Armageddon?? (106 page)

“Wouldn’t
you like to know, lover.” The same voice said.

“Err…can
we land somewhere soon, Boss.” The Tactical navigator said, chocking back
laughter. “I think I need to visit the bog.”

“I’m
not landing so you can knock one out, Flight Lieutenant Pervert.” Winter
replied laughing.

Once
the tanks were filled up again Winters dropped back and took station off the
Victor’s port wing.

“Thanks
for the top up, Stu. I think we’re going to need it, over.”

“You’re
welcome, Martin. Good luck, I would say ‘see you in Hell’, but I think that
would be inappropriate, over.”

“See
you when we come back out.”

Twenty
minutes later, systems checks complete, Winters and Maxwell stared at the dark
ellipse of the Hellmouth. They had seen it on footage from UAVs and combat
aircraft and had it described by fellow RAF aircrew, but nothing really
prepared them for the sight if the thing itself. Maxwell throttled back and
engaged the filters that would protect the Olympus engines from the various
kinds of filth found at low level in Hell.

“Oh
well, here goes nothing.” Winters said as the Hellmouth began to fill his
forward vision. “Hold onto your hats, lads.”

The
change from the skies of Earth to Hell was sudden and rather unexpected,
catching both Winters and Maxwell by surprise. There was no transition, one
moment the Vulcan was in the clear blue skies of Iraq, the next in the red,
cloudy murk of Hell. The Vulcan was already starting to climb when they saw
another old aircraft making its landing run on the airfield at Hell-Alpha. One
of the B-29s the Spams had brought back into service for second-line work. Both
pilots peered hard at the veteran but it was too far away and the air was too
foul to make out its name. They’d heard the Enola Gay was back in service and
wondered if it had been her.

That
made Winters reflect on something he had seen just before launching from RAF
Akrotiri. Two Globemaster C.1s; the new fifth and six aircraft; of 99 Squadron
had landed, taxied to a remote part of the air station where they had been
placed under heavy RAF Police and Regiment guard. Rumor had it that their cargo
consisted of ‘special weapons’ and having seen the level of security Winter had
no doubt that for once the rumors were true. It was logical of course, he did
know that someone in the MoD had realized that it would be somewhat difficult
to use the navy’s Trident missiles against Hell, so some of the Trident
warheads had been remanufactured into free-fall bombs. AWRE Aldermaston and ROF
Burghfield had used the most recent design of weapons as the basis of these new
ones – the WE.177A/B/C, and they were also working on a warhead for an extended
range version of the Storm Shadow.

Hellmouth
Air Traffic Control Center, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell

Sergeant
Stephanie ‘Stevie’ Moss liked being an Air Traffic Controller. It gave her a
real feeling of power over the officers that flew the RAF’s aircraft. To help
manage the flow of aircraft around the Hellmouth Number 1 Air Control Centre
had deployed a Type 101 radar and a Tactical Air Control Centre. Some of the
ATC staff were less than pleased to be deployed to Hell, but Moss did not mind,
it would be the first chance for her to earn a campaign medal, and besides they
did have the entirety of 1 Squadron, RAF Regiment defending the radar site, so
she was not particularly worried.

She
watched as the blip she had been expecting appeared out of the Hellmouth.

“X-Ray
Five, Five, Eight, this is GCI. Welcome to Hell, gentlemen. You are clear to
climb to operational altitude, over. Keep alert at all times, the air here is
crowded and poor visibility means you will have very little warning of any
aircraft out of their approved flight path.” There was a note of asperity in
Moss’s voice, most pilots were doing their best in the unfamiliar conditions
but there were some who just did what they wanted and left everybody else to
sort out the problems.

Vulcan
XH-558, Over Hell

It
was reassuring to hear a familiar accent from ground control. “Thank you, GCI,
climbing to cruising altitude, over.”

As
expected at 28,000 feet the Vulcan broke through the clag and Squadron Leader
Maxwell pulled back on the lever that opened the filters. The power from the
engines surged and the bomber immediately began to climb more rapidly, up to
its operational ceiling of 55,000 feet.

