Liberty's Last Stand (26 page)

Wiley Fehrenbach and JR Hays decided to welcome any contingent that came to take the El Paso National Guard armory with a little ambush, then the ambushers would evade. Washington was probably lighting a fire under Lee Parker, so it was just a matter of time before he sent troops to the armory. This time it wouldn't be ten troopers and a colonel. This time he'd send the first team, some tanks, and maybe an infantry company, all with orders to shoot to kill.

Army Apache helicopters were already circling the area. Armed with Hellfire missiles and rockets, they could incinerate any vehicle, and their Gatling guns were hell on exposed troops.

The Apaches were the reason the Guard hadn't moved from the compound all day. Let the army open the ball, Wiley Fehrenbach and JR Hays reasoned, while they waited for the Fort Hood helicopters that were the equalizers. Every minute brought them closer.

JR was in Fehrenbach's office. He heard thunder and watched lightning from the window. A soldier rushed in; three colonels followed.

“Sir,” the soldier blurted. “Four tanks and four Bradleys are coming out the main gate of Fort Bliss.”

Wiley Fehrenbach looked at his colonels and said, “You know what to do.”

The colonels saluted, “Yes, sir!”

“Wait!” JR roared. He got on a handheld radio. “Milestone One Six, this is JR.”

“One Six, go ahead.”

JR could hear the engine; the Blackhawk was airborne.

“At least four tanks and four Bradleys are coming from Fort Bliss, probably headed toward the armory. We need you to take out any airborne Apaches you can find, over.”

“Can do.”

“Leave the stuff on the ground to us. Over.”

“One Six copies. Out.”

“Some of those Apaches are ours, along with a Blackhawk,” JR told the colonels. “Don't let your men shoot at a helicopter unless they are absolutely sure it's the enemy. Now go.”

For the first time that day, JR felt optimistic. Lee Parker had dithered too long.

He got more news when a trooper announced, “We're destroying the decryption gear, sir, so the army doesn't get it.” JR nodded, and the trooper handed him a batch of messages from Camp Mabry.

The first was from Loren Snyder: “She can be moved. I'm searching for men.”

Another, from Elvin Gentry: “Dyess surrendered. Airplanes, weapons depot, and fuel facilities not sabotaged. Am recruiting crews. Awaiting further orders.”

FIFTEEN

L
ightning was flashing from the clouds and gusts of rain and wind were pounding on the Blackhawk as it ran at a hundred feet above the housetops toward the El Paso National Guard armory, the coordinates of which the crew had punched into their GPS systems. The Blackhawk rocked and rolled in the turbulence. Fortunately the myriad lights of the city were still on, houses alight, street lights, traffic on the boulevards, so they had a good ground reference. Two Apaches were behind the Blackhawk, one on the right, one on the left.

If the city had been blacked out, Sabiston would have kept his crews on the ground. Still, they could go into inadvertent IFR conditions at any moment if some of this cloud dripped toward the ground, or if they hit a column of rain, or if the ground rose up into a cloud. If they flew under a thunderstorm, with its river of cold air descending out the bottom, all bets would be off: It would be all the pilots could do to keep their machines from being driven into the ground. Or a house. Or a school. Or a telephone pole. Of course, the same held true for the army pilots in their Apaches. Sabiston was listening on the Fort Bliss air traffic frequencies, trying to discover how many of their Apaches were airborne.

It sounded like only one base Apache was still airborne, and the pilot was bitching about the weather. “I gotta get on the ground,” he told the tower.

Sabiston keyed the intercom to talk to his copilot. “Good news. Only one enemy Apache in the air, and he wants to come down. So what do ya think?”

The copilot, who was from Albany, New York, keyed his mike and replied, “We are fucking crazy. Once more into the suck. Will Texas pay our widows death benefits?”

One of the Apaches behind him keyed the radio. “Sabby, I got him on infrared. Clear to the left.”

The copilot initiated a turn. They were almost on the housetops. Flying a helicopter was an unforgiving art, and in filthy weather this close to the ground, it attained the level of black magic.

The Apache behind them came abreast, accelerating. The Apache was an attack helicopter, manned by a crew of two seated in tandem. The pilot sits in the rear seat, the copilot/weapons operator, or gunner, sits in the front. Both were usually rated pilots and both had controls to fly the machine, but in combat the front-seater operated the sensors and aimed and fired the weapons, which included a chain gun under the fuselage and whatever rockets or missiles were loaded for the mission. It was designed to provide close air support to infantry, armor, and artillery, and it did it well.

