The Battle for Houston...The Aftermath (18 page)

Charlie, running last, followed the rest towards the open door in the smaller building. He suddenly felt the hair on his back stiffen and saw a shape move in his peripheral vision. He threw the unconscious Alberto into hands through the open door, shouted to catch the body and that he needed backup ASAP. He violently threw off his bloody poncho, turned as the door closed behind him and headed back the way he had run. It was raining hard and now he was getting wet; visibility had dropped somewhat but he could see what had caught his eye.

The wind was making a screaming noise again. Charlie felt to make sure his Glock was in his waistband, in position, and the now rain-cleansed knife in his hand was pointing downwards, and looked forward to see a troop transporter coming towards him behind the warehouse they had just left. He also noticed that the blood hadn’t diluted itself enough yet and would be easily visible.

Charlie waved at the truck which was coming straight towards him. It was still fifty feet away when he pointed to the blood pool growing several yards in front of the approaching truck and put his hand in front of his mouth to signal eating food.

The truck carried on towards him, and he hoped that some of his men had heard his call for backup.

“What is all this blood, amigo?” stated a passenger in the cab.

“I shot a large deer, it was standing right here and we are cutting it up in that building!” he shouted pointing to where he had just thrown the body. “We want to skin it and cut it before we leave! Do you want some meat?” Charlie asked noticing that he was totally alone. The men hadn’t heard his request.

“Si!” replied the man. Charlie hopped onto the step as the truck continued towards the building he had just walked away from.

“How many men in the back?” Charlie asked the man, taking out his Glock and keeping it hidden behind the outside door panel. “We don’t want to give away too much meat!”

“A dozen, we are going to get the rest of our men in the other terminal. We don’t have to tell the other men about the meat, amigo,” the man smiled while replying.

“That’s good,” replied Charlie as the driver stopped the truck, put on the park brake and both men caught a single bullet each from Charlie’s Glock through the head. The silencer did its job; nobody would have heard the shots in the rear of the truck.

Charlie looked around and saw one of his men looking at him through the slit in the door waiting for orders. Charlie pointed to his Glock, showed two fingers for two men and then held up the four fingers of his free hand twice and pointed to the rear of the truck.

Immediately two men rushed out and headed for the rear of the truck on the driver’s side.

Charlie jumped off the step and did the same. They met at the rear where all three men jumped up, held onto the closed rear gate, and simultaneously took aim and fired a dozen rounds into the rear with their silenced Glocks before Charlie ran out of ammo.

It sounded like somebody walking through a forest of twigs as the rebels inside the bed of the dark truck saw the movement at the rear and noticed three ugly men calmly and gracefully shooting them. There were a couple of screams as bullets didn’t kill, but they were quickly followed up by a second shot which did.

Within seconds there was silence and Charlie told the men to go and inspect to make sure everyone was dead. “I will turn the truck around, and we can offload the cargo,” he shouted to the men. Already others had cleared the front of the cab and Charlie jumped in, felt warm blood soak through his trousers as he sat in it, and proceeded to turn the truck around.

One by one they dragged the bodies in. The death toll inside the building was growing rapidly and once the truck was clear, a tarp was placed over the dead pile.

“The front door is locked; these tankers don’t work but we can make sure nobody gets in here for a while,” shouted one of his men.

“Our work here at Bush Intercontinental Airport is done guys, for round one. The first army is leaving and we should ride with our new Calderón buddy, here, in the truck to visit our friends. I’m sure our guys have left the airport area after seeing increasing troop movements, I know that the radio will still be hidden under the bridge, so let’s go and join the battle.”

Calmly, they locked down the building making sure it would need heavy tools to get in, started the truck with the unconscious Alberto in the company of six smiling Seals in the rear, and headed towards the northern area of the airport they had come in on. They joined the tail of a mass movement of vehicles heading in the same direction from underneath the northern terminals and stopped just after the bridge where the other Seals had hidden six hours earlier.

“Charlie Six to anybody out there,” called Mike, after two men had retrieved the hidden radio, and they drove off to catch up with the front army.

