Free The Battle for Houston...The Aftermath by T. I. Wade

hundreds of men getting out of the ditches in the middle of the Interstate and into twenty undamaged trucks, two of which had fuel tankers behind them. Then his eyes fell on the next swath of burning debris where the F-5 had gone down; even he was shocked at the destruction. It was as if a stretch of the Interstate had been cleared of everything that was on it. There was broken metal and fire everywhere on both sides of the asphalt for as far as he could see. It was pure devastation.
    “Manuel, do you want to use my radio?” asked his commander. “Manuel, Manuel, can you hear me?” Manuel raised his arm which hurt to show that he did and staggered towards the jeep.
    “Alberto, Alberto, report! Pedro, Pedro, report in! Are you OK?” There was silence as nobody responded. Manuel tried again and again and the fourth time Pedro replied. He was OK but his men had taken a beating. Alberto also came over the air and he said the same thing.
    “I don’t know if there are more, but leave your dead and get into town. The buildings will help protect us from the air. He reiterated his orders several times telling the men to fan out and get into town as fast and in any way they could. Do you have any missiles left? Did we shoot down any aircraft?”
    “I saw one go down. It came out from the sun, a missile blew it up,”
stated an unknown man.
    “I saw a second one right behind it. It also blew up a mile in front of me, and the explosion killed hundreds of my men,”
stated Carlos Sanchez.
“It took out a whole mile of people and trucks.”
    The commander next to him stated that he saw one from the east go down right behind his jeep.
    “We got three aircraft. How many missiles and launchers do we have?” One man said he had one and suddenly the world around Pedro tossed him around, his body blew backwards toward the way he had come, and this time he hit his head against the side of his commander’s still unscathed jeep and he blacked out.
    * * *
     
    Martie Roebels, going in behind the general, fired her first two rockets at the first group of trucks Manuel was looking at behind the jeep and he bore the brunt of the edge of the explosions as the trucks and men he was facing flipped in the air in front of him. He didn’t even know what was happening.
    General Patterson was a hundred yards in front of her, and he ordered the girls behind him to peel off; a 500-pound bomb was not something to fly over. He saw where he wanted to deposit his first bomb, at the next group of undamaged vehicles on the north side; and he pulled the stick back to gain altitude so that he would also be out of harm’s way.
    The small twin-engine jet screamed upwards and rose 3,000 feet before he forced the stick forward. It felt like he was on the fastest roller coaster in the world as his belts stopped his head from being flattened against the canopy above his head and he shouted “Bomb gone!” as he released the 500 pounds of pure destruction.
    He had seen a large group of trucks and men, Carlos Sanchez’s group, and he released the bomb for that precise area. As the bomb dropped he hauled the joystick to the left, pushed both throttles to maximum and dipped south as fast as he could.
    Several seconds later the blast caught up to him and rattled the thirty-year old aircraft around him. He was pushed here and there, and then it was over.
    * * *
     
    Carlos Sanchez was trying to get his machine gunner to aim at the aircraft, and his man fired off his first rounds as General Patterson pulled the stick back, climbing steeply, and the man’s tracers headed out behind the little jet. The machine gunner didn’t have time to catch up with the aircraft as it quickly rose several hundred yards ahead of him and his commander, and the next thing he saw was a shape drop from underneath the aircraft as it dived away and headed southwards.
    He froze as he saw the shape slowly descend towards him and he forgot all about trying to shoot the aircraft as his body