The Battle for Houston...The Aftermath (16 page)

This time all four military men looked at the president in awe.

“We still have nukes?” asked General Austin.

“Yes, and so did the Chinese, General Austin. General Patterson managed to capture a multi-warhead Russian M-36 nuke, I think it’s called, aimed for Washington and a dozen other cities. It was ready for launch in Harbin, China. Gentlemen, many thanks to all of you, and also many thanks to your Marines, General Watson; we were maybe twenty minutes away from some Chinese officer sending this Russian missile over here. We were this close to total East Coast annihilation; you two just don’t understand.”

There was silence for a couple of moments as the two new men realized that it had been touch and go over here. While in Europe, they had been complaining to the president over their satellite phones about the 747s not arriving to get the military troops back home.

“I’m ready to work and to help,” stated General Watson. “What do you want of me and my men?”

“Me too; I reviewed and admired General Patterson’s battle plan for New York City; in Europe, we heard all about it several days after the end of the invasion,” added General Austin. The U.S. Army is ready to defend our country, Mr. President.”

“Thank you, gentlemen,” replied General Patterson. Now what is the best way to destroy this army of 150,000 well-armed rebels?

For an hour the four men planned. The weather at McConnell wasn’t bad enough for the president to head back to Andrews in
Blue Moon
. With no expertise as a soldier, he wanted to return to Washington where he could be most effective aiding the civilian rebuild.

We must not let them retreat back into the city of Houston. If that happens we would end up with months of building-to-building combat,” stated General Watson.

“I agree, murmured each of the four men, all looking at a large map of Houston and its surrounding areas.

“I will have 12,000 Marines ready in the town of Spring to the north, and we have another 4,000 Marines here at McConnell ready to parachute in at the first opportunity. That will give us a good force of 16,000 Marines under my best leadership to halt their forward advance. It looks like their leaders might be anticipating capturing the state of Texas, and I believe will try to head north very soon. General Austin, I agree that if they run into my guys, plus choppers and attack gunships, they will retreat and go hide in the inner city, and we will have to go in and get them.”

“What about an old-fashioned siege, like Genghis Kahn did in Beijing, and starve them out by surrounding the city? For your information, next month the president will write into law that all cities north of Washington, in a line across the country, and a similar line from Dallas Texas, except coastal cities, are to be off limits to civilians and patrolled by our soldiers as war zones, especially in the south. You men must understand that we cannot support the whole country; with only fifty-plus million people, the entire country is too large to police until our population grows and with it a need to naturally increase our living space. Cities like Houston, San Antonio, Philadelphia, and Chicago, are now useless and disease-ridden, and are going to crumble and die before we breed enough people to fill them up again. And by that time, we feel that they will need to be destroyed and rebuilt from scratch. That is why we looked at nuking Houston before this hurricane reminded us that it is in the wrong place due to fallout.”

“A siege will take too much time, Patterson. I think that we should attack them from north and south,” suggested General Austin. “Let’s fortify an area around the highways they will need to use, wait for them to retreat into our strong defensive positions, and simply ambush them. They are rebels and will retreat when heavily attacked. It’s like playing pinball; if we can get them to bounce backwards and forwards into different masses of soldiers, we can whittle their numbers away. General Patterson already has a large number of my men from Texas on the move, and they have a few tanks and howitzers to reinforce a southern position here on the North Sam Houston Parkway, between Interstate 45 and Highway 59,” the general suggested, pointing to the map laid out in front of them. “That will stop any retreat into the inner city. I don’t think a siege will work due to the time scale. It will take weeks or months, with us sitting around and waiting for them to get hungry enough to come out and attack.”

The other two agreed and General Austin’s and Patterson’s suggestion was forgotten.

