The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Stuart Mackey]

Oi, Slade, you forgot the New Zealand Division (4th of 3 NZEF) attached along with the Brits and Aussies. Of course equipment will be an issue...but we do field units far better in fighting effectiveness than their US equivalents.

Well, you Kiwis are such a shy, self-effacing bunch its easy to forget about you.

Not at all, the Australians are such braggarts that they would eclipse anyone .

Equipment is the problem, there just isn't any, the few stockpiles in New Zealand are very old and probably not usable. Creating a large armored formation is going to be a real pain. However, I did allow for the possibility that a New Zealand brigade may be form part of one of the Australian divisions.

Well actually the modern gear (105 LAV3+ Pinzgaur+ 24 Javlin launchers+ 1 regiment Hamel 105mm light guns) we do have would not even fit out a brigade for this sort of war, let alone sustain one.
Fact is we haven't been able to field a brigade since the early 60's, for all intents and purposes, infact, when all this kicks off we could not sustain a battalion in combat for more than six months and probably a lot less. I will say though the casualties we could inflict would be out of proportion to our losses, but we cannot easily replace those losses.
But as per both world wars, do you want quantity or quality ? Get us the gear and we can field a sustainable division that will be significantly better than the average US equivalent (true of the Aussies as well), to say nothing of our SAS which is second to none on the planet as it is. As such, you could temporarily sacrifice a US division set to outfit us, and get a division that is better than what you would otherwise have had, had that gear gone to one of your own formations (this sort of thing was done in WW2 to equip British formations in the 8th army when they were in a tight spot for gear).
Naturally I can supply you with all the requisite unit names etc. if I haven't already.

[RecklessPrudence]

Highly enjoying this - I started lurking 'round here a few months before Armageddon???? started, and I've got to say, it's been a wonderful ride.

If the tooling for the A-10 has been destroyed, what's the likelihood of whoever digging out all the research Fairchild Republic put into it and 'recreating' a (perhaps improved) version. Or would that be too much like building something new, and humanity'd be better off copying the Su-25, which I assume the tooling still exists for. On that note, why on earth would you destroy the capability to replace your losses for a plane that is still seeing combat and has proved itself so effective? Is that another example of Air Force brass's disdain for the dedicated ground-attack aircraft as a whole?

Also, I heard an apocryphal tale of an A-10 being hit with a SAM in Desert Storm and losing an engine and two-thirds of a wing, and the pilot able to bring it either to a controlled crash or a safe landing (back at base, even!), depending on the version. Would you happen to know if this is true or not?

Well, you Kiwis are such a shy, self-effacing bunch its easy to forget about you.

Not at all, the Australians are such braggarts that they would eclipse anyone .

Well, the Kiwis I've known haven't exactly been backward about coming forward about their own exploits, either. In fact, one of my best mates is from the land of sheep, and he's one of the biggest braggarts in a non-annoying manner that I've ever known.

[Pelranius]

You could just simply give the blueprints and a working model of the A-10 to someone like the Chinese for reverse engineering, though I suspect it would probably be cheaper to order new machining tools and do it yourself back home. Of course, that's assuming there's enough space capacity in the American aerospace industry to pull off something like that.

[Jonen C]

Amusing/Evil thought: Now that they are fighting ANGELS, how long until DIMO(N) reforms into the UN Special Duty Agency NERV?

[EdBecerra]

I've got an uneasy belief that the Russian Army has some KVs hidden away somewhere. There's depots all over the place that are full of forgotten "stuff" that a delighted Russian Army will find and bring out of storage. They're not alone in that of course, the US also has a lot of good things stockpiled and forgotten (the US Army for example has no idea how many trucks it owns) but the Russian Army is legendary for the fact it never throws anything away. So the KVs were me being a little tongue-in-cheek. You must admit, its a lovely picture, the inspector goes to a base that's been on care-and-maintenance for a couple of decades, goes to a long-neglected warehouse, cuts off the rusty padlock and inside are 30 or 40 KV-1 (or even better KV-2) tanks. I've no doubt at all that JS-3s and T-10s would make their reappearance.

It's not just a lovely picture, it's a very realistic picture. The Soviets liked to keep elderly military pensioners busy that way. A man in his sixties, infirm and slow, might not be much use on a battlefield, but keeping a warehouse clean and its contents maintained is easily within his abilities. Even more so when you throw a few dozen such men at each warehouse.

