INVASION USA (Book 2) - The Battle For New York (52 page)

Many had already tried and found places as far south as they could go in the States, but winter was long and it would take months to walk to the warmer areas of Florida, Texas, and even Mexico.

Here, gangs had begun to get very powerful, had daily battles for territory control, and killed indiscriminately. Thousands died on a daily basis. Unfortunately, there really was no better place to go. Most people shot first before asking who was there, and nobody was safe.

*****

On the other hand, Panama was much warmer than the northern states, and gang violence was nonexistent due to the 10,000 Chinese soldiers who were in control of the area around the canal. It was probably one of the safer places to be at the moment.

Mo Wang, holding a suitcase in each hand and dressed in local attire, including a Panama hat, walked down a street in Puerto De Balboa, a couple of hundred yards from the massive Naval ships being supplied, and looking very much like a tourist. It had been a long journey to get off the ships.

Once they had dropped anchor to take on fuel and supplies from the military supply ships already there, he had carefully packed his two suitcases with some clothes and three satellite radios, his smaller suitcase of money, and all the valuables he had. He got himself and the suitcases aboard a large woven supply basket, about the size of a basket used by a hot air balloon.

The basket and several others like it hung from two thick ropes and transferred food stuffs across the water from one ship to another. It was impossible to get down to sea level from the aircraft carrier and he waited for dark before he made his move. The crew was hard at work transferring supplies from the smaller ship to the aircraft carrier’s supply doors three floors higher than the supply ship itself. He waited carefully until one of the baskets arrived and was unloaded before he made his move. Mo Wang walked up to the now empty basket, threw in his cases, told the sailors manning the basket that he was going to have a meeting with the supply ship’s captain, got in the empty basket, and was transferred to the supply ship within five minutes.

Nobody had expected him, or questioned him. It wasn’t their duty. He gave a few sailors on the other side a shock when his head suddenly appeared and he climbed over the side with his two suitcases and demanded where the captain was.

He was escorted halfway there when he told the sailors that their services weren’t needed anymore and asked if smaller boats from the Panama shore had made any appearances selling goods. He was told that they had, during the daylight hours, on the shore side of the ship and opposite the side of where the aircraft carrier towered over the smaller supply ship.

He slept through the rest of the warm night in a lifeboat, out of the way and under a tarp, and awoke to much noise early the next morning. There were at least 30 boats of all types close to the ship’s side several floors below and, carrying his belongings, he arrogantly walked down the stairs, as close to the small boats selling their wares as he could.

Nobody seemed interested in him, and since the Chinese sailors were busy with the supplies, he reached a crane-looking winch where most of the small boats had congregated. Two armed guards were there making sure that nobody used the crane to lift themselves into the boat. Mo Wang asked the men if they knew who knew how to work the winch because he needed to hitch a ride to shore to look for some girls for the officials on the aircraft carrier.

They automatically asked what was in the suitcases, and Mo Wang looked at them as if they were stupid and replied that they were full of money—useless money to entice the girls aboard. Not thinking that they had any control over what the officials wanted, they allowed the official-looking man to get into the smaller woven basket and he was winched down the three levels to the boats below.

The vendors tried to sell him fruit and clothing, but he finally motioned with his hands and in bad English stated that he wanted to go to shore. One boat captain, his boat a little bigger than the others, pushed his way through and asked in English what he was prepared to pay for the 300-yard boat ride to terra firma. He had already pulled three $100 American bills out of the thousands in his suitcase. The man agreed and then pointed to Mo’s old Rolex wristwatch. To Mo who had a lot of money, it was a fair deal for his 10-minute ride. Expensive, but at least he would be free, and his Rolex was 20 years old anyway. He was sure that he could find a replacement if he needed to know the time in his new world, which seemed unimportant at this precise moment.

He walked along the road in Puerto De Balboa and realized that even though little had changed here, it was still a port and a far more dangerous place than he was used to. He searched and located two Chinese soldiers walking around, he presumed to keep order, and he ordered them to escort him to a hotel or place of safety since he had important orders from his comrades on board the military ships.

His Chinese identification made them come to attention and salute him, and together they walked for an hour towards the better part of town where they found a decent hotel on the outskirts of Panama City and opposite a large bus depot where it seemed that old and colorful buses were still running.

Mo Wang thanked his two guards, gave them an American $100 bill each, and they seemed extremely happy, telling him the American money still worked well in Panama.

He then paid a $100 American Ben Franklin, got several local notes in return as change for two nights, and checked into the hotel under his real name. He went up to his room and changed into clothing that he had bartered for with the boat owner while he was bringing Mo into the harbor. He left his Chinese clothes in his room, one suitcase with warm clothing he wouldn’t need, pulled out a couple more Ben Franklins in case he needed to purchase something, and walked out of the back door, his remaining red suitcase in his left hand, the silver money suitcase in his right hand. With the large Panama-style hat covering his head, Mo Wang took the first bus out of town an hour later.

Being a man of means, he already had three passports, one Chinese, one American, and one British, all with his photo in them with different Chinese names. The first bus out of town was going north. It wasn’t that he really wanted to go north, but it was the first bus out of town and it was heading into San Jose, Costa Rica and could hitch him up with points even further north.

Mo Wang didn’t really know where to go, but he had heard nice things about Honduras, and an island called Roatán just off the coast of Honduras, where one of Lee Wang’s aunts had moved years earlier. It sounded better living on a small island than on the more dangerous mainland. He had enough money to last him the rest of his life, and he could start all over again, maybe becoming a fisherman, or a chicken farmer—something simple.

*****

The chairman hadn’t thought or cared about Mo Wang for a couple of days. He had more urgent things to do, like go over the battle plans with his ship’s captains and the several colonels on board the ships to make sure that the attack was successful.