“It’s a pretty open area on this piece of North Sam Houston Parkway I would like to defend,” stated the army commander. “The open ground will give armor and artillery good aiming possibilities. Any area south of the Beltway begins to have buildings, and I believe not advisable to defend. I hope to have 6,000 to 8,000 men there in twenty-four hours and, we must cover and ambush on these five major north/south roads. I know of another 10,000 men and weapons I can get into this area from neighboring states within seventy-two hours. Patterson, there is a group from Alabama who fought with you in New York. They have a pretty powerful array of several tanks and the remaining howitzers you used around New York harbor in January; I believe there are 10,000 troops who are ready to move.”

“Excellent, get them moving,” replied General Patterson. “Those guys were fantastic in the defense of New York, and I’ll be glad to have them around. “

If I cover the ten to twelve mile area of the same two major roads north of Spring and have heavy ambush positions on the highways themselves,” added General Watkins, “General Austin and I should be able to surround the entire airport areas within forty-eight hours. I reckon that this storm has another twenty-four hours of momentum before the cold front picks it apart, and then those rebels will move north. I can have my current men positioned on the main routes north and, as General Austin stated, hit them and push them back to the airport to rethink their plan of attack. I bet they will then head south and bang straight into Austin’s Army boys. By that time the Air Force will have better weather to pound the stinky meat off their asses.”

“Plus, if Seal Team Six can extract their leaders, the Calderón brothers,” added Admiral Rogers, “then their men should be leaderless for a time and factions of them will jump around inside their corral like wild horses and, as General Austin stated, we can whittle down their numbers even more.”

“And one more thing, they will not get any reinforcements corralled up like this, so their numbers should quickly reduce once the aircraft go in. Boy! Do I have a surprise for you guys!” laughed General Patterson and explained to the new men about the seventeen Chinese helicopter gunships about ready to fly into McConnell.

The Battle of Houston – May-June

Hurricane No-Name was the first hurricane of the 2013 season. The formation of the initial tropical storm was a hundred miles west of Belize, and the lousy weather had missed Cuba, traveling northwards and passing westward and on the same path Mo Wang had taken northwards a month earlier in his ship.

The tropical storm had hit warmer than usual water east of Cancun and had turned in a Category One. It continued its forward movement at 12 miles an hour in a northwest direction until the winds increased to become a Category Two Hurricane, three hundred miles south of Corpus Christi.

The strong cold front coming the south began to effect the hurricane’s direction, and the storm began to move from northwest to north and then northeast as it did its best to push the cold front northwards out of its way. The winds had just increased to a Category Three, winds above 111 miles an hour, when the two Orion Hurricane Hunters passed through on their first run several hours later.

With warmer than usual Gulf water for May, and the cold air sent southwards by the cold front, the 300 mile wide hurricane with no name stalled a hundred miles off the coast of Port Arthur, Texas.

The cold front was strong; the two mighty weather patterns equaled each other for three days and stayed stationary fighting a battle one would lose.

Over time and still over warm water, the hurricane’s winds slowly diminished to ninety miles an hour and the cold front, still a stable air mass, picked away at the storm’s strength and warmth.

Meanwhile, weather over Houston was lousy with heavy wind and rain bands hitting the area from east to west in gusts of a hundred miles an hour. In this weather very few could stay dry and if they were dry, they stayed where they were.

* * *

Manuel was worried. He did not like having all of his men in one basket, at the airport, and constantly had men go outside and check the weather. Every time they returned with the same answer; nothing had changed.

The Seals had returned to the terminal and had been ordered by Manuel’s men to find a corner and wait out the storm. Manuel had eyed their gifts with thanks, and he had allowed them to stay in his terminal.

The rest of the Seal team had returned to the railway yard and located enclosed rail cars which kept them dry for the next 48 hours while the storm raged outside.

The temperature wasn’t cold, it hovered just over sixty-five degrees, which was cold for southern Texas, but not cold enough to bring down vital body temperatures.

* * *

General Patterson and the other two generals couldn’t do much more than monitor troop movements and fly men into Kansas, far enough away from the storm to still have sunshine and low winds.

