The aftershocks of the battle of Goyle manor were felt throughout the British isles. Forty-two death notifications were delivered to the families of the ministry combatants, while an additional thirty-four men were sent home to heal. On the other side of the fence there were thirty-three fatalities, Fifty-one were made Prisoners of war, and forty-one were missing in action, either dead and unidentifiable or still out there and trying to make it to friendly lines.
Even Hogwarts wasn't left untouched, as several students received letters stating they had lost parents, uncles, family, and were required to attend the funerals. Other than that, however, the school continued as it normally would: Students went to class, teachers assigned homework and Dumbledore sucked on lemon drops.
The only significant change was that the remains of A-Company from 1st Battalion were now stationed at the castle for some well-earned rest. Besides, as a garrison they made a good deterrent, and served to pacify worried parents. The generals of the BMA figured, quite rightly, that Hogwarts would not be attacked unless Riddle was really desperate. Its defences were too formidable, and even ungarisoned it would require a massive army to capture it, for little strategic gain. True, the castle was a significant building and capturing it would be a morale boost, but wars are hardly won by moral victories. No, the castle would be safe until Voldemort was willing to commit his entire army.
In a conference room in London, three floors below the ground, the high command of the British Magical Army was assembled. The meeting had been called by the Unspeakables that ran he Special Reconnaissance Unit, and the person to speak was Romeo, head of the department of Mysteries.
"Good afternoon, ladies, gentlemen. I called you all here today because I have very good news. In the briefing you have all read about Horcruxes, correct?"
There was a murmur of affirmatives throughout the room, and several opened the dark blue folders with 'TOP SECRET' stamped on them.
"As explained on pages 12 until 36, we are using the theory of magical resonance to locate these fragments of Riddles soul. It is with distinct pleasure that I can announce that we have managed to locate three pieces so far. The first is located along the coast of southern England, close to the Isle of Wright as described on page 38. The second fragment was detected In diagon alley, presumably inside Gringott's or Borgin and Bukes, detailed on page 40. The final piece has been found in the midlands, near the village of Little Hangington, for details see page 44. Now that we know of these locations, we need a plan of action. Any thoughts?" He asked the assembly.
"We must attack in force, commit all available troops into battle." Spoke General Churchill. He had been a proponent of the 'overwhelm the enemy in numbers' doctrine of the Hit-Wizards, and it certainly showed. "If we strike with enough force, we can bleed the enemy dry defending those points."
He was interrupted by Colonel Miller. "I don't think that's a good plan minister Bones. If we strike with small groups of highly trained personnel, like the commando's that the Dutch government has sent to support us, or the Special Magical Service of your own government. To commit our entire force would be reckless. If we strike silently and unseen, he won't notice his missing Horcruxes until it is too late. Else he might just produce more!"
His last argument, however, was swept away by Romeo. "Actually, Colonel Miller, he can't. I do hope he tries, as it would rid us of the problem, but he has stretched his soul to breaking point. My department has produced a graph illustrating the Holtzman-resonance on magically interconnected objects to demonstrate, on page 33. Of course, we didn't have seven shards of a soul lying around, so we used communications mirrors instead as a model. As you can see, the more interconnected instances of an object exist, the more unstable the connection and the instance itself are. The amount of magic required to stop the connections and objects collapsing in on themselves in a resonating cascade failure grows exponentially as the number of instances increases and more and more energy needs to be kept in synchronised state. To create an ninth piece would require magic far over the Hammerstein threshold."
The whole room was looking at him in various stages of wonder, and several were doing pretty good imitations of goldfish. Romeo sighed; Nobody ever understood him!
"If he makes any more Horcruxes, he dies."
A look of understanding passed through the room. Most of these men were soldiers, and didn't need to know the how's and why's, they just needed to know where their country needed them. How their country needed them, however, became a heated debate, and the room was quickly divided into two camps. The first, headed by Colonel Miller, advocated the capture and destruction of the horcruxes in swift, smash-and-grab commando raids. This, they argued, would put a minimum of personnel at risk, and minimize the chance that Riddle figured out what was up. On the other hand, the camp of general Churchill believed a large-scale, combined operation would be most effective. It would either bleed Riddles forces, should he commit them to secure his treasures, or scare him into making another horcrux, killing him and decapitating the enemy command structure.
In the end, a compromise was reached: as long as intelligence believed Riddle was in the dark about their operations, they would stick to commando raids, not letting him know that they knew about his anchors. The moment, however, it became apparent he figured out what was going on, they would commit large sections of their forces.
The last part of the meeting focused on an expansion of the 23rd regiment, by adding a 3rd battalion, 200 men strong, including a company of engineers and an artillery company. This last unit would use Black-improved potionlaunchers, now capable of firing standardised cartridges, which improved rate of fire to 6 rounds a minute, in optimal conditions.
To the surprise of absolutely everybody in the command of the BMA, there were no signs of enemy resistance at the site of the Horcrux located at the seaside, near a landmark known as the 'wuthering cliffs'. Therefore, it was selected as the target for the first 'smash-and-grab' horcrux pickup, with the added bonus that it might give an idea of what kind of protections had been established around the horcruxes in general. The unit that would take the field against whatever defences Voldmort had installed would be the men of Britain's best: 23 SAS, Whiskey squadron, also known (if only to a very select few) as Her Majesties Special Magical Service. This elite group of wizards had been part of the British armed forces since the founding of the SAS, since several of the magical tricks that brought with them, such as invisibility cloaks and veritrasium, were extremely useful to use in the special forces.