Add to that the extensive Soviet holdings in Siberia, and the picture just gets larger. The Canadian author Farley Mowat noted during his tour of the USSR in the 70's that the Soviets were into permafrost research in a BIG way, and loved finding new and innovative ways to use underground permafrost "warehouses" to store military hardware. Protect things from the moisture, and the bitter cold does the rest. I mean, damn, while it wasn't intentional, they found a friggin' MAMMOTH preserved by the Siberian deep freeze. You think deep-freezing a few thousand tanks will be hard, compared to that?

Ed.

[EdBecerra]

On that note, why on earth would you destroy the capability to replace your losses for a plane that is still seeing combat and has proved itself so effective? Is that another example of Air Force brass's disdain for the dedicated ground-attack aircraft as a whole?

See the article here, and notice particularly the "Background" paragraph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Thunderbolt

One of the dirty little insider secrets of the USAF is that they hated the A-10. REALLY hated it. So after they were FORCED to take it in, they did their best to reject it, and eventually eliminate it.

Not because it was an ineffective aircraft, it wasn't. They hated it because of the JOB it did. Ground support. The "fighter mafia" in the USAF hates anything that interferes with their self-identification of the "noble knights of the sky" who charge out and engage the enemy in one-on-one jousts as in days of yore.

Scratch a fighter pilot, and you'll find Baron Von Richthofen living under his skin, still desperately seeking for that one last "dawn patrol", straight out of WW1.

Hell, they outright and unashamedly refer to bomber pilots as "truck drivers."

The infighting over "close air support" inside the American military community is LEGEND to those who've been in on the arguments. The AF (while they'd never admit it in public!) takes the stance that "mudfeet" don't need close air support -- that's what bodies are for. (You know, as in "throw more bodies at that charging T-72 tank, and you'll take it down. Eventually. A few hundred dead? What does that matter? They're just infantry grunts... no one important. Not like *pilots!*")

And you'll find retired AF generals who are STILL livid, decades after the fact, that the US Army managed to keep control of combat helicopter gunships. The AF would much prefer such things not exist at all. After all, they simply aren't of ANY use at one-on-one duels, and to the fighter mob, such jousts are the only justification for aircraft. Who needs bombers? We'll drive the enemy fighters from the sky, and those damned ground-pounders can do the rest. So what if they take casualties in the process? They're infantry. They're expendable. Pilots now... eeep! If a pilot dies at the hands of a non-pilot, the world might come to an end! (*sarcastic snerk*)

Hell, most (though not all) fighter pilots still have wet-dreams of the days of yore, taking off in open-cockpits and challenging the enemy to dramatic duels in the sky, to be held over the trenches, where all the bloody inferior infantry can stare, dumbfounded, at the acrobatics and bravery of their noble flying superiors.

Granted, if you trap them into that confession, they'll grumble and grump, and try to avoid talking about it, but you can see it in their eyes.

Not so much the latest crop - the kids who grew up on high tech, simulators and computer screens, they have a different point of view. But from those who grew up with the stars of WW1 and WW2, who saw and worshipped aces like Saburō Sakai, Erich Hartmann, Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, and Lydia Litviak, the reason mankind had wars was to give them a chance to saddle up and break a lance with noble rivals. And if a few (non-pilot!) people sorta kinda accidentally got killed in the crossfire, well, that was sad, really sad, yeah, but ultimately unimportant compared to the glory of knightly combat...

Thankfully, that attitude did begin to fade, and it's all but gone now, but while it was there, the political infighting between people who thought air power was about fighters and nothing else, and people who felt that ground support was vital tended to result in the destruction of a lot of good planes.

Remember, for the longest time, there was a "missile mafia" who thought "We have ICBM's... what do we need an AIR FORCE for?" And before that, the "carrier mafia", and the "Battleship mafia"... and before that, those who insisted that "those clanking, clattering hunks of armor will NEVER replace man's most noble companion, the cavalry horse!"

And they were sincere about that.

Just because we're soldiers (and sailors and marines and pilots) doesn't mean we can't and won't be as shallow and as self-serving as the next man.

We're only human, after all.

Ed.

[Stuart Mackey]

Well, the Kiwis I've known haven't exactly been backward about coming forward about their own exploits, either. In fact, one of my best mates is from the land of sheep, and he's one of the biggest braggarts in a non-annoying manner that I've ever known.

Well you see its a matter of education, someone has to show you incompetents how to do it properly.

[Simon_Jester]

I was under the impression that while their best radar coverage is directed forward, modern fighters did not have outright blind spots in any direction. Apparently, I am mistaken. Could you explain in more detail?

