“Given the size of the holes the LEO community have taken to blowing in the alleged perpetrators, I think that’s a reasonable assumption.” There was a brief spasm of amusement at the sally from FBI Director Robert Mueller. “One thing about these lava attacks, we don’t get much looting, people are too busy running to think about getting a free television. Most of them anyway. And the draft is sweeping most of the candidates for street criminals out of the way into the forces where the Sergeants are straightening them out. Law and order isn’t really a problem, you’d be surprised how rarely it is in a really major disaster. How long it will stay that way is another matter, one or two more attacks like this and we’ll have mass panic on our hands. That’ll do more damage to our industrial production than the attacks themselves.”
"Which brings us to the why? Neither Detroit nor Sheffield were really important production centers, so why Detroit? Have the analysts worked out the enemy's strategy?"
"Only the obvious so far, Mr President.” Secretary Warner took a deep breath. “Sheffield and Detroit were both industrial powerhouses until quite recently, very recently in Baldrick terms. Remember, to them, centuries are a short period. My guess is, this 'Belial' has worked out that our military strength relies on our industrial base, but his intel is stale and his targeteering is lousy. Make no mistake though, he hit us hard this time around, this is the worst blow we've taken since this whole business started. We don't want to give him a chance to refine his aim."
“Then we have to kill him at source. Now. Prime Minister Brown was right, we can’t just let this pass. Hell has to hurt for this and hurt badly. We lost under four thousand people in 9/11 and we took two countries down by way of retaliation. Now you say we’re going to lose upwards of 25 times that number.” Bush’s jaw set. “They’re going to have to pay, the American people demand it. Tell me what we’ve got and how we’re going to use it. The answer ‘nothing’ won’t be accepted.”
“Sir, we have several plans in motion. We have a path-finder of our own on the way up to Tartarus, he’s expected there in 24 to 36 hours. Once he’s in place, we can portal a deceased special forces team to his location and they’ll position navigation beacons to home a B-1 strike in. They’d devastate the area. As a back-up we have a British special forces group ready to go in. If the B-1s can’t do the strike, they’ll do a ground raid. We have a B-1 searching for Tartarus as well, if our pathfinder can’t get through, she’ll find Tartarus, eventually. We have time Sir, we believe that it will be a week or more before Belial manages to get set up for a third strike. One of our options will be in place by then.”
“Not good enough, what do we do now?” Bush’s voice was dogmatic and a little petulant.
“We can hit Dis with an air strike, the B-1s won’t be able to hit Tartarus for days, we can let them loose on Dis. With conventional bombs of course. We have a nuclear strike plan, we can adapt it for a conventional bombing strike. That’s about our only serious option right now.
“In the meantime, we have to think about limiting the disaster we have in hand. We have a couple of options there. We have a prototype device that is designed specifically to close portals. This prototype is too large to be carried by an existing bomber but we do have a different alternative. We have old C-54s we’ve pulled from the boneyard and we can refit one to carry that prototype device. The original plan was to use a Britannia and target the Sheffield portal but that’s run a long way out of steam now, the vulcanologist believes it’ll run dry in a day or less. We can test out our new device in Detroit instead.”
“There’s another thing we can do.” Doctor Surlethe’s voice was clinical. “We can deprive the baldricks of their own navigation beacons. I propose we test the entire population for the Nephilim genetic ancestry and quarantine those carrying it in isolation camps until the war is over.”
There was another stir in the room, this time of anger. In one corner, Karl Rove leaned back in relief, somebody else had made a political error of grade one levels. Secretary Kempthorne was the one who took up the cudgels though. “And we know what to look for do we?”
“Well, we will, after some investigations.”
“And then you propose to place people in indefinite confinement without them having committed an offense on the vague off-chance that a baldrick might use one of them?”
“Better that than an incinerated city.”
“Even though we already know that wearing tinfoil hats offers complete protection against mind entanglement?”
“But there are a few people out there who won’t. There are always eccentrics who deny that the tinfoil hat is absolutely essential to prevent baldricks taking over their minds.”
“And you want to indefinitely jail an unknown number of people, possibly millions, because one or two might refuse to wear their hats?”
“Well… Put like that….”
“And that’s how it will be put ladies, gentlemen, Karl.” Rove winced, he hadn’t been forgiven after all. “We will make it a legal requirement to wear a tinfoil hat and enforce it. But there will be no mass detentions. We did that in 1941 and the stain is with us still. Thank you, we will have another meeting in six hours time when we can get some of the rest of the world in with us. Karl, Dr Surlethe, I wish to speak with you two privately.”
Chapter Sixty
Indian Air Force Jaguar-IS “JM-414” Over the Southern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge
Statistically (as confirmed by the Federal Aviation Administration) 80 percent of cockpit voice flight records recovered after aircraft crashes, end with the words ‘Oh Shit.’ The speaker may have been the pilot or the co-pilot (or, it is rumored, in some cases the aircraft itself although this possibility is denied, derided and generally rejected) but the ultimate words remain the same. So, Flight Lieutenant Aniruddha Mehta’s exclamation when a wyvern came out of nowhere and removed his Jaguar’s entire vertical fin and rudder assembly was entirely in accordance with tradition. It was no consolation when the Wyvern almost thereafter immediately had a terminal encounter with a U.S. Navy F-18E and gone down after taking two hits from AIR-120 rockets and a burst of 20mm cannon fire. The fact was that JM-414 was going into a flat spin and there was nothing Mehta could do about it.
Mehta hadn’t seen anything like the creature before, not outside mythology and fantasy art. It was a huge flying creature two legs, one pair of wings and small steering fins on the lower tail and upper neck. Mehta estimated is size as roughly 12 meters long and its wingspan around 40 meters. It had been fast, it had dived on him in a collision course with an approach speed of around 400 knots. As it had passed it had taken a swing at his aircraft with the great spiked ball on the tip of its tail, a ball covered in strong scales. It had totally wiped out his fin and that had killed JM-414 as surely as a missile hit. He looked downwards, he was over the battle area but whether he was on the baldrick or human side was another matter. On the other hand, he had no real options in the matter, JM-414 was uncontrollable, going into a flat spin and would soon break up. His only choices were to eject or ride the aircraft in. He opted for the former and felt the slam in his back as the ejection rocket blasted him through the disintegrating canopy of his aircraft.
U.S. Navy F/A-18E “Eagle One” Over the Southern Front, Phlegethon River Bulge
The Indian pilot was out of his stricken aircraft, that was one good thing. What would happen on the way down and when he reached the ground was quite another. Lieutenant Commander Michael Wong really didn’t have time to worry about him. The sky was full of flying things, harpies, a wide variety of human aircraft and now these wretched giants that had appeared out of nowhere. They were about the same size as the Greater Heralds he had killed right at the start of the Salvation War and which were now proudly represented by the two great red kill marks under his cockpit.