Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival (47 page)

The early morning darkness was chilly as the jeeps, filled with men and weapons, headed north on the 190 as quietly as they could. During the night Manuel and Alberto had picked the jeeps with the best exhaust silencers. They should get to within mortar range before being heard. The army naturally would have guards out, but several Mexican civilian vehicles had passed through their position during the last twenty four hours, not realizing that there was a large group of hidden men watching them pass.

Manuel reckoned that the Mexican army would have a road block either side and told Alberto to silently take out all enemy soldiers until they got within range.

Alberto’s jeeps crept northwards at five miles an hour, trying to keep as quiet as possible still under the cover of darkness. His scouts from the previous day told him that they were within half a mile of the camp. He stopped and a dozen men with sharp knives went forward through the brush to find a road block with Mexican soldiers in different forms of sleep. One man was literally sleeping standing up with his head on a tree trunk they had built as a roadblock. The main gun position was positioned behind a row of sandbags a couple of feet high, a hundred feet behind the roadblock. Their blood ran down the road as they were quickly dealt with. There were also two good-looking jeeps to increase their vehicle numbers.

Once the roadblock was dealt with, he and his scouts moved forward on foot, using all the cover they could. There was a growing band of light on the eastern horizon and they only had several minutes to use what was left of the darkness as surprise.

They crept up a second rise of sandy ground, reached the top, looked down and saw a large army camp spread out a couple of hundred yards away. It was within mortar range and he sent a scout back to tell the men to drive the jeeps quietly to the first rise and then haul the four 80-mm mortars by foot the last couple of hundred yards.

Alberto could hear the convoy of jeeps creeping forward and he doubted that the sound would travel much further than where he was. Now the sky was lightening as he saw silhouettes of teams of men hauling the heavy mortars, four men to a mortar, with several bringing up cases of bombs behind them.

They were set up. His best mortar men aimed into the most densely tented areas as the sun lit up the higher hills for everyone to see. There were guards walking around and he scanned the terrain around his position. He couldn’t see any enemy soldiers any closer and his second-in-command whispered in his ear that the mortars were ready. He ordered his men to ready the dozen shoulder rocket launchers he had brought and waited for this second group to prepare.

The sun’s highest edge rose over the horizon as he brought his right arm down, signaling the attack to begin. The quiet around him was broken by mortars and rockets being propelled out of their tubes. Alberto had whispered orders for 12 bombs per mortar to first lay a deadly barrage of fire and then his rocket launchers fire a volley of six rockets per launcher. There were screams of orders from the camp as soon as the first hisses of bombs leaving the tubes were heard. Suddenly, and with the first eight mortar bombs in the air, there were men running everywhere as the first four bombs hit in a pattern at the same second, spewing men and tents in every direction. More mortars went into the smoke and dozens of explosions ripped the quiet scene into pandemonium.

Within three minutes 48 mortar bombs and 72 rockets blew several areas of the large camp to pieces. The damage was relatively small for such a big camp but men could be seen running in all directions out of the danger area.

“Get the machine-gun jeeps forward, the others pick up the mortars and give them a good reason to want to follow us!” screamed Alberto into his radio mike and five jeeps with machine guns rushed forward towards the camp. The rest of the jeeps were driven forward to collect the mortars and launchers and as the jeeps spun around to face south the men piled in their heavy equipment and climbed aboard.

Alberto, viewing the pandemonium below him, suddenly saw a convoy of old armored vehicles and two tanks come over and down the rise of the road a mile away, north of the camp and it didn’t take long for two of his five machine gun-equipped jeeps to become pieces of twisted hot metal as the tanks blew them to pieces.

“Get all our jeeps out of here! I want two teams of rocket launchers to reload and take out those tanks!” Alberto shouted as something landed several feet from where he lay. He instinctively ducked as the shell blew a couple of men to pieces. The tanks still couldn’t see the enemy but they had figured out where they were.