[explanation]

Wow. That was a serious lack of understanding on my part, then. Thank you.

I was at least aware of aircraft not being able to scan the entire sphere around them at once, and of radar not being able to see through the plane, but I had some kind of vague idea that the planes had multiple antennas or something. In hindsight, that was thinking backwards: "Certainly I would want to be able to see behind me, so the plane must be designed to do that." Big mistake.

That helps to explain why AWACS planes are so useful, too.

The only planes that actually have 360 degree radar coverage are dedicated AWE planes like the E-3 Sentry and A-50, and those don’t carry weapons. They also simply have much greater radar range, but the radars can only scan the vast volume they can see a couple times per minute.

Although when the volume in question is so large that nothing can plausibly cross it in thirty seconds, that really ought to be enough, I'd think.
_______

Well actually the modern gear (105 LAV3+ Pinzgaur+ 24 Javlin launchers+ 1 regiment Hamel 105mm light guns) we do have would not even fit out a brigade for this sort of war, let alone sustain one.
Fact is we haven't been able to field a brigade since the early 60's, for all intents and purposes, infact, when all this kicks off we could not sustain a battalion in combat for more than six months and probably a lot less. I will say though the casualties we could inflict would be out of proportion to our losses, but we cannot easily replace those losses.
But as per both world wars, do you want quantity or quality ? Get us the gear and we can field a sustainable division that will be significantly better than the average US equivalent (true of the Aussies as well), to say nothing of our SAS which is second to none on the planet as it is. As such, you could temporarily sacrifice a US division set to outfit us, and get a division that is better than what you would otherwise have had, had that gear gone to one of your own formations (this sort of thing was done in WW2 to equip British formations in the 8th army when they were in a tight spot for gear).
Naturally I can supply you with all the requisite unit names etc. if I haven't already.

I do have one question: why in particular would you expect that division of New Zealanders to be superior to divisions from the US or elsewhere in the British Commonwealth? What major differences in doctrine, equipment, or troop quality would there be to explain the gap?
_________

On that note, why on earth would you destroy the capability to replace your losses for a plane that is still seeing combat and has proved itself so effective? Is that another example of Air Force brass's disdain for the dedicated ground-attack aircraft as a whole?

Seems to be. The US Air Force leadership is mostly descended from the Cold War era Strategic Air Command and the fighter forces, not the Tactical Air Command. So the Air Force tends to think in terms of dogfighting and stealthy deep penetration raids into enemy airspace. Any plane that can't do either of those is pretty low on the list of priorities, unless it's vitally necessary to keeping the planes that can do so running.
_________

Not because it was an ineffective aircraft, it wasn't. They hated it because of the JOB it did. Ground support. The "fighter mafia" in the USAF hates anything that interferes with their self-identification of the "noble knights of the sky" who charge out and engage the enemy in one-on-one jousts as in days of yore.

Scratch a fighter pilot, and you'll find Baron Von Richthofen living under his skin, still desperately seeking for that one last "dawn patrol", straight out of WW1.

Hell, they outright and unashamedly refer to bomber pilots as "truck drivers."...

I get the feeling you may be exaggerating the problem a bit. If nothing else, the Air Force always had some respect for the strategic bombing done with deep strikes and stealth aircraft. If they didn't, I'd wonder why we still have the B-2s and why the F-22 can carry JDAMs.

But tactical bombing done in direct support of troops on the ground... you're definitely right that that's not what the Air Force would rather be doing. Usually, they aren't thinking "oh, you can just use human wave tactics to stop the enemy ground forces." They're thinking "with enough well-placed bombs, we can win the war in a week! Yeah, that's the ticket! It's a waste of time for us to keep aircraft hovering over the front lines when we could be busy tearing the enemy apart all over their own country!"

That idea dates back to World War II and earlier; it's the bomber commander's dream. Combine it with the fighter commander's dream you describe of dogfighting between the "knights of the air," and you have a complete (if incoherent) picture of how to wage a war- from which the ground forces are conveniently absent.

[JBG]

However, I did allow for the possibility that a New Zealand brigade may be form part of one of the Australian divisions.

any hope for the reuse of the ANZAC name of old?

There could certainly be an ANZAC corps, or an ANZAC division within the Commonwealth Army.
I'm presuming that the 11 CW divisions (5 Brit, 2 Oz, 3 Can and 1 CW) would be an army (1st (Commonwealth) Army?).
If I were to be dividing the CW Army up I'd form three corps H.Qs - one Brit, one Australian and one Canadian. We can do from the resources of the ARRC and H.Q Field Army, though I don't know how easy the Australians and Canadians would find it.

