be able to cover that distance before the two outside know what’s going on. The woman and the boy in the house shouldn’t be any trouble. Remember, Reynolds, take them alive if you can.”

  Carlos and Will were in the process of building a new smokehouse, between the barn and the main house, when Carlos went to the barn for another hammer. Just as the little Cuban entered the barn, Will looked up and saw the line of soldiers charging across the clearing. He grabbed his gun and headed for the house, shouting for Christina. Because of the location of the smokehouse, Will had to run diagonally toward the line of advancing men to get to the front door. The old man was twenty yards from the porch when Corporal Eastern, the soldier with the bad temper and a score to settle, raised his gun and fired. Will tumbled to the ground.

  The shot drew Carlos from the barn. When he saw the line of men approaching and Will on the ground, he knew he couldn’t make it to the house from that direction, so he sped out the back, and along the precipice near the rear of the homestead, trying to gain entrance to the back porch.

  Corporal Eastern saw the little Cuban dash around the barn and head for the house. He could hear Reynolds shouting at him as he raised his gun again and pulled the trigger. The shot rang out; Carlos threw his hands into the air and fell off the cliff, down the hillside. Eastern turned just as Reynolds came running up to him. “Got him, sir!” he yelled.

  “No, got you!” Reynolds shouted as he shot the corporal between the eyes with his pistol. Reynolds swung around screaming, “The next man who even fires his gun gets the same thing. I want the woman and the boy alive!”

  When she heard the shots, Christina bolted to the window just in time to see the soldiers moving in on the house. Quickly, she snatched up Todd and headed for the cellar trapdoor in the floor of the kitchen. Throwing back the rug that covered it, she grasped the ring, and opened the hatch. Christina thrust the silently protesting boy into the opening and, for protection, also ordered Ra down into the dark stairway. “Don’t make a sound,” she shouted, “and stay in there until I tell you to come out!” She slammed the door shut and threw the rug over it as a third shot rang out, followed by more shouting. Taking her nine-millimeter pistol from the counter in the kitchen, she walked to the center of the living room, calmed herself, and waited for them.

  She killed the first two soldiers that burst through the living room door. Three others were wounded. There would have been more, but she ran out of bullets.

  They grabbed Christina and threw her hard to the floor, tying her hands and feet as she struggled, then they ransacked the house looking for the boy. It wasn’t long before the men found the trapdoor. An over-anxious soldier lived just long enough to regret his haste when he opened the hatch and a hundred-and-fifty-pound version of hell with teeth hit him in the chest. The dog seized the man’s throat, his front paws practically draping over the shoulders of the militiaman, his back feet still on the stairs of the cellar. As the man gurgled in a macabre dance with the dog, the soldier next to him, unable to shoot for fear of hitting his companion, reversed the gun and swung it like a club, hammering the butt of the gun against the big dog’s head. The impact was so great that the stock snapped off the weapon and the animal tumbled down the stairs into the dark cellar. No one was anxious to go down the dimly lit stairs, so they shouted to the boy from the door above: “Come out! Get out of there now or we’ll shoot you and your goddamned dog!”

  Alone in the darkness, Todd realized that Ra had been hurt, and not wanting anything further to happen to the dog, he acquiesced. The men moved back from the door as they heard movement on the stairs. Seconds later, when the boy’s head and shoulders appeared through the opening, they grabbed him and dragged him out, quickly slamming the trap door.

  A few minutes after Cody and Travis passed the small column of vehicles, Delta Camp came into view. Cody Joe checked the instruments one more time and took a deep breath. “It’s show time. Hold on tight.” He rolled the wing over and dropped down on Delta Camp like an avenging metal angel. As he descended almost vertically, Cody yelled, “I’m going to chew them up with the fifties on the first pass. On the second pass, we’ll go for the ammo dump and use the napalm.”

  Cody leveled out with the terrain about a quarter mile from the camp and throttled back in order to get as many rounds into the compound as possible. He knew there would be little or no return fire on the first pass, so he came streaking in one hundred feet off the ground, clobbering the headquarters, the newly built officer’s barracks, and the rows of tents for the enlisted men. The big .50 caliber rounds carved twin rows of mayhem as they ripped through buildings like a shredding machine. Tents and huts collapsed, men screamed, and complete panic ensued in a matter of seconds.

  Cody ran the plane out past the camp and stomped on the left rudder while pulling the controls back hard and to the left. The responsive aircraft jackknifed up and over as he applied a little more stick and rudder to bring it smoothly around for another pass. Travis’ stomach was thrown up and down so fast, he felt like a blind man strapped to a Brahma bull.