The soldiers heading into the Houston area from Fort Bliss felt the storm’s strength first; they hunkered down in their vehicles and the wind and rain increased as they drove closer at a good twenty-five miles an hour. They entered the Houston Beltway area and prepared to set up camp in buildings until the storm abated slightly.

The group from El Paso was twelve hours behind and had just entered the far reaching bands of Hurricane No-Name.

* * *

North Carolina weather was hot and beautiful, and Preston understood the children’s wishes for a swimming pool. Nobody could figure out how to actually build one, and the first trial was a simple hole in the ground, dug by a back-hoe which was a dismal failure; the water just disappeared.

One of the technical sergeants remembered seeing several pallets of bags of cement and, on the second day, hitched a ride on a passing C-130 going into Seymour Johnson from Andrews to go and see if the bags were still in storage. He arrived back the next day in a C-130 with fifty bags of cement on two pallets and the soldiers and kids set about turning the hole into a shallow circular pool thirty feet across and five feet deep at the center.

There were still several bags of cement left over from installing floor slabs in the new buildings and, with a cement mixer, the kids and a couple of the female adults began the fun of becoming dirty and laying a six-inch thick cement layer from one end of the hole to the other.

Preston was amused at the antics of the builders. Every now and again a mud throwing fight would break out as several smoothed the dirt in readiness for the cement; often it was Little Beth or Clint who started the fights.

Preston was going over his Mustang and P-38 Lightning with several Air Force technicians and mechanics flown in from Andrews and Carlos and Martie, now rested, were doing the same. Carlos was often on the phone to Mo Wang in Harbin and Lee Wang still working at
The Cube
.

It was fascinating what Mo Wang was finding in the storage areas, as well as packing up the factory for transportation.

It seemed to Preston that Mo and Carlos had put away their differences and were working together. Lee didn’t have much to do but watch the satellite slowly change orbits, and he estimated three more days until the first visuals of western Texas.

Preston called two people during his visit to the farm. On his second day at home, his first call was to General Patterson asking for an update on the weather over Houston. He was told that nothing had changed and that the Hurricane Hunters had estimated forty-eight more hours before anything would change. He could stay a third day.

The second call was to Michael Roebels who was in Silicon Valley, using over 3,000 military engineers and civilian scientists to exchange new parts and spares arriving from Harbin, and installing them into the nearest hospital to connect the 300-bed facility to the now-working local Silicon Valley electrical grid. He told Preston that they expected to have the first civilian hospital fully operational, including all operating rooms and ICU units, within forty-eight hours, and then he could send out several teams to direct power and setup other hospitals. A small nuclear power station in the San Francisco area was now under power and would be at full capacity within a month.

Preston told him that it was certainly good news and reminded Martie’s father that they had a nuclear power station within twenty miles of the farm. Michael Roebels replied that all the planning was already done across the country, and that they would have enough electrical parts and spares for ten small operational grids across the U.S.; Preston’s area was fifth in-line for the revitalization of a fifty-mile wide power grid.

Martie was feeling better and called her father every day to find how he was doing. Michael Roebels was a busy man; Mo Wang was sending in so many parts that all they could do was to offload the aircraft, categorize the parts on each pallet and send them into storage warehouses until they were needed.

He was enjoying his work and had hundreds of electrical engineers in ten teams working on designing and building new product. He had listened to his daughter, and set up plans to rebuild several hybrid cars found scattered around the streets and highways. One team was turning them into purely electric cars; they worked well, had a top speed of 40 miles an hour and a charge powerful enough for 160 miles.

A second team was using parts from China to build new vehicle recharging stations, and once the small electrical grid became live around Silicon Valley, they would start distributing several of them around the area. They needed to work on ramping up the charge rate and decreasing the charge time, and figured out that four to five hours would be needed to get a vehicle fully charged for a second 160 mile range.