Jan, there is a lot of nostalgia in Australia and NZ for the ANZAC moniker. Both forces would work well together - consider the use of ADF facilities including officer training by the NZ Armed Forces.

By this time frame the ADF is well on the way to replacing it's Leopard Is for Abrams. So we have around 100 lovingly maintained, one owner Leos to play with.

Could be worse!

[Stuart Mackey]

I do have one question: why in particular would you expect that division of New Zealanders to be superior to divisions from the US or elsewhere in the British Commonwealth? What major differences in doctrine, equipment, or troop quality would there be to explain the gap?

Oh, the Aussies can be as good as us. I would also point out that I don't know the first thing about the Canadians, although they were superb in WW1, alongside ourselves and the Australians.
We train harder than the Americans and expect more of ourselves, something of a necessity given that our numbers are so few, we have to do more with less. From those I know who have worked with US line forces, to be blunt, we are simply better at it and have much better aptitude and competence at lower levels.
This is something we have proven time and again through numerous wars, including the one we are in now(Afghanistan with the SAS), we have a track record of producing better forces.
Not that we don't make mistakes, mind, we are by no means perfect.
Essentially its always come down to training and 'state of mind' for want of a better phrase.

[Stuart Mackey]

Jan, there is a lot of nostalgia in Australia and NZ for the ANZAC moniker. Both forces would work well together - consider the use of ADF facilities including officer training by the NZ Armed Forces.

I would expect NZ and Aussie to be working together in this scenario, although I do point out that ANZAC units are matters of convenience historically, when our forces, for whatever reason, are unable to do a job by themselves or politics demand it, because we are separate countries.
The thing about ANZAC is not so much the armed forces element of it, although that's the outward symbol, its now much more about our relationship as nations because of war, we are very close (even if they are thieving, underarm bowling bastards.)

[Chris OFarrell]

I do have one question: why in particular would you expect that division of New Zealanders to be superior to divisions from the US or elsewhere in the British Commonwealth? What major differences in doctrine, equipment, or troop quality would there be to explain the gap?

Oh, the Aussies can be as good as us.

Yes, you do come *close* to our standards, sometimes, especially if the Bledisloe Cup is sitting in NZ at the moment...

In all seriousness though, the Australian and NZ defense forces are almost interchangeable in most key ways, Training, doctrine, skill and organization, right down to the kit we use. In fact in East Timor right now, there IS the ANZAC Battle Group where a number of Australian and NZ infantry company's and their support sections are rotated in and out of a battalion sized unit seamlessly all the time as a single command. There is also a persistent rumor that the ASAS and NZSAS are continually swapping people in and out of each others units, *especially when one country has them deployed somewhere officially or unoffically, to get the best 'experience' mix in their units* but nothing is ever said publicly about it. Wouldn't surprise me though.

For the sake of the Salvation War, I can see us seriously not coming in with Australian or NZ divisions, but a single 'Army' made up of both. I can also see Australia pulling all those Leo I's out of storage and mating them with the Abrams into a moderate sized Armored regiment, to form the 'fist' in the glove. Don't know if NZ has any real tanks in storage to pull into the unit though.

I can also see NZ getting first dibs on the enhanced Hawks, which are probably a close enough match to the Skyhawks to get the RNZAF Strike Arm back up to scratch, we can live with the Hornets and F-111's for now.

But BOTH our armed forces are horribly lacking in real IADS technology, that is going to really hurt in terms of being able to operate as something of a Corps level formation.

[RecklessPrudence]

So I'm guessing the tooling was destroyed prior to the Gulf War? Before the A-16 was scrapped, before the Warthog really proved itself, and before the pilots who had flown it (and, as far as I've heard, at least, loved it) got far enough up the hierachy to make their opinions felt?

I was really hoping that, if something as good as the A-10 made in it into production, the only thing that would take it out of production would be an actual, y'know, valid reason. I know about those wonderful designs that, through politics and many other reasons, never see acceptance, but I thought that, maybe, something that actually made it and was so effective would be recognised for its quality.

I guess I'm just naive that way. So any 'hog that is sufficiently damaged is lost? Do they replace them out of the boneyard, at least? I read that they're upgrading the active 'hogs to the 'C' variant, in order to keep them in service until 2028, how do they expect to replace combat/accident losses, or indeed planes fatigued to the point of needing major work? Magic?

