“Dragon Teams Three and Four – wait!  Hold your fire!”

The remaining armored vehicles were doing something wholly unexpected.  As they swerved to the shoulders to avoid the wreckage ahead, they were sliding, some sideways, to a complete stop.  The top hatches were all popping open and the men inside were climbing out with their arms in the air – first one, then two and finally all of the men.  They were unarmed and terrified, their weapons left in the vehicles.  As they climbed out, they laid prostrate on the pavement.

Barrett shouted to the men as he stepped out into the road, “ Estás rodeado, todo el mundo al suelo! Ponga sus manos en el suelo delante de ti! Si alguien se mueve, vamos a disparar!”

The men complied with the orders and continued to lay motionless in the dirty road.

Holt radioed to Barrett, “What are we going to do with all of them?”

“I don’t know.  We can’t take them; we certainly don’t have the resources to deal with them in Mansfield.  Besides, we barely have enough people to drive all these vehicles, much less tend to prisoners; there must be close to seventy of them.  Let’s get them lined up and I’ll address them.”

The teams stepped out from behind their cover and corralled the prisoners, while Barrett paced along the line and addressed them, “Usted es libre de ir, seguir caminando hacia el sur y no volver aquí. No luchar de nuevo, la próxima vez no será tan indulgente. Ahora Go!”

The soldados and sicarios nodded graciously and marched past the teams in a single file line to the south, too afraid to look back.  They knew that they would have shot the guardsmen dead as they lay on the ground, if the roles had been reversed.  As the grateful men left, the soldiers under Barrett’s command inspected their newly-acquired rides.

“Well boys, if you didn’t consider yourself a guerilla before, you can’t deny it now.”  Barrett turned and said to Holt, “Can your men grab the Strykers?”

“We’re on it.”

“Good, let’s double time it.  I don’t know if anyone else might be coming our way and I sure don’t want to give these babies up.”

Barrett keyed up his radio before climbing into his vehicle and said, “Dragon Warrior here, do you copy Cochise?”

“Affirmative; go ahead DW.”

“We’ve commandeered seventeen ERC 90s.  We’ll be following the Strykers out on the designated route.  Do not frat us Cochise.

“Copy that, DW; thanks for the heads up. I guess congratulations are in order.  If you can’t get your own tanks, then just steal the other guys; is that how it works now?”

“I’ll take anything I can get at this point, Cochise.”

“Roger that.  You better get moving, DW; we’re a few minutes out and closing fast.  See you round the campfire tonight.”

“Affirmative, stay safe.”

***

The rhythmic Whoof, Whoof, Whoof of the helos echoed off of the rooftops as the four, Apache Longbows crossed the Rio Grande from Brownsville into Matamoros.  Thanks to the successful strikes by Lobo and Guano earlier that morning, the four gunships’ mission was a walk in the park.  If Governor Baker had not sent the F-5s to eliminate the Mexican jets, the choppers would have been in for a very tough day.  Cochise grinned at the thought of the well-executed plan as he led his team of Longbows flew over downtown Matamoros.

Cochise, the commander of the air-strike team, had taken his call sign from the nantan warrior of the same name.  Cochise lead the Chokonen band of Chiricahua Apaches in the latter years of the 19th century.  The Apache chief and his warriors battled both the Mexican and American governments’ intrusions into their lands in the Sonoran region of Mexico, southern Arizona and New Mexico.  They mastered the art of the guerilla during their struggle against annihilation.  The Mexican government often resorted to using American and Native American mercenaries against the Chiricahua, paying a bounty for each scalp they collected, regardless if it was man, woman or child.

The modern day commander was of Lipan Apache lineage, from the Devil’s Backbone region in the central Texas Hill Country.  The ruthless displays of violence by the Zetas and Gulf cartels against the people along the border reminded him of the stories he had heard from his grandfather.  The acts of beheading, flaying and even scalping were becoming far too common these days for him.  His contempt for the cartels and those that supported them was great.  He loathed the depravity that they peddled, and he had seen what it had done to his own family.

“Alright cowboys, I want a quick flyover of the park to make sure everything was destroyed.  Not a single tank is leaving this place on my watch.”

“Roger that, Chief.”

The Longbow was the most advanced of the Apache gunships.  The main contrast between it and other variants was the large dome that was visible above the chopper’s four-blade rotor.  The dome housed sophisticated radar that allowed the Longbow to detect and engage targets while it was hidden behind cover, such as trees or buildings.  It also contained equipment that would allow multiple gunships to automatically engage a target that had been detected by a single Longbow.  Each chopper was also capable of controlling multiple UAVs from the air, affording them the ability to literally make dynamic, on the fly adjustments to the drones’ mission over the battlefield.

As they flew over the Olympic Park, they engaged several vehicles that had somehow managed to escape the earlier bombardment unscathed.  The ERC 90s were no match for the Hellfire missiles launched from the choppers.

“Excellent work.  Now, let’s do some real damage.”

They continued over the sprawling city and encircled the aging, coal plant that supplied the city’s power grid.  They targeted the towering, rusted structure that housed the plant’s turbines and generators with the same deadly Hellfires.  As the plant collapsed in on itself, the Longbows rolled away from the immense heat of the blast and regrouped, before continuing on with their mission.  A spectacular ball of flames and thick black smoke rolled and churned skyward as the choppers disappeared to the south.

Their final target, the airport, was all but abandoned after the earlier loss of the F-5s.  Apparently the staff had assumed that more trouble might be on its way, and they were right.  The choppers flattened the towers, hangars and terminals with the missiles and then strafed the runway with the remainder of their arsenal.  The nearly forty Hydra rockets fired from each Longbow peppered the solitary runway, rendering it completely unusable.

“Alright boys, we’re all out of firecrackers; let’s get these birds back to the nest.  I don’t think our friends will be calling Matamoros home any time soon, and if I’m guessing correctly, we’ll be able to say the same thing about Reynosa in a couple days.  But until then, thank you fine pale-faces for a splendid day on the town.”

Ch apter 28

William

Washington, D.C.

He smashed his first cigarette of the day in the ashtray on the nightstand beside him and sat up in bed with a smile.  Over the past several days, he could not quit smiling even if he tried; everything was going perfectly.  He finally climbed out of bed and made his way to the tiny kitchen.

Houston had still been largely a success.  Although one of the nuclear devices had been discovered and disabled, the second had been detonated precisely as planned.  News had been slow to develop on the attack, perhaps because it had been so devastating.  Hopefully there would finally be some updates.

William started the pot of coffee and sauntered across the room to a heap of wrinkled clothes that he had been robbing from over the past week.  He had been so busy stoking the destruction of the republic, there was scarcely time for the more mundane tasks.  He retrieved a pair of faded jeans and shook the wrinkles out of them before pulling them on.  He dug through the pile of clothing for a moment before finally locating his favorite brownshirt.  He stumbled back into the kitchen while he pulled it over his head.  William poured a tall cup of hot coffee and grabbed his coat and pistol, before trotting out the door.