The Battle for Houston...The Aftermath Read Free Page A

wild-looking and barking dogs everywhere; and his men wanted to shoot them from the vehicles, but orders had been given for silent travel. Every shopping center or strip mall he passed was nothing but broken bricks and blackened ruins. The only thing that he saw which looked undamaged was one McDonalds sign on the corner of a strip mall. He saw the famous sign, but he couldn’t see where the McDonalds had stood. The whole strip mall was nothing more than blackened rubble.
    The airfield was small, but at least there was enough room to park many of his trucks on the asphalt runway and taxiway in long lines. There was one empty hangar which still had its structure undamaged, and he turned it into his overnight headquarters.
    Manuel radioed Alberto and was told that he too had reached his airfield and would set up camp. He would be the backup army for Manuel, who didn’t want to show anybody watching, the size of his forces just yet.
    Pedro’s army was still twenty-odd miles behind and was to camp in a town called Pearsall. There they found several men, who were waiting to join their army. They had accumulated around a thousand cans of food from several unoccupied houses; the food would only feed a small part of the army, but they and their rations were welcomed. Pedro set up camp in the whole town, his men taking ruined houses for their overnight accommodations.
    Here they were far enough away from listening ears to solve the growing dog-barking problem and many animals met with quick deaths before the rest decided to retreat and head out of the danger area.
    Carlos Sanchez had told him that he thought San Antonio had no more than three thousand American soldiers guarding the town, but he didn’t know where they were based. He anticipated a thousand in each of the three bases.
    Early the next morning, May 10th, Manuel’s army cut hundreds of openings into the perimeter wire around Lackland Air Force Base while Alberto’s army continued up I-35 into the center of the city and towards Fort Houston, the second base on his list. His men were to divide into two groups, one half attacking Fort Houston while the other half headed to Randolph Air Force Base a couple of miles further east.
    It was impossible to take the whole city by surprise, but Manuel’s armies needed to take over the bases and make sure that the food supplies and anything else they could scrounge out of the bases wasn’t destroyed by the Americans.
    At exactly 06:30 Manuel’s army attacked the installations at Lackland. In hordes his men spread out, shooting anybody who fired back at them. There were good defenses, but not good enough to repel an army of 25,000 men and slowly the firing ceased as American soldiers who weren’t immediately shot surrendered their stations. It wasn’t worth fighting when you saw thousands of enemy advancing at you.
    By 07:30 hours Fort Houston was attacked and much the same happened there. At 08:15, Randolph Air Force Base was attacked and, with only a couple of hundred men defending this base, the battle was over within 30 minutes with many of the still sleeping soldiers either shot in their beds or taken prisoner.
    At all three bases, the radio areas were hit first. Unfortunately for the attacking armies, at Randolph the commander had a satellite phone connection and called the president telling him of the attack by thousands of civilians. One of Alberto’s men saw the man on the phone, quickly put a couple of bullets through his head, and then crushed the satellite phone with the butt of his AK 47.
    At the other end of the phone, the President of the United States heard the gunshots, heard the Air Force Commander grunt sharply and then fall. The last thing he heard was somebody shouting orders in Spanish and then the phone went dead, and his face went white.
    “Where the hell is Randolph Air Force Base?”
he thought to himself and immediately got on the phone to Carlos to find out if he knew, tell him what he had heard,