Armageddon?? (110 page)

On
the other hand, this mission was the only way humans could strike at the source
of the attacks that had destroyed Sheffield and Detroit. Not to mention the
only way any further attacks of the kind could be prevented. There were special
forces in the vicinity of Belial’s fortress, the radar beacon they were using
for navigation proved that, but they lacked the strength and firepower to do
much about the place. A long way south, two human aircraft carrier battle
groups were due to enter the Hellish Sea and start pounding their way up north
but even flat out it would be two weeks before they were on station – and
supporting them this far away from a home base would be a real pain. No, for
the moment, the bombers were it, the best and most plausible form of striking
at the source of the sky-volcanos.

“Tankers
ahead Curt.” The co-pilots voice was relieved. It hadn’t quite been decided
what to do if the complex refueling arrangements hadn’t worked. The B-1s
couldn’t make it to the target area without refueling so if the refueling went
sour, the aircraft went down. Trafford assumed that the only course of action
would be to walk out but 6,000 miles was a long way by B-1. On foot it was an
impossibility even forgetting the hostile environment of Hell. So, seeing the
glint of red as the light flashed off the silver wings of the tankers was a
great relief.

“Got
them. This is Foxhound Leader to all Foxhounds. Tankers in sight, prepare for
refueling.” Trafford relaxed a little and shifted in his seat again. “3,750
miles out, none of us are going to walk right for a month after this.”

“There’s
always the steam baths and massages.” His co-pilot’s voice was droll, the idea
came from an old film starring Jimmy Stewart and its ideas on post-flight
treatment were a long-standing bomber crew joke.

“Yeah,
right. It look to you like the clag is a bit thinner up here? Sometimes I’d
swear I can almost see the ground down below.”

“Just
your imagination Curt. Take two reality pills and remember we’re bombing the
crap out of Hell.”

Chapter
Seventy Six

Walls
of Dis, Hell

This
wasn’t like normal sieges. The rules of a siege were well-established; the
defenders mounted guard on the walls of the besieged fortress, the attackers
started to build their own fortifications around that fortress. Their aim was
to cut supplies to the besieged garrison and eventually bring about its
surrender. If that didn’t seem likely, they would concentrate on the weakest
point of the line and break through there. Or try to, a wise garrison commander
kept a force in reserve for exactly that eventuality. The reserve force could
be used another way, if food was running out, it could launch an attack on the
weakest point of the fortifications and break out. If there was a reserve.

Nobody
had ever besieged Dis before, not even during the Great Celestial War. It was
too big, its walls too long. It would require more than the total armies of
Hell, even before the humans had set about decimating them, to set up a proper
siege. Garrisoning Dis was even more impossible. Dagon had 243 legions, of whom
24 were Krakens and 16 cavalry. That left him with 203 legions of foot
soldiers, 1,350,000 in total. That meant he had one soldier for every 50 feet
of wall. That wasn’t a garrison, it was a fig-leaf. Dagon snorted at the use of
the old Earth religious reference. These humans weren’t the blind, foolish
followers of superstition that the Demons had known. They were supremely
logical, supremely practical, utterly ruthless killers. And nobody had told
them that putting Dis under siege was impossible so they had gone ahead and
done it.

At
first, Dagon didn’t even believe that the city had been put under siege. There
were no earthen walls being thrown up, no garrison surrounding the city. The
humans had started to arrive and set up their camps, scattered around the city,
wherever they felt the ground suited them. Isolated encampments, just their
tanks and mickvees parked on the plains, surrounded by a wall of earth. And
their artillery of course, Briefly Dagon wondered at how Belial had got to know
all the names for the human weapons, was he in league with them? That was a
question better not asked because Belial was now Satan’s favorite and to
criticize him meant death. Anyway, the names were good, ‘aircraft’ made much
more sense than ‘sky chariot’ and few now used the original demon names. That
was good for the old names implied magic and there was no magic in the human’s
arsenal. They used machines instead. Engineering had met magic and engineering’s
victory had been absolute. Dagon knew Dis would fall, his paper-thin screen of
soldiers couldn’t stop the human onslaught.

