The Battle for Houston...The Aftermath Read Online Free PDF Page B

entrance to the silos, the guard detachment of the 100 men was steadfastly guarding the area.
    “Anybody gone through here since I left?” he asked the man.
    “No, Sir. We have had two men at the door 24/7 and a machine gun over there with six men around it pointing at the entrance to this room,” he added pointing to the machine gun placement behind sandbags. “We bedded down in the several rooms around here. Nobody could have gotten through this room.”
    “Found any secret doors?” General Patterson asked.
    “How did you know, Sir?” the captain asked.
    “Well, we haven’t found an armory or magazine. Every base has one somewhere, so may I assume you found it, Captain?”
    “Yes, Sir! It was in the extra wide corridor as you go left out of here, and on the wall several yards away was one of the same little green buttons in the middle of a blank wall. A ten-by-ten foot stone door opened, and it led us into an ammunitions magazine. It has taken us a whole day with 50 men to record what is in there.”
    “How many helicopter missiles?” asked the general now looking straight at the captain who pulled out a long piece of what looked like legal paper and scanned it for a few seconds.
    “Missiles in total: 600 cases, 3 missiles to a case,” he replied.
    “Air-to-air and air-to-ground I assume,” suggested the general.
    “Exactly 200 cases of three types sir; air-to-air, air-to-ground and also ground-to-air,” replied the captain. We also found a couple of those stored ground-to-air missile-launcher units on wheels, the ones they kept pulling out of the ground yesterday.”
    “And I would assume a secret elevator with a grass top to take everything to the surface, Captain?”
    “Correct, Sir,” replied the captain, “except that it was a concrete top, part of the actual area the helicopters were stationed on. It’s going to take the 747 Transporter filled to the brim to get the whole armory out of here.”
    “We are going to exhaust those 747s before we are finished here,” added the general “We still have a whole factory to check yet.”
    The general’s transportation problems were growing. The president wanted all the men returned from Europe ASAP while General Patterson now wanted all this valuable modern military weaponry flown back ASAP.
    He would have to use the fleet of C-130s until the troop return was completed. He began to realize that it was going to take weeks to get out of here, and he didn’t want to hang around that long. The general remembered that the first flight of C-130s should still be in Japan and he headed for the surface where he could satellite phone Misawa.
    The C-130s at Misawa were about to head off to Elmendorf when he reached the commander of the base. It was still early; dawn was rearing its head over the eastern horizon.
    General Patterson told the colonel to load up the 1,600 Marines tightly into the C-130s; they should take 110 men with only basic equipment and squashed into each aircraft. That should free up five of the aircraft. The general told the commander to return the extra aircraft to Harbin. He also gave orders for the flight crews of the C-130s going into Elmendorf to offload the Marines at Edwards Air Force Base temporarily, and then return to Harbin via Elmendorf. General Patterson needed to return the tankers to Harbin once they had air-refueled the outgoing aircraft on their long flight into Elmendorf. Instead of going into Elmendorf, the tankers were to return to Misawa, refuel themselves and then head back here to Harbin.
    General Patterson wanted these valuable attack helicopters transferred, and one helicopter with dismantled rotor blades could just fit into the cargo hold of a C-130. With the 16 C-130s still on the apron and the five returning aircraft, he could load all of the remaining choppers; 17 in one flight stateside, and the four extra aircraft loaded with their valuable air-to-ground missiles. That would leave the transporter for the