He was right there Stevenson reflected blowing up that angel had brought me up on General Petraeus’s radar and I’ve become his go-to officer for anything strange or unusual he thinks up. “It was only a little angel Jim. And it got us our white ring.” Her tank had the usual long series of black rings around the barrel denoting dead Baldricks but hers had the single, unusual, white ring for the angel they’d killed in Iraq. None of the other nine tanks in her group had one of them.
So much had changed since then. The sweeping movements and great battles of the Curbstomp War had been replaced by the grinding attrition of the deadlocked war with Heaven. That was no bad thing she thought it has only been for the last month or so that my vehicles have had full load-outs of ammunition and the artillery boys are still short. There were subtler changes in place though. The extemporized and emergency modifications that had taken place in the Curbstomp War had been replaced by properly-engineered solutions. Her tanks showed that effect. In the charge across the Phelan Plain and up here, her tanks had been equipped with tent-like air filters that had kept the engines clean but were clumsy, fragile and obstructed the turret’s movement. Now, they had been replaced by a much smaller and neater solution. The same applied to her personal equipment. The combination of sand goggles to protect her eyes and bandannas across the nose and mouth to prevent dust inhalation had gone in favor of an integrated mask that covered her face with a loose-fitting filter that allowed her to see, breath and speak without getting her lungs filled with powdered pumice. The new equipment had been made possible by the analysts who had sat down with dust samples and determined the characteristics of the materials that were most effective against it. Slowly, very slowly, Hell was becoming a place where First-Life humans could live. For a limited period anyway. Rather like my home town of Bayonne, she thought.
She shifted her weight against her tank and looked over to where the technicians were setting up the equipment to open a portal back to Earth. It might have been quicker to have gone to one of the new permanent portals that linked Earth and Hell but that would have meant a long drive and her heavy armor wasn’t known for its reliability in road marches. “So, you guys got the words. The egg-heads managed to get the signature of a portal to Heaven from Michael-Lan’s visit to Myanmar. There’s a group on Earth going to open up a portal to that location in a few minutes. We’ll take our armor through this one, form up and prepare to penetrate that portal. Order of march will be Alpha platoon in the lead with my HQ section, Charlie, Delta and Echo platoons following with Bravo platoon forming up the rear. When we transit to Heaven, I’ll lead Alpha in, the rest of you will follow as soon as I confirm our location and situation.
“Once through the portal into Heaven, it’s a straightforward Thunder-Run. Bravo, Echo and Delta platoons will remain at the portal site to garrison it. Jim, that’s your job. You hold that portal regardless right? If you hit real trouble scream for help and we’ll turn back to support you. Charlie Platoon will stick with me and Alpha to do the Thunder-Run itself. We’ll do a twenty-mile swing. Route will be a triangle, out, across and back. Remember, people, Hell had got weird directionality and we’ll have to assume that Heaven is the same. Watch the beacon at all times and keep a picture of where we are relative to it. Rules of engagement, if it moves, shoot at it.”
“What about humans there?” Lieutenant Charles Wayne sounded concerned. He was a retread, a veteran NCO recalled to the ranks and made into an officer. He still had some of the reservations instilled during his earlier stint with the colors.”
“We don’t know.” Stevenson carefully hid the fact that the same question worried her. “When we charged into this place, we could assume the humans were on our side. They were all damned souls after all and we were pulling them out. Even the Baldricks weren’t actually enemies, most of them were just as much victims of Satan as we were.” And that’s a concept that the Second-lifers we’re pulling out of the pit just can’t get their minds around. “But, will that be the same in Heaven? We just don’t know. Theoretically, all the humans up there are saved souls, the redeemed or whatever the religious called it. So we could expect them to be agin’ us. Only, we’re learning how different things are from what we expected. And that causes doubt about everything.”
She shifted her position on the tank again. “Hokay, so we admit we don’t know what to expect. That’s one thing we have to find out. What’ll humans do up there when they see us? Fight us? Fight for us? Take cover and hide? We don’t know. We hope it’ll be one of the first two, that way we learn something.”