I know one of the design goals for the A-10 was 'cheap', but why weren't planes sold to NATO allies (considering that they were built during the Cold War) to recoup some of the costs - like the F-111, or countless other designs? If the USAF didn't appreciate them, I'm sure some other country would have loved them, even if they had to deal with a few pieces not being as advanced, like everyone had to for the F-16.

[Stuart]

I know one of the design goals for the A-10 was 'cheap', but why weren't planes sold to NATO allies (considering that they were built during the Cold War) to recoup some of the costs - like the F-111, or countless other designs? If the USAF didn't appreciate them, I'm sure some other country would have loved them, even if they had to deal with a few pieces not being as advanced, like everyone had to for the F-16.

NATO didn't want them (they were offered around); they are a single-role aircraft and the small NATO airforces needed multi-role birds to provide a full portfolio of capabilities. Also, when the A-10 was being built, it and its capabilities were simply out of fashion.

The really BIG joke is that the A-10 was never intended to be built at all. The aircraft the Air Farce wanted was the Northrop A-9 that was a sort of up-armored and modernized version of the Navy A-4/A-7 line of development. The A-9 was actually a very good aircraft, its faster than the A-10 and can carry a larger warload. The Su-25 looks almost identical to the A-9 and its been alleged for a long time that the Russians got hold of the plans and copied it (more likely, two good design teams started off with the same specs and ended up with the same solution). However, the requirement specified a competition so the Air Farce went to Fairchild-Republic and asked them to put up a ghost competitor. Fairchild-Republic agreed and basically threw together a prototype using whatever parts they had in the shop (bit of an exagerration there but they did do more or less that - now you know why the A-10 has some very unusual design features). Anyway, this Frankenstein prototype went to the competition - and, to the AFs fury, wiped the floor with the A-9. So much so, there was no way of hiding it and the A-10 got the contract which put Fairchild-Republic in an awkward position because, not expecting to win the contract, they'd made zero preparations to actually build the aircraft. In fact, they were planning to get out of the military aircraft business altogether and they didn't even WANT the contract. But, they were stuck with it and they had to somehow put together a production line and stay in the military aircraft business.

So the A-10 was hated by everybody right from the start. The Air Farce hated it because it had stopped them getting the plane they wanted, the manufacturer hated it because it was forcing them to stay in the military aircraft business, the market hated it because it was a single-role aircraft in a world that was obdurately multi-role. Truly an orphan stepchild.

[tim31]

And now it is 'd in the hearts and minds of aircraft geeks everywhere. I can ask ten people what they liked about Transformers and at least three of them will respond with 'roll in strike package one, send the hogs to killbox one-alpha.'

And then there's my devotion to hopelessly outdated game A-10 Cuba!, but I digress.

[White Haven]

What did the A-10 offer that won it the competition so handily, if the A-9 was both faster and more heavily armed?

[phongn]

What did the A-10 offer that won it the competition so handily, if the A-9 was both faster and more heavily armed?

Survivability, loiter time, cost and other factors, perhaps.

[Force Lord]

This is one of the best fics I've seen Stuart.

Hope I'll live to see a movie version, if it happens.

[Stuart]

What did the A-10 offer that won it the competition so handily, if the A-9 was both faster and more heavily armed?

Survivability, it could have more bits shot off and keep flying, manoeuverability (allowing it to line its gun up at low altitude, maintainabiolity and repairability, ease of flying, all-round view steadiness as a gun and bomb platform and range.

[Stuart]

Air Crash Investigation Group, Wright-Paterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio, February 2009

"Well, look at that." It was more the level of bafflement in the speaker's voice that drew attention than the words themselves.

"What's the matter Rich?" Gail Claiborne looked up from the X-ray pictures of a wing spar she'd been studying.

"I've been listening to the contents of the cockpit voice recorder tapes from Blue-861." Doctor Rich Arden was using words loosely here. In this case, "listening to" meant hearing the words certainly, but also studying the oscilloscope readings and examining the various tracks the system had recorded. It was a much more complex subject than it sounded and outsiders only guessed at the wealth of information the tapes contained.

"Did the pilot say anything?"

"Apart from some fascinating obscenities as his plane disintegrated, not really. Russian's a good language for swearing. The really curious bit is elsewhere. Come and have a look."