“Okay,
open the bomb bay doors. Time to start our Cranberry impression.”

Underneath,
the mapping radars scanned through the murk and started to make their record of
the terrain that lay under the reddish fog that masked Hell. The minutes ticked
past and turned into hours as the maps were generated, watching his displays
Winters wondered how long it would be before there was a Google-Hell to partner
Google-Earth. Even the thought suggested to him that Hell had irreversibly
changed since The Message had arrived eight long months ago; no matter what
happened in the war, it would never be the same again. While the radar system
mapped the ground hidden in the murk below, the optical equipment started
measuring the density of the dust suspended in the atmosphere, trying to gauge
the size of the plume that extended from the giant caldera that formed the
hell-pit. Above them, the sky was a red glare, no sign of anything to break the
uniform light. Or to indicate what the light was for that matter, a problem
that was believed to have given several physicists nervous breakdowns.

“Any
sign of anything interesting down there?” Winters nodded towards the H2S
display. As primarily a bombing radar, it was good at picking up the rectangles
of habitations. Human ones anyway, yet another reason for this flight. Nobody
really know how the baldricks actually lived. Did they have houses? Or live in
caves? Nobody really knew.

Maxwell
shook his head. “Nothing. This place seems almost unoccupied apart from the
concentration around Dis.” He looked down to the flight instrumentation. “Time
for a tank-up Boss.”

“Gotcha.
Dropping down to 30,000 feet. That’ll be above the clag but the tanker should
be able to manage it. Who have we got?”

Maxwell
looked at the roster. “Lion-Oh-Three. Singapore Air Force KC-135. I’ve got his
beacon up.”

“Fair
enough, I’ll give him a bell.”

The
refueling went efficiently enough, without the backchat that distinguished the
RAF-only refueling hook ups. Winters got the impression that the Singapore Air
Force crew were going out of their way to seem professional and efficient on
this, Hell’s first aerial refueling. Other than the inevitable fuel leak, the
hook-up went fine and the tanker peeled away to return to its base back on
Earth.

“Humorless
lot aren’t they.” Winters was relaxing as XH-558 climbed back to her
operational altitude. “Still, coming from a country where one has to get a
police permit before chewing gum…”

“Is
that true? I thought it was an urban legend.” Maxwell stopped suddenly. “Whoa,
now that’s one thing we wanted to see. The beacon is up.”

Sure
enough, the navigation display showed a bright light far to the north of them.
The beacon set up by a Special Undead Forces team to steer the heavy bombers to
their target. Winters didn’t hesitate. “Control, this is XH-558. We have the
Belial Beacon on our display. We read location as….” He hesitated and read the
numbers off the display. “Have you got that? Then tell the spams their Bones
are in business.”

Market
Place. City of Dis, Hell

Yellithanakstra
went around the stalls in the market, looking for food for herself and her
mate. And their kidling of course. Sometimes she had to remember that there
were more than just the two of them now. There were some small food-beasts
around but the choice had dropped dramatically. Word was spreading across Dis
despite the efforts of the surviving Dukes to stop it, Beelzebub’s army had
been smashed, destroyed. The humans had slaughtered his forces just as
efficiently as they had destroyed those of Abigor. Now they were spreading out,
surrounding the city, slowly cutting it off from its sources of supply. As they
did so, their aircraft were pounding targets across the city.

Even
as she thought of the humans and their machines, a wailing noise erupted from
the roofs and walls of the city. The watchers had seen more human aircraft
coming in and were blowing their horns to warn the demons in the city to take
cover. Yellithanakstra looked around, some of the demons here were already
scrambling for cover, trying to hide under abutments and arches from the bombs
that would still be raining down. The older hands, like Yellithanakstra didn’t
bother. The human aircraft, she rolled the new word around on her tongue, might
be fast but they were incredibly accurate. Their bombs, another new word to
savor, always hit the targets they were aimed at. Mostly the palaces of the
powerful dukes, the barracks where their legions lived, the fields where they
trained. They never scattered their bombs at random across the city.
Yellithanakstra wondered at that, if they did, just bombed at random, they
could create panic and chaos in Dis.