Dagon
shook his head and returned to the problems of the siege. He had more soldiers,
more by far than the humans. The human encampments hadn’t linked up, they were
still separate entities. Last night, some demons outside had tried to get
caravans of supplies through to the city, knowing that prices within the walls
were already soaring. The great camps between the human positions had seemed an
open invitation and that was just what they had been. An invitation to
destruction. The caravans had set out and died under a hail of mage bolts –
Dagon stopped himself and carefully used the right words. A hail of artillery
fire. The caravans had been destroyed, when the light had returned, all that
was left of them was charred wreckage. The siege was as tight as if the humans
had surrounded Dis. How they’d done it, Dagon didn’t understand but they had
and that was all that mattered.

“Keep
down My Lord.” One of the foot soldiers near him whispered urgently. That was
something else Dagon had noted. The soldiers up here crouched behind the stone
crenellation and spoke in whispers. They were afraid, mortally afraid and once
more Dagon knew that the fall of Dis was inevitable.

“You
fear the humans?” Dagon’s voice was silky as he asked the question that was
also a threat.

“Humans,
no. Their magery yes. “ The new words hadn’t spread down to the rank and file
yet. “My Lord, if they see you, you will die. They can see in the dark and
strike without warning.”

The
ranker measured distances and the route that Dagon had used to approach. “My
Lord, they are watching now for you. They saw you come to us and now they wait
for you. When you appear again, if you appear again, you will die. Watch this.”

The
soldier placed a spare helmet, Dagon didn’t like to think of how the helmet had
become a spare, on a trident and lifted it where Dagon’s head would be if he
stood up. There was a dull thud and the helmet lurched and spun. When Dagon
looked at it, there was a hole the size of his talon punched in the front but
the back was a gaping void, its edges hot and singed.

“Three
soldiers we’ve lost tonight to that magery, on just this section of the wall.
How many more, I don’t know but if the rest of the walls are like this….”

The
soldier didn’t need to finish the thought but Dagon did it for him, silently,
in his head. If this rate of attrition kept up, he wouldn’t even have a
paper-thin defense when the assault came. He had a mental picture of what that
would mean, the humans breaking through the walls, their tanks and mickvees
plowing through the streets, their artillery devastating the city and they took
in by storm. Every demon knew what happened when a fortress fell to attack by
storm, a days-long orgy of looting, rape, pillage and torture than would only
end when there was nothing left to kill and destroy. If the humans were as
efficient at storming fortresses as they were at destroying armies in the
field, and there was no reason why they should not be, then Dis was indeed
doomed. And with it the whole demon race.

Dis
could not be stormed, its surrender had to be negotiated before the humans got
to work. Deumos had been right, somebody had to contact the humans and ask for
terms. But, nobody could do that while Satan still lived. The answer was
obvious although millennia of loyalty screamed in protest at the inevitable
conclusion. Satan had to go. That meant Dagon had to see Deumos and throw his
lot in with her plan. Now, quickly because the humans would attack soon and then
it would be too late for Dis and everybody who lived within it.

B-1B
“Strawberry Bitch” 128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard, Over
Tartarus

“I
guess that must be the first target?” Major Andrea Czernick swung Strawberry
Bitch around in a wide circle, looking at the great black ellipse beneath them.
“Sheffield or Detroit do you reckon?”

“No
way of knowing is there? Hang on a minute, Sheffield’s lava outfall has
stopped, Detroit’s hasn’t. The portal is that crater is clear of lava. Looks like
its building up though and will lap over again soon but its clear now. So that
must be Sheffield. Damn.”

Strawberry
Bitch had been allocated the southern portal, a few miles away, Shoo Shoo Baby
was lining up on the other. It looked like Shoo Shoo Baby had got lucky and
drawn the Detroit portal.

“Look
on the side Jim, at least if this thing works, we’ll stop the Sheffield attack
resuming.”

“If
it works, I hear the first test was a flop. Lining up Andy?”

