“Comes of making a career with an army that has a German heritage.” The woman’s voice was contralto but had a distinct growl underlying the very precise pronunciation. “Old habits die hard. Do you think this piece of dreck will talk?”
“No, he’s going to go all heroic on us. Not that it will matter in the long run. We have the entire crew, one of them will cough up the goodies. He’ll get the deal, the rest can carry the load for him.” Thanas returned his attention to Ben-Shoshan. “One chance. This is it. What the hell happened out there.”
“We killed the Scarlet Beast. And the Whore of Babylon. With our nuclear missiles.”
“No, you didn’t. A formation of Australian F-111s took out the Beast. Your missiles were targeted on Damascus, Teheran, Baghdad, Cairo and Tel Aviv.”
Ben-Shoshan went white. “Yitzchak! That bastard Yitzchak did it somehow. You talk to him.” Ben-Shoshan looked at the woman who was still staring at him. Her face was still emotionless, menacing.
“We plan to. Now, you tell us everything that happened, everything down to the smallest detail.”
Ben-Shoshan spoke for almost an hour, his words being recorded on a tape machine. When his story reached the point of his death, he stopped. “That’s all I can remember. What happened to those missiles?”
“Your Air Force got four of them. The fifth, there wasn’t time to stop it. Tel Aviv is toast.”
Ben-Shoshan broke down, started to cry. “You said 153,000 dead? Can you check to find out if my family were survivors? We all lived in Tel Aviv.”
For a moment Colonel Thanas let his act slip and real sympathy crept into his voice. The story Ben-Shoshan had told rang true although it was hard to believe anybody could be so sloppy in their control of nuclear weapons. “I do not have that information and the casualty lists are still being compiled. I will check for you though. Even if the answer is that they are not yet amongst the known dead, that may change. People will die from the attack your submarine launched for decades to come. Think about that if you think we are being harsh with you. Also, we can check here. The number of casualties from Tel Aviv has completely overloaded our receiving system and many of the dead arriving from there still have to be interviewed, documented and identified.”
“That bastard Yitzchak. Right at the end, he said Yahweh would protect him.”
“Well, he didn’t.” Major General Asanee grinned. It was not a comforting sight. “We have detained him in another cell. We’ll have a chat with him. Colonel Thanas, get a crowbar, a bicycle pump and a plate of asparagus.”
Two hours later, Ben-Shoshan was still trying to absorb what he had done when the two officers returned. Colonel Thanas went to the bars and called Ben-Shoshan over. “Captain, I wanted you to know this as quickly as possible. I am deeply sorry to have to tell you that your parents, wife and children were amongst those killed at Tel Aviv. They are here and have been identified. Please accept my condolences for your losses. On the subject of Yitzchak, he has made a full confession. He was approached by an archangel called Azrael who claimed to be acting on behalf of Yahweh. According to Yitzchak, Azrael believed that Michael wasn’t prosecuting the war with us enthusiastically enough and Azrael saw this as a chance to displace Michael as Yahweh’s leading General. Yitzchak was promised archangel status in Heaven and various other Second Life benefits if Azrael succeeded. Obviously, he was misled.”
Ben-Shoshan nodded, still devastated by the news he had been given. “The rest of my crew?”
“We think they were loyal to us, right up to the time they died. The way your nuclear control system, such as it was, got set up, everything went through your communications officer and he was in a position to intercept some messages and substitute others. We have indications that other people were involved though. We’ll be pursuing that. You’ll be staying here with your crew until we’ve got to the bottom of this. Provided we don’t discover anything more, we will not be recommending disciplinary action against you. You’ll punish yourself worse than anything we can think up.”
The two Thai officers started to leave. There was one other question that Ben-Shoshan had to have answered. “Ma’am, the asparagus. What did you do with it?”
“Ate it with hollandaise sauce. It was lunchtime and I was hungry.”