She
looked at the aircraft approaching fast. Big aircraft with the strange wings
that could flap forwards and backwards. Their camouflage made them hard to see
against the red-gray sky but she caught a brief glimpse of the red stars on the
wings and tails of the four aircraft. Then they were overhead, their howl
making her head shake, and she saw them bank before releasing a rain of bombs.
Underneath them, the palace of Naberius disintegrated into a cloud of dust
shrouding a pile of collapsing stone. The humans weren’t perfect, she thought,
Naberius had been killed when Satan’s own palace had been bombed. Or perhaps
they had decided to destroy the palace anyway in case somebody had taken
Naberius’s place.

Yellithanakstra
sighed and started to return to her home. Her mate would be off duty soon,
returning from the walls where he and his legion were waiting for the human
assault they knew had to come. Demon armies fighting humans in the open had
been destroyed. Would they have any better luck fighting from behind stone
walls? She was so absorbed with her worries and the sight of the human bombers
flying effortlessly overhead that she never saw the wooden pole being pushed
out from behind a cart. It was beautifully timed, going between her legs and
catching her feet, sending her sprawling to the ground.

For
a second she lay there, on the cobblestones, stunned by her fall. When she had
collected her wits, she started to get up again but a violent blow to the back
of her head sent her back to the ground. Half-stunned, she looked around and
saw greenish, scaly legs surrounding her. Bewildered, she looked more and
realized she was surrounded by a group of orcs, almost a dozen of them, all
carrying heavy clubs. They were jabbering at each other, rattling away in a
language she couldn’t understand. Orcs never spoke in the presence of a demon,
to do so was to invite death and so few demons understood orcish. Whatever the
argument was about, one of the orcs solved it by taking his club and swinging
down, hitting Yellithanakstra on the back.

She
screamed in rage and tried to summon up magic to drive them away but the rest
had been encouraged by the success of the attack and they joined in, swinging
their clubs down on her with all the force they could manage. Yellithanakstra
felt the bones in her body breaking with the impacts, felt the ones to her head
driving away her ability to concentrate for the generation of magic or even to
think. She tried to crawl away but the orcs followed her, still battering her
with their clubs. Eventually, she collapsed, her body shaking as the street
faded away from her sight.

The
orcs looked down on the body of their victim, a few still taking a few last
swings although the demon was obviously dead. Then, they heard other demons
running towards them and they scattered, running through the narrow alleyways
and into the drains. Soon, they would gather and try and set up another ambush
for an unwary demon.

Al
Sahra Airfield, Iraq

”What
a show, what a fight, we really hit our target for tonight, though with one
engine gone we will still carry on coming in on a wing but with flair.

The
chorus of the old song reverberated around the beams of the mess. Al Sahra had
been one of Saddam Hussein’s based, now it was the home of the B-1Bs of the
128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard. Major Curtis Trafford gave out
a cheer as the song ended and he finished off his drink. Coca Cola as it
happened since he was on alert, waiting for the word to come that the beacon
was up and the strike waiting in the dispersal areas could head off for
Beelzebub’s fortress. Six B-1s, two of them were carrying the massive EBU-5(1)
Mod.1 bombs intended to close off the portals showering lava onto Sheffield and
Detroit. The other four ware loaded down with conventional bombs, some unitary
penetrators designed to knock down fortifications, others anti-personnel
bomblets to slaughter any baldricks caught in the open.

“Attention,
your attention please.” General Graydon was standing on a chair at the end of
the room. A dangerous thing to do in a mess full of rowdy pilots. “We have just
heard from the Brits, a Vulcan they have up has picked up the beacon from
Tartarus. The raid is on. All assigned crews, report to your aircraft. The
tankers are already taking off. You have already had your briefings, be ready
to follow them. Thank you.” Graydon stood down and left the room.