Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival (35 page)

Heading up the 190 highway was easy. The road was good and all the locals stayed away, thinking that the army trucks were local. They reached within fifty miles south of Mexico City by dark.

They stayed away from the city, and continued north using ring roads to avoid attracting interest. They reached the much larger air base and decided to attack at dawn the next morning.

At this base they were met with heavy resistance; at least a thousand Mexican soldiers protected the base. Manuel decided to arm their valuable rocket launchers for the first time to aim at any aircraft wanting to take off and fired mortars and machine guns at the men and aircraft on the ground. There were dozens of helicopters and propeller aircraft in front of the hangars and many of them were in flames by the time five jet aircraft screamed out of a rear row of hangars and headed away from him down the runway.

Manuel suddenly had to duck as a dozen Mexican-fired mortar bombs hit the ground around him, throwing dozens of bodies into the air. The defending soldiers were now throwing everything they had at the attackers to protect the aircraft lifting off the ground.

For a full minute two dozen mortar bombs pelted his area. Several of his vehicles, including a military truck with 500 gallons of fuel violently exploded from a direct hit a couple of hundred yards behind him. Pieces of metal and body parts started to land around him and the firing stopped as quickly as it started. The jets were screaming down the runway and the Mexican soldiers did not risk hitting their own aircraft.

Manuel shouted orders for the rocket launchers to fire on the moving jets coming closer and watched as three rockets headed for the first one. He couldn’t believe that all three of them missed and the jet left the ground and went vertical, its afterburners pointing directly at him and painfully stabbing his eardrums. It took the men a few seconds to reload. They were too late, except to get a single rocket off as the second jet screamed past. The third jet was only several feet off the tarmac and passed them when two rockets went straight into the underside of a fully fueled fourth aircraft about to leave the runway.

The fifth jet was not far behind and it went straight into the massive explosion caused by the fourth aircraft, causing the sky to light up as a sonic boom crashed into Manuel’s ears, making his ears ring for days to come. He jumped up and began to run to towards the base, firing and swinging his arm to signal for his men to follow.

The control tower had been taken out by a direct hit from a mortar just before the two jets had exploded so he felt safe from any further action.

He was not! Manuel was temporarily deaf. He did not see Isabella, the DC-3 of Carlos Rodriquez, pass by a few miles away to the north. It was too far away for battle-deafened men to hear any aircraft above crackling of flames around them.

Three hours later, with everything of no value to him destroyed, Manuel Calderón departed. He left thousands of dead bodies lying all over the base, many his own men. He commandeered several survivors and executed over fifty soldiers who had surrendered but had refused to join them. His mission completed, he headed back on the ring road and was happily motoring south in the nice Mexican Air Force jeep he had captured when all hell broke loose.

Arrogant and powerful in his perceived position of invincibility, he had not sent scouts ahead to confirm that the path they had traveled north on only a day earlier was safe and clear.

He reached an area where there were small hills on each side of the major ring road going around Mexico City when he was ambushed by a brigade of 2,500 Mexican troops who had followed him north for the last three days, never managing to catch his fast-moving men.

On their radios the Mexican troops listened to the attack on the important air base and were still in the process of setting up an ambush in case the gangsters retraced their route south.

A similar ambush was being set up on the same road to the north by a second brigade travelling south as fast possible, to meet the bandito head on. They were still ten miles north of the air base when they saw the smoke and quick radio communications were given to the northern brigade that the banditos were heading south.

Manuel’s small army had grown every day he travelled north, and a dozen new trucks and jeeps, and tons of new guns, ammo, and food supplies had been commandeered from the three destroyed bases. With the new recruits from the third base, he still had about 3,500 men, although he had lost a couple of hundred in the heavy fighting. He and his men had found out the hard way that Mexican troops fought well when they knew their lives were in the balance.

He was still quite deaf but felt strong and invincible until the first mortars began exploding around him, one taking out an old Wrangler jeep with his most forward machine gun position on its rear bed, a hundred yards in front of him. He screamed at the driver through his radio to turn right towards the hills on the western side of the road and all his vehicles in the ambush zone turned at the same time, several already hot fireballs on the hot tarmac.

He had five radios in his groups behind, over 250 vehicles in a line two miles long and he shouted commands for the rear half of the vehicles to attack down the lefthand side of the road in front of them.

Machine guns bullets hit his jeep, the heavy steel protecting him as he and his driver leaned down as low as they could in the front seats and the six men behind him shielded him with their riddled bodies. The jeep flew over the small mounds at forty miles an hour and the driver whisked the jeep around once they were behind the sandy dunes.

Many more vehicles didn’t make it as the Mexican army threw everything they had at the gangsters. Manuel crawled up the ridge, holding onto his radio, and scanned the devastation. He could hardly see through the smoke and flames. He saw his men making the advance several hundred yards to the north and he shouted at them through the radio to kill the soldiers, kill every single one of them.

Several of his vehicles carrying mortars were behind the dunes and they were setting up their tripods as fresh mortar fire began to explode around him. His was already deaf from the massive explosion on the runway hours earlier and could hardly hear himself scream into the radio.

“Manuel, Manuel, we have more soldiers coming from the north!” shouted his second in command who was still commanding the rear of the convoy. “One of my men counted thousands of men about three miles away to the north and heading towards us at full speed. I sent him up on a high ridge; he can see everything. We are attacking from the north side and there are many, many soldiers on the other side of the road to you. They have about fifty mortars and dozens of machine guns.”

“Attack, attack them, Carlo!” Manuel screamed over the radio. “I will charge them from here and you from your position. We must get them into a crossfire and they will run, I promise you. They are Mexican soldiers and are chicken livers, scared and useless. Now, attack, Carlo, with everything you have, amigo, or we are all dead!” He saw hundreds of his men watching him and waiting for orders as his mortars blasted back. They were all hugging the dunes as the next wave of mortars began crashing into the ground several yards behind them.

