The Battle for Houston...The Aftermath (2 page)

“One week there were people shooting at us, the next week it was a ghost town. We heard the army was coming, thousands of men and small civilian aircraft, and they rounded up the people and left. We had to cross the border to escape being noticed. Even the stinking dead bodies were counted and burned in huge piles of thousands,” he told Manuel. “The city was cleaned of dead and the area left to the three army stations to control.”

“How far north have they gone, the people, I mean?” asked Manuel.

“I sent out some guys to head up I-35 and Highway 59, north and east and they got as far as San Antonio before seeing anybody. Even then soldiers were still moving people northwards. It will be hurricane season soon and I think they have moved people out of the coastal cities like Houston as well. The men I sent in that direction, to Houston, will be back in a few days,” stated Sanchez.

“What about the air force base to the north?” Manuel asked over a meal of fruit freshly shipped over from Mexico. He watched thousands of his men stream over the bridge spanning the Rio Grande. The deserted city of Laredo was filling up again with his men.

The loud roar of weapons being fired around the three small military installations had attracted men, mostly Latinos, hiding in the countryside around the area. Any men other than Latinos were shot on sight.

By the time they rested and had a good night’s sleep in real beds, 300 Latino men had arrived at the guard posts, armed and ready to join the army. The commanders slept in a heavily guarded motel, a ransacked, but still usable Days Inn on the outskirts of Laredo.

It was at midday May 6th, when they again got together at the Days Inn; Sanchez’s men still hadn’t returned as they sat down to a good meal to discuss a battle plan. It was the first time Manuel Calderón and his brothers had ever visited the country; he had sent over billions of dollars of drugs, but had never set foot in the United States.

This city, Laredo, looked like most of the cities he had passed on his journey northwards. Panama City was a massive city; their police force tried to find out who the traveling men were, and after several hours of fighting, retreated, leaving hundreds dead on the often dirty and low-income suburban and shanty-town battlefields where they had collided.

The same had happened in Honduras and other countries they passed through. The partially destroyed communication systems prevented the country’s leaders from knowing what was going on, and the armed forces fighting against the Calderóns didn’t have backup or the stomach to take on the large well-armed groups more than once. In the U.S., it was the first time the brothers had seen empty towns and cities.

Something was different here. Manuel could see by the large numbers of local banditos arriving to join his invading army that the men had already helped themselves to local military or civilian weapons.

“Why are they making this large piece of country empty of people, Alberto? Pedro? Carlos?” Manuel asked the group the next day over a lunch of good American steaks. A large bull had been found totally mad and wandering around the outer city area a few days before their arrival and Carlos Sanchez had it shot and butchered. After hanging the meat for a couple of days, it was soft enough to eat.

“The men think that there were so many dead bodies,” stated Carlos Sanchez, “and so many civilians being shot, that the American government decided that they cannot control the whole country. I think they have moved all the remaining civilians into smaller areas to protect them. These American banditos told me that they have all killed many people for anything they had: food, money, old trucks, farmhouses, beautiful women, even for a new cell phone which they know doesn’t work. Some of these people are pretty crazy people, Manuel.”

“Get me some of the new arrivals who have travelled the furthest to get here, let us find out what they know,” ordered Manuel to several of the group commanders and they headed out to search. “We will meet with them tomorrow over lunch.”

The next day, over a large bottle of bourbon provided by Carlos Sanchez, a group of three men arrived to tell their stories.

“Name!” ordered Manuel to the first man. He was a mean-looking ox of a man, six feet tall and had one tooth sticking out of his smiling mouth. He was filthy, the smell from him worse than their dirty bodies, but he was a killer, a real killer and a real asset to his army.

“Antonio Pedro Muñoz Izquierdeas, Señor Calderón. I used to sell cargo from you in Dallas and Fort Worth.”

“Where have you come from, Antonio, and how did you know I was here?”

“A man who I used to deal with from Señor Sanchez’s family told me that an army was coming, Señor, your army, and that if I wanted to shoot soldiers, it would be better to fight with your army. I met the man at our old connection point outside Austin and came south with him last week.”

