Armageddon

Chapter Seventy Three

Vulcan XH-558, Over Western Iraq. XH558 was flying her first operational sortie since returning to RAF service, a survey flight of Hell. With her long endurance she could stay on station for a long time and increase humanity’s knowledge of the geography of Hell. Wing Commander Winters was quietly proud of what the British had achieved in mobilizing their air force, pulling it back from the shadow it had nearly become to a viable multi-role force with a seriously destructive capability. They had managed to put a higher percentage of their museum and reserve aircraft back into service than the Spams had managed. Winters wondered if that meant that British museums kept their exhibits in better condition or that the RAF was simply that much more desperate? Even the old Swordfish from the Battle of Britain Flight was back on duty, patrolling over coastal cities in case a Gorgon turned up to open the skies and pour lava over them. There was a joke running around, if one of the amphibious baldricks turned up, it would get an 18 inch airborne torpedo right where it hurt most.

While the other three Vulcans, XL426, XM584 and XM603 were being loaded up with 1,000lb bombs in preparation for bombing missions in support on British troops in Hell, XH-558 had received a different fit. In the forward part of the bomb bay was a reconnaissance crate containing a number of different radar, IR and visual sensors which would record the ground conditions below the bomber. They would record to digital storage in the aircraft, but could also download to ground stations. As well as the ultra-modern sensors in the bomb bay the Vulcan would be using its H2S bombing radar and a digital video camera someone had installed in the visual bomb aiming blister. Two air sampling pods were also being carried under the wings.

Unlike the Americans the RAF had not bothered to alter the tactical camouflage schemes of its aircraft, as yet. They did not have the manpower to spare at the moment, and to be honest were not really convinced that it was necessary. The most they were willing to do was to paint the two TSR. 2s into a similar two-tone grey to that worn by the Tornado GR. 4 and Buccaneer S. 2B and they hadn’t even done that yet. The aircraft had carried out their first strikes in their gleaming white prototype paint. Repainting the Vulcans wasn’t even on the cards, so the Vulcans were still resplendent in their green and grey wrap-around tactical schemes.

In the aft portion of the bomb bay was an additional fuel tank to reduce the aircraft’s dependence on air-to-air refueling, something that had not yet been practiced in Hell, at least not by the RAF. That was about to change. The Spams were counting on aerial refueling to get their bombers all the way up to Belial’s stronghold and they needed a test of the system to see whether it worked. XH-558 had got that job as well. Plus one or two more. The Vulcan currently had its H2S radar radiating as it closed with a tanker aircraft to top up its tanks before entering the Hellmouth. The first of three planned refuellings, two of which would take place in hell itself.

“You should see her soon, Skipper.” The Radar Navigator, Squadron Leader James Bolam reported.

Wing Commander Winters strained his eyes to see their tanker, reflecting on the fact that his eyesight was not quite as good as it had once been. There, he spotted an object ahead of them trailing a vapor trail.

“I’ve got her, Jimmy, shut down the radar so that we don’t microwave the crew.” Winter said.

“Right, David, let’s see if we can put all that refueling practice to practical use.”

“X-Ray Hotel Five, Five Eight, this is Spartan One, is that you lighting up my ECM display, over?” A voice in Winters’ and Maxwell’s ears said rather unexpectedly.

“Yes it’s me, Spartan One, good to hear your voice, Stu; I’d heard that you were back flying tankers.” Winters replied. “Are you ready to give me some fuel, over?”

“Yup, we have the centre hose trailing, now be gentle with me.” The tanker pilot replied, using a feminine voice to finish the sentence.

As XH558 closed in on the tanker it revealed itself as a hemp painted Victor K. 2, in this case XL231, Lusty Linda / Spirit of Godfrey Lee. The Victor was one of the many RAF aircraft that had been forward deployed to Basra airport, it had seemed appropriate to refuel one V-bomber with another one.

While Winters carefully lined up the Vulcan behind the Victor Maxwell maintained careful control of the throttles. The refueling probe made contact with the basket first time and the transfer began, though as usual aviation fuel leaked over the bomber’s canopy, partially obscuring the view. This was a problem which had first arisen during the ‘Black Buck’ missions of the Falklands War. The RAF engineers had never quite found out yet why the probes, which had been perfectly serviceable in the nineteen sixties until they had been removed, should now leak fuel like it was going out of fashion.

“Ooh, you are a big boy.” A sultry female voice said over the radio.

Winters looked at Maxwell somewhat surprised. Below him he could hear the rest of the crew roaring with laughter.

“Ah, do you have a split, sorry female crew member, Stu?” He asked.

“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.

Across the mess, the 24 crewmen assigned to the strike quietly got up and left, collecting back-slaps and salutes as they went. Trafford followed them, out to where Dragon Slayer was waiting. The mission was a complex one, already tankers would be converging on the strike route, some to refuel the B-1s, others to refuel the tankers. It took 14 tankers to get each of the B-1s to their target and back and more than a few of those tankers would be flying two missions. It was a 22,000 mile flight in total, making this the longest-range bombing mission that had ever been attempted. It was one for the history books, and it was one to avenge Detroit.

Trafford started to climb in to his aircraft then stopped half way in, reaching out to pat the airframe. “Well, honey-bunny, we’re on our way at last.”