“We checked the area north of the camp last night!” shouted a scout over the radio. “There was nothing there last night!”

“Everybody get out of here! Take those two Mexican jeeps! Let’s go!” Alberto shouted as a second shell from one of the tanks landed several yards behind him and blew a small tree to pieces.

He had certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest, but didn’t see the 5,000 troops which had just arrived an hour earlier still behind the northern rise and ready for travel.

They drove with pedals to the metal out of the area. The enemy was still firing blind and they roared over the next rise before another tank shell landed in the rocky outcrop to their left, sending shrapnel-sized rocks in every direction.

“Manuel, Manuel!” shouted Alberto over the radio as a piece of rock whistled passed his ear. “They have dozens of armored carriers and two tanks. There is no way we can fight that many.” He heard a small propeller aircraft fly overhead. He watched it follow the road until it was taken out a couple of miles south of them by Manuel’s rockets. It literally flew into a barrage of ground-to-air rockets.

“Everybody get into vehicles, we are heading for the border!” shouted Manuel into the radio “I need all the rocket launchers we have here and their missiles.” His men scampered into all the remaining vehicles they had. Some of the captured Mexican trucks had forty soldiers in them and were pulling full fuel tankers behind them as they left camp; they would not be so fast. Manuel watched them go, holding any jeeps back with the collected rocket launchers, and waited for Alberto to come over the rise to the north.

A few minutes later Alberto’s jeeps came towards them as the last of his vehicles disappeared over the next rise to the south. Alberto’s jeep screeched to a halt as Manuel patiently waited in the middle of the road.

“They seem to have new reinforcements!” shouted Alberto as his jeep stopped a foot away from his brother. “It looks like a whole new army of soldiers with two tanks and at least six other armored vehicles.”

“It was to be expected,” replied Manuel. “They were waiting for something.”

“I think we reduced their numbers by a few hundred but that is not important anymore with their reinforcements. I saw a long line of troop vehicles behind the tanks, at least twenty with more coming over the rise as we left them behind,” added Alberto.

“I’ve told the rest of our men to head for the border. You go and keep them moving. Shoot anything out of the sky you can. I’m going to take out their fuel tankers. That should give us some time and then I’ll catch up to you. Alberto, apart from refueling, you head south until I tell you to stop. Just tell me which road you are on, understand?”

Alberto nodded and Manuel allowed half of Alberto’s jeeps to head south before checking what weapons his men had. He then asked the men how much ammo they had. The answer he got was eleven rockets for four rocket launchers and three jeeps with a machine gun on its rear bed.

He headed south in the lead of his twelve jeeps and fifty men to find a place to prepare an ambush on the main road. Manuel needed a place where there was open ground and where the jeeps could easily escape south without using the tarred highway.

His forward jeep with his second-in-command driving found a good spot several miles further south. Manuel’s group had nearly caught up with the slower convoy ahead of him when they left the hilly area and found open ground of a dozen or so miles before the next range of hills.

There was a hill where the road had been cut into the side of it. On the other side was a long rise of scrub and bush about 400 yards off the road and continuing south into the distance. Manuel drove a mile further on then turned off the road and doubled back through the scrub to his ambush point. He lined his jeeps up behind the ridge for a quick getaway and gathered his men to check what they had.

He checked to make sure that all the rocket projectiles were HEAT, “High Explosive Anti-Tank” rounds. The four rocket launchers he had were all older RPGs, but he had enough to do the needed damage and he had his best RPG marksmen with him.

With limited time they set up the ambush. The two tanks would be the most important targets and he ordered two men with launchers to place themselves in a second ambush position half a mile further south. He wanted the two remaining RPGs to destroy the fuel tankers being pulled behind any troop carriers. Once hit, the tankers would become balls of fire which could take out several trucks with their violent explosions. Also, having a vertical wall of dirt right behind the ambush area, he hoped that the pressure of the fireballs would do painful damage to more soldiers, or at least their ear drums, so that they couldn’t hear orders being shouted. He had done this a couple of times in Colombia with great success.

