Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival (6 page)

Peter and Marcie resumed their journey, noticing the two boys in the housing estate watching them as they carried on down the highway.

It was a slow journey down Interstate-10 to Yuma. There were many wrecked and burned tractor-trailers, far more than smaller cars and trucks like the Dodge, but a sort of roadway had again been made by traffic before them and they averaged 25 miles an hour without mishap to the outskirts of Yuma.

Since both vehicles were going to the same destination, they reached the military base gates just before four in the afternoon. The Dodge’s tank was on empty as they drew up; Peter had filled the tank with the remaining fuel before they left their overnight camp.

It took twenty minutes before the guard, under orders from the base commander, finally let them in and was told that they could stay in Sally’s small single-bedroom apartment until she returned. No, they didn’t know where she was, but knew that she was alive and still flying somewhere on the East Coast.

***

Will Smart and family were trying to get more gas for their farm generator, now down to its last twenty gallons and they and an Air Force engineer were at a gas pump, just by Lake Palmdale, north of Los Angeles and just outside Lancaster, California where they lived.

The Smart family had their old truck as well as an old Air Force jeep with a couple of armed soldiers as guard duty. Will and Ben brought all the five-gallon gas canisters they could find and several of their neighbors had tagged along in a weird variety of vehicles, also to fill up whatever they had. The jeep had a large and operational military generator on a towed trailer behind it with enough electrical power to get the pumps working.

The twenty or so vehicles already in line were either old trucks dating as far back as the 1950s or lawn tractors. Two larger farm tractors towing farm trailers held several families all holding onto more gas canisters. The inside of the gas station’s shop and the small pawn shop next to it had been ransacked weeks earlier, but that didn’t stop the kids on the trailers from going in to see what they could scrounge.

Five of the six gas dispensers were broken, Will assumed by people trying to get fuel out of them with no luck; but the sixth one had only minor damage and a yellow repair tape around it. This one must have been broken before the New Year.

The engineer, and Ben with his sister Oprah by his side, discussed the inner workings of the gas dispenser while a second soldier looked for the main breaker switch inside the shop. There was nothing left inside, the entire shop was broken and ransacked, and even the breaker box had been smashed several times and was totally useless.

They slowly and carefully fed power from the running generator directly into the gas dispenser and tried to find why it had been shut down. It took them an hour but they finally found the problem—a fuse had stopped in the old counting mechanism of the fuel-flow computer; the system was quickly brought to life by by-passing the dead Chinese fuse.

The machine tried to shut itself down immediately, but again was brought back to life by by-passing the active security system. It took another twenty minutes of hit or miss, but at least the machine was alive and there should be fuel in the tank buried below them.

Finally gasoline ejected from the nozzle in quick and uneven spurts of about a gallon at a time. Trying to keep the spillage down to a minimum, they started filling the red five-gallon containers for everyone. The Smarts alone had brought twelve, sixty gallons of needed fuel. Once filled, Will and Maggie got into the truck to take the containers home to pour them into their 200-gallon tank at the ranch. It would take a couple of hours to fill everyone’s containers and there would be new people once others found out what was going on.

An hour later, Will and Maggie returned for their second trip to find the original line down by half, but another twenty people had lined up behind the tractors. There were mumblings as the Smarts began refilling their twelve containers, but it stopped when Will explained to the line that it was thanks to them they were going to get fuel at all.

The Smarts returned for their third refill as the second tractor with three families and 20 five-gallon containers had just filled up, and the first new person in the queue invited the Smarts to refill in front of him; he was an older man with a wife and three containers.

“Can we tell what’s left in the tank?” Will asked the engineer, and the man replied that it wasn’t possible. It could go dry at any time.

“I would assume that it could have been filled just before the problems,” he suggested. “We have taken out about 500 containers, 2,500 gallons, and if it was full, there could be the same amount still to go.”

