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one aircraft to airlift any needed supplies to the men, and, fly them all into one location: Ramstein in Germany. He also instructed them to protect the U.S. base there and bring its allotted 600 troops home on its return flight.
    He then gave orders for the entire fleet of 747s to refuel and fly the Arctic route to Harbin. One was to stop at Travis and pick up three hundred engineers and technicians to help the Chinese in Harbin dismantle and pick up every piece of equipment on the two bases and the factory. The troop transporters could truck everything to the airfield immediately. He phoned Michael Roebels, who was spending the day at Silicon Valley, and ordered him to get 300 men ready for pickup.
    It was a whirlwind of activity for that hour. Preston was swept away by how fast the general worked and directed the Air Force personnel to organize themselves to get to China to collect needed electronic equipment. He was still touring the plant a few minutes after the call to Andrews when the general’s phone rang.
    General Patterson listened for a few seconds and his face went white with anger. He put the phone down and looked at the ground for a second before telling the several people around him what the conversation was about; the President of the United States had just told him there had been an attack from the southern border and San Antonio, Texas had been taken by an enemy army of what they believed to be a large number of armed civilians.
    “Shit!” he stated to nobody. “Mo Wang, Lieutenant Colonel Clarke,” he stated to Mo and the Marine major. “I need to get back ASAP. It looks like we are in trouble, and I’m needed back there. Preston, Lieutenant Colonel Clarke, you are coming with me. We will take
Blue Moon
and
Easy Girl
back to Misawa and I will have to figure out this new problem in the air. Now I know how General Allen felt trying to keep up with all this dammed new stuff happening all at once. Major, leave your second-in-command here and Mo Wang, you will be our person in charge to pack up and get all this stuff stateside.”
    Mo nodded, glad to be part of the system of trust.

Chapter 3
     
    Houston – May-June
     
    General Patterson was told by the president that there were perhaps as many as 50,000 men in the civilian army that had attacked San Antonio. The base commander had estimated far more, hundreds of thousands, and by the time word got to General Patterson in China the suggestions had increased to 300,000.
    The number wasn’t that far from accurate. Once the several bases had been overrun in San Antonio, and Manuel had no opposition to fight on the fourth day, word got out that there was a foreign army taking over Texas; and the numbers of armed men had already increased by 20,000 to 170,000. Manuel had lost several hundred men at the three bases. The Americans had fought hard; and once they understood the magnitude of the attack, they fought like madmen.
    It was not possible for 3,000 men to fight 50,000 and, within several hours, the fighting had ended at the bases called Joint Command San Antonio. Then they cleared the smaller National Guard base and several other bases and storage facilities around the city. Manuel was lucky that at the time he had attacked, there wasn’t one military aircraft in the whole of Texas that could fly. He didn’t know that all the Texas-based aircraft were further north on food duty, or over in Japan and China.
    Manuel’s next problem was what to do with the 900 captured Americans. Killing the enemy whilst in battle was part of war, but to murder nearly 1,000 captured men and women by firing squads was far above the nastiness of even the Calderón Cartel. His men had done well losing only several hundred to over 2,000 American dead.
    He couldn’t stop his men playing with the female soldiers, that was part of the spoils of war; but it took a day, his fifth day in America, to decide what to do with the prisoners once he had given the order for the men to