“Do you two idiots know the penalty for looting then?” He snarled to the two terrified survivors. “Search and cuff them.” He ordered the other Redcaps. “Sergeant, search the house in case there are more of them in there.”
“Yes, Staff.” McDonagh replied.
Sergeant McDonagh led half a dozen Redcaps into the semi-detached house. With the power cut it was eerily quiet, though there was the distant sound of dripping water.
“Clear!” Each soldier shouted as he, or she cleared a room.
“There’s a door here, Sarge.” A corporal said to McDonagh. “I reckon it leads to a basement.”
“Right, Corporal, you go first. I’ll cover you.” McDonagh ordered, turning on the torch attached to her L1A2.
The Corporal kicked in the door.
“On the floor! Nobody move!” He yelled as he charged through the door, Sergeant McDonagh close behind him.
He swung his L85A2 around the room until the torch tapped to it illuminated the body of a middle aged man. His head had been caved in.
“Oh shit!” The Corporal breathed.
“Maybe later, Corporal, but now I think we’d better tell the Staff about this.”
“There were three bodies, Staff.” McDonagh said to Mann a few minutes later. “They’d been sheltering in their basement, who knows why. There was a middle aged man and woman, I presume husband and wife; they’d both had their heads caved in; and an old woman, looked like she was in her late seventies, or early eighties.”
“Had they killed her too?” Mann asked, the disgust dripping from his voice.
“There were no signs of violence, it looks like a heart attack.”
Mann kicked the nearest of the two looters savagely, hard enough to break his ribs.
“Is this your handiwork, you scum?”
“No, they were already like that when we got here!” The looter with broken ribs said through clenched teeth.
“It were ‘im!” The other looter protested, indicating the dead man.
“Get these two pricks out of here before I do something they regret.” Mann snarled at the other Redcaps, before storming back to his wagon.
“You heard the Staff, get them moving.” McDonagh ordered. “And don’t forget to bring the evidence.”
One of the MPGS soldiers searched through the plastic carriers. Rather surprisingly one of them was filled with food rather than valuables.
“There’s a packet of crisps in here.” He said to his ‘oppo’, holding up the bag.
“What flavour?”
“Prawn cocktail.”
“They would be, I hate prawn cocktail.
“We’d better get a shift on before Mr Nasty notices we’re dawdling.”
“Did you get their names?” Mann asked McDonagh a few minutes later. “The stiffs, I mean?”
The sergeant reached into the pocket of her DPM jacket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper.
“I found a gas bill by the door, it seems that they were a Mr and Mrs Beckett.”
“Well hopefully that should help us to locate next of kin; as for the bodies, we’ll just have to let command deal with that.”
Sixth ring of Hell. Corporal Louis Hoffman paused as he spotted some movement ahead, dropping to the ground and signalling the rest of the patrol to halt and take cover. In this part of Hell is was probably a baldrick patrol and while the patrol from Air Troop, G Squadron, 22 SAS, had enough strength and firepower to deal with any isolated group of baldricks they did not want to draw attention to themselves, at least not yet anyway. Hoffman carefully swung his L1A2 battle rifle from left to right, scanning the ground ahead. Neither his eyes, nor the Combined Weapon Sight fitted to the rifle revealed anything.
“What is it, Louie?” The voice of Captain Patrick Fleming, the patrol commander, said in his headset.
“Thought I saw some movement ahead, Boss.” Hoffman replied. “I’m not sure now.”
“Seeing things now are we, Louie?” The voice of Staff Sergeant Henry ‘Don’t call me Henno’ Garvie remarked. “Better safe than sorry, though.
“Dave, go forward and support Louis. See if you can spot what’s up there.”
Now that the forces of Satan were on the back-foot, Hell was crawling with human Special Forces, and Britain was one of the major providers. Patrols from both the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service were roaming the areas of Hell assigned to the UK, gathering intelligence and rescuing inmates where ever possible. The Special Reconnaissance Regiment had established a number of Observation Posts from where they could watch the comings and goings of Hell’s military forces, and direct attacks when necessary, while the Paras, Marines and RAF Regiment Gunners of the UK Special Forces Support Group were on stand-by to support any patrol that got into difficulty, or add extra muscle to any attack.
The various UK Special Forces patrols had already managed to rescue quite a few former military personnel, who had been marked down as a priority for recovery. These deceased personnel had then been transferred via portal to a safe area near the Hellmouth for rehabilitation. Encouragingly many, mainly amongst the more recently arrived, had volunteered their services.
The Staff amp; Personnel Support Branch of the Adjutant General's Corps now had the headache of working out the back-pay and allowances of these deceased soldiers. There had also been suggestions that it might be possible to use some of these troops as battle casualty replacements for units deployed in Hell, or to form new units. That didn’t solve the legal problems of course, after all, how does one pay the dead for their services and what were the limits on service terms? Technically, those who were being found in Hell hadn’t yet fulfilled the terms of their enlistments and that raised even more legal questions. It was reputed that several members of the Pay Corps and Legal branch had already gone mad trying to think out the implications.
Corporal David ‘Dave’ Woolston carefully made his way forward. He was a large, powerfully built man of Afro- Caribbean extraction, and thus was one of the two members of the patrol carrying a GPMG, in this case the new L7A3 variant, which was chambered for the same 8.58mm round as the L1A2.
“Spread out, but be careful, we don’t know what we are dealing with.” Captain Fleming ordered.
“Wait, I see something.” The patrol’s sniper, Corporal Finn Younger reported.
Corporal Younger normally carried an L115A1 Long Range Rifle, though for the deployment to Hell he had decided to draw an AW50F from the armory at Credenhill. It gave him an extra reach and the 12.7x99 Raufoss Mk. 211 rounds it fired were extremely powerful.
Younger lined his weapon up on the target, preparing to fire if necessary. However to his surprise the figure in the sight resolved itself into a human shape rather than a baldrick. Even more surprisingly the figure seemed to be moving tactically rather than in the way a civilian might cross a piece of terrain.
“I think we have possible friendly forces ahead, Boss.” Younger reported.
“Right everybody, carefully stand-up, its time to reveal ourselves.” Fleming ordered. “Staff, Fin, Dave, Pete, you stay down for now to give us covering fire.”
The rest of the patrol slowly got to their feet to discover that they were being observed by two figures that were definitely human.
“Who are you?” Captain Fleming called out.
“Sergeant Tony Stevens, 2nd Royal Irish Rangers! Who are you?”
“Captain Patrick Fleming, Special…I mean 1st Scots Guards.”
“You’re one of THEM, eh, Sir.” The filthy bedraggled figure replied. “Don’t worry I have heard of you, I died back in 1978, an IRA sniper.
“This is Corporal James Beveridge of the Royal Engineers.”
The other figure nodded.
“If you want any tunnelling done, I’m your man.” The engineer said. “Still that’s what did for me in the end, bloody Bosche heard us coming and blew up ma tunnel.”
“How many of there are you?” Fleming asked.
“About twenty in this group, Sir.” Sergeant Stevens asked. “I think you’d better come and meet our Senior Officer.”