And so it was that Talbot Grey, the retired owner of the nearby lighthouse, had his night's rest interrupted by a knock on his door. So he climbed out of bed, stumbled down the stairs and opened the door to answer a young man in uniform holding a military identification.
"I'm terribly sorry to bother you, sir, but my commanding officer has send me to ask if we could use your barn for tonight. It's a matter of national security."
Grey took a long, pained look at the identification, released a long sigh, and finally grumbled: "All right then. Here's the key to the barn. Try not to make a mess of things."
Before the fresh-faced NCO could thank him, the grumpy old man had thrown the door shut, stumbled back upstairs, crept back in bed, and went to sleep, leaving the young soldier to proudly report to his officer that he had secured permission to use the barn as a temporary base of operations.
In the seclusion of the borrowed barn, the men of W squadron prepared themselves for their decent to the seaside cliff. It had been flagged as the most likely hiding point, seeing as the horcrux showed up a dozen meters away from the shoreline.
They made it into the cave by rappelling down the cliff. Even though they did not encounter any traps or resistance yet, they were moving very carefully. This was the hiding place of an extremely important object for an extremely dangerous man, so it was better not to take a chance. When the men reached a dead end, a swift breach charge took care of the gateway. Lieutenant Winters led his twelve-men strong force onto the small dock.
"Look, sir! Bodies!" one of the men called out, pointing at the water. Every man pointed his weapon at the floating shapes, but when they failed to act, many relaxed. They figured they would not move unless the water was disturbed. Winters turned his attention to the ghostly green glow at the back of the cave.
"Well, you've got to give the man points for style, following the villains handbook to a tee. Not too smart though, having a bright light show us where to go."
The unit's infiltration expert, Sergeant Bahram, agreed with his CO.
"true, Sir. But his main aspect has always been power, both in output and endurance. He might be dangerous now, but gods forbid someone with his power and a brain shows up. I mean, If he were really smart, he'd have hid this somewhere physically unreachable, like the bottom of the sea, instead of making it easy for us."
"well, Bahram. Why don't you see if you can create a way to that island for us?" Winters asked his Indian Sergeant. These kind of things were exactly why he had requested the Sergeant to be added to this operation. Bahram's nickname was 'solid snake', which had to do with the way he could manipulate ropes. His family had been friends with a family of fakirs, and had been the finest producers of magical ropes in India for generations. Due to the fact that the rope he was using tonight was a family heirloom, it reacted much better to his wishes than a new rope would. Most fakir's could only make a rope stand up: Bahram could make it slither around like a snake before having it turn stiff enough to walk on. Minutes later, a rope bridge was in place over the water.
The teams had made it to the other side when they found something odd: the ripped remains of clothing and a mummified, severed arm still clutching a wand, a golden locket wrapped around its wrist. One of the men picked it up and opened it, and found it was stuffed with a vengeful note signed R.A.B. It seemed that, whoever this person was, he'd been unable to replace the horcrux with his decoy, but had died trying. The disinterested soldier dropped the locket. Which bounced off a rock. Then it hit another rock, before it disappeared into the dark water with a small splash. All hell broke loose.
Winters saw the undead begin to rise from their watery graves, but where a lesser man might have panicked, the experienced officer kept his cool.
"CONTACT! Form a circle, back to back! Incendiary only! FIRE!"
While lieutenant Winters and the rest of the team kept the soulless undead at bay the best they could, Troopers Daniel Foster and Michael Reeds were sent to find a way to recover the locket from the basin. After a few minutes of fumbling, and finding vanishing the potion didn't work –the liquid was apparently meant to be drunk- their lieutenant became impatient.
"Foster, Reeds!" he yelled over the spellfire, while simultaneously dispatching a flaming inferius. "I didn't ask you to move it to a museum, for Pete's sake! Just blow it off its pedestal, if need be!"
Three explosions and a few sharp cracks later, the contents of the basin were spilled over the floor, and Foster grabbed the soulpiece before announcing they had the objective. They went over the rope bridge fighting, working to exhaustion to keep walls of fire up to hold the vile creatures at bay. Three agonising minutes later, all were back where they had started, and began moving to the exit. Fortunately, the inferi did not pursue.
AN: Score one for the good guys!
Seriously though, I'm sorry this comes so late. At the moment, my problems in writing this are two-fold. First (and most importantly) I'm suffering from a massive lack of time, between a research project which had to be re-done twice because data didn't cooperate, academic reading for various subjects, and a girlfriend whom I can only see in the (free/writing-time) weekends because she studies in a different town. My second problem is a combination of writer's block for this story (though I have some later chapters, and even a tie-in one-shot nearly done, what's supposed to go in between just won't come), while I have an overflow on inspiration for other projects, both Fanfic and original. If this chapter comes off as slightly rushed, that's probably the reason. Rest assured though, I'm not going to abandon this! After all, what kind of writer let's go of a project the moment it gets tough?