Gail walked over to Arden's work area and pulled up a stool. "Show me maestro." Before getting into this line of work, Rich Arden had been the road manager for a heavy metal rock band and his stories of the escapades he and his group had got up to were legendary. They had also resulted in his nickname (and flight callsign) 'Maestro'.

"So, we have the cockpit flight recorder tapes and we play them. Nothing very interesting in the words so lets take them out." He manipulated the computer controls and the speech pattern of the pilot flying the ill-fated Blue-861 were removed. "Now, what we have left is the cockpit background noise."

"What's that?" Gail put her finger on a spike a split second before Blue-861 had fallen apart in mid-air.

"Now that's what I asked. There were two ways of looking at this, one was to start eliminating known sounds, air flow, engine noise, radar sound-effects and so on. The other was to get a cockpit take from a flying Su-35, eliminate speech from it and use that as a template. Fortunately the Russians sent us copies of the cockpit flight recorder tapes from Blue-863 as well and I eliminated the pilot's speech and got a clean trace of the cockpit noise. So I subtracted that trace from the message of Blue-861 and lookee here."

"Oh my." Gail was stunned. "Well, look at that."

"Now somebody else is going to say 'What's the matter Gail?' and I'll have to go through the whole thing again." Arden looked around catching one of the investigators with his mouth half open. The investigator in question promptly looked guilty and tried to hide behind his equipment. The rest of the room had been covertly listening, more in hopes of hearing a new heavy metal band story than anything else. "No? Well, we have something here that I don’t think has ever been recorded before. Want to have a look?"

Arden's work area filled up as the investigators crowded around to look at the display. The green line left on it was remarkable. The baseline showed a small amount of grass, random noise that couldn’t be predicted or ever quite eliminated but the spike that was left had, quite definitely never been seen before. It was a straight line, up and down.

"There's no sidebands, no resonance, no echoes nothing." Gail's voice was awed. "It’s a completely pure note."

"That's right. Every musical note there has ever been has been mixed up with all sorts of distortions. Look at them using this equipment and it’s a ragged peak. It goes up in a jagged line, there's a plateau at the top that shows cyclic variations and it goes down in a jagged line. Then there's side-bands and resonances at different frequencies. Lots of them. All the energy transmitted in the note is spread across the area under that line, dispersed, weakened and generally dissipated. Even so, sound's got a lot of punch, we broke things with it quite regularly."

"Like theater manager's hearts?"

"Those too, although most of them deserved it. Some of them never even read the contract, hence the no-green-jellybean rule. Anyway, that's not the case here. The sound is one perfect pulse. Straight up, point, straight down. A perfectly pure note and all the energy is concentrated in that note. Talk about a slam, the energy here," he tapped the screen with a switchblade, "is incredible. This thing, its coherent sound. It's the sonic equivalent of a laser and I'd guess that its just as destructive. It's got about as much resemblance to a musical note as a high-powered laser has to a flashlight."

"And the walls came tumbling down." Gail spoke almost dreamily.

"Sure. Sound travels faster, the denser the medium is. In air, this thing shook an Su-35 apart and tumbled the gyros on two missiles. What it would do if transmitted in water or rock, we can only guess. A lot of we-wish-that-hadn't-happened would be my guess."

"Write all this up." Doctor Peptuck, the team leader, spoke sharply. "Write it up in as much detail as possible. The brass need to know about this as quickly as possible."

Conference Room, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, February 2009

"You're quite sure about this?" Another investigation, another place, same disbelief mixed with a tinge of fear.

"Of course." Conrad MacLeod was quite emphatic. "It helped that we knew we were dealing with inhalation anthrax and that gave us a baseline to work from. It also gave us a puzzle to answer. Why were so few people showing symptoms? If anthrax spores had been dumped over an inhabited area, a high proportion of the population would be dead or dying and there is no cure for inhalation anthrax. We can immunize, and it looks like we might have to, but we can't cure. And yet the death toll was a few here, a few there, a disproportionate number on military bases yet even there only a handful. As information came in from all over, that was the worldwide pattern. A few dead, isolated infections. Unprecedented."

"And it was this Baines guy who gave you the answer?"

"In a way, yes. DIMO(N) were interested of course and Baines knows Revelations and all the derivative material intimately. Unhealthily intimately in my opinion, but he's the best we've got for tracking down this sort of thing. He pointed out that Revelations contains the following prophecy. 'Then I heard a loud voice from the temple, saying to the seven angels, Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of God. So the first angel went and poured out his bowl on the earth; and it became a loathsome and malignant sore on the people who had the mark of the beast and who worshiped his image.' Well, anybody who has seen people dying of anthrax knows the ulceration is certainly loathsome and malignant so that fitted. That left us with trying to work out what the mark of the beast was.