  Cody missed the communications post on the first pass. The radioman, who was taking a break on the front porch when the plane attacked, saw it all. In a flash, he was at the radio. “Colonel Rockford! Colonel Rockford! This is Sergeant Dickens at Delta Camp. Come in, come in!”

  Rockford, in his Jeep, heard the urgent broadcast. “Right, Dickens, this is Colonel Rockford. What is it, man?”

  “Colonel, we’re being strafed by a World War II fighte
r. The guy’s stomping the hell out of the camp!”

  “What the—All right, sergeant. Get on the horn to our air base and get that F-16 up and over there double time. You hear me, Dickens? Do it now!”

  Fredrick Marshall, the F-16 fighter pilot, was playing cards with the maintenance people when the call came through. That was about all he did anymore: play cards, eat and sleep, then play some more cards. When he heard about this development, he was ecstatic. Not only would he have a chance to fly again, he was going to get some target practice at an aging WWII aircraft.

  However, Cody’s plane was anything but aging. In fact, Cody’s plane was better, faster, and more dangerous than most of the P51 Mustangs that saw combat in the war. His magnificent engine had been beefed up to provide maximum horsepower and performance. Furthermore, he had an engine booster system installed wherein a water/alcohol mix injected into the cylinders delivered instant cooling, giving an extreme burst of power for short durations, greatly increasing the already remarkable speed of the ’51. The original P51 Mustangs were equipped with .30 and .50-caliber machine guns in the wings. Cody had installed all .50-caliber guns, eliminating the need for two kinds of ammunition and providing the airplane with greater devastation at a longer range.

  Still, with all the innovations on Cody’s aircraft, it was nowhere near a fair match. The F-16 had a 20-millimeter Gattling gun pod mounted on its underside that fired up to seven thousand rounds a minute and was armed with two heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles. It wasn’t going to be a fair fight, but then, Captain Marshall didn’t really want a fair fight. He wanted a little excitement. He was going to get to do a little fancy flying, knock the hell out of some joker pretending to be a WWII ace, and be back in time for supper.

  Minutes after the call, Marshall was taxiing his plane onto the threshold of the strip, nervous excitement cranking up his pulse and slicking his palms. With a final check of the instruments, he moved the throttle forward and the magnificent metal beast all but leapt into the air, climbing away from the earth. Let the games begin, he thought with a smile as he knifed through the sky towards the P51 and its unsuspecting pilots.

  Cody stood on the rudder and cranked the plane around for another pass. He had picked out the ammo dump on his first time through. It was right where his man had said it would be. He came in hot and low, reducing the margin for error as much as possible, and offering only a brief target to the men below. The camp loomed up in front of him again and he could see the soldiers spilling out of the buildings and tents, many with guns in their hands, firing up at the plane. “Now it’s really gonna get interesting,” he muttered under his breath as he opened up with the .50s once more. After a solid burst of three or four seconds, he grabbed the quick release on the wing tanks.

  Travis watched as holes magically appeared in the metal wing covering. Bullets punched ragged gashes in the fuselage with muted popping sounds as they swept across the last two hundred yards. Cody never flinched. Impervious to the ground fire, he held the airplane straight and level, glued to his target. “Come on baby, hold on,” he whispered. “Just a little closer . . .”

  Two hundred feet from the corrugated roof of the ammo dump, Cody pulled the release and the wing tanks tumbled, seemingly in slow motion, toward the earth. One of the homemade firebombs went crashing directly through the tin roof of the ammo dump. The other splashed across the back side of the compound, engulfing buildings and tents with flame, but its impact was dwarfed by the explosion of the dump. The Mustang had just roared over the roof of the building when the ordnance in it was catalyzed by the napalm. The explosion was horrendous, creating a fireball ten stories high and melting everything within a hundred yards of the impact. Fifty yards past that, the blast and the shrapnel blew buildings and people into unrecognizable pieces. Less than five minutes after the start of the attack by a single WWII aircraft, Delta Camp was no longer an issue. Of the nine hundred men in the camp, fewer than two hundred remained unharmed and nearly four hundred had been killed. Never anticipating such an event, the colonel had made a tremendous strategic error. He had placed his ammunition depot within shouting distance of the billets for his soldiers, and he had paid dearly for it.

  Resistance ceased after the fireball explosion. The survivors were interested only in getting away from the terrible carnage. Demoralized and frightened men scrambled for the safety of the woods as Cody and Travis made one final pass. They still had plenty of ammunition, but there was no need to continue the attack, so complete was the destruction.

  Cody climbed to two thousand feet and circled the compound for a moment, surveying the disaster below. He was not proud of what he had done, but he was satisfied that the threat of Rockford’s army, at least in that camp, was over.