The Mexicans, he realized, were shooting blind. He raised his arm and screamed
“Charge!”
like they did in the movies and all his men, apart from the mortar teams, sprang up. The mortar teams went to rapid fire and threw bombs down their tubes as fast as possible to cover their advance and he and his men ran for the enemy position about a hundred feet on the other side of the road.

Bullets sounding like bees swarmed around him, his driver going down before he had reached the tarmac. The man on his left went down several yards later and it seemed like an eternity before he threw himself onto the side of the dunes on the other side of the road.

He grabbed for several grenades he had taken from one of the bases and he and dozens of other men pulled their pins and threw them as far forward as they could. He counted many men with him doing the same and seconds later hundreds of explosions rent the air above where the Mexicans had been shooting. He looked back at his mortar teams and with sign language told them to send over another wave of mortar bombs and he signaled his men to throw more grenades.

They threw everything they had as dozens of mortar bombs blew the ground into showers of dirt dozens of feet in front of them. He gave the sign to reload weapons, couldn’t hear anything over the radio, screamed into it to Carlo that they were going over the dunes and attacked.

It was a mess. When he went over the top, “bees” again buzzed around him and he saw hundreds of Mexican bodies and hundreds more running, already a couple of hundred yards away. Carlo, he saw, still had stiff opposition; about a hundred Mexican soldiers had dug in on the slopes to defend their northern perimeter. He screamed at his men to fire at them.

Suddenly it was over. Carlo’s jeep ran over several Mexican soldiers and didn’t stop as it came towards him. Manuel didn’t have time to count, but his eyes roved over hundreds of dead bodies. It looked like a scene from a World War I movie. Now it was time to get going as the remaining Mexican soldiers, still running in the direction of Mexico City, might turn to help the soldiers coming in from the north.

“Carlo, Luiz, Umberto, gather your men. Leave the dead and wounded. We need to go south now and meet up with my brothers. We are moving out before the other soldiers arrive!” he shouted, running back across the road. He was shocked to see so many of his men scattered everywhere, hundreds of them, and so many broken vehicles. He shouted at a man he knew to take over as his driver and he reached his jeep as the mortar teams finished reloading back into their vehicles. He counted less than thirty vehicles in one piece and shouted at them to follow him. Men were alive on the ground and were begging for help. He ignored them, jumped in the jeep, and the driver sped off to the south.

An hour later he stopped his group and waited for several minutes before Carlo caught up with him. His vehicle convoy was reduced to 50 and he counted another 95 vehicles in Carlo’s group with only two trucks pulling 500-gallon fuel tankers, the last two vehicles. He had lost a third of his army and seventy-five percent of his fuel.

His ears still ringing, he explained to Carlo loudly that apart from refueling they would not stop until they got into radio contact with his brother Alberto, which should be about 150 miles to their south. All the men were tired but they drove south through the oncoming night and into the next morning.

They reached a hilly area, good cover with a good lookout spot, and he got two men with binoculars to climb a large hill close to the road to look north while the men rested, ate a meal and fueled the vehicles. Manuel was not going to be caught unprepared again.

His commanders did a count and numbered their army at 1,917 men. He had lost over 1,000 men in the two battles in the same day, not very good for a commander.

“The soldiers, they are coming, Señor Calderón, about an hour behind us. I can see a dust storm,” stated one of the lookouts running up a couple of hours later.

“They must be very angry to travel so hard,” Manuel said to the men around them and they prepared to leave.

Thirty minutes later the radio operator in the rear of his jeep finally got communications with the group coming north.

“Much fighting?” Manuel asked his brother Alberto.

“We have destroyed five army bases and one airfield and met with very little resistance. It seems most of the soldiers went north after you, Manuel.”

“Well get ready to fight, brother. We have the whole Mexican army about ten miles behind us. Find a good ambush position and wait for us to join you. They ambushed me and killed my men. Now it’s time to do the same to them. Have you heard from our big army?”

“Yes, we had an aircraft fly in to the small air base at dawn this morning to give us information,”
was the reply.
“Pedro and our army are stuck in Panama at the canal. There are thousands of Chinese soldiers there and they have been fighting them for nearly a week.”

“What are Chinese soldiers doing in Panama?” asked Manuel over the radio completely puzzled.

“I don’t know, but the aircraft flew over the whole canal and said there were at least 5,000 to 10,000 Chinese soldiers all the way along both sides. They even shot at the aircraft with tracer bullets from machine guns at several locations. I ordered the pilot to tell our army to destroy every single Chinaman and execute them or allow them to join our army, but make sure we have no more problems. His information was that the resistance at the canal was being overrun, and it would take about a week to get it under control before our army can continue northwards.”

Manuel signed off, after reminding his brother to find a good ambush point. He was going to give the Mexican army a little of their own medicine and then he would fall back across the southern border. From there he would taunt them so the Mexican soldiers would wait for them and, once his army arrived, destroy the rest of the opposition. Then he would return to the north where all their allies were situated and waiting for them.

He was looking forward to taking over Mexico; lots of pretty girls and Tequila farms to own.

The United States – March

Day after day, the Jumbo Jets brought back troops. Just feeding the enormous numbers of returning men was a huge task. Food was beginning to run out at many of the military storage sites around the country and once the aircraft changed their flights and started bringing in food from Europe, all the C-130s were delegated to restock the twenty-five main storage areas across the country.

These were the major Air Force bases, and the problem was that the Jumbo Jets could fly nonstop into the bases themselves, but with the extra flying time, they would lose a flight each a week, which meant thousands of tons of food.