INVASION USA (Book 2) - The Battle For New York (53 page)

Barbara worked long hours flying Lady Dandy, often with the help of Martie or Preston when they had spare time at night, and she helped ferry in soldiers, ammo, projectiles, and mortars from the surrounding Army and Marine bases as the bases received phones for communication and the commanders could give a list of what their armories had.

The snowstorm had given everybody a good two days of rest, something they were all desperate for, and now they were a little behind in setting up the circus of all circuses—The Invasion of the USA.

*****

“I see them! I have found the ships!” Lee Wang ran out on the 19th day of January, three days before the assumed day of attack. Carlos, Preston and several others ran into the communications building at McGuire to see what Lee was so excited about. There they were, the minute dots that could barely be seen by the naked eye, 500 miles offshore just south of Jacksonville, Florida. The ten specks were steaming in a direction which would bring them straight into New York Harbor.

Lee, with Carlos’s permission, had moved Navistar P’s orbit from the central USA and had positioned the satellite directly above Birmingham, Alabama. He had also brought the satellite’s orbit above earth down by 100 miles to get a wider and closer viewing range, and now they could see the ten dots with small wakes behind them as they sailed into the Atlantic area.

The ships couldn’t be seen on the Chinese satellite feed and the satellites hadn’t been touched in case the enemy might be alerted by the movement. Lee didn’t think that the enemy actually knew they didn’t have control of the satellites any more. Maybe the only satellite control center had been at Zedong Headquarters.

“It looks like they are doing about 20 knots,” observed Vice Admiral Rogers once he had studied the computer screen for a couple of minutes. “That gives us two days. I think we need to bring our plan forward by 24 hours.”

“Are we ready with our plan of defense?” Preston asked Colonel Patterson, who had just walked in and was quickly briefed by Carlos. He had arrived late the night before and had gotten several hours of sleep for the first time in days.

“Yes, I think so,” he replied. “There’s not much more to do. The next flights in from Kabul are due in another four hours. I think that we should unload, refuel, and fly ten of the 747s into Seymour Johnson to have their seats removed and get our larger food-distribution plan started a day early. Seven of the bigger, more southern cities in the Pacific Time Zone have clear runways. Five of the passenger aircraft can go straight into Edwards and can begin distributing supplies into Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

“The others can go into our supply bases in Texas and cover Dallas, Houston, Santé Fe, Denver, and Salt Lake, if their runways are clear. The 747 transporter is going to deliver food into Chicago, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia for the next three days, but it will take another ten hours to clear Chicago’s runway. They only have three bulldozers working. Once we have more aircraft, we can get them onto the Baghdad and Kabul routes and have another couple left over for supply runs out of Texas. We received word a couple of days ago about a very large Army food-storage warehouse at one of the bases in Texas, from the colonel who arrived with the Texas convoy, and he made me promise to distribute the food supplies in and around Texas. I want to fly three new 747s into that base as soon as we have them.”

“What about the defense perimeter?” asked Vice Admiral Rogers.

“All ready and a day early is even better,” continued Colonel Patterson. ”It will save the troops from getting cold and bored. We will be short one flight of 6,000 troops, but we now have close to 85,000 soldiers on the ground in and around the airports, the harbor, and on every street and window overlooking possible escape routes from the highways. We are ready to delay the arriving troops. Over 190 mobile-command radios are now operational, every gun team is patched in, and every platoon or company of men, guns or ships can be given immediate firing orders. Or they can just stay tuned to the running commentary from our spotters around the highways, or be ready in the harbor area for Phase Two. We even have a radio on top of the Statue of Liberty, wired directly into my Harbor Command Center on top of the south tower of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The bridge explosives are in place. Gentlemen, we are as ready as we could ever be.”

“That means we could expect visitors anytime after dawn tomorrow,” added the vice admiral.

“Correct,” replied the colonel. “I want all fighter aircraft in the air from here to McGuire as soon as the first incoming 747 aircraft touches down. The aircraft with the least range will take off last. The F-4s will only take off once the first empty 747 aircraft are back in the air. The incoming troops will see nobody, apart from the expected Chinese engineers with our pilots refueling the aircraft and smuggling themselves on board each one. Can we trust the Chinese engineers to play their parts, Lee?”