“Won’t be Boss.” One of the enlisted crewmen spoke up. Stevenson smiled under her mask. In the old days an enlisted man would never have dared interrupt a full Colonel in the middle of his or her flow. But, with the massive expansion of the Army had come different attitudes. The enlisted man glanced around and continued. “Heaven’s been closed for centuries while Yahweh lied to us. Humans in it will be old-timers. To them, we’re as alien as people come. They’ll run and hide. And when we kick Angel ass, they’ll take note of it.”
Stevenson nodded. “Sounds right. Hokay then, we assume they take cover. If they don’t, watch what happens when we start to blast the Angels. If they join in our side, fine, if they do the opposite, mow’em down. Otherwise try not to hit them. If they get in the way, well, that’s the way it goes. One last thing. Angels use sound weapons, DIMO(N) call it trumpeting. Everybody wear your active noise cancellation earphones all the time. We don’t know if they’ll counter trumpeting if we wear them but we do know they won’t if we don’t. And don’t forget your tinfoil beanies. Mount up.”
A laugh ran around her group. These days, no thinking person was seen without their metallic helmets. There was a reason why the H.E. A had gone back to World War Two style steel helmets. Yet another item that had been emptied from the world’s museums before new production had caught up with demand. Her troops made a great play of adjusting their helmets before swinging into their vehicles. Once securely inside their vehicles, they were safe of course. Daemonic thought control couldn’t penetrate a thin layer of aluminum, it stood no chance against inches-thick rolled steel armor. Ahead of her tank, the black ellipse of the portal to Earth opened up.
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.
“We’re through.” General Schatten’s cry of triumph masked a slight sense of surprise that the portal to Heaven looked so like the ones to Hell. Just a plain, black ellipse, this one large enough to take a pair of tanks side-by-side. A few yards away from his control post, a battery of M-109 155mm self-propelled guns had their tubes trained on the shimmering ellipse. There had been a fear that, when it opened, an attack group of angels would come pouring through. If that had happened, they would have been on the receiving end of a barrage of artillery fire. But, the ellipse was quiet.
A hundred yards away, another portal opened, this one driven through from Hellside. A battlegroup of 22 vehicles made its transit, moved to Shatten’s position and formed up on the concrete. Five groups of four vehicles and a two-vehicle command groups. To his eyes, this one was slightly odd in that most battalion combat group commanders preferred to use Bradleys as their command tracks, but this group was headed by a pair of Abrams tanks. A very experienced pair given the number of kill rings circling their barrels.
“General Schatten, Sir.” The battalion commander was a woman, a very well-endowed one. She’d already peeled off her breathing filter and goggles and was blinking in the bright sun.
Schatten returned her salute. “Colonel Stevenson, pleasure to meet you. I remember your account of blasting that angel. We believe his name was Appoloin-Lan-Gabriel by the way. You did good that day.”
“Thank you sir. We ready to go?”
“All set, we’ve punched a portal through using the signal intercepted in Myanmar. Good luck Colonel and kick some ass over there. We’ve been putting up with enough down here for too long now.”
Schatten retired to his command post and watched the tanks maneuver into position for the first push into Heaven. Stevenson was taking her two-tank HQ section and a platoon of tanks through first as the spearhead. Very wise he thought. To his critical eye, the way the tanks were being handled wasn’t as precise and skilled as he would have wished. Too many new recruits, the old prewar divisions had been pruned over and over again to provide cadres for newly-forming units and the dilution of quality showed. Then, the six selected spearhead tanks accelerated and vanished through the ellipse.
The silence of the communication channel seemed to stretch time out as Schatten waited for the first report in. Eventually, there was a crackle of static. For some reason, radio interference was greater when transmitting through a portal and, of course, there had to be a line-of-sight from the transmitter through the portal to the receiver. That was why all the permanent portals were fitted with high-capacity fiber-optics communications links.
“Hokay, so we’re here.” Stevenson’s voice on the radio had an amused note in it that confused Schatten slightly.
“Colonel, what do you see?” Schatten wasn’t amused, he was annoyed at the obvious levity.
“Well, we’ve got a nice, red-gray sky and everything else seems red and dirty. Oh, there’s a river not far away, that’s red too.”