It lasted another 120 canisters after Will had filled theirs for the third time and was about to fill them again for the fourth time just before dusk. It actually ran out of gas on the last container before his first one. A line of another fifty families had carted off their canisters and now there were well over a hundred people still in line.

“Sorry, everybody,” Will shouted to the growing chorus of laments. “Where is the nearest gas station to this?” he asked the crowd.

“Palmdale Boulevard!” shouted dozens of voices at the same time.

“I know three of the five gas pumps at the station were destroyed by a crashed aircraft, but I think one pump is still usable like this one,” someone shouted.

“OK,” replied Will, “we will meet there tomorrow morning at 08:00 hours The Air Force personnel will bring their generator again and we will try to give you guys some gas. Please don’t tell everybody, I’m sure we can only help a few hundred people, as there is only so much gas in these tanks. OK?”

There were again mumbles and Maggie suggested to Will that some of these people would probably walk there, start the line and spend a freezing night waiting for gas. She hoped it would work.

It did. A crowd of nearly a thousand people were waiting in line when the Smarts arrived at daybreak the next morning. Even though the temperature was a few degrees above freezing, it looked like a line for tickets to a ball game or concert. People stood with dollar notes in their hands at the ready, whole families carried dozens of containers and sometimes just a lone person on a lawn tractor waited with one or two containers.

The line was orderly and anxious faces waited as the men worked the best looking gas dispenser first to see if they could get it to work.

An Air Force engineer understanding this time what to do had the dispenser running and was about to allow the first person to place their canisters on the ground for filling when an old truck came speeding up to the gas station, screeched to a halt next to the front of the line and an overweight man got out and rushed over to the group standing around the dispenser.

“Who gave you authority to steal my gas?” he shouted to the group arrogantly. “I’m going to call the police. You are stealing my gas. This is my gas station and my gas. How dare you dispense it without my authority? Who is going to pay for the gas you steal?”

“We will!” shouted the first dozen or so people in the line.

“Then you can buy it for twenty dollars a gallon,” continued the owner, breathing hard, “or I will call the cops and get you and your soldiers thrown out of here.” Will Smart stepped forward, pulled out his detective badge and showed it to the man.

“Now you are price gouging,” Will stated calmly. “That is a State offense, so I will have to take you down to the precinct, or you can take the money in the hands of the people. They are prepared to pay and that is what you will get for your gas, or the soldiers here will throw you off your property. Take it or leave it, and by the way I don’t think dollar bills are worth anything anymore. There is virtually nothing you can buy with them. Barter them, yes, but value? I don’t think there is a lot you can do with them. But yes, you will receive payment for what these people take, and I’m sure they are paying you more than those prices still up on your sign on the corner.”

“And if I don’t want to sell the gas?” questioned the man angrily.

“Then I think the soldiers and I will leave and you can take it up with this line of people here. I’m sure they would persuade you pretty quickly that they would like gas, especially the mean-looking man with the sawed-off shotgun. You see him? About number ten in the queue? He’s been standing here since last night and I’m sure he’s in a foul mood.”

The owner slowly acknowledged the number of people in the queue and grabbed the money out of the first man’s hand and allowed him to continue. The first man had three containers, fifteen gallons and Will Smart noticed two twenties and several one dollar bills while the owner counted it. The still-angry man didn’t complain.

One family had ten containers and three hundred dollars passed hands, the next, an old woman with one container, handed over a ten dollar bill. The owner shouted at the old woman to get going, she didn’t have enough. Will grabbed the owner by his collar and read him the riot act.

“You have taken in more money than the fuel is priced at, and now you want to tell this poor old lady that she’s not paying enough? Soldiers throw this man off his property and tell him he is now unwelcome here.”

Two soldiers came up and forced the man back to his truck, ordering him to get moving. They left him there and returned to the gas dispenser.