"We started out by thinking that it was poetic or descriptive and was a reverse truth. In other words, we thought it was the writers assuming, not that the disease was infecting people with a particular characteristic but that everybody who was infected was assumed to have the mark of the beast. You know, the old line, 'they must have done something bad to deserve it.' But that didn’t correspond to the infection patterns, nowhere close. So we had to think that there was something about these people that made them vulnerable to the disease. That led us to ask what the mark of the beast could be. You know why sensitives are sensitive?"

"Because they are nephilim, they are descendants of humans who mated with the Baldricks."

"Exactly, and they retain a tiny amount of Baldrick DNA in their make-up and that makes them detectable to the Baldricks and capable of pushing messages the other way. The more Baldrick they have in their DNA, the more effective they are as sensitives. The odder they are as well by the way. With computers and our own transmission equipment, we can boost those contacts to the point where we can open portals. Now, doesn’t having Baldrick ancestry sound like 'the mark of the beast' to you?"

"And so you compared lists?"

"Of course. With our own list, the congruence was perfect. All the reported anthrax infections we had have been people we identified as Nephilim. They're sick and pretty much all of them are going to die. Our portal engineering capability has been hit hard, I'd guess that about a third of our sensitives are dead or dying. The same picture is emerging worldwide but there's an interesting little side-note. It's pretty obvious from the infection pattern that our allies are not telling us about all the Nephilim they found."

"Oh." The word was filled with emphasis.

"Exactly. I would say that, while they are all contributing to the main portal engineering program we run on behalf of everybody, they all have their own national programs as well. From these lists, I would say that Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, India, Israel and Singapore are all running their own portal program and have kept back some of their sensitives, probably the best ones, for that program."

"I think that's very likely." Team Leader Chris O'Farrell sounded more than slightly amused by the idea.

Conrad MacLeod looked at him sharply for a moment and then the implication sank in. "And we're doing the same?"

"Of course. Have you noticed that kitten and all the other really top-rank sensitives aren't on the sick-list? We've got them tucked safely away. Navy's doing a lot of work, they’re refitting Enterprise right now to generate her own portals. Can you imagine that as a naval tactic? Got some anti-ship missiles coming in? Easy. Open a portal, step through and close it. Then, wait a few minutes, open another and reappear a few dozen miles away. Or open a portal over and enemy city and drop a nuclear device through it. The possibilities are endless. Anyway, back to the anthrax. So, the enemy has developed an anthrax derivative that only infects Nephilim. That's a hell of a genetic engineering achievement. Are really they that good?"

"Well, that's what we thought. This was a new strain of anthrax bred especially for this attack and that's a scary level of biological warfare capability." Both men looked grim, nobody knew better than the workers at Fort Detrick just how dangerous biological warfare could be. "Anyway, we got samples of the anthrax bacillus from the casualties and had a look at it. We started off on the wrong foot, thinking this was a new strain and that wasted a day or so. The real answer was quite an eye-opener. Do you know how old anthrax is?"

O'Farrell shook his head.

"Well, anthrax is a very old disease, its possible it's one of the oldest still-extant diseases. There's anthrax spores that have been found in the wrappings of Egyptian mummies and there's even a theory that the so-called curse of the Pharaohs is the result of inhaling those spores. It's also a disease which we've got a complete sequence of the genome for, complete with genomic landmarks that can be used to distinguish between different strains. Anyway, we got some spores from the Egyptians, ran the tests and guess what, they're a lot closer to the samples from our victims than anything else we tested. In fact, our samples are a lot closer to the genome of anthrax's harmless relatives. So, this isn't a new strain, it’s a very old one, quite possibly the original."

"The original anthrax?" O'Farrell said.

"Yes. Norman Baines has suggested its possible that anthrax was a disease specifically intended to kill nephilim. He's got the theory that sometime in the past there was a concerted effort, presumably by Heaven, to kill off the nephilim. That would explain why they are so rare. Spreading to attack non-nephilim humans and animals may have been an unintended mutation. But, be that as it may, I think we have a handle on the first of these so-called 'Bowls of Wrath'. Oh, by the way, there's an upside to all this; since this is a very old strain of anthrax, our antibiotics should work fairly well against it.

"Very well, I'll send all this information back. It looks like Bayer is going to make itself another fortune."