The Apache gunner had his target in sight; the chain gun sent a finger of fire shooting across the gloom.

The target absorbed two seconds' worth of 30-mm, then, with its tail rotor gone, lost control and tilted sideways, rotating viciously, then went into the ground and exploded.

Erik Sabiston saw the flash of the explosion in his night-vision goggles.

“The base,” he told the copilot. “Turn toward it.”

They turned right. The base was lit up with streetlights, house lights, lights in parking lots. Tanks and artillery were bunched up, parked in a large grass area behind the exchange, facing the main gate.

“Go down the flight line,” Sabby said.

They got lost once, flying just over the tops of the buildings, then miraculously they saw the field dead ahead: Blackhawks, Apaches, and a few old Chinooks were lined up in rows illuminated by floodlights on poles. They should have at least turned the lights off.

“I have the controls,” Sabby said. He turned the Blackhawk and pulled the nose up, bleeding off airspeed dramatically. When he was down to fifty knots, he straightened out, about fifty feet from the ground, and flew between the two rows closest to the hangar. He spoke on the intercom to the door gunners. “Shoot 'em up, guys.”

The gunners fired one-second bursts at each target. One helicopter caught fire.
Brap
,
brap
,
brap
, the gunners worked methodically; the noise bursts were out of sync. Another Apache in the line caught fire.

“Some ground fire from the hangars,” the copilot said, and within seconds a hole appeared in the right front quarter of their windshield. It was a strange feeling, being fired on intentionally by Americans.

When they finished the line, Sabiston accelerated and turned to fly back to El Paso International. No warning lights on the panel. All systems looked normal. “Any damage in back?” he asked his crew chief.

“Don't think so. I'll inspect.” He turned the controls over to the copilot, then flipped freqs and got on the radio to JR Hays, who needed to know about the disposition of the base armor and artillery.

The Apache flown by Harvey Williston was following the Blackhawk down the line. “I have the target,” his gunner said. Dustin Bonner, from Tupelo, Mississippi, was the gunner. Earlier, Dustin was wondering if he had made the right decision signing on with the Texas Guard. There was going to be a lot of flying, a lot of shooting, and a lot of dying done before this thing was over. Maybe, he thought, he should have sneaked back to Mississippi and got back to playing blues guitar and working on his uncle's catfish farm. One thing was sure, there was a future in catfish. Being a gunner on an Apache in the middle of a shooting war, not so much.

Certainly not when you were flying in a helicopter in shitty weather like this. Even if the bad guys didn't whack you, Mother Nature might. He fired rockets at the first few helicopters in the third row, which look undamaged. Three of them were obscured by the warhead's blast. Locked up a TOW wire-guided missile and launched it. Another. Then he was aiming the 30-mm M230 chain gun mounted on the fuselage between the landing gear. He pulled the trigger, moving from parked chopper to chopper.

The Apache flown by Mike Berk from Bemidji, Minnesota, followed along behind, with Mike's gunner doing the dirty work. Despite soldiers sheltered behind hangar doors taking pot shots, there was no opposition. First Armored had not yet got it into their collective heads that they were in a war. They'd figure it out pretty soon, though, so the next trip down the flight line wasn't going to be as pretty. Ahead of him he saw Williston turn left. “Follow me, Mike. Hellfires into the hangars. You have the one on the right, I'll take the left.”

The two attack helicopters made a sweeping 270-degree turn as lightning flashed and rain came in waves, under that low ceiling, until they were lined up. The ramp lights were off by then—someone had gotten to the switches. It didn't matter to the Apaches, which had night-vision and infrared sensors that allowed the crew to fly and employ their weapons as if it were high noon on a cloudless day. The gunners fired the Hellfire missiles through the open hangar doors, and the explosions caused at least one fire that they could see.

Then the two Apaches swept away southward toward El Paso International.

Wiley Fehrenbach worked feverishly with his officers and NCOs to get their stuff loaded and out of the Guard's compound. When the trucks were rolling, men jumped in their cars and left as fast as they could get out of the garage. The last of the cars were still pouring from the parking lot when the tanks rolled into view.

The tanks stopped, then the Bradleys behind them. Only when the parking lot was empty did the tanks move forward again, carefully.