The Chinese fighters had completed several take-offs and landings on the carrier deck and only one aircraft had been destroyed so far. The pilot had missed the catch-rope across the deck and the aircraft had fallen over the end of the ship, taking a couple of soldiers manning an anti-aircraft gun with him.

The attack team rarely left the meeting room during the two days of restocking and the 24 hours it took all ten large ships to travel through all the Panama Canal locks one-by-one. Being extremely large ships, it took far longer than usual, and the aircraft carrier—a pretty small one compared to the more modern carriers—fit through with inches to spare.

Once they were done and Mo Wang was many miles away from them, they set a course for the western edge of the island of Puerto Rico, and from there they cruised due north, 200 miles off the American shore, and aimed straight for New York Harbor seven days sailing in front of them.

*****

Preston and his team spent a couple of days flying and practiced firing their guns at a firing range they could use at Quantico, the only place around that had an area big enough to be able to use their aircraft’s guns and rockets. Several trucks and other useless modern military vehicles had been placed around the open-ground firing range, and slowly they got better at precise aiming.

They had to be good, because they would be the fighter cover for the troops on the highways fighting the Chinese soldiers once they got out of the airports. They practiced flying very close to each other in case they needed to give a few fingers to the Chinese pilots in the 747s, telling them where to go and escorting them into land.

The weather turned very cold and snow fell for three days, grounding just about everybody except the daily incoming flight from the Middle East going into Newark’s cleared runways. The 747s had to land on clean runways and the engineers, with more and more electrical generators coming online now, had Newark’s directional systems and landing systems working as well as before the catastrophe.

They had already used many of the new Chinese electrical parts, and the engineering teams realized that even though they had tons of electrical parts, many would not work until some sort of electrical power station came online. The first thing they would do once the attack was over, was to see if they could get the closest nuclear reactors up and running again and a simple power grid established—at least around areas of New York. But until then, they would be using over 1,000 military field generators, getting only the necessary electrical equipment powered up. Nobody really knew what would be the first area to repair.

The snowstorm dropped three feet of snow into the region, and only the three runways and disembarkation areas around the aprons were cleared to continuously allow the aircraft in. The enemy soldiers could fight their way through the snow drifts, as far as the American forces were concerned. Why make it easy for them? Colonel Patterson was hoping that they did not come in with snow camouflage, but it didn’t really matter with 30,000 troops now filling every window, rooftop, or any other place they could see the highways, as well as dozens of minor and side roads from the three airports into the harbor area.

The harbor area and coastline around New York Harbor looked untouched. The heavy snow helped to hide the 53 155mm howitzers. Three more had arrived from a New York Army base and the 40 105mm howitzers placed on either side of the entranceway, were camouflaged, and with the fresh snow, now invisible to any shipping arriving under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

Another 40 105mm howitzers had been placed on five large river barges, pulled by two working tugboats into the area a mile in from the bridge, tied together and placed horizontally to look like an island.

Every gun had been camouflaged, and two of the now three destroyers had entered New York Harbor sailing under the bridge, and their lookouts with powerful binoculars could not see one gun placement.

In addition to the howitzers, there were well over 100 large mortar teams in placements around the area—several on and around the area of the bridge that were not expected to fall if the middle span was detonated. Several of the Mutts, jeeps, and even other vehicles had been placed on the roofs of buildings nearby, loaded with armor-piercing rockets that hopefully would be accurate enough to knock out any smaller guns aboard the ships.

Colonel Patterson was told by Colonel Grady that even if the biggest guns could not get through the modern hardened armor of the ships, they certainly could destroy the upper infrastructure of the warships if they concentrated on those areas. Fifty anti-aircraft cannons had been placed slightly further out from the shorelines, and their main task was to protect the bigger guns from the air. The Chinese fighters would have to go through a wall of flying steel to destroy the bigger guns, as the satellite-guided munitions under their wings would be useless in this fight. They had lost all of their guidance systems, since Lee and Carlos now controlled the satellites.

Vice Admiral Rogers had his only three old submarines tied up at the old wharf by Battery Weed, less than 1,000 feet inside the harbor from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. They were to dive and sit close to the harbor floor at about 50 feet, and literally send as many torpedoes as possible in the direction of the aircraft carrier once it entered the kill zone and then aim for the rest of the military ships.

The three submarines had simple wire-guided torpedoes that were 30 years old, but they could still pack a punch and sink a ship, especially an aircraft carrier built in the Ukraine. The vice admiral reckoned that at least 18 to 24 torpedoes could be launched before the submarines were taken out and hopefully only by the fighters, but at 50 feet in murky waters, they would be totally invisible from the air. The Navy had worked out a system of aiming the torpedoes from a command center above the submarines on the battery, since the submarines would be firing blind.

Two of the destroyers were hidden from view at the Staten Island ferry terminal, and they would be positioned behind larger ships where they could sneak out and attack anything coming deeper into the harbor.

The older destroyers didn’t stand a chance against the more modern Chinese ships, but they could get off several shots if they fired first, and the closeness of the battle would guarantee hits on the foreign vessels. The third destroyer was hidden behind the back end of Manhattan Beach Park, and once the attacking ships entered under the bridge it would sail at full speed behind them to close off the entrance and take up her battle stations from outside the harbor bridge.

*****

Carlos wasn’t working with Lee much anymore. Both Maggie and Buck had joined Lee in his place, both as good and knowledgeable as Carlos in the software field of electronics. Maggie was now Lee’s assistant, and Buck was helping most of the time since he wasn’t flying Air Force One around. The president had been told to stay home, stay away from the war. This arena was for soldiers, not politicians.