Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival (58 page)

The colonel, now in civilian clothes, had completed a check of the barracks by the remaining men and ordered the last dozen or so men out the gate. The buses ran all night if there were people waiting at the stops. Two men, U.S. Air Force Chinese-Americans who still spoke the language, were ordered to be the colonel’s escort and get him anything he needed.

He was to be made a captive, checked for weapons and placed in a seat until Hawaii. There he was to be removed from the aircraft, kept in solitary confinement until the last flight, and then Mo would be there with Major Wong for Colonel Rhu to be released into their custody again.

The four aircraft used nearly all of the long runways getting airborne, and within minutes the airfield was quiet and dark. All lights were switched off and the captain was relieved by one of his lieutenants for the graveyard guard duty shift.

General Patterson was busy in the storage warehouse. The lights had gone out, but he was working with small battery lights they had brought. He already had his command center, a table and a chair, ready behind a line of pallets ready for loading. Twenty of his men were guarding the warehouse inside and out, and out of view of the night guards who were making lazy rounds every hour. They were not thinking about any trouble, just their upcoming leave in a month’s time.

A platoon of Marines had arrived with one of the aircraft and the thirty men and their guns and ammunition had been transferred into the warehouse without being noticed. They had easily driven the empty forklifts back to the warehouse where Chinese-American drivers had taken over and returned to the aircraft with the next pallet. Looking Chinese, they could just walk back to the warehouse at any time. Some even sat on the returning empty forks holding cases of weaponry under plastic wrapping while the Marines who didn’t look like they belonged in China drove with clothing covering their features.

The Marine lieutenant’s job before dawn was to take out the guards at the control tower at 2:00 am, then the main guard posts, and lock all gates into the airfield by 3:00 am. Just before dawn he was to lock the doors to the barracks, imprisoning the sleeping men without raising any alarms.

Major Wong’s job, with six of the Air Force’s best men, was to capture the captain at 2:00 am, the rest of the half dozen or so lower-ranked officers by 4:00 am, and then prepare the control tower for the arrival of the C-130s and if needed, the Gunships by 5:00 am. The general did not want any men killed and gave orders to use weapons only as a last resort.

Once the guard posts had been disabled with no loss of life at 02:30 hours, there were only a dozen soldiers on guard duty and another five sleeping in the main guard house. The Marines quietly went around to the base’s motor pool to assess potential transportation to get to the next base five miles away. This base might also have an aircraft control tower and see the incoming C-130s, so the general wanted to force the colonel’s hand by getting him to send men over to the airfield, or else launch an all-out attack on the base if necessary.

There were a dozen clean, brand new Chinese troop-carriers, a couple of jeeps and three aircraft tanker-trucks with snow ploughs on their front bumpers. It wasn’t much, but a good cover to get 360 men close to the gates.

General Patterson, still with this niggling feeling that something just wasn’t right, set out planning the next morning. He had dozed much of the day in the transporter with many others, and they were all ready for battle. Nobody could find any plans of the other base in any of the offices and he would have to go in blind, knowing that it would be man-to-man fighting and probably a lot of the action could be underground.

By this time the airfield was virtually secure. Of the one hundred men, twenty-seven were already tied down in chairs in an empty aircraft hangar next to the storage area and the rest would struggle unsuccessfully to get out of the barracks.

General Patterson now walked around the base confidently with Major Wong and the six men as guards. He headed into the control tower and looked at the equipment. It was much the same equipment the Air Force had used up to New Year’s Eve, modern with every aircraft control device necessary.

“Why aren’t there any aircraft on the airfield?” he asked Major Wong. “Surely an airfield of the size and with modern equipment must have some sort of aircraft defense for itself and the other more important base to the south.”

“I agree totally,” replied Major Wong. “It is so crazy to see so much without an aircraft here. It has been worrying me as well.”

The general told the major that the men would take everything possible back and this control tower would certainly upgrade the 40-year-old equipment now being used at Andrews.

They then checked all the offices as the junior officers, half a dozen of them, were collected and were being marched to the hangar.

Major Wong returned to the tower to search for frequencies the two bases would use communicating with each other and found them while General Patterson continued to check every one of the several warehouses large enough to house aircraft. There was tons of equipment in place—ladders, generators and stairs for several different aircraft—but the hangars were empty of actual flying machines.

By 04:30 hours the first of the C-130s were taking off. They were to fly the thirty-minute distance slowly and below 500 feet, and land as quietly as possible on the farthest runway, the left one which was a few hundred feet longer and further away than the right airstrip. The plan was to disgorge the Marines, then line up at the runway’s other end, turn off their engines and wait for the general’s orders that the rest of the troops had been detained. The captured men were then to be flown out of China and be confined in Misawa until the mission had ended. Then they would be freed back at the airfield and told to go home.

The first five aircraft came in as silently as possible, their engines feathered, and used as little tarmac as possible. Four hundred Marines ran out of the aircraft and were shown where to join the Marines already around the two still-occupied wooden barracks. By now, several light sleepers had heard noises outside and were banging at the doors.

