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
