Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 680: Unrestricted Global Warfare

The war room in the Reich Chancellery was abuzz with constant chattering.

A single globe lamp threw a pool of light across the great map table; shadows hunched in the corners where officers consulted folded papers and whispered into phones.

Outside, Berlin moved like a city in a fever, factories working, trains stacked with men and steel, but inside this room the world was an arrangeable problem laid flat on a table.

Bruno stood at the head of the map, his uniform impeccable, however he did not stand in his full glory.

Rather he wore the simplified field uniform of his position.

He had not needed to be called; such councils had long since become his stage.

Around him leaned the Reich’s senior commanders: Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz, and of course Generalfeldmarschall Heinrich von Koch, who kept his hands folded and said little, letting others fill the silence.

Reports were brought in, one by one, in clipped German, voices measured and controlled.

Port schedules. Intercepts. Merchant manifests.

The same pattern echoed across the cables: freighters nominally bound for neutral ports, registry papers in Panama and Liberia, pallets marked “humanitarian aid,” then clandestine transshipment to French-controlled harbors.

Bank transfers flowed along routes that deliberately obscured origin and purpose.

“They cloak their shipments in soup,” one adjutant said flatly. “They ride under flags of convenience. They use neutral registries and shadow companies.”

Dönitz’s lip twitched. “And our diplomatic notes? Our protests? The world filigree of law?”

Bruno listened, the faintest of smiles at the corner of his mouth.

He had expected every permutation.

He had watched the allies’ surgical hypocrisy for days now, the public language, the private freight.

“They think secrecy absolves them,” he said quietly. “They have no idea what a ledger looks like until the debt must be repaid.”

The Kaiser cleared his throat. “Reichsmarschall, there are implications. Neutral shipping? The United States? Countries in Latin America? To sink flagged vessels without positive identification—”

“You would lecture me on law while our boys lie dead in shallow graves?”

Bruno cut in, voice low and cold. His eyes were pale and terrible, and in them was the tired patience of a man who had measured loss in decades and decided the arithmetic favored ruin.

He turned back to the map and tapped a line of blue markers in the Atlantic.

“Did they not understand my words? Or do they mean to bait us?”

Rommel’s face hardened. “Rules of engagement, Majesty—”

“Rules of engagement,” Bruno repeated. He let the phrase hang like a gauntlet.

Then, with a motion that surprised almost no one but echoed through the room, he leaned forward and fixed them each in turn with that weapon of a stare he had used in parliaments and on battlefields.

“Sink any vessel, regardless of the flag it flies, or the shape of its hull, that we have credible intelligence is carrying war material to France. Any nation that aids or abets our enemy is already at war with the Reich by action, not by pronouncement. Monrovia taught the world nothing? We made our stance clear there.”

The word Monrovia landed like a bell.

For a moment the room remembered, the burning, the message: Germany would not be provoked into the posture of victim and then snubbed by law’s slow hands.

The Reich had answered once and had been accused of excess; that accusation would not be allowed to bind them again.

Rommel inhaled slowly. “Reichsmarschall, that authority, if implemented, means we sink neutral tonnage. It will create incidents, diplomatic ripples, the possibility of escalation with states that have not yet decided. Are we ready for that blowback?”

Bruno’s smile sharpened.

“The world is already at war, General. Their money props up the enemy while their rhetoric shields them from responsibility. They will try to hide behind phrases: ’regret,’ ’necessity,’ ’humanitarian aid.’ We will not let words arm their proxies. We will cut the veins.”

A murmur moved through the officers. Some faces tightened.

Heinrich’s gaze was level, the old friendship between him and Bruno folded into an understanding older than politics.

Admiral Dönitz folded his hands.

“Operationally: we will expand the interdiction zones. U-boat flotillas into the North Atlantic will increase patrols. Surface raiders will be authorized to stop and inspect under the new standard. If a manifest shows military cargo destined for a French port, and we can corroborate via signals intelligence or human assets, we act.”

“You will not play coy,” Bruno said. “No half measures. Intelligence will be aggressive. Decode the ledgers. Intercept the manifests. Use our banks to trace transfers. Use our agents in neutral harbors. If…”

he paused, eyes like steel. “if a neutral port becomes a conduit for French war material, that port and its ships are part of the theatre.”

A younger admiral, who had been silent until now, ventured, “Reichsmarschall what of the Americans? If they catch a hospital ship or a freighter of theirs…”

Bruno’s laugh was soft and humorless.

“If the Americans supply France openly, then we will sink their vessels. If they do so covertly, we will expose it. Either way, the ledger grows and they must answer their citizens. Empires and republics alike hate being charged with hypocrisy. They will have to hold elections in the wake of sunken coffers. They will feel the cost.”

He set his palms on the map and leaned in.

“We will do this with precision. We will not shoot blindly and call it law. We will gather proof. We will make it undeniable. Then we will strike where it matters.”

A strategist at the sideboard unrolled a series of charts.

“We can use commerce-raiders, disguised as fishing vessels, to shadow suspicious freighters. We can seed counterfeit manifests into registries to force the enemy to prove their innocence, which they cannot without revealing the source.”

He tapped the datum where a Panamanian-flag freighter was due to meet a French coastal lighter. “We will wait for the lighter next tide. Then we take action.”

Bruno nodded. “Good. And when the smoke clears, every merchantman that delivered munitions to a French dock will be a sunk ledger entry against those governments who financed it.”

The Kaiser swallowed. “So there will be losses among third parties. Neutral lives.”

“War is a calculus of loss,” Bruno replied without flinch.

“They have chosen to make their trades at the expense of our sons. They will have counted the arithmetic and decided it worth the price. We will do the same.”

Heinrich broke his silence at last, voice low. “And the diplomatic consequence? How do we frame ourselves when London and Washington cry foul?”

Bruno’s smile narrowed to something like a blade.

“We frame ourselves as the victims of duplicity, the defenders against a world that pretends to protect peace while arming our enemies. We will make them choose: either stop the shipments and prove their righteousness, or they stand naked in their contradictions when their freighters sink. The world will see who spoke true.”

He tapped a folder stamped Naval Rules, Executive Order 13.

An adjutant slid it forward; the inked directives were crisp, uncompromising. The admiral’s hand hovered to sign.

“Implement immediate coastal interdiction in the English Channel and North Sea. Suspend prize-court formalities in cases of undeniable evidence. Increase signals intelligence assets. Deploy fast-attack craft to shadow suspicious hulls. Authorize the Kaiserliche Marine and Luftstreitkräfte to interdict supply lines outside the narrow limits previously observed. Any port acting as a conduit for French war materiel will be marked for blockade and targeted air interdiction.”

Voices rose then, a brief flurry as aides recalculated fuel estimates and diplomatic fallout.

Maps were annotated, coordinates circled in red. This content belongs to novęlfire.net

Outside, Berlin’s night pressed against the thick windows, unaware of the small decisions that would make its waves.

Bruno straightened.

He regarded each face in the room as if choosing which to trust and which to use.

“The allies will posture,” he said.

“They will make speeches. They will drape themselves in virtue. Let them posture. We will act. We will starve France and the men who abet her of the things that win wars: metal, fuel, and rope. We will starve them until they stagger, and when they stagger we will close.”

He turned his face to the Kaiser, deferential in gesture but absolute in tone.

“Majesty, sign the order. Let history record who chose to hide blood in bank ledgers and who chose to take responsibility on the decks. We will not be the sheltered party. We will be the ledger collectors.”

The Kaiser hesitated a breath, then laid his hand to the parchment.

His sign was a heavy, reluctant stroke, like a seal hammered into consequence.

Outside the door a telegraph clanged; somewhere a freighter slipped from harbor under a neutral flag.

Inside the war room, the map lay marked with new red lines.

The order was out. The sea was now a field, and the law that had governed trade was to be rewritten with depth charges and fire.

Bruno sank back and let the silence gather around him like a shroud. His smile never reached his eyes.

“Let them come then,” he said softly. “If they would make commerce a weapon, we will drown it. Let them test the price of their hypocrisy.”