“And we have just received the news of the Papal statement. The full version will be issued in about three hours time but we have an advanced abstract now. It reads as follows.
“Current events have challenged the very core of our beliefs and thrown all that we believed into doubt. One thing must remain clear, that we follow the teachings of Jesus Christ that provide a good and just basis for all of human conduct. But we cannot deny that these have been corrupted and misapplied, that grave mistakes have been made and that crimes of great magnitude committed. At times like this we must believe that we have been mislead and deceived by imposters and deceivers who succeeded in leading us down a false path. We can be sure that the God who has led us down this false path is not the God of whom our Lord Jesus Christ Spoke. We can be sure it is those deceivers and imposters and in particular those who lead them, that are responsible for the grievous errors that have been committed in our Church’s name. we must cast out such deceivers and purify ourselves so that we can, once more, follow the teachings of Christ as they were meant to be followed.
"To do this I call upon the Holy Catholic Church to excommunicate God.”
Chapter Seventy Seven
Plateau of Minos, Hell
By the standards of Hell, the Plateau of Minos was well-organized. If was dominated by the great black gate at one end, a gate that had all the appearances of a transit portal but was set in the rocky face of the Hell-pit, in the mouth of a cave that defined its shape. Nobody knew what lay beyond that gate, the Demons who had been brave enough to try crossing it, or had been unfortunate enough to fall through it, had never returned. One thing that the demons working on the Plateau did know was that it was through that gate that the human dead arrived in Hell.
Once working on the Plateau had been an easy position, only a trickle of dead humans arrived to be processed, but that had changed. The demons working on the Plateau of Minos had been the first ones to be aware of the changes on Earth. For millennia the rate at which the human dead had arrived had been constant but a mere few centuries that had started to change. The trickle had become a stream, the stream a river and the river had turned into a flood. Now, three bodies arrived every second and any break in the routine would cause a disastrous backlog. The fact that there were worse disasters than a work backlog never dawned on the demons who worked on the Plateau but it should have done. If they looked over the chasm that separated the Plateau of Minos from Lucifer’s Finger, they would have seen the crumbed ruin of the great spur of rock and the palace that had once stood on it.
But, bowed down by the routine demanded by the constant stream of bodies emerging from the gate, they didn’t. Instead, the ancient tradition held sway. Two demons would pick up each unconscious human dead and carry it over to one of the line of hydras waiting on the edge of the Plateau. The command would form in the hydra’s heads, it would wrap its tail a number of times around the human and then flick it out across the chasm to the Hell-Pit. The number of times the tail was wrapped around the victim determined which circle it would land in. Down there, other demons would receive it, make the preparations needed and the victim would awaked to begin an eternity of torment. On his throne above the plateau, Minos himself sat, commanding the work of the line of 27 hydra that worked on the limits of his domain. Minos had by far the smallest holding of any Lord of Hell but his was also the most important. Without him, no dead human would reach its proper place in Hell.
This morning, Minos wasn’t feeling particularly well. He had a headache, one that had led him to assign the arriving humans to the most agonizing of Hell’s circles. In the last few minutes, his headache had been joined by a curious throbbing sensation, one that seemed to vibrate the air around him and make the dust on his throne bounce. It wasn’t the human aircraft overhead, they were a familiar sight by this time, streaking through the comforting dust of Hell’s atmosphere and then swooping down to pound some selected target in Dis. A palace perhaps? Or a barracks? There were times when Minos was grateful that his realm was so tiny.
What happened next defied his whole concept of reality. A formation of human aircraft, not the sleek ones overhead but ungainly-looking things with wings loaded with weapons and a strange set of whirling blades above them. Painted red and gray like so many other human aircraft but with a blue, six-pointed star on the body. One of them rotated towards him and its wings erupted in fire. Minos just had the chance to see 16 missiles streaking off their racks towards him before his headache was cured forever.
Beneath him, the laboring demons were stunned into immobility as the AH-64D helicopters rose over the rim to pour 30mm gunfire, rockets and Hellfire missiles into the mass of demons in front of them. It was slaughter, pure, unmitigated and relentless. The gunners in the helicopters unleashed salvo after salvo of unguided rockets into the mass in front of them, playing their gunnery controls as if they were musical instruments, switching from rockets to cannon and back again as they split the mob of screaming demons into small groups and then cut those groups down. The demons were unarmed, defenseless, their command cut off by the first salvo of Hellfires that had slammed into Minos and cut him down from his throne. Now, an Apache was hovering over his body, studding it with 30mm cannon fire to make sure he was truly and irrecoverably dead. His minions were workers on the plateau, they didn’t even have their tridents and all they could do was run. Only, there was nowhere to run to, the gunships were advancing slowly across the plateau, mercilessly cutting the demons down no matter whether they stood or ran. As they did, they taught a grim lesson to the shrinking numbers of survivors. This is what helicopter gunships do. This is what they are for.
The demons were driven backwards, always backwards, away from the Plateau rim, towards the great black stain in the wall that represented the death gate. Then, there was nowhere further they could retreat to, some took the dreadful chance and dived through the blackness to escape the relentless hammering of the gunships, the others gave up and stood by the cliff face until the helicopters killed them.
Behind the first line of eight AH-64s, a second group of eight hovered over the hydras that writhed and screamed on the plateau rim. More Hellfire missiles slashed out, thumping into their bodies, ripping them open and sending multi-colored sprays of demon blood arching through the air. In their death-spasms, some fell off the edge, screaming and falling down into the hell-pit where they had thrown so many unnumbered thousands of humans. Others threshed around for a few minutes before the combination of Hellfires and gunfire stilled them forever.
The Plateau was silent except for the thudding noise of the gunships as they circled overhead, looking for any sign of resistance (by which the pilots and gunners meant any sign of life). At the cliff face, the pile of human bodies arriving through the gate was rising steadily, well, the second wave of the assault would handle that. It was already arriving, nine UH-60 Blackhawks loaded with Israeli commandos, their command section and one very special, absolutely indispensable passenger. The Blackhawks touched down, the commandos spreading rapidly across the plateau, quickly ensuring that the dead demons strewing the rocky surface were indeed dead. There were some dead humans in there as well, those unfortunate enough to have arrived just as the assault was starting. They had died with their demon captors although the unconscious humans had never been aware of by how little they had missed salvation.
With the plateau secured, the commandos started picking up the human bodies that were still pouring through and moving them to safety. Another small group disappeared down the tunnel that marked the only access to the Plateau of Minos and started setting explosive charges on the tunnel wall. The men were experts, demolition men who had set more charges than most people would be able to count. A few seconds after they emerged from the tunnel, a dull blast and a cloud of choking gray smoke marked the success of their latest labors. A couple of them went back into the tunnel and re-emerged, their thumbs raised. It would be years before anybody used that access route again.