Bacup Police Station, Bacup, Lancashire.

Inspector Kate Langley looked up from her desk towards the metal bucket that was catching the leak in her office roof. It was hard to concentrate on her paperwork with that infernal noise going on all the time, the sooner they moved into the new police station and out of this rickety Victorian relic the better. A knock at the door brought her back to the present.

“Ma’m, there’s been a serious landslide at the top of the town.” Sergeant Parrish said gravely. “Looks like several houses have been buried. Our mobiles, the fire service, ambulance and Civil Defence Corps are already on the way.”

Langley stood up, reflexively taking her revolver out of the desk drawer and grabbing her yellow fluorescent jacket and hat. “Right, Sergeant, get as many bodies out there as you can and put a call to H.Q for assistance. We’ll need all the help we can get.

“I’m going to head out there myself to take charge; I’ll need you to coordinate things from here.”

“Not a problem, Ma’m; I’ll get Sergeant Beck to go with you.” Parrish replied.

The scene that greeted Inspector Langley and Sergeant Beck on their arrival at the landslide was one of utter devastation. It looked like half of the hillside had simply given way and had come crashing down on a quiet residential street, smashing it to rubble. Where there had once been houses, trees and grass there was now nothing but black, glutinous mud.

“It’s like Aberfan.” Beck muttered, deeply shocked.

Langley stepped out of the car, putting on her wet weather gear, though by the time she had done so she was almost soaked to the skin. The three fire appliances from Baccup Fire Station had already arrived, as had a couple of ambulances and some vehicles from the re-established Civil Defence Corps. The firemen and civil defence workers had already started to dig amongst the rubble at the edge of the landslide, hoping to find someone alive. As the fire service would have primacy in this case Langley sought out the senior fire officer to offer what help she could.

“What can we do to help, Derek?”

“It’s a damn disaster, Kate.” Station Officer Derek Clarke, commander of Red Watch, replied. “I don’t think there is much you can do here, other than traffic control. I’ve requested that the brigade’s Urban Search and Rescue Unit be sent to us, but I don’t think that they will be doing anything other than pulling out bodies.”

Clarke paused to take a look at the bare hillside; it didn’t look too stable.

“Bronze Command to all units, withdraw now. The hillside looks like it’s about to go again. Over.” He said into his Personal Radio. “Kate, there is one thing you can do.” He said turning back to Langley. “This slip is going to be even bigger by the looks of things, we’ve got to get people out from under its path.”

Langley nodded and sprinted back to the car as she would get better reception from its radio than from her PR.

“Juliet Bravo to Control, urgent message, over.”

“Go ahead, Juliet Bravo.” The voice of Sergeant Parrish said from the radio handset.

“There’s going to be an even bigger landslide, Sergeant and we need to evacuate everyone who may be in its path immediately. Get every spare body onto it immediately, and see if Captain Morrison can spare some of his Home Guards to help out. Over.”

“Understood, Juliet Bravo. Out.”

Inspector Langley held on to the radio handset for a moment, rain running down her face. She looked skywards, oblivious to the rain now running down her neck.

“Damn you!” She called out. “Don’t think you’re going to get away with this! First, we’re going to get up there somehow then we'll kick your arse.”

[Sidewinder]

Hope I'll live to see a movie version, if it happens.

If a movie exec actually green lights a movie version, you're unlikely to see "humanity vs. God & His angels"- at best, you'll see "humanity vs. evil aliens pretending to be God & His angels." The US is not a Christian nation, but you must be an idiot or a lunatic to pretend the US does not have a significant number of Christians- people you must win over if you want your movie to be profitable.

[Force Lord]

I'm holding up to the edge of my seat now.

Why I'm seeing SDN people in that story?

[Surlethe]

Is there anything about the landslide that is necessarily caused by Heaven? It may be that humans start blaming Heaven for any catastrophe, even though Yahweh's angels might've had nothing to do with it.

[Sidewinder]

And now it is 'd in the hearts and minds of aircraft geeks everywhere. I can ask ten people what they liked about Transformers and at least three of them will respond with 'roll in strike package one, send the hogs to killbox one-alpha.'

As Mr. Slade noted, the A-10 is a single-role aircraft, i.e., near useless against a Su-27 or MiG-29, which will get the first shot, as they can fly higher & use air-to-air radar, & the A-10 cannot. As much as you & I love the bird, the only thing it can do against Starscream, Thundercracker, & Skywarp, is run & hide.

[Mr Bean]

Part eight up indeed, reading now