The owner, pointing his finger, was about to yell at the soldiers when the first large rock landed on his truck roof and he looked to see where it had come from. When the second missed him by inches and hit his windshield hard he jumped into the truck and pulled the door shut just as a larger rock hit his cab roof making a good-sized dent. He looked at the group in front of him and Will sensed that he was going to ram the gas dispenser. He ordered the three soldiers in attendance to aim their rifles at the truck and the man quickly changed his mind, spun his steering wheel around and headed back the way he had come.

An hour later the tank was dry and a second dispenser in the second line was started and it too ran dry another hour later. A third one was connected up on the other side of the station and it ran for two more hours before it ran dry. By this time Will had refilled his containers and most of the first line of people had gone through, most having only two or three canisters. The line was much shorter with only a dozen or so people and Will shouted to them that it was over and that they would try another one tomorrow, but he didn’t know where.

He and Maggie invited the three soldiers and the engineer back for a late lunch at their ranch and they gladly accepted.

Over lunch of a dozen tins of food and some fresh rolls Maggie baked from flour received from a neighbor a week earlier, they had an afternoon of eating and chatting about what the future held for the area.

The soldiers were happy to be there and had orders to do whatever Will and Maggie wanted them to do. The rest of the men were hard at work loading aircraft with rations back at Edwards Air Force Base. The base commander was now the Smart family’s best friend.

Carlos and Colombia – February

Carlos sat in the copilot’s (right) seat as
Blue Moon
cruised down to Bogotá, Colombia at 15,000 feet. His father and uncle Philippe, the Colombian Ambassador to the United States, sat behind him with all four of their bodyguards, Manuela, Mannie, Dani and Antonio. The eleven other AC-130 crew members and six Marines sat in or around their transport, an old jeep especially equipped with two 2,000-rounds-per-minute Miniguns, one facing forward and one on a pole at the rear. The whole jeep was set up for three passengers: one driver and two gunners. All three positions were protected by armored panels and the heavy vehicle carried an extremely high quantity of ammo. The jeep took up most of the room in the AC-130’s small rear compartment. Every inch had weapons of some sort crammed into it and the heavy weight could be felt by Sally, the pilot, on takeoff.

Another six Marines and their commander, Lieutenant Buff Moore, were in the second AC-130 Gunship,
Easy Girl
, on Sally’s left wing. They carried a second jeep identical to the one in
Blue Moon
. Both were recently modified by the armaments division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and had been picked up en-route. Jennifer was in flight control of
Easy Girl
which had the C-130 tanker,
Mother Goose
, on her left wing. They were in loose formation and heading straight towards Bogotá, out of MacDill Air Force Base just outside Tampa, Florida.

The flight into Bogotá from MacDill was seventeen hundred miles, eight hours at a slow, fully-loaded cruise speed.
Mother Goose
was to refuel the two Gunships before they reached the South American coastline and again before she would turn back. The refueling would make sure that they had enough to return from Colombia to American soil, but she would hang around Cuba for their return just in case.

The AC-130 Gunships were not very practical aircraft for the food distribution now in operation by every other flyable transporter aircraft in the U.S. Over 137 older aircraft of all sorts had been found at air bases and civilian airports since the end of the invasion ten days earlier. Three more AC-130 Gunships, two C-130 Tankers and thirty older C-130 Transporters were being stripped of their more modern and useless electronics to have older, still-working electronics fitted at their bases in Florida and northern California. The balance of all military aircraft except a few Coast Guard 130s, were electronic pieces of junk and would not be flyable until new parts were produced, which could take decades.

The 130s would be ready within a month or so, many having completely reconditioned older engine models installed, since their more modern engines’ electronics were fried.

“We still have fifteen minutes before we start refueling Patterson Key,” stated Sally to the freshly promoted General Patterson back at Andrews Air Force Base. She was speaking over her handheld satellite phone, still the only form of long distance communications. Because aircraft radios could only transmit so far, Carlos and Lee had set up several phones to enable conference calling. General Patterson, Sally, Jennifer and the tanker pilot Major Wong each had one, as did the President, Buck, and Ambassador Philippe for this trip. Another one would be given to Preston once he decided that his two-week vacation was over.