“I’d say three miles,” her co-pilot stated as she brought the speed back to about 20 miles an hour above landing speed and began her landing checks. “Two miles to target,” continued her co-pilot. Sally was struggling with the sun off to the left of the road, which was affecting her vision.
“The enemy is about three miles in front of your landing area, and I counted 14 vehicles. They seem to have men lying on the roof. I’m going in from the west and will start my run when you tell me you are airborne, Sal.”
“Roger that,” Sally replied. “Just remember we have our own troops down there when you go in. Out.”
“Half a mile to touchdown,” added her co-pilot.
“I have it on visual,” she replied, and she took Tom in on the westbound side of the highway, skimming a few feet over a couple of dead cars standing in the middle of the road.
“I’d say about 1,000 yards of clear road ahead of us,” her co-pilot added. The wheels touched, and Sally worked on slowing the fast moving aircraft as silently as possible. She used up the whole space and hit the brakes hard as she closed to within 50 feet of an upside-down burnt out Volkswagen beetle, next to a low slung sports car, also burnt to the ground and with dead bodies still sitting in it. She turned off the highway as far as she dared, her co-pilot giving her distances to anything the wings could touch, and she slowly turned the large aircraft about and as she got back onto the asphalt, the co-pilot pushed the rear door release.
Immediately, Sally began her take-off checks as the door slowly opened and the full load of troops ran onto the road and around the aircraft to cover her take-off.
“The convoy is about a mile behind you, Sal,” stated Martie. “You’d better get moving so that they don’t see you, and stay as low as possible. I’m at 1,000 feet to the south and going to come in from the west, guys. Keep your men off the road.”
Sally slowly pushed the throttles forward as the door came up and she tip-toed the now empty aircraft out of there as quietly as possible, clearing two stationary cars by a few feet and following the contours of the road as she brought her undercarriage up and kept the engines on as low revs as possible.
“I’m clear,” Sally stated into the radio. “Martie, fire a short burst to get the feel of the guns. They will slow you down slightly and screw up your aim.” Sally, now that the sun was behind her, could see clearly in front of her and kept the aircraft as low as possible until the ground fell away as the road went over a brow. She gained a safe height and kept the revs down for another five miles before pushing in the power slowly, pulling the aircraft up and turning to the north and then to the west to see what was going on behind her.
“I’m going in with the guns on the moving vehicles. I’m about a mile out at 1,000 feet and diving in from the sun,” Martie stated, her excitement coming through the radio, and making Sally smile.
“I got some, I got some!” Martie shouted over the radio several seconds later. “Two trucks are burning and several are trying to get off the road in all directions. I’m coming back in from the north.” Several seconds later she came back on the radio, “I got another one! It just blew up in front of me! I’m turning in at 1,000 feet and going in from the south.”
“Roger that,” replied Sally. “Martie, you should have about six seconds of ammo before they start clicking. When they click, leave the firing button alone—you’ll be out of ammo. You can then arm your rockets.”
“I got the two I was shooting at!” Martie shouted over the radio another 20 seconds later. “One exploded and made the other one catch on fire. I’m heading back west to hit the stationary group hiding under the trees with my rockets. Thanks Sal, I heard the clicking. Over.”
“Ground troops—‘Martie the Terrible’ is finished in your area. I see two to three vehicles still driving around trying to hide. They are about a mile in front of you and I’d set up a road ambush if I were you, plus a couple of side ambushes in case they try to rough it, but the trees look pretty dense and I don’t think they can get far off the road. I see eight burning vehicles, three sitting still on the highway, and three mobile—and a couple of those have smoke coming out of them. We’ll be in bright and early tomorrow, guys. The sunset is beautiful. As they say ‘red sky at night, trooper’s delight.’ Out.”
“Thanks for the lift, ma’am. We can see that that girl can shoot and we’ll see if we can leave a couple of bad guys for you to deal with tomorrow. Out,” replied the major on the ground.
Martie went in from the north since they were hiding in the trees on the south side of the road. She watched as her first two rockets landed 20 or so yards short and blew up in the verge not causing any damage. She flew over and around and on her second attempt, her two rockets went straight into the group of five trucks and she watched as the middle truck literally lifted off the ground and exploded about ten feet in the air, spewing the other trucks with fire. She screamed the Mustang upwards as the sun went down over the horizon.
Apart from the several fires burning up and down I-20, the area was getting dark beneath her.
“Come on girl, let’s go home,” advised Sally. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere tonight, and if they are I believe they are in for a nasty surprise. The boys are heavily loaded with everything they could carry. I have you on visual about a mile to my south.”
They moved into formation and flew home silently, Sally letting Martie alone as she worked through the ramifications of her action. Men had died down there, even if they were the enemy. Either she was made for this type of work, or she wasn’t. Sally knew her friend well and believed that Martie was a fighter—a good person to have around in times of need—but left her alone to her own realizations. The end of the fifth day of the new world looked like there could be hope.
Chapter 9
China
The board room on the 30th floor of Zedong Electronics in Nanjing was busy, and there was mixed feelings of excitement, apprehension, and dread. The 16 men were getting ready to tour Shanghai’s International Airport and then go on to the harbor. They had just finished an early breakfast and the bus was ready for them downstairs. It was 5:00 am, early on the morning of the seventh day in Shanghai and thirteen hours ahead of East Coast time in the United States. The first of the Boeing 747s would be taking off for its nonstop flight into John F. Kennedy Airport later that morning, which in a few weeks would be renamed Guomindang International Airport.
Chairman Wang Chunqiao raised his hands, and everyone took their seats. The room was cleared except for the 16 men sitting around the boardroom.
“Comrades, we have achieved something nobody in the world has ever achieved—the control of every living man, woman and child in the western world!” The men in the room applauded this statement.
“To remember the words of our great leader, Mao Zedong, ‘If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while imperialism would be razed to the ground, and the whole world would become socialist; in a number of years there would be 2.7 billion people again and definitely more.’ Comrades, I believe we are carrying out and completing his legacy, and whomever must die in this transfer of power from world capitalism to world communism will be replaced by our own breed of people. The most powerful influence in my life was my training, and much of your training, by our leader’s great wife, Jiang Qing. As you know, our success will be the ideas of controlling the world that I learned from her teachings for 15 years. Her vision was a world full of people where everybody was equal and worked for the state. Now, the remaining 2.7 billion people will work for us. They will work for her, and they will work for the world’s greatest leader, Mao Zedong, and the original Guomindang Communist Party. We are its 16 leaders. We are the Politburo of the future. Tomorrow, we leave our country of birth and with 4,000 of our Red Guards, go forth and carry on ‘The Great Leap Forward’ and multiply and complete the ‘cultural revolution’ our beloved leader began over 50 years ago. As my father, Zhang Chunqiao, believed, the Cultural Revolution created in 1966 was designed as a necessity for world maintenance and the survival of our species on this planet. The capitalistic system of greed followed by every person in the western world does not work. Human freedom does not work, could never work, and will only lead to the end of human civilization. Now it is our turn, and we will rule every man, woman, and child in a state of perfection, where they are the worker bees of life, all equal, and they will live and die to make our world the greatest in history.”