“Mike Three here, Charlie Six,”
came a clear response.

“Hi, Mike Three, we are leaving the airport fence, and we are behind their forward army coming your way. It looks like they are heading northwest. We have extraction number two aboard and extraction number three is a few miles ahead of us. Three quarters of their men are still in the airport and ready for an air show. Over.”

“Roger that. We have a buddy,
Pave Pronto
, incoming and two of her sisters about ten minutes behind her. We have the forward enemy unit visual and will start court proceedings in about five minutes. I recommend you head on foot towards the railway yard. Paul Six is already on his way in and Mike One, who is listening in, will meet and greet you. I hope you can return to the airport once the air show is over and, hopefully, Extraction Three will re-join you there soon.”

“Roger that; say hi to them from us; send them back and we’ll work out a new plan. It will take us about three hours to get our cargo delivered and then return to the outer airport perimeter fence. We will leave our limo-ride close by, so don’t blow it up. Out!” he ended.

“I hope they don’t find our body pile before we get back,” suggested Charlie to the driver as they sped through the now gaping hole in the fence where hundreds of vehicles had passed through the holes they had cut a few days earlier.

* * *

At the same time,
Blue Moon
was landing at McConnell. The weather was wet and rainy and the temperature cold enough to wear a jacket, as the North Carolina crowd deplaned and got ready for flying. Preston, Carlos, Martie, and an Air Force pilot had landed an hour earlier, flying in the Mustangs and the P-8 Lightning.

“They got two of the brothers, Carlos,” stated General Patterson excitedly as the earlier pilots, now fed and ready for battle, walked into the control tower, where the general had made his center of operations.

“Excellent! I’ll tell my Uncle Philippe. He will certainly want to get them back to Bogotá for trial. There are many political implications getting them back there, and I’m sure you and the president will understand,” replied Carlos pulling out his satellite phone.

“I’m sure the president will agree once I put it to him,” replied General Patterson. “We have a Jolly Green Giant going in to collect and resupply. Also, Preston, Buck’s Huey is being retired as Air Force One as of today. You had better tell him. We have the president’s old VH-3A Sea King
,
the one on display at the Nixon Library, now operational and it will be Marine One again until further notice. Buck is currently at Edwards getting ready to deliver your gunships to Colombia tomorrow. I asked him to go over and hold the delivery until we know we don’t need them here. Only so many aircraft can blast one airport to pieces, and the first flight of Chinese helicopters, the ones we saved from Harbin, are arriving in an hour.”

“We have more U.S. helicopters operational?” asked Preston.

“Yes, we are at desperate measures. We have pulled all the C-130s away from food distribution and have had every technician in all the forces working 24/7 to get as many choppers in the air as possible. The Coast Guard has three of their older Sea Kings in the air, the Navy has managed another dozen, mostly their SH-3Gs, the Air Force has seven more 70s-era Jolly Green Giants airborne, and the Marines have given us our biggest fleet yet: twenty-two of their Sea Stallions. We currently have 200 helicopters and the same amount of civilian fixed-wing aircraft helping Mike Mallory with his food program and a dozen newly revamped Sikorskys flying in for body-cleaning operations. They will be heading into the Interstate-10 area later today.”

“What about the jets going in to Houston?” asked Martie.

“Weather is still too bad for flight operations for the faster jets for at least another hour, but you guys are heading out in thirty minutes with four air-to-ground rockets and two MK-77 napalm bombs per P-51. Your bomb weight is 552 pounds each and they are the smaller-sized MK-77 napalms. You will have four rockets per aircraft, two under each wing. We found a supply of these old World War II “Holy Moses” rockets. These High Velocity Aircraft unguided models are pretty old, but were used up to 1955. We have enough for two attacks and they are being fitted to your aircraft as we speak. Your P-38 Lightning, Preston, will have two larger 1,000-pound HE bombs and eight of these rockets underneath her wings. We will use up this old stuff until either they surrender, or they are gone. Our bomb loads are light enough for quick maneuvering. We already have three gunships on their way in, and
Blue Moon
will head in within five minutes.