“Tell me what you have seen north of here,” demanded Manuel.

“Lots of dead Americans, Señor! Lots of dead people, mostly shot by other Americans, and helped by other friends I know. There were no American police after February. We shot anybody who had a uniform and a gun, sometimes three or four a day. In Fort Worth where I live, I had to kill several men who even attacked my own house. Lucky, I had several machine pistols and shotguns and I killed those men. There were others who killed my neighbors and I shot them and then ate the food they had stolen. At one time, at the end of January, there were bands of police trying to keep law and order, but snipers killed them one by one until they didn’t come around anymore. Then the National Guard arrived and more army soldiers and the fighting got very bad. These soldiers were better equipped than the stupid policemen and many of the banditos left town. So did I, and me and my family crossed the border into Mexico to stay with my wife’s family south of here. I returned, Señor, and got as far as Austin, before coming up to roadblocks and small aircraft flying around looking for us.”

“Why did you come back?” Manuel asked.

“Hey, Señor! There’s lots of stuff to steal here. Even though there was little food, many people were protecting their houses full of things to steal. In one house alone in San Antonio, Señor, I found $100,000 stashed away in the farmer’s mattress. $100,000, Señor, is a lot of money and American dollars still buy things in Mexico, Senor Calderón; a lot of Tequila and nice things for pretty girls.

“How much money did you find, Antonio?” was Manuel’s next question.

“A lot, Señor…millions! I worked with this team of five men during March and April, until I heard about you. We killed about a hundred gringos and black people, and often their whole families. We even killed scared Latino families; some of their women were very pretty and would do anything we asked once their husbands and sons were dead. One even cleaned my clothes,” he laughed, the men around him grinning at the joke. “We always killed everybody and burned their houses, Señor. Now that the army is patrolling San Antonio, and they have moved all the people to the north, many of the men we knew were shot and so I left the city. There were only a few thousand soldiers, Senor Calderón, but for us, there were too many.”

“So you are a rich man, Antonio. I don’t need to pay you, just give you houses to clean out once we win the fight,” suggested Manuel.

“None of the men need your money, Señor, just a nice piece of land or a nice big American house to live in and people to work the lands for food. Just like in the old days in Mexico—people to work while I drink Tequila, Señor Calderón; people to be servants, nothing more!” Antonio smiled.

From all three people, it was the same story; the army had moved the remaining people north to areas of safety. It didn’t sound like very many were still alive from the stories the three men told. That meant that he could easily take over a good piece of Texas without a big fight.

Manuel knew that he would someday come up against the might of the U.S. military, but it didn’t seem that there were very many. Surely they were still stuck in Iraq and other places in the world. Also during his entire operation in Mexico he hadn’t been attacked by one American aircraft. Maybe they didn’t have any more than the Mexican military and he still had 30-odd ground-to-air missiles to surprise them.

He felt pretty confident about taking over Texas and declaring it his own country. His uncle had told him that it used to be one of the twenty biggest economies in the world, and that alone could make the Calderón family nearly invincible.

“OK, guys, we take over everything between here and San Antonio,” declared Manuel that evening. “Me and my brothers and our main army leave at dawn tomorrow morning and we will travel fast on I-35 directly into San Antonio. Carlos Sanchez, you attack Corpus Christie and then go southwards to Brownsville and McAllen with your men. Kill all military you see and then attack and ransack any military barracks for weapons and equipment. There should be lots of ammo around for you to arm your men. Leave any civilians alone and let any Latino men join you who want to. Grow, Carlos Sanchez; grow as big as you can. Force any man who speaks Spanish to join your army. No gringos or black men, we can’t trust them. Don’t kill the farmers, we will need food in our new country of Texas, amigo. Once you have the area controlled by your men, leave two thousand men in each of the three cities, heavily armed under disciplined leaders. I will wait for you for one week after I attack San Antonio and then I will attack Houston. I want to make Houston our new capital. It’s big and a good place to fight the Americans when they come. Carlos, you must find every vehicle that works and get your men to look for food as you move, or your army will grow hungry. Comprehend?”

