NOVGO.NET Chapter 688: Seventy-Two Hours
Chapter 688: Seventy-Two Hours
Bruno watched the feeds like a man reading the cards of a poker hand that had just been dealt to him.
The war room’s walls were glass and steel, every flat lit by scrolling maps, telemetry, and the ghostly blue of live imagery.
Satellite sweeps, a luxury the Reich had spent nearly four decades perfecting.
Bruno had begun investing into rocketry, optical lenses, electronics, computers, and just about every other technology needed to field such a network as early as the 1900s.
Not only giving direction where needed to cut out the guess work, but also acquiring the greatest minds in these individual fields.
It had been a monumental effort, and expense on his part. But it was proving to have paid off well beyond what he had paid.
Because Bruno knew these that while not as glorious as say turbojet fighters, combined arms battalions and nuclear powered super carriers. Satellite imagery, GPS, and eventually the internet itself would ultimately be the future of warfare.
Over the course of the last decade, Germany had launched hundreds of satellites into space, forming a global network that gave the Reich global reach in surveillance.
And currently Bruno was scrolling through overlapping frames, each pass peeling another layer off the map until the truth lay naked beneath.
France was collapsing like a badly built house.
The corridors Heinrich’s armor had carved were bright red on the screen: columns sheared, rail hubs on fire, convoys stalled and shredded.
Cities that had meant something to the Republic only a week ago were now little knots of smoke and motion.
Radio chatter, intercepted and decoded, had been fed into the console; commanders’ voices grew ragged as their formations unspooled.
“They broke faster than the models predicted,” murmured one of the staff officers, eyes glued to a replay of a bomber sweep that turned a rail yard into a black bloom.
Bruno did not move. He let the room talk itself empty.
Each new image only confirmed the arithmetic he had done in private nights. Logistics collapsed first.
When supply disintegrates, so does morale. When morale went, tactics followed. The rest was merely execution.
A fresh feed blinked up from the south.
The map snapped to the Pyrenees. Red triangles advanced from the Spanish side, and another stream of blue tracks, Spanish aircraft, overran the French air corridors like a hand swatting a fly.
The annotation on the margin read: Spanish expeditionary force: committed. Spanish air intercept confirmed.
“Spain?” the Kaiser breathed, as if the name itself were both a surprise and a relief.
“Yes, Majesty,” Bruno said without looking away. “They crossed at dusk. The Spanish High Command committed two corps, and their air arm is in contact. Italian divisions are reported over the Alpine passes within the hour. The southern flank is no longer a flank. It is a front.”
On the table the console erupted anew: Italian armor coming down through the Aosta, air-to-air engagements over the passes recorded in jagged bursts.
Camera feeds showed Italian fighters driving the French squadrons west.
The French still had pockets of resistance in the north and center, but every hour the picture smoothed into the same brutal geometry: encirclement, isolation, attrition.
And then there was the disastrous invasion of Belgian. The Siege of Ypres had faltered, as German Airborne Brigades cut it off entirely from the French mainland.
Within days the Belgian Royal Army had forced the French at Ypres to withdraw where they found themselves encircled by German Airborne forces and their Pursuers.
The result was total annihilation of the French invading force.
Now the Belgians, Dutch, and German Airborne Brigades sent into the low countries as reinforcements marched across the Belgian Border into Northern France.
Bruno straightened, the uniform folding around him like a second skin.
He had fought arguments with hedgehog patience over weeks, but the numbers always cut through the rhetoric.
He stepped to the head of the table and tapped a screen.
The room fell away until only the figures and his voice remained.
“France is now facing an invasion on four fronts,” he said. The sentence was a clean strike. “Eastern, our spearhead, Northern, the Belgian-Dutch axis. Western, Spanish entry over the Pyrenees. Southern, Italian forces down from the Alps. Their command structure is fragmented. Their rail nodes are burning. Their armies are strafed from the sky and picked apart in the field.”
He let the staff watch the live overlay for a beat, letting the gravity show them what his tone already had: inevitability.
“We are eighty miles east of Paris itself,” he continued. “We amass at their doorstep. If we feed the Third and the Eighth armies the resupply they require, fuel, munitions, CAS rotation, engineering detachments to clear the causeways, we will drive that wedge until the Republic is no more.”
A murmur ran around the table. One of the admirals looked up, eyes wary. “Estimate?”
Bruno’s hand moved, fingers circling a point on the map as if drawing a line through fate.
“Seventy-two hours to operational collapse of organized resistance in the field. And with it formal capitulation becomes politically necessary for any surviving government to avoid the annihilation of Paris and the seat of state. From the very start of hostilities until France surrenders it will be six days in total. That is the quickest war between major powers in recorded history, and we will make it so.”
Shock. Relief. A dozen other faces read the same complex of emotions. The Kaiser’s wrinkled hands tightened on the edge of the table. The youngest general breathed as if the calculation had been a prayer.
“You would have me accept surrender in three days?” the Kaiser asked, voice thin with awe.
“You will not have to accept it, Majesty,” Bruno said. “You will have to enforce it. We will not merely occupy. We will secure. The Republic will not be permitted to stagger back into life as it was. We made this mistake in 1916… Never again. That is our political objective. That is what the world must understand.”
He turned, for the first time meeting eyes at the table one by one.
There was no brag in his expression.
Only the precise cruelty of a man who had stopped believing in second chances.
“But,” he said, and the conjunction dropped like a stone into the pool of their triumph, “a French surrender does not end the war. It only ends this phase. Britain, America, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and all the other nations that have thrown their lot in with the Allies. They will see Paris fall and not the world reduced to order. They will recalculate and prepare for a campaign to sever our influence. The Republic’s collapse will be a clarion call.”
A diplomat at the back shifted, the movement a small ripple of cold worry.
“They will not be able to act immediately,” he said. “Their mobilization will take weeks to coalesce.”
“Which is why we will not waste our window,” Bruno snapped.
“We finish quickly, then we prepare for what comes next. The liberal order beyond Europe will assemble every asset they can. We must fortify our gains, harden our logistics, and extend our reach to deny them easy footholds. If the world outside Europe wishes to oppose civilization itself, then it will meet a continent united and prepared to face them.”
He moved his finger to a different pad.
Projections rolled up: contingency plans to hold ports, to sink supply lines, to contest neutral waters.
Satellite overlays showed likely sea lanes for allied convoys and potential staging ports.
Intelligence splashed dossiers on covert networks, sympathizers, and neutral routes that might channel arms.
His men had predicted these options; Bruno had fed them into the same cold machine of probability.
“The moment Paris falls,” he said, “we do two things simultaneously. We secure the political instruments of France, the ministries, the rail hubs, the state broadcaster, and we strike at the external arteries that would pump aid back into this theater. The High Seas Fleet will contest all shipments. Our agents will deny them safe harbors. We shall make the cost of foreign aid intolerable.”
He paused and looked at the Kaiser.
“Understand me: this war will not end with a treaty penned on linen and wine. It will end with institutions remade, with puppet authorities that ensure no revival of this hostility for generations. Or, failing that, we will win a long peace on terms chosen by us. Either way, we prepare for resistance beyond their borders.”
The generals murmured assent.
The Admirals traded looks.
Some of the younger staff, schooled on doctrine and models, saw not only the calculator but the human consequence.
Bruno’s stare cut them off before they could fill in the blanks.
“Mobilize the logistics corridor now,” he ordered.
“Coordinate air rotations with the Mediterranean commands. Send the engineering brigades to clear the Burgund causeway. Divert the fuel trains currently slated for reserves and route them to the Third and Eighth armies without delay. Activate the intelligence nets to shadow any foreign re-supply. The Reich will not be surprised by the world after we have surprised France.”
The room moved then, not in the heat of impulse but in the measured, brutal efficiency of a machine set to purpose.
Orders were relayed, rerouted, coded.
Men stepped forward with the surety of those accustomed to being given impossible tasks and made to deliver.
Bruno lingered for a moment, watching the map where his hand had drawn the bright red wedge.
He thought of waiting: the patience that had been his weapon and his punishment.
After all, the Russians were already headed to the front lines to aid the German Third and Eight Armies in their final push to Paris.
And they brought with them the necessary supplies to push forward.
But in both of his lives Bruno had learned, many times over, never to rely upon others, especially when one’s own survival was at stake.
“Begin,” he said finally, soft enough that the tapes would record it as the normal cadence of command. “Begin everything.”
As the room flowed into action he looked out a narrow slit of window toward the west, where smoke thumbed the sky.
For a second the old image of Erich’s grave flickered in the back of his mind, an immovable stone in the snow.
He had rewritten epitaphs, remade histories, and now he would remake a continent.
He did not call it victory. Not yet. He called it inevitability… and then he set about ensuring it.