The Uvalde Raider by Ben English (great books for teens TXT) 📕

be landing at an old auxiliary airstrip situated roughly south of Carrizo Springs, on a cattle ranch known as the Chupadera. This remote paved strip, built during the Second World War, was about 4,000 feet long and originally constructed to handle large aircraft such as the B-17 in an emergency situation.  Gholam would have no problem setting down the Flying Fortress there.

Taking additional care to land into the wind, they would abandon the contaminated Boeing and meet up with a part of the support team that would provide transportation back into Mexico. It was about five kilometers to the Rio Grande from the airstrip and only another eight through the state of Coahuila before they would be on Carretera Federal 2, the main highway between Nuevo Laredo and Piedras Negras.

Inside another 24 hours, all of the Hezbollah personnel involved would be out of Mexico along with their new hostages. Most would leave the country by civilian airliner while a few, tasked with the security of their captives, would make their way out on a Cuban flagged freighter.

Meanwhile, the United States would be fighting a growing manmade catastrophe of a magnitude near unheard of in its existence. The persistence of the nerve agent could last for weeks with the cooler temperatures of fall and then winter, while the disruptions to the country’s infrastructures would continue for years to come.

Over the next hour, the most sinister plan ever devised by any principal of modern terrorism would reach full engagement, and what occurred then would be completely irreversible. The man called Yahla al-Qassam would go down in history as the greatest practitioner of such terrorism ever, and would finally reach the important destiny for which he had been created for. ‘Allah’u Akhbar!’ Nothing could stop him now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ezekiel Templar had been rapidly gaining on the renegade B-17, traveling better than twice the speed as the Flying Fortress was making at this altitude.  He kept low to the ground and off the horizon from the Boeing, letting the mottled gray camouflage of the Messerschmitt blend in with the Hill Country landscape below.

As he closed rapidly, Ezekiel formulated a hasty plan of attack that seemed to have the best chance for success. He would come up fast on the right side of the four-engine bomber, zooming up beside as he cut throttle and lowered flaps to match its speed. Opening the small window framed into the side of the 109’s canopy, he calculated to close within 50 yards and attempt to put rounds into the flight deck area with the folding stock AK.

It was a plan rife with ifs and maybes, but it was the only plan handy for the circumstances he found himself in. He knew he had to stop The Uvalde Raider now, before it got any closer to the populated areas surrounding San Antonio. To do that, he figured he only had about thirty rounds in the AK and the element of surprise to get the job done.

Each one of those rounds would have to be placed out of the danger zone where the VX was stored, or the aircraft would leak the deadly substance over the area overflown. Somehow, he had to bring the bomber down, hopefully in a sudden and uncontrollable manner. There was plenty of highly inflammable aviation gas in the wing tanks of the old bomber and that was how stocks of nerve agent were best destroyed, by incineration.

As he came up fast from behind and below, he could make out the metal tube protrusions angling down and away from the original waist gunner positions on the Boeing. Evidently, these delivery devices were connected to the original .50 caliber machine gun mounts still emplaced in the aircraft. He reasoned that the holding tanks and other apparatus were in the bomb bay area, it was where he had seen the terrorists working the night before. Ezekiel made a big mental note to keep his rifle fire directed away from that section of the airplane.

He was where he needed to be, on the right approach with enough air speed to surprise the bomber’s occupants. The colonel started a zoom climb, timing the diminishing distance to coincide with a chopping of the throttle while in the same instant employing the flaps on the German fighter. It was a maneuver that called for an enormous amount of finesse. Once he matched the speed of the slow-moving Boeing, the Messerschmitt would only be a few miles an hour over its stalling speed.

The Me109 Gustav arced gracefully skyward. Ezekiel Templar made his best guess on the throttle and flaps, and cracked back the side window as the splotchy gray German fighter pulled alongside the polished aluminum clad American bomber. A blast of wind through the cockpit greeted him as he struggled to bring the AK into position. The pistol grip of the assault rifle banged hard against his left thigh; its barrel being whipped about by the hurricane force of air. The pain was sharp and intense, and Ezekiel fought against the ensuing nausea that added upon everything else occurring within the cramped confines of the Messerschmidt’s interior.

‘There!’ he thought to himself as he lodged the forearm of the AK into the space created by the opened slot of the side window. He rotated the safety lever to what he thought was semi-auto fire as Micah had instructed, and looked at the huge Flying Fortress that filled the view to his left. Shifting the muzzle toward the flight deck against the shrieking wind, he found himself staring into the saucer sized eyes of a startled Yahla al-Qassam. The old Air Force colonel gripped the assault rifle even tighter and pulled the trigger.

The first indicator for Gholam Javad that things were not going well was when Al-Qassam grabbed the co-pilot’s control wheel and steered hard to the left, swearing vehemently in his native Farsi. As the Flying Fortress banked