“Yes, I believe so,” replied Lee who, with his wife and daughter, had spoken to each man one at a time and had offered whatever the man wanted to get him on their side. Only seven of the 100 engineers had not sounded happy about defecting and another ten had been suspect. The others had welcomed the opportunity as long as they could go back and bring out as many family members as they wished once the contest had been decided. The 17 engineers that were still suspect had been placed under guard at JFK where Majors Wong and Chong were already in place to assist with the refueling and become the new pilots of two of the incoming aircraft.

Lee was to be flown into La Guardia to help with Chinese communications at the third airport. There were only ten Chinese engineers there due to Colonel Patterson’s belief that with their reduced flight size, the chairman might only use the two closest airports instead of all three airports.

*****

Colonel Patterson was right. Twenty-three hours later, and two hours before dawn on a cloudy but cold morning, several aircraft entered the edge of the old, most powerful radar screen on Blue Moon, which was circling over McGuire at 5,000 feet to get the maximum information out of her radar capabilities.

The aircraft, in a long line, were arriving in from the north and were over Prince Edward Island, 1,000 miles from New York. It would still take the aircraft two hours to reach New York, but radio messages went out over the vast mobile communication system and hundreds of truck and car engines started and landing lights at the three airports’ repaired electronics and aircraft-directional systems came alive to guide the aircraft in. It took only one radio message from Blue Moon, who immediately prepared to land, to warn everybody.

America got ready for its invasion.

Colonel Patterson had decided to monitor proceedings from Newark’s control tower and he had two other Marine majors who would be in command of the battles, if there were any, at the other two airports. Newark Liberty International Airport was much closer to the harbor area, and these incoming troops had to be taken out quicker than those from the other two airports. Twenty-five thousand troops were in hiding around Newark airport alone, all the way from the airport to the Bayonne side of the Newark Bay Bridge, which was the major ambush site for this section of the attack.

The Newark Bay Bridge was nearly 10,000 feet long. The invading troops, or the majority of them, would have to walk across it. Once they were trapped on the long bridge, they could be attacked from the air at both ends, and hopefully made to surrender if they wanted to survive.

Dozens of heavy machine guns were hidden in the buildings nearest to the Bayonne end of the bridge, and teams were ready to carry them into place and cut off the two empty stretches of highway on the bridge. With more heavy machine guns camouflaged on the other end, the only hope for the Chinese soldiers would be to jump into the freezing water, which would mean certain death.

Everyone got into position and waited. Preston climbed into his P-38 because at the last minute Colonel Patterson had asked him to be air cover for the Newark Bridge and be airborne to strafe the bridge, hopefully to help scare the invaders into surrendering quickly.

Another Air Force pilot was to fly his P-51 and with Martie and Carlos, they were ready to help guide the refueled and airborne enemy-flown 747s into McGuire if they couldn’t get the American pilots aboard.

Blue Moon quickly landed and got off the radar screen. The incoming 747 pilots might have seen her, and all the fighter aircraft waited. They didn’t want to show up on the incoming aircraft’s radar and scare them into landing somewhere else. Even after such a long flight from China, they still had reserves of fuel to land somewhere else in the United States, even as far south as the Caribbean islands.

It took over an hour before the lead aircraft showed up on the less-powerful radar screens in the airports, and the air traffic towers from different airports watched as the 23 blips on the screen slowly came closer and began to merge into two different lines.

Thirty minutes later they were just over 100 miles out and the aircraft slowly turned into long final approaches to both JFK and Newark, just as Colonel Patterson had hoped for.

Just in case some of the aircraft could peel off and still go into La Guardia, he waited until they were 20 miles out before telling all the troops at La Guardia who had access to motorized transport to get aboard and head over to JFK. It would take them an hour, but at least 1,000 more men driving in to assist the 20,000 troops already in place on the roads out of JFK would help if need be.

