A moment’s hesitation would have been instantly fatal, but fortunately Peter had encountered this problem twice before, in a combat landing exercises. He shoved the cyclic forwards, trading his precious remaining altitude for speed in a desperate attempt to escape regain lift. He succeeded, but it was already too late to avoid his pressing appointment with the ground. The Explorer skimmed over a half-completed apartment block then ploughed into the corrugated metal roof of a small tow-bar factory.
‘PINDAR’, under the MoD Main Building, Whitehall, London.
The Prime Minister strode briskly through the underground corridor. He’d retired to Number 10 after the initial searches had turned up nothing, but in truth he’d only been napping. He wasn’t ready to believe that the demons had simply retreated after their slaughter, and it would seem that his instincts were correct.
“It’s Sheffield sir,” the aide next to him said, “some kind of massive incendiary attack. Reports of fires burning out of control and of buildings collapsing. No baldricks though.”
Gordon Brown didn’t bother asking her to elaborate, as the situation room was just ahead. He spotted Lord West across the room – the Secretary for Defence probably hadn’t left since the initial attack – along with several other cabinet members. The screens showed images of fire, brimstone and digital maps with conspicuous red outlines superimposed on them.
“How bad is it Admiral?”
“Prime Minister. In short, the Baldricks have hit Sheffield with a weapon of mass destruction, based on their portal capability. We’re looking at a total loss of the city centre, severe damage out to three miles and significant damage to the surrounding areas.”
The PM’s expression was grim. “Comparable to a sub-strategic nuclear yield?” The scenario seemed familiar somehow, but he couldn’t place the source of the deja vu.
“Not exactly sir. We had one piece of luck, a police helicopter caught the deployment on video.” Lord West nodded to the comms officer, who touched a control. A pair of images appeared on a large screen, documenting G-SYPS’s initial encounter with the Baldrick.
“Right is natural color, left is the thermal image. They intercepted the demon over the cathedral, don’t know if that was significant.”
The PM was staring at the Baldrick. It looked like a grotesque cross between a woman and a bat, with bronze skin and no visible arms. There was something odd about its hair… and its wings had started to glow.
The image began to show streaks and speckles. Lord West continued to narrate. “Intercept control lost radar coverage over the city shortly before the intercept. Radio contact with the helicopter was lost about now.” The buildings began to recede and the angle shifted. “They’re maneuvering for a shot. A little too late, unfortunately…”
The baldrick suddenly closed its wings and fell away, leaving a tower block in the centre of the frame. The image flared; the visual camera quickly recovered to show a blossoming orange firework, while the thermal image stayed whited out. The room was silent as the cascade of magma obliterated the buildings below. Then the image spun crazily before blanking out.
“The helicopter went down?”
The voice came from behind him but it was one the PM had become tiresomely familiar with. Sure enough, Deputy Prime Minister David Cameron was standing behind him.
“Actually no, though it was a close thing.” As if on cue, the video switched to showing a panoramic aerial view of the destruction. “They recorded this before they had to return to base. We’ve established that the burst height was a little over eight hundred feet. Portal diameter is about fifty feet, and the damn thing hasn’t shown any sign of closing yet.”
Threads. That was it. An old BBC documentary, about Sheffield’s destruction during a nuclear war. Gordon pushed the trivia out of his mind, but not before thinking well, at least things aren’t that bad.
"Casualties?"
"We're guessing at the moment, but I'd be surprised if we take less than ten thousand fatalities. Still, it could've been much worse. That figure would be tripled if the attack had come at noon instead of midnight."
And that was our safest Labour seat the Prime Minister thought grimly.
“What’s our response so far?”
“We’ve got fighters up Sir. Tornados patrolling and some Hawks. They’re trainers but they’ve always had a war-emergency point defense role. They’re carrying a gun pod we’ve had in storage ever since the Phantoms were phased out.”
“Tornados? Hawks? What happened to the Typhoons? For all the money those things cost us…”
“They’re out in Iraq Sir. Anyway, the Home Guard is being mobilized and we’re moving in. With that portal still open, we’ll have to be damned careful. The explosion did one hell of a lot of damage and if there’s another, we could lose all our first responders. Casualties? Quite apart from the numbers issue, we’ve got the lot. Severe burns, blunt force trauma, gas poisoning, you name it. The baldricks didn’t hit us with a nuke but they might as well have done. First priority is to get the scene cordoned off…”
He was interrupted by the telephone ringing. One of the aides picked it up and spoke for a few seconds. “Sir, I have Dublin on the line. They’ve picked up the news, probably intercept of the transmissions we’ve been watching. The Dublin Fire Brigade is already on its way. A ferry is being held for them.”
“Word’s out then. Didn’t take long did it. Have we any more data to give out.”
“No Sir. We’ll be getting download from a Keyhole fairly shortly but that’s all we can expect. All our good stuff is out in Iraq or on its way there. We can get a Nimrod down but it’ll take time.”
“I thought BAE Systems had killed off our Nimrod fleet?”
“Not all of them sir. Just the ones they ‘upgraded’. The old ones are still flyable.” The phone rang again. “Its Norway, Sir. They got the news about the attack but no more than that. They say, whatever they’ve got and we want we can have.”
“Nice of them. Still no theories on why Sheffield was the target? Ground zero was the university, were they doing anything important?”
“Nothing credible Prime Minister. I checked the university… their materials department did some engineering work on the new HEAD shells, but that’s all.”
Another cold war memory bobbed unbidden into Brown’s mind; a novel in which the Russians had destroyed Birmingham with a single ICBM, then tried to sue for terms. Bad end to a good book… he couldn’t remember the title. No matter, it was a plausible scenario here. The attack might be a carefully judged attempt by Satan to demonstrate his power before opening negotiations. But it was also plausible that Sheffield was just unlucky, and that more strikes would follow as fast as the demons could manage.
“We have to know why and more importantly if, when and where the next strike will be. What about that demon general the Americans captured? If he’s supposed to be on our side why didn’t he bother to warn us about this?”
“You’ll have to ask the Americans that Sir, he’s in their hands.”
“We’ll do just that. Mr. Cameron, if you could call the White House and the Kremlin please, I’ll want a video conference ASAP.” Brown was more inclined to assign the twit to making tea, but alas one had to accommodate political realities.
(Hats off to Starglider who did this bit (all the Belial/Lava attack parts are his).
Chapter Forty Eight
'The Cavendish”, West Street, Central Sheffield
Alex Malcolm had saved up two week's worth of alcohol rations for the pub crawl, and he was determined to use them all before the night was over. University life hadn't changed that much, at least not for the engineering students. They'd all had to join the cadets and that meant weekends wasted on the firing range and the drill ground, but that was all. Not like the humanities students, most of whom had been evicted from the halls of residence and drafted. In their place were throngs of 'mature students' being pushed through the new short technical and medical courses. In Alex's mind the humanities students were no big loss, it's not as if they were doing real degrees anyway, though the replacement of all those hot young psychology girls with boring ugly ex-call-center workers was a crying shame.