From his vantage down the street three blocks, JR Hays and two volunteer troopers watched the tanks and Bradleys go by. JR had an AT4 under his right arm and an M4 carbine on a sling across his back. One of the troopers was also carrying an AT4, an extra, just in case.

Before they left the armory, JR asked the young guardsmen, “Have either of you ever actually fired an AT4?”

“No, sir,” each of them said.

“Then you get to watch me miss tonight. Your job is to act as lookouts, to ensure we don't get jumped by scouts.”

But to JR's amazement, there were no scouts. This was
America
, for Christ's sake, not Baghdad or Mosul or some other squalid Arab town. Well, the soldiers would learn. And fast. The next time the Guard tried this, it wouldn't be so easy.

JR decided he would try for a Bradley when the troopers had re-embarked and were headed back to base. Patrols looking for guerillas or hidden troops took manpower. A constant low-level threat also took a toll on morale. JR knew because he had done his tours in the Middle East.

JR found a basement stairwell to hide in, and took the extra antitank rocket.

“If you see a scout, open up, force him to take cover, then scatter to the rendezvous point. Tonight's goal is to ratchet up their fear a notch. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Both these young troopers looked to be about twenty years old, but they were game. Given time, they would be good soldiers. Time. That's what JR had to buy them by arranging some serious air attacks on the 1st Armored. Fuel storage tanks were probably the top priority if he could get some planes in the air carrying bombs. Without fuel, 1st Armored was going nowhere.

With just the top of his camo cap showing, JR watched the troops set up a perimeter around the armory, with tanks on the four corners. Bradleys each carried six troopers, so that meant there were twenty-four troopers out there afoot, searching and guarding and looking to shoot the first man they saw with a gun.

Time passed. Perhaps a half hour. The idling tanks were surprisingly quiet. The thunderstorm drifted off to the east and the wind was just a zephyr.

Finally JR realized they had fired the armory. Probably by pouring gasoline around. Some of the windows must have been broken or shattered on their own, because soon smoke was oozing around the lights on poles around the place and the lights illuminating the parking lot. He hoped the fire department had the sense to stay in the station tonight.

He checked his sentries, who were out of sight. Waited.

Waiting was the hardest part, he thought. You never get used to it. You wait for everything in the army, literally everything. Take a number, soldier. Or get in line. Then in combat, you wait some more. Wait to shoot and wait to die.

Finally, with visible fire coming from three of the armory windows, the Abrams tanks started snorting and moving. Two of them led off up the street.

JR Hays ignored them and watched the troopers return to the Bradleys. The Bradleys lined up; two tanks guarded the rear of the column.

Darn.

Picking up his AT4 and the spare, JR scuttled out of his hidey hole—he didn't want to be there if the tank or Bradleys cut loose. The Abrams main battle tank was a formidable foe. Equipped with a 120-mm gun, a .50-caliber machine gun, and two .30-caliber machine guns, it was a rolling sixty-ton fortress protected by massive armor. Quite simply, the M1A1 Abrams was the finest tank on planet earth.

The Bradley was also armored, more lightly than a tank, but for protection it did have a nice 25-mm gun that fired up to two hundred rounds a minute. Twenty-five millimeters meant the shells were about an inch in diameter. Throwing three of those monsters every second, the gun could shred buildings, vehicles, and people very nicely, thank you, at terrific ranges.

JR took up a new position, partially hidden by a corner of a building. He laid his spare AT4 on the ground against the building. The lead pair of tanks clattered past JR at perhaps eight to ten miles per hour. He turned on the battery in the AT4. Now the Bradleys came, in formation, at the same speed. Kneeling, JR glanced at the trailing tank, then sprinted forward to get a square shot at the rear of the last Bradley. He kneeled, pushed the safety button forward, quickly made sure he had the crosshairs where he wanted them, and pushed the fire button. The job took no more than four seconds. Just a tiny delay and the rocket shot out of the tube, leaving an enormous blast of glowing hot exhaust gases pouring from the rear of the launch tube. . .and almost instantly the rocket hit the end of the Bradley, punched through, and exploded. A jet of fire shot back out the entry hole.

JR had already dropped the empty tube and was running for the corner of the sheltering building when he heard the chatter of a machine gun. That was from the tank behind him, he thought. He tore around the side of the building, out of sight of the tanks, ran right by the extra loaded tube lying by the building, and ran hard. Troopers from the other Bradleys would be after him in seconds.