“Lined
up. Bomb-nav system on, target designated, approach height 29,000 feet, speed
454 knots. All data entered. Take it from here, Strawberry Bitch.”

The
B-1B settled into its bomb run, the attack-navigation system taking data from
the flight computer and bombing radar and transforming it into precise flight
commands. Humanity had come a long, long way from the crude Norden bomb sight
in the B-24 whose name the B-1 carried. At a precisely calculated moment, the
aircraft lurched as the EBU-5 dropped clear of the bomb bay and arced
downwards. Czernik held her breath as she watched it fall in a perfect
ballistic arc that terminated in the center of the portal. There was a
brilliant flash, one that seemed unnaturally bright against the black of the
portal, a flash that seemed to grow out of all proportion to the size of the
bomb she had just dropped. The black ellipse of the portal seemed to flicker,
its edges pulsating as they absorbed the blast from the bomb. Then the portal
started to swell outwards , doubling or tripling in size, before it collapsed and
vanished.

“Yee-hah!”
Czernik’s scream of triumph was echoed throughout Strawberry Bitch as her crew
looked at the featureless crater that now lacked its black crown. A split
second later a similar scream of triumph came over the radio from Shoo Shoo Baby.
Obviously the Detroit sky-volcano had just been shut down as well. Czernik
pulled the control column back, bringing Strawberry Bitch into a gentle climb
away from the target location. First responsibility was to clear the target
area for the formation of four B-1s that were targeting Belial’s fortress.
Second was to send a message home. She thumbed the button on the radio that
selected long-range communications and composed her voice into its best
neutral-official tone. “This is Foxhound-Electric-Leader to Rivet Crown. Do you
read me?”

“Rivet
Crown here. Receiving you.” That was a relief, there were no satellites in Hell
and the egg-heads seemed to believe there never could be so relay aircraft were
being used. Rivet Crown was an old EC-121 that had been ‘borrowed’ from a
museum and pulled back into service while Boeing 747s were converted to take
her place. She had last directed air intercepts over the Gulf of Tongkin more
than forty years before. Another old lady doing her best.

“Report
Operation Electric Strike successful. Repeat Operation Electric Strike
successful. Both portals hit by bombs and closed down. Both portals shut
completely. No sign of further sky volcano action here.”

“Confirming
that Electric Strike Leader. Both portals shut down. Wait one.” There was a
long humming crackle of static and Czernik thought she could hear the drone of
the relay aircraft’s piston engines. “Electric Strike Leader, we have word from
Detroit. Sky volcano has vanished, the lava has ceased to fall and the portal has
closed. Mission confirmed as successful. Rivet Crown out.”

Czernik
relaxed in her seat, as much as was possible in the poopy-suit she was wearing.
That was one thing the air force still had to sort out, a decent means of
in-flight relief for female crew members. And it was still a long way to go
back home.

B-1B
“Dragon Slayer” 128th Bomb Squadron, Georgia Air National Guard, Over Tartarus

“The
sky volcanoes are down!” Rivet Crown just confirms shut-off.” Trafford relayed
the message to the crews and heard the explosion of cheering in the four
aircraft. “Now let’s get that bastard Belial.”

Even
if this part of the strike was a failure, the mission would still count as a
success. The volcanoes had to come first, partly so the bombing conditions for
the two Foxhound-Electric aircraft would be perfect but also, as the old
proverb insisted, business had to come before pleasure. So, taking out Belial
and his fortress had to wait for second place. But, the main formation’s time
had come and the four B-1s dropped into the appropriate formation.

“Bomb-nav
system on, target designated, approach height 45,000 feet, speed 522 knots.
Intervalometer on. All Foxhound aircraft synchronize now.” The master bombing
system on Dragon Slayer sent out an electronic bleep that aligned all four
bomb-nav systems on the aircraft to within a thousandth of a second. Ahead of
them was the great square that Abigor had described as “The Adamantine
Fortress” and carefully drawn for them. The special forces team that was on the
ground below had photographed the installation as well and those illustrations
had made up the target pack. Now, the bombers had a radar image of the target
and the set was complete.