You guys are faster, catch up to protect
Blue Moon,
and go in once
Blue Moon
and the other three gunships are done. Your mission is to open the terminal roofs or roadways, depending on where the rebels are, with your rockets and then drop in the napalm. Once done, you leave only after the gunships are safely on their way home. Of course you are free to use your gun ammo on anything moving, but there is a M35 troop transport the Seals are calling their limo, so if you see one vehicle by itself, leave it alone. The Seals wouldn’t appreciate it and they get real mean when they are angry!” General Patterson smiled. “Also return to Dyess after this mission and Dyess will get our F-4s and F-5s back into a closer range once again.”

“And the Super Tweets, General?” asked Martie.

“Martie, the Tweets are going in two hours after you guys return this afternoon. We will first have the gunships returning and then you guys will be refueled and re-armed, and you will be air support for them on the next attack. We have a busy day and we had better get down to the briefing room.”

The weather was letting up. The Orion Hurricane Hunters had reported to the men on the ground that Hurricane No-Name was no more; she had decreased down to a tropical storm, winds less than seventy miles an hour, was being pushed eastwards, and the storm center was 50 miles out and directly south of the Texas/Louisiana border. General Patterson gave orders for all aircraft not yet on flight operations to get airborne.

Lieutenant Paul reached the railway yard an hour later and twenty minutes after the McConnell briefing started. He handed his prize over to the Marines. The Jolly Green Giant was still an hour out, and so was Pedro. He had begun to regain consciousness halfway to Spring, but quickly had been given a sleeping pill: a blow to the head to put him back to sleep.

Lieutenant Meyers arrived an hour later and, now awake, bound and gagged, Pedro’s bloodshot eyes, showed shock as his brother’s still unconscious body was placed next to him and then also was bound and gagged.

Visibility was still bad in Spring, Texas, several miles north of downtown Houston, where the helicopter was been guided in by radio to an open landing zone between several railway cars. The rain was still heavy when the squalls hit and she came directly from the north and then turned eastwards to land into the wind.

Large cases of food and munitions supplies were hauled out, the two captives thrown in, had M-16s pointed at them by six men inside the large helicopter, and within two minutes, the Jolly Green Giant brushed over railcars to the east as her rotors bit into the wind and lifted her slowly up and away. She stayed low to compensate for any unnecessary noise.

* * *

The large Marine force covering the wide twelve-lane I-45 highway north of the airport could now see the enemy army several hundred yards to their south. The whole army had stopped as if it was a starting line for a vehicle race, and the Marines were wondering what was going on.

* * *

“Where is Alberto?” screamed Manuel into his radio. He had stopped the northward direction of every one of 25,000 men to ask where his brother was. Unbeknown to him, Alberto was being placed into a helicopter a mile south and four miles east of his position. A quarter of his men had traveled up the second highway, the Hardy Toll Road and had joined his group as they merged onto Interstate-45. The weather was bad, and the helicopter had gone in low and well out of hearing range, additionally obscured by the ground wind and rain.

This bottle-neck had slowed down his forward movement, even though he had four roads stretching north—two four-lane highways and two two-lane side roads. This had happened every work day the previous year, when this area of highway was jammed with homeward-bound rush hour traffic traveling north out of the city.

They travelled slowly through desolate highway searching for any signs of life. Even the dogs had disappeared and this worried Manuel. He passed by a large empty and fire-destroyed mall on his left. “The Woodlands Mall” was noted on his American-made map and he decided to stop and find out where Alberto’s and Pedro’s men were. The weather was clearing and he wanted them out of the airport before an air attack could take place. He didn’t know what was going on around him, but he knew never to stay in one place too long.

“Carlo, get me Pedro on the radio,” he shouted into the mike, frustrated that Alberto’s men did not know where his brother was.

“He disappeared to talk to you four hours ago, Señor. He never returned. We are waiting for him at the airport,”
answered Carlo, one of Pedro’s commanders.