Half way through the move, she was checking on Alpha Company to make sure they were sustaining fire on the gate and wall around it. Back in the old days, she wouldn’t have had to do that but the massive expansion of the Army had meant quality had dropped. A lot. Still, the company were firing slowly and deliberately at the gatehouse structure. One of the towers was already down, the other looking decidedly battered from the sabot rounds that were splitting the marble apart. As she watched, a great sheet of shining white stone detached from the face of the tower and crashed to the ground. Then, there was a sound that reminded her of a bell chiming and her tank lurched.
“What the hell was that?” Her loader’s voice came over the intra-vehicle comms system.
Stevenson thought for a split second. “Trumpet blast. Our insulation took most of it and the active noise cancellation system a lot more so what we heard was what leaked through.” Enough to make a 70-ton tank rock she thought. Angels were a lot more dangerous than daemons.
She switched over to the battalion command frequency. “Charlie and Delta, we’re taking trumpet blasts here. Maintain fire on the wall. York, any angels trying to fly yet?”
York Battery’s commander was probably listening on the radio, waiting for the chance to blow something up. “No sign of any flight activity ma’am. All trying to stay under cover I guess.”
“Hokay, use the radar for surveillance and pick off any that do appear. In the meantime, switch your gun to electro-optical and hose down that wall.”
I guess his finger must have been on the fire button all the time. The brilliant red streaks from the 57mm tracer rounds were slashing at the wall-top before she had time to formulate the thought. By the time her attention had returned to the gatehouse, her tanks had opened fire and the different angles of impact had brought the second tower down. “Shift fire to the gate itself. One round HEAD.”
With the protecting bulk of the towers down and the gate supports severely compromised, the single barrage of HEAD rounds were enough to leave gates themselves a mass of burning splinters. “Bravo Company, follow me. Alpha, pick up behind. Everybody else, keep hammering the wall top either side of the gates.”
The temptation to open the tank up and watch what was happening through the open commander’s cupola was great but Stevenson crushed it down hard. The lesson of Hell was quite clear, humans were more or less safe inside their armored vehicles. It was when they left the protection of rolled homogenous armor that things went wrong. Her tank started to rise as it crossed the burning rubble of the gate, then its nose dipped and Setevson saw what lay inside the compound. For a brief moment sheer blind fury grabbed hold of her and she wanted to swing her coaxial machine gun across the camp guards who were already throwing down their swords. She managed to master the impulse, just, by the barest of margins. For a second the lights inside the tank flickered and the computers blipped, then there was a rattle that she recognized as machinegun fire hitting her tank.
“What happened?” Her voice was terse and strained.
“One of the guards, took a swing at your tank with what looks like an electrically charged sword. Bravo-three, four, five and six took him down with coax.”
“Roger that. Thank’s for the service guys. Tanks, spread out, keep the rest of the guards covered. For pity’s sake be careful how you maneuver, we don’t want to crush the poor bastards in the mud.” She took another look at the center of the compound where the prisoners held there were staring at the human tanks that had just blasted their way into their own private Hell. “Charlie and Delta, move on up. York, follow them. Which one of you has that TV crew on board?”
“That’s us Colonel. Charlie-Seven.”
“Hokay, get up here fast. The world has got to see this.”
Chapter Sixty Six
Sampson Household, Sapulpa, Oklahoma, USA
“The following news items contains images and stories that some viewers may find distressing. Viewer discretion is therefore advised. Nikole, are you there?” The news broadcast cut away from the studio into a scene that, from its clear white light, should have been Heaven. Only, the sight of the walled enclosure and the vile, filth-drenched mud of the ground seemed more like Hell than Heaven. The wailing from the crippled inhabitants of the camp made the situation even more confused. John Sampson had spent most of his life as a fairly observant Episcopalian but he was sure that he had never heard of anything like this in Heaven. In the background, a large group of humans were trying to lift an angel out of the mud and load the victim on to a tank transporter so it could be moved away from the scene. For a brief second, the sounds of the camp were drowned out by a Mi-26 helicopter flying overhead, carrying another angel as a slung load. Then the pitiful sounds of the camp returned, the contrast with the roar of the helicopter engines making them even more plaintive.
“Hello, Anita? Good to hear from you.” She turned slightly and faced the camera rather than the monitor off to her left. “This is Nikole Killion reporting from Heaven. Earlier today, the Spearhead Battalion of the Third Armored Division overran this concentration camp, here, in Heaven. Ladies and gentlemen, I spent six months in Hell as your assigned correspondent there. I saw many things in Hell, some too dreadful ever to put on television. I saw our tortured dead being retrieved from the Hellpit. I saw battlefields where the mangled corpses of the daemons who died trying to fight our tanks with bronze tridents covered mile after mile. I saw more than I ever wanted to of horror in Hell but I saw other things as well. I saw our humanity as we succored those in need, I saw the tenderness and compassion of our troops as they treated the crippled and wounded. And I saw the guilt of the daemons themselves as the evil influence of Satan faded and they realized the error of their ways. I saw their joy when the realized the weight of oppression was lifted from them. But never did I see in Hell anything like the scenes I have witnessed here today.”
Behind the camera Killion saw the producer made the traditional ‘you’re laying it on too thick’ sign. Before she could resume though, there was a dreadful scream from behind her. The angel had been lifted on to a cargo palette so that it could be moved more easily but one of its broken wings had caught the edge and been twisted around. Undoubtedly the bones had grated against each other to produce that scream of pain. Killion glanced again at the producer and got a ‘forget it, you were right’ sign.
“This concentration camp is something beyond our understanding. The Armenian Massacres, Auschwitz and the rest of the Holocaust, the Rwanda Massacres, the Hellpit, all of those were executed by one group oppressing another. That isn’t an excuse for them of course but it highlights the fact that this place is different. The only thing that separates the angels in this camp from the rest is that these ones didn’t quite agree with everything Yahweh said. For that one crime, they ended up here, their wings, and in many cases their legs, broken beyond repair. The doctors here have told me they will do what they can but these are the worst bone injuries they have ever seen. Colonel Keisha Stevenson, commander of the Spearhead Battalion, has spared a few minutes of her time to speak with us. Colonel, what is happening right now.”
“Hokay, Nikole. Our first priority is to get the victims in this place out. I’ll be honest with you, some of these angels are not going to make it. The least we can do is get them out of here so they can die in more comfortable circumstances. We’ve got a hospice area set up a mile or so away, we’re moving the beyond-hope ones there and doping them up with morphine so their final hours will be as pain-free and pleasant as possible. The rest, we’re trying to get to hospitals on Earth. It’s triage I’m afraid, separating those who can be saved from those who cannot. The worst duty of any doctor tasked with handling a major disaster has to face.”