Plain of Mapheloistamitos, Hell
Azrael, didn’t really recognize this set up. There were bronze columns set at strange angles in the rock and a long, sloping downramp leading to the center of the strange structure. Huge rocks, dozens of them were gathered at the top of the slope, ready to be rolled down. Gathered around the structure was a Choir of the Angelic Host, one loyal to Azrael, ready to sing the chants of blessing. Michael-Lan had explained that Belial, who had designed this set-up, had used Naga to generate the offset portal needed to drop Lava on Earth but the Angelic Host had no Naga. Angels weren’t differentiated the way daemons were; an angel was a jack-of-all trades, the specialized daemons were masters of one. That meant the Choir was being pushed to the edge of its capabilities. Still, to Azrael, the arrangement was as strange and alien as the environment he found himself in.
The trip to get here had been equally strange. After his meeting with Michael, the meeting in which Michael had made it quite plain that Azrael didn’t have many choices, he had portalled to Earth. A strange part of Earth, one where the ground was frozen and covered with ice. Only black granite pierced the ice to make a strange, surreal landscape. A bitterly cold landscape. Then, from there, Azrael had portalled to this point in Hell, one far removed from the human-occupied abode of the daemons. Michael-Lan had been very clear on this point. Never, ever portal directly from somewhere humans can see you to Heaven.
Disobeying Michael wasn’t on the agenda, not any more. Michael had known all about Azrael’s network of human loyalists, the ones he had tricked into continuing to support Yahweh’s agenda. He had also known of Azrael’s plot to supplant him as Yahweh’s leading general. Azrael had been given two options, one was to join forces with Michael and become his second-in-command. For that he would be richly rewarded. Michael had sworn the most holy of oaths that if Azrael supported him loyally, he would get everything that was coming to him. The other option was to be arrested as one of those responsible for the spate of bomb attacks that had taken place across the Eternal City. After all, those attacks were human tactics and Azrael was exploiting humans and their tactics. The suspicion was inevitable even if it was wrong.
The Choir was starting its chorus and Azrael watched the center of Belial’s array for the formation of the black ellipse. They were homing in on a Nephelim in the city called New York. On paper, this wasn’t like Belial’s lava attacks that centered on a specific point and needed to be fine-tuned. The whole city was the target and nobody really cared where the rocks landed. Only, Michael had a specific target in mind for the first rock. That would need a pathfinder to go in and move the Earth end of the portal to the desired spot. Azrael had picked one of his most loyal followers for that purpose. The black ellipse in the center of the array formed and the pathfinder dived through it.
New York Air Defense Interception Zone Command Center, World Trade Center Site, New York, United States
The alert siren filled the monitoring room, causing the staff to transition from somnolent ease to frantic activity within seconds. Mostly, the warning were false alarms, caused by a sudden increase in problems with the cell- phone network that was the backbone of the portal warning system. Corporal James Yan hoped that this was another one and he could go back to reading his graphic novel but one glance at bank of monitors told him that wasn’t a likely probability. The spectrum analyzer was processing the data from the cell-phone network’s receiver limitations, but it was clearly showing a broadband hump peaking in the low gigahertz. The spectrum display flicked and restructured itself, crisper and with fewer gaps. Secondary windows began to fill up with phase analysis of signal components. Yan stared at the screen absorbing the data on it, before speaking directly to his commanding officer.
“Sir, we have a portal forming over lower Manhattan. Confidence is high, say again, confidence is high for portal opening over lower Manhattan.”
There was a brief pause on the line and Yan could hear a hurried conference in the background. It sounded as if Mayor Bloomberg himself was there. Whatever was being said, the decision was sudden and obvious. All over new York, the air raid sirens started to wail and the street lights started flashing. The ACLU had seen to that, they had taken legal action on behalf of the deaf to force the government to organize visual and well as audio warnings of an impending Netherworld attack. New York was getting ready for its attack, the only question was what form it would take. Another angel of death like the late Uriel? Or was it the hypothetical rock attack? The disaster in Baghdad from the floods caused by the rock attack there was still on television every evening. So was footage of Indian, Pakistani, Iranian and American troops trying to rescue the people whose homes had been washed out by the tidal wave.