As the sun rose over the horizon, a small sliver of light between the ocean and the lower cloud layers, the silhouetted shapes of aircraft could be seen by nearly everybody as they glided in, a mile apart, into the two airports—ten coming in from the northeast into JFK and 11 from the southeast into Newark.

It didn’t look like any would change direction towards La Guardia and the waiting became long and slow for the airport soldiers. It was still very cold and the air around them was totally silent of noise.

Everybody who had a part to play at the airports got ready and the aircraft came swooping into the coast of the United States from the orange-colored Eastern horizon one after the other. The engineers, both Chinese and American—the Americans all wearing the well-used clothes of the termination squads long since dead—waited patiently on the runway.

At JFK, they had set up ten refueling generators, each able to pump fuel through one pipe only. Two were normally used, one under each wing to refuel a 747-400 with up to 64,000 gallons, or an Airbus with over 70,000 gallons with a pump and pipe. At least 45 minutes to an hour would be needed for each plane. Since nobody expected the aircraft to fly further than McGuire or Andrews, one pipe would pump in enough for the short trip and only 20 minutes of fuel was needed to be pumped into each wing.

The colonel had reckoned on 20 minutes for the incoming pilots to be disabled and hidden somewhere in the aircraft. He also prayed that apart from the pilots who would stay aboard, none of the Chinese troops on the ground would know anything about refueling aircraft and how long it should take.

Newark only had eight generators ready to pump fuel into the 11 incoming and thirsty aircraft. It wasn’t enough, and nobody had been told where the aircraft were going to land. Lee Wang had monitored satellite calls and only two calls in the last two days had been received from the enemy. One was to ask if everything was going according to plan, from a voice he didn’t know. He told them that the three airports were secure and that they would be ready within 24 hours of the phone call. He had been asked about refueling, with the other end of the call not giving away any information, and he had stated that the pumping systems were operational and ready.

The second call was from the incoming pilots telling them that they expected to be refueled and out of America within the hour. Lee replied that they would do as good a job as possible and that there was food and drinks in the terminals for the pilots. The pilot in charge responded that they were not allowed to leave the aircraft, but they would appreciate food and refreshments being carried aboard. The plan was set and the American pilots got ready with trays of food and tea urns and even wore captured engineer white coats to look as official as possible.

One by one the aircraft gently came in and landed at the two airports. It was a beautiful sight for anybody who loved flying to see the long final approach of lines of majestic aircraft as far as the eye could see. A group of 30 Chinese engineers headed by Major Wong at Newark, and a second group under Major Chong at JFK got ready in the termination squad uniforms to welcome the troops and make it look like they were ready for their arrival.

Over 300 snipers covered the apron area on the roof tops of the terminals, dressed in white camouflage and invisible to the incoming aircraft with white sheets pulled over their rifles and bodies, which blended with the deep snow perfectly.

Men with batons directed the first aircraft into their refueling positions and mobile stairs were towed by old cars and trucks into position by the left side doors facing the terminal, three to an aircraft. As the first engines began to die down, the fuel lines were connected to the empty wings and jet fuel began to flow. Immediately, Chinese troops dressed in green camouflage descended down the stairs and a commander walked up to the majors who waited for them at both airports.

The Chinese commander at Newark spoke rapidly to Major Wong, bringing out a map to discuss the movement of his troops. The major responded, showing him the way out of the airport, then pointed at the map, showed him the direction of the bridge as the first aircraft slowly emptied hundreds of armed men. Wong gave several orders to his squad in Chinese, and they ran forward to assist the American Air Force technicians with the refueling underneath the first eight large aircraft.

Much the same happened at JFK. As soon as the first aircraft stopped disgorging heavily armed troops, the men in white coats were ready to climb the stairs to “feed” the pilots. Once the new pilots, all armed with Tazers on heavy stun and automatic pistols with silencers beneath their white coats, and with tea urns full of extra ammo entered the empty aircraft, the stairs were immediately pulled away to be towed to the next aircraft waiting to disembark. This move was planned to stop any of the Chinese troops from getting back into the aircraft.