The Battle for Houston...The Aftermath (3 page)

Now that they had reached the limits of rural living, he could see what the men who had travelled overland to join his army had told him back in Laredo.

There were no houses without damage. Most were broken down blackened ruins where once families lived. There were wild-looking and barking dogs everywhere; and his men wanted to shoot them from the vehicles, but orders had been given for silent travel. Every shopping center or strip mall he passed was nothing but broken bricks and blackened ruins. The only thing that he saw which looked undamaged was one McDonalds sign on the corner of a strip mall. He saw the famous sign, but he couldn’t see where the McDonalds had stood. The whole strip mall was nothing more than blackened rubble.

The airfield was small, but at least there was enough room to park many of his trucks on the asphalt runway and taxiway in long lines. There was one empty hangar which still had its structure undamaged, and he turned it into his overnight headquarters.

Manuel radioed Alberto and was told that he too had reached his airfield and would set up camp. He would be the backup army for Manuel, who didn’t want to show anybody watching, the size of his forces just yet.

Pedro’s army was still twenty-odd miles behind and was to camp in a town called Pearsall. There they found several men, who were waiting to join their army. They had accumulated around a thousand cans of food from several unoccupied houses; the food would only feed a small part of the army, but they and their rations were welcomed. Pedro set up camp in the whole town, his men taking ruined houses for their overnight accommodations.

Here they were far enough away from listening ears to solve the growing dog-barking problem and many animals met with quick deaths before the rest decided to retreat and head out of the danger area.

Carlos Sanchez had told him that he thought San Antonio had no more than three thousand American soldiers guarding the town, but he didn’t know where they were based. He anticipated a thousand in each of the three bases.

Early the next morning, May 10th, Manuel’s army cut hundreds of openings into the perimeter wire around Lackland Air Force Base while Alberto’s army continued up I-35 into the center of the city and towards Fort Houston, the second base on his list. His men were to divide into two groups, one half attacking Fort Houston while the other half headed to Randolph Air Force Base a couple of miles further east.

It was impossible to take the whole city by surprise, but Manuel’s armies needed to take over the bases and make sure that the food supplies and anything else they could scrounge out of the bases wasn’t destroyed by the Americans.

At exactly 06:30 Manuel’s army attacked the installations at Lackland. In hordes his men spread out, shooting anybody who fired back at them. There were good defenses, but not good enough to repel an army of 25,000 men and slowly the firing ceased as American soldiers who weren’t immediately shot surrendered their stations. It wasn’t worth fighting when you saw thousands of enemy advancing at you.

By 07:30 hours Fort Houston was attacked and much the same happened there. At 08:15, Randolph Air Force Base was attacked and, with only a couple of hundred men defending this base, the battle was over within 30 minutes with many of the still sleeping soldiers either shot in their beds or taken prisoner.

At all three bases, the radio areas were hit first. Unfortunately for the attacking armies, at Randolph the commander had a satellite phone connection and called the president telling him of the attack by thousands of civilians. One of Alberto’s men saw the man on the phone, quickly put a couple of bullets through his head, and then crushed the satellite phone with the butt of his AK 47.

At the other end of the phone, the President of the United States heard the gunshots, heard the Air Force Commander grunt sharply and then fall. The last thing he heard was somebody shouting orders in Spanish and then the phone went dead, and his face went white.

“Where the hell is Randolph Air Force Base?”
he thought to himself and immediately got on the phone to Carlos to find out if he knew, tell him what he had heard, and find out where the video satellite was focused because he wanted it to focus on the area where the base was situated.

Carlos also didn’t know where Randolph was so the president immediately phoned General Patterson in China. He got the answer that it was Joint Command in San Antonio, Texas, and a now pissed-off General Patterson would be back as soon as possible.

Flight from China – May

Colonel Patterson headed downwards to the underground level stepping over three bodies his grenade must have taken out. There were lights, and he carefully stepped into an empty corridor which smelled badly of explosives. He backed into the stairwell and watched a line of guys looking at him from the stairs above.