  While they circled the compound, Travis turned away from the destruction below and looked to the west. His attention was captured by a dot—a fast moving dot—coming in at about five thousand feet and headed right for them.

  “Cody, we’ve got a bandit at two o’clock, coming in hot. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a fighter jet.”

  “Got him,” Cody said as he banked around toward the oncoming plane.

  “Cody, I don’t like it. Does Rockford have fighter planes?”

  “Well, come to think of it, it’s been rumored that he snatched one from a training facility outside Little Rock, but I didn’t put much stock in it. Now I’m beginning to wonder.”

  Travis grabbed the back of Cody’s seat and shouted, “Get this damned plane down on the deck, now. He’s coming for us and if he catches us high, we’re screwed!”

  Cody Joe jammed the throttle to the firewall and threw the aircraft over and down. The plane plummeted like a mortally wounded dove. Once again, Travis’ stomach ended up somewhere near his knees, but that was okay. They were in for a fight, one in which they would be outclassed, outgunned, and battling for their lives. They needed the terrain below to confuse the F16’s missiles and diminish the enemy’s speed and maneuverability advantages if they were to have any chance at all. As the jet approached, Cody brought the ’51 around tight against the hills at a thousand feet.

  When Fredrick Marshall had closed to three miles in his Falcon, he activated the Sidewinder under his starboard wing. To use a heat-seeking Sidewinder missile, he had to be fairly close; it wasn’t one of the thirty-mile missiles used on most of the F-15s and ’-16s. Besides, Marshall thought it would be better that way. He’d get to see the results first hand. In seconds, the warble in his headset went to a steady, insistent tone and the triangle on his targeter went from blinking to solid. He was locked. About a mile out, he grinned and pulled the trigger, releasing the missile.

  “Surprise, surprise.” he whispered with a feral smile.

  Cody had just leveled off when Travis saw the puff of white smoke under the wing of the jet and watched the missile rip away, streaking toward them. “He’s fired a missile, Cody! We’ve got a heat-seeker on us! That son of a bitch is gonna climb right up our exhaust port!”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” replied Cody in a voice so calm it belied his tenseness and concentration. “Hang on, I’m gonna try something.” Before Travis could open his mouth, Cody turned the huge engine off and put the craft in a shallow dive, turning the exhaust port side away from the oncoming rocket. In the few seconds they had left before the missile would strike, the cold, rushing air began to cool the exhaust ports, diminishing the signal given to the heat-seeking projectile screaming toward them. At the last second, when the missile was less than two hundred yards away, Cody snapped the plane hard to the right, pulling it away at almost a right angle. The missile, unable to lock on the much diminished heat signal, streaked under their left wing, earthbound.

  As the deadly projectile exploded in a maelstrom of flame against the mountain below, Travis breathed a monumental sigh of relief. “God, Cody, nice flying.”

  “We’re not done yet,” Cody replied matter of fact, “he’s still coming.” And indeed, the jet stre
aked by a thousand feet above them.

  The plane fell like aerodynamic lead, and Cody hit the starter button as the green earth rose up at them. The engine coughed and turned, but didn’t catch. “Come on, baby, come on,” Cody coaxed as he hit the starter button again. The prop still windmilled as the rounded hills of Arkansas raced up at them with frightening speed.

  Travis, strapped in the back with no control over what was happening, felt like a man locked in a wildly speeding roller coaster that had just thrown its tracks at the high point of its course.

  Cody’s voice was getting louder and more insistent through the headphones as they ate up the last two hundred feet between them and the forest below. “Come on! Come on, you son of a –” Suddenly the engine roared to life. Cody slammed the throttle forward and leveled her out, the final seconds taking them so close to the earth that the tops of the pine trees nearly took the paint off the undercarriage of the plane. “Hang on, buddy!” Cody yelled as he yanked back the stick and climbed toward his opponent one more time.

  Marshall couldn’t believe it—the goddamned missile must have been defective. It missed! Expecting to see the kill first hand, he had flown right by them when it failed to strike its target. Cursing, he turned and climbed.

  The jet, twice as fast as the ’51, tore open the sky as its afterburners kicked in and climbed, in seconds, to five thousand feet. The ’51 had barely reached a thousand feet when the jet rolled over on its wing and dropped like a steel falcon. Marshall laid his finger on the trigger of the Gattling gun as he closed once more on the Mustang.

  Cody, seeing the jet coming at him, snapped the plane over and dove, zigzagging, hugging the rugged terrain in an attempt to evade. He knew that if the cannon on the Falcon locked in on him for two seconds there wouldn’t be enough of his plane left for a Christmas tree ornament. Survival depended on timing—but timing was one of Cody’s strong points.