The attack team rarely left the meeting room during the two days of restocking and the 24 hours it took all ten large ships to travel through all the Panama Canal locks one-by-one. Being extremely large ships, it took far longer than usual, and the aircraft carrier—a pretty small one compared to the more modern carriers—fit through with inches to spare.
Once they were done and Mo Wang was many miles away from them, they set a course for the western edge of the island of Puerto Rico, and from there they cruised due north, 200 miles off the American shore, and aimed straight for New York Harbor seven days sailing in front of them.
*****
Preston and his team spent a couple of days flying and practiced firing their guns at a firing range they could use at Quantico, the only place around that had an area big enough to be able to use their aircraft’s guns and rockets. Several trucks and other useless modern military vehicles had been placed around the open-ground firing range, and slowly they got better at precise aiming.
They had to be good, because they would be the fighter cover for the troops on the highways fighting the Chinese soldiers once they got out of the airports. They practiced flying very close to each other in case they needed to give a few fingers to the Chinese pilots in the 747s, telling them where to go and escorting them into land.
The weather turned very cold and snow fell for three days, grounding just about everybody except the daily incoming flight from the Middle East going into Newark’s cleared runways. The 747s had to land on clean runways and the engineers, with more and more electrical generators coming online now, had Newark’s directional systems and landing systems working as well as before the catastrophe.
They had already used many of the new Chinese electrical parts, and the engineering teams realized that even though they had tons of electrical parts, many would not work until some sort of electrical power station came online. The first thing they would do once the attack was over, was to see if they could get the closest nuclear reactors up and running again and a simple power grid established—at least around areas of New York. But until then, they would be using over 1,000 military field generators, getting only the necessary electrical equipment powered up. Nobody really knew what would be the first area to repair.
The snowstorm dropped three feet of snow into the region, and only the three runways and disembarkation areas around the aprons were cleared to continuously allow the aircraft in. The enemy soldiers could fight their way through the snow drifts, as far as the American forces were concerned. Why make it easy for them? Colonel Patterson was hoping that they did not come in with snow camouflage, but it didn’t really matter with 30,000 troops now filling every window, rooftop, or any other place they could see the highways, as well as dozens of minor and side roads from the three airports into the harbor area.
The harbor area and coastline around New York Harbor looked untouched. The heavy snow helped to hide the 53 155mm howitzers. Three more had arrived from a New York Army base and the 40 105mm howitzers placed on either side of the entranceway, were camouflaged, and with the fresh snow, now invisible to any shipping arriving under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.
Another 40 105mm howitzers had been placed on five large river barges, pulled by two working tugboats into the area a mile in from the bridge, tied together and placed horizontally to look like an island.
Every gun had been camouflaged, and two of the now three destroyers had entered New York Harbor sailing under the bridge, and their lookouts with powerful binoculars could not see one gun placement.
In addition to the howitzers, there were well over 100 large mortar teams in placements around the area—several on and around the area of the bridge that were not expected to fall if the middle span was detonated. Several of the Mutts, jeeps, and even other vehicles had been placed on the roofs of buildings nearby, loaded with armor-piercing rockets that hopefully would be accurate enough to knock out any smaller guns aboard the ships.
Colonel Patterson was told by Colonel Grady that even if the biggest guns could not get through the modern hardened armor of the ships, they certainly could destroy the upper infrastructure of the warships if they concentrated on those areas. Fifty anti-aircraft cannons had been placed slightly further out from the shorelines, and their main task was to protect the bigger guns from the air. The Chinese fighters would have to go through a wall of flying steel to destroy the bigger guns, as the satellite-guided munitions under their wings would be useless in this fight. They had lost all of their guidance systems, since Lee and Carlos now controlled the satellites.
Vice Admiral Rogers had his only three old submarines tied up at the old wharf by Battery Weed, less than 1,000 feet inside the harbor from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. They were to dive and sit close to the harbor floor at about 50 feet, and literally send as many torpedoes as possible in the direction of the aircraft carrier once it entered the kill zone and then aim for the rest of the military ships.
The three submarines had simple wire-guided torpedoes that were 30 years old, but they could still pack a punch and sink a ship, especially an aircraft carrier built in the Ukraine. The vice admiral reckoned that at least 18 to 24 torpedoes could be launched before the submarines were taken out and hopefully only by the fighters, but at 50 feet in murky waters, they would be totally invisible from the air. The Navy had worked out a system of aiming the torpedoes from a command center above the submarines on the battery, since the submarines would be firing blind.
Two of the destroyers were hidden from view at the Staten Island ferry terminal, and they would be positioned behind larger ships where they could sneak out and attack anything coming deeper into the harbor.
The older destroyers didn’t stand a chance against the more modern Chinese ships, but they could get off several shots if they fired first, and the closeness of the battle would guarantee hits on the foreign vessels. The third destroyer was hidden behind the back end of Manhattan Beach Park, and once the attacking ships entered under the bridge it would sail at full speed behind them to close off the entrance and take up her battle stations from outside the harbor bridge.
*****
Carlos wasn’t working with Lee much anymore. Both Maggie and Buck had joined Lee in his place, both as good and knowledgeable as Carlos in the software field of electronics. Maggie was now Lee’s assistant, and Buck was helping most of the time since he wasn’t flying Air Force One around. The president had been told to stay home, stay away from the war. This arena was for soldiers, not politicians.
Barbara worked long hours flying Lady Dandy, often with the help of Martie or Preston when they had spare time at night, and she helped ferry in soldiers, ammo, projectiles, and mortars from the surrounding Army and Marine bases as the bases received phones for communication and the commanders could give a list of what their armories had.
The snowstorm had given everybody a good two days of rest, something they were all desperate for, and now they were a little behind in setting up the circus of all circuses—The Invasion of the USA.
*****
“I see them! I have found the ships!” Lee Wang ran out on the 19th day of January, three days before the assumed day of attack. Carlos, Preston and several others ran into the communications building at McGuire to see what Lee was so excited about. There they were, the minute dots that could barely be seen by the naked eye, 500 miles offshore just south of Jacksonville, Florida. The ten specks were steaming in a direction which would bring them straight into New York Harbor.