One by one, they were ordered out at gunpoint by their captured captain. They were ordered to exit unarmed and with their hands above their heads. Captain Zeng who had seen the hundreds of arriving American Marines around his barracks knew that if he didn’t do as ordered all his men would die.

Without a shot being fired, the northern and personal air base of the ex-Chairman of Zedong Electronics was captured. All the Chinese troops, apart from Captain Zeng, had their hands bound and were placed in the C-130s for transport back to Japan. The aircraft were to return in twelve hours with doctors and medics from Misawa. The attack on the second base would certainly have more potential for casualties.

“Captain Zeng,” said Major Wong in Chinese, “you are the only one left on this base. Your men will be returned here unharmed once we have finished our mission.”

General Patterson was having a meeting in the control tower an hour after the airfield had been cleared of aircraft. Over the satellite phone General Patterson, who was now in the meeting wearing his full military combat uniform, had phoned the 747s, which had already landed in Hawaii and were about to take off for Travis in California. Colonel Rhu, in confinement until further notice, was extremely unhappy.

The C-130s had received no communications with anybody else and were well on their way to Japan.

Major Wong was the interpreter for General Patterson who wanted to find out as much about the second base as possible. He certainly did not want to leave nuclear missiles in the hands of an enemy who could use them. He already knew that the United States was out of range of any more that the ex-chairman had rained down on his own country, but a nuclear weapon was a nuclear weapon, and who knows what orders had been given to this colonel if he heard that something had gone wrong with the plan.

Captain Zeng was open and honest with the questions after learning that Zedong Electronics no longer existed, and the whole Politburo, apart from Mo Wang, was dead. The captain wanted proof and the major told him that the Americans had commandeered their Chinese Airlines aircraft wearing the captured Red Army uniforms, Mo Wang was on the Americans’ side, and a Chinese engineer was brought up to tell his story about being captured at JFK in New York.

Finally, Captain Zeng asked the final question. “I come from Beijing. What has happened to my family?”

Mo Wang told the captain the bad news that one of the missiles he, the captain himself, had seen leave the second base five miles away, had exploded over Beijing, likely directly over Tiananmen Square on Beijing's Cangan Boulevard. Unfortunately, nobody knew what had happened in Beijing, but it was suggested the man should think about Hiroshima in Japan during World War II.

Captain Zeng was quiet for several moments thinking about his family. Even if they survived, the radiation sickness would have got them. Mo told him where the other two Pakistani-made missiles had gone and that in five minutes their glorious ex-chairman had murdered millions upon millions of their own people in their own country.

From then on, Captain Zeng was no longer an enemy. He was also told that Colonel Rhu would have been given the same information while en-route to Hawaii. Mo Wang knew that the colonel’s family was from the Hong Kong area, and were long dead.

Now the time had come to destroy the final threat of an attack on the U.S. homeland.

Every single American who would survive the end of the attack on the last, most dangerous base of Zedong Electronics, including General Patterson, was about to get the shock of their lives. What was below ground in this secret base of Zedong Electronics could have destroyed what was left of the entire East Coast of the United States of America, and it had enough range to get there.

To Be Continued in…

INVASION USA IV —
THE BATTLE FOR HOUSTON – THE AFTERMATH

The Book of Tolan Series (Adult Reading)

Banking, Beer & Robert the Bruce – Hardcover and eNovel.

Easy Come Easy Go – Hardcover and eNovel.

It Could Happen – eNovel.

INVASION USA Series (General Reading)

INVASION USA I: The End of Modern Civilization – eNovel.

INVASION USA II: The Battle for New York – eNovel.

INVASION USA III: The Battle for Survival – eNovel.

INVASION USA IV: The Battle for Houston – The Aftermath – October 1st, 2012.

The Tolan Chronicles Series (General Reading)

Volume I – 1779-1879 – October 1st, 2012.

Volume II – 1879-1979 – November 1st, 2012.

Volume III – 1979-2079 – December 1st, 2012.

Volume IV – 2079-2379 – January 1st, 2013.

Volume V – 2379-2779 – February 1st, 2013.

Battle Asteroid – The Vin Alpha Series (General Reading)

Volume I - The Beginning – May 2013.

Volume II – Somebody Doesn’t Like Us – June 2013.

Volume III – They Are Just Jealous – July 2013.

Volume IV, Volume V, Volume VI, Volume VII, Volume VIII

Children’s Books

Roto Goes to Sea – December 2012

The Tickle Story – June 2013.

T I WADE was born in Bromley, Kent, England in 1954. His father was promoted with his job to Africa and the young family moved to Africa in 1956. T I Wade grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Once he completed his mandatory military commitments, he left Africa for Europe at the age of 21. He lived in the UK, Germany and Portugal for 15 years before returning to Africa in 1989. Here the author got married and due to the upheavals of the political turmoil in South Africa, the Wade family moved to the United States in 1994. Park City, Utah was where his writing career began in 1998.

To date T I Wade has written five novels, the sixth is under edit and the seventh half complete.

T I Wade, his wife Cathy and two teenage children live 20 miles south of Raleigh, North Carolina.