All Manuel needed now was as much fuel as possible to arrive in the ambush zone before the tanks got to his second ambush further south.

His second two rocket teams headed south with the machine guns on the jeeps to do the necessary damage and to make sure the path was clear for him and his four jeeps. And then they waited.

It was only twenty minutes later when the first tank arrived traveling at a good twenty miles an hour. This was followed by three armored personnel carriers with machine guns sticking out of their turrets. The second tank was next, then a second group of three armored carriers and behind emerged a dozen troop carriers.

Manuel worked out the distance between his two ambush points. A quarter mile was already used up and he began to sweat.

Finally, the first troop carrier pulling a heavy fuel tank presumably for the tanks up front came into sight and he got ready with his radio mike. He whispered orders for the first man with an RPG to bead his aim on the first tanker. It held about 500 gallons and looked heavy by the way its tires were squashed nearly flat. Then came a second tanker and two jeeps followed behind it.

“We need to fire pretty soon,” whispered his radioman further south, and he asked them to wait a few more seconds. A third, fourth and fifth troop transport truck hauling tankers appeared as the radioman to the south whispered urgently that they needed to fire immediately. Still Manuel waited another two seconds until he shouted fire over the radio. His gunners rose as one, took aim and got their rockets off before the Mexicans saw them.

It took twenty seconds to reload and aim the launchers and two massive explosions hit their ears as two of the tankers took direct hits. A second massive blast hit them, hurting their ears from 400 yards away. Manuel watched as his second launcher fired their second volley towards the lead troop carriers 700 yards away. Again a vehicle took a direct hit as the third and last RPG rocket fired by his fastest team flew high and hit the embankment feet above its intended target. Millions of pieces of rock and stone whistled out in all directions and Manuel shouted to get into the vehicles and get out of here.

His jeep’s RPG gunner was reloading and then aimed his third and last rocket at another truck and tanker, and Manuel waited for him as the others aimed their jeeps south. It hit the truck which seemed full of supplies and the truck, now a fireball, lifted off the road into the air and landed on its fuel tanker which immediately blew apart causing Manuel’s ears to ring. He grabbed for the passenger side of the jeep and they followed the dust of the others before the surprised Mexican troops had fired their first shot.

He reached his second ambush point and the jeep stopped and he stood up to look over the rise to view the damage. There were two armored vehicles heading directly towards his position, one tank had smoke coming out of its turret and the other was going around in circles, a track had been damaged by the RPG rocket. He saw three of the armored vehicles burning and he sat down and slapped his driver to move forward.

“We have armored vehicles at 300 yards, get going!” he screamed to his driver. He then radioed to the rest of the jeeps making a massive dust storm in front of him to get back onto the asphalt to stop the dust and wait for him. He needed help getting the armored cars off his tail.

His jeep was at full speed and his crew was hanging on for their lives as he saw a pattern of bullets hitting the sand to his left. He shouted to his driver to go over the dune and head for the road. He heard bullets whistling overhead as the driver turned slightly, hit the dune, made the jeep rise into the air and they were over with the road a couple of hundred yards in front of them. Manuel saw the last of his jeeps and men rising over the dune in front of them.

The jeeps were much faster than the armored vehicles behind and it only took several seconds before they were over the rise and out of range of the machine gunners on the armored cars getting further and further behind.

They drove for several hours before several vehicles needed to halt for refueling. They caught up with Alberto’s slower vehicles averaging about thirty-five miles an hour with the heavy troop carriers and fuel tanker transporters at maximum speed. Much like the Mexican army, now several miles behind, they could not move any faster. Manuel and Alberto had more than enough fuel to get to the border, a day’s travel away.

Also, no enemy aircraft had been seen for the last couple of hours as they had changed highways. The spotter plane, if there was one, was searching for them further north on the main highway. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for an aircraft to find them and during mid-afternoon their movements were noted. The Cessna was high and nearly out of sight.