Carlos Sanchez nodded his head and gave orders to his men to get ready to move out. He wanted to be moving down the dual carriage highway towards Corpus Christie by dawn.

“Remember, Carlos Sanchez, your men will need food. You are not going to find any food in the cities, the best place to find food is in army barracks or places that are defended. There is no law and order in this country, no such crime as murder just the crime of survival. Alberto will give you three of the radios I captured from the Mexican army. I will keep a radio team at the edge of my army and always on a hill. That means you can talk to me once you are within one hundred miles of me and my men.”

There wasn’t much sleep that night. It took a lot of work and organization to move an army of men. All the leaders and commanders got trucks packed, munitions counted, fuel dispensed and by dawn the next day the two highways out of Laredo were full of men and trucks heading away from Laredo.

Carlos Sanchez, with most of his men already stationed further out of the city of Laredo, left first on a different highway due east to the Calderón armies.

The weather was blustery and overcast, the winds from the south, and rain squalls hit from behind as Manuel led his mobile army of 25,000 men north on I-35. His 3,000 vehicles, mostly jeeps and civilian cars, and Mexican military troop carriers pulling the fuel tankers, covered both sides of the highway northwards for twenty miles, and they managed a good speed of ten miles an hour. His vehicles included three old Mack U.S. army trucks pulling fuel tankers, captured from the U.S. National Guard base in Laredo.

Alberto’s army of 25,000 men was crammed into 2,000 mostly slower military and civilian trucks of all sizes. He had found several dozen old trucks with flatbed trailers, and the hundreds of vehicles started the journey an hour after Manuel’s group disappeared over the horizon.

Pedro’s much larger army was next and was due to leave immediately after Alberto’s last vehicles left. He only had 40 percent of his 60,000 men in vehicles and most of his men had to walk.

All three armies had several hundred men on horseback who rode out a couple of miles on each side of the highway in case of surprise flanking attacks. They were also there to ransack farms, ordered to leave any civilians or farmers alive, but take any food, fuel, vehicles or horses they could find.

The last army of 25,000 was to leave the next day on foot under the command of Pedro’s second-in-command, leaving the last 15,000 men to guard Laredo and search every inch of the town for food and any vehicles with fuel. Manuel had decided to leave a relay radio station every fifty miles along the road, on a hilltop. They had several extra radios, ransacked from the Mexican army, and would need communications if and when attacked by American soldiers.

For three hours Manuel and his army surged forward covering 20 miles an hour. The highway was clear with many crashed or non-working vehicles neatly moved and placed on the sides of the two stretches of asphalt. They saw no one and it was as if they were the only people on earth.

Manuel thought that they certainly weren’t expected yet and they could get into San Antonio in a surprise attack. He had a list of military installations he needed to engage and could not understand the American logic; one military base covered nearly the whole city. There were two Air Force bases and an Army Base, Fort Houston.

He wasn’t worried, he had a big army and it seemed he wasn’t expected. He decided just to take one at a time.

It was impossible to hide so many men from prying eyes but there was no need to stop and regroup. His three armies were moving and within six hours his group reached the outskirts of San Antonio. Manuel wanted to attack the first base at dawn to get a foothold in the city. He found two small municipal airports on his map and he decided to aim for Castroville Municipal Airport; Alberto would overnight at the Devine Municipal Airport several miles further out of the city and directly on I-35.

To get to the Castroville airport, Manuel’s men needed to leave the Interstate, and he picked a couple of side roads to get his large number of vehicles through. This took time and he arrived just before dark.

If the people who had lived down these small roads were still there, they would have seen hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles, much like rush hour traffic, moving on the narrow roads in front of their rural houses.

There were no people to be seen. Manuel thought he saw a person watching them here and there, and he had seen several men drive or ride up to their group of men on horseback and get in line to help the cause.