He didn’t want to leave the surface, but he knew that the Marines would follow his orders and fight until there was no more opposition. What worried him down here was not only meeting the enemy but coming face to face with American soldiers who shot first and asked questions later.

There was nothing else to do, but bite the bullet and go forward. He grabbed his third grenade and slung his M-16 over his shoulder and took his pistol out of its holster.

He looked back into the empty corridor and decided that to the right was the correct way to proceed and it should take him towards the rear of the base. He silently headed to the next left hand corner and peeked around it. Again the short corridor was empty and it turned right again twenty feet ahead. Also there were two doors on either side of the corridor.

The general reached the next corner and peeked around. It opened into a large cavern, but he couldn’t see anything past the entrance. He nodded to the Marines to open the side doors and they loudly crashed the doors open.

“Who’s there!” shouted an American voice from the cavern around the corner. “Show yourselves or we send in grenades, we have dozens of guys, so make my day!”

“U.S. soldiers, Air Force and Marines checking out these doors,” shouted out General Patterson and he peeked around the corner to see three Chinese-American Marines dressed in red army uniforms ready to blow his head off. “OK men, it’s me, General Patterson. We are checking these doors.”

“Um, sorry, Sir!” stated one Marine as the general showed himself and the three men saluted. “You shouldn’t be doing this special work; it’s far too dangerous down here. We are making sure no enemy pass this point. We have several other squads guarding other entry points so you’d better let us guide you. Those doors were locked and we didn’t bother to open them, it would have made too much noise.

“Two store rooms with cleaning equipment,” added the Marine captain coming around the corner. Again the three men saluted.

“We heard you guys blasting the hell out of the enemy up there,” continued the Chinese-American Marine sergeant taking off his Red Army outerwear to show his U.S. camouflage. “I suppose we can get rid of this borrowed gear,” and he and his two men discarded the enemy clothing. “Unfortunately we have had only a little fishing down here, caught only three fish since you guys arrived. Come see.”

The general followed him and found three Chinese soldiers tied up and gagged. One had the rank of major and the other two looked like sergeants. General Patterson asked the Marine to take off the major’s gag and he ordered Major Wong to ask the man if the man knew where Colonel Zhing was.

“He was blown up and killed on the wall sir,” Major Wong translated, getting a quick answer out of the man. “This man is his second in command.”

“Ask him why he was coming underground,” commanded the general.

“There are systems to activate if they were ever attacked and with the colonel dead it was his duty to make sure that the underground sections were closed and made secure. Unfortunately, it seems that he was too late and he can’t understand where these soldiers came from.”

“Ask him if he would like to guide us to the main area. If not we can find it ourselves and then we won’t need him and I will shoot him,” stated General Patterson raising his pistol towards the man.

The major immediately agreed to show them around, and the Marine sergeant stated that he would go on ahead and make sure the other men wouldn’t shoot first. They still had their issued dog whistles which would warn the others of their approach.

They were still only twenty feet underground, and they could hear that the battle above them was dying down.

Two men pulled the major up on his feet and tied a rope around his arms. He had been well frisked and only had his tunic, shirt and trousers on. His shoes and the rest of his equipment were in a pile with the other men’s clothing and weapons several feet away.

With the sergeant leading, they slowly moved forward, the Chinese major several feet behind him and the general behind the major with his pistol in his back. The underground room, with unpainted cement on all four sides, was empty of people. In the middle were several 50-gallon drums of what looked like gasoline and several large wooden boxes on pallets.

The room looked much like the armory at the airfield and again there was the same green button Preston had found on the opposite wall in the airfield’s armory. Actually there were three of them across the rear wall, not just one in the middle.

General Patterson wanted one of the boxes inspected and two soldiers got to work opening the closest one of five. Inside was what looked like spare parts for the helicopters. Looking around carefully he noticed an elevator door, painted grey, on the side of the room. He wanted to use it to go up and check what was happening above but thought it was a little premature and he might get his head blown off by both his men and the enemy, so he postponed his rise to the surface.

“Have your men gone through this section yet?” the general asked the sergeant.

“No, Sir. We have been using that other door over there only,” he stated pointing to a second open door on the front wall and to their left. “It leads to some offices and sleeping areas. We didn’t realize that those buttons would open doors; we thought they were for the elevator or something.”

General Patterson asked the sergeant and Major Wong to push the buttons to the outside doors first. This time thick wooden hallway doors opened, nothing happened and the general told the major to push the middle door.

The major pushed the button and waited. A larger ten-foot by ten-foot concrete door opened in the wall and showed a cavern behind, which was in darkness.

“Sergeant, go find some of your men, we’ll wait here. I want these two smaller doors guarded while we inspect the cavern behind the large door,” ordered the general. They waited and a few minutes later several more Marines arrived. “I want one of you with a whistle to come with me. I can’t hear it, but you guys can. Major Wong, ask our captive what is behind that large door.” The conversation was quite long.

“It’s the entrance to the nuclear missile chambers and there are five silos. He also said that three silos are empty and two still have missiles in them,” replied Major Wong. General Patterson’s face went white with shock.

The captured man went first and when he hit the light switch the general’s mouth opened and his face drained of blood.

He was at upper missile height and only a steel chain stopped him from falling into an empty silo a hundred feet or more deep. The walls were blackened and it still stunk from the blast when the missiles had left the silo. They were in the middle of the silo room. The next two silos on either side of the ones he was standing next to were fifty feet away and behind armored glass to the roof. Both were empty.

General Patterson believed that one of these had killed General Allen and most of Beijing.

This was what he had come for, but he counted only three; and he had been told five silos. He looked at the Chinese major and the major pointed to two more green buttons behind protective glass on the other side of the cavern they were standing in. A narrow corridor between the glass dividers led to the other side.

General Patterson asked the captured major to go first and he headed over and pushed one of the two buttons. Again a large door opened and this time, once the light was turned on, the general’s mouth opened and shut like a fish. He was in silo number five and it was much bigger and deeper, and had a large rocket still in it. Major Wong opened the other door and walked into a separate room.

“Bloody hell!” stated General Patterson in total shock. The tip of a Russian R-36M multi-head Intercontinental Ballistic Missile stood in front of him, above him, and a hundred feet below him in its massive silo. He looked around and the mouths of all the men were open.

“What is this Russian 1970s missile ready for?” the shocked general asked Wong to ask the major.

“If the invasion failed, Colonel Zhing had orders to fire this missile. You can see on its side the writing of the Supreme Commander. This Russian-purchased R-36 has 10 warheads, and the Supreme Commander wrote on its side where he wanted each warhead to go. I was coming down to begin the firing sequence manually from a control station over there,” he added quite calmly pointing to a command room in the corner of the silos where one of the smaller doors was; the center looked like six inches of armored glass protected it from blasts.

“Who has the codes to fire this weapon?” asked the general looking at the scribble written in English on the side of the missile less than a foot away from him.

“Just the colonel and I,” replied the major still calm.

“Is there another Russian missile next door?” the general asked Wong. The answer wasn’t what he expected.

“The second silo blasted our three Zedong satellites into space in 2009 on one of these same Russian missiles, stated the major. “Our Chairman then placed this Russian missile in here, in case something might go wrong in America. The three smaller missiles arrived a few months later from Pakistan, also in 2010, and were for our own Chinese cities if the Chinese government tried to stop our plan. They were given suggestions from the Chairman that he had these missiles in a secret location here. The Russian missile in the silo next door is the same as this one, General, but it still has three of the latest Chinese communications satellites as its payload, not an atomic warhead, and was to be used as a backup if the first three satellites didn’t make orbit. The Chairman wanted to purchase a second R-36M multi-headed intercontinental ballistic missile from the Russians, but they didn’t want him to have more than one. He was made to sign an agreement in Vladivostok to state that he would send this missile to America if he ever needed it, or if the Russians wanted him to use it.”