would burn up harmlessly.
Deep within the G-PALS constellation, five more Brilliant Pebbles went active. A new shape rose above the distant horizon — a new target. The Franco-German Radar SAR satellite came rushing toward its own destruction. Within an hour, every French and German reconnaissance platform in low earth orbit met that same fate.
Even as its first tank columns rumbled toward the Polish frontier, EurCon’s sophisticated orbital “eyes” had been blinded.
CHAPTER 19
Movement to Contact
Lights were on all across the compound, bright against a pale black, starlit sky. Although it was already past midnight, the officers and men of the 19th Panzergrenadier Brigade were still up, readying their weapons and vehicles for war. Work details crowded around canvas-sided trucks, hurriedly off-loading crates containing ammunition, rations, and spare parts. Company and platoon officers and NCOs circulated through the stacked crates, ready to pounce on supplies their units still lacked. Shortages were the rule rather than the exception.
When the shooting started at sea on June 3, the brigade was strung out across Germany, caught right in the middle of its accelerated redeployment to Cottbus. Some units had already been moving into their new quarters, though “new” was definitely the wrong word to use for ramshackle barracks built in 1945 to house Soviet occupation forces. Other battalions had still been stuck in their old cantonments around Ahlen, waiting for their turn on Germany’s clogged rail lines and autobahns. They’d reached Cottbus the day before, spurred by a preliminary war warning order from II Corps headquarters. Moving the hundreds of tons of stores they would need for sustained combat was proving considerably more difficult.
Lieutenant Colonel Willi von Seelow frowned as he stood looking out a window in the brigade commander’s spartan office. He and the rest of the staff had been working hard for several days to remedy the chaotic supply situation. Now they were out of time. Despite their best efforts, the 19th would go into battle with barely fifty percent of the ammo, food, and fuel stocks he considered essential.
From what he’d heard, few units in the Confederation’s newly integrated army were in better shape. A logistical system already showing the strain of the army’s hasty redeployment to the Polish border and the heavy fighting in Hungary was starting to fall apart.
Von Seelow shook his head angrily. It was one thing for senior officers and government leaders to talk blithely about conducting a “come as you are” war. It was quite another to actually fight one — especially with half your supplies still locked up in warehouses four hundred kilometers behind the likely front line.
He turned away from the window when the phone on Colonel Georg Bremer’s desk rang.
“Bremer here.”
Von Seelow watched his short, dark-haired commander sit up straighter.
“Yes, Herr General.” Bremer listened intently to the voice on the other end for a few moments, jotting down notes all the while. When he put the pencil down, his face was more serious than von Seelow had ever seen it. “Yes, sir. I understand completely. You can count on us. Thank you, Herr General. And good luck to you, too.”
He replaced the receiver and then looked up. “That was Leibnitz.”
Von Seelow nodded. Gen. Karl Leibnitz commanded the 7th Panzer Division, the brigade’s parent formation.
“It’s official.” Bremer stood up from behind his desk and tugged his uniform jacket straight. “We cross into Poland at 0400 hours today. The plan is ‘Summer Lightning.’ “
Von Seelow felt cold. As relations with Poland and the Czech Republic worsened, the army’s general staff had prepared several contingency plans for operations along Germany’s eastern border. Summer Lightning was the most ambitious of them all. Naturally, as the brigade’s operations officer, he’d studied each plan in detail. But he’d never really expected to see any of them put into practice — not even when the crisis began heating up. Somehow, he’d always believed cooler heads and common sense would ultimately prevail.
Under Summer Lightning, two full EurCon corps, the II and III, would attack across the Neisse River south of the city of Frankfurt. Together, the two corps could mass fourteen hundred main battle tanks, nearly a thousand armored personnel carriers, and six hundred artillery pieces — all manned by 120,000 tough, highly trained soldiers. They would be supported by fighter-bombers and more than one hundred attack helicopters.
Three more French and German divisions, EurCon’s I Corps, would feint along the Oder River north of Frankfurt. With luck, they would tie down the Polish troops deployed there. At the same time, the VI Corps and several Austrian units would conduct probing attacks to pin the small but formidable Czech Army in place. EurCon’s V Corps, with two German panzer divisions, would remain in reserve in central Germany.
If all went well, the six divisions in II and III Corps would easily punch a hole through the two Polish mechanized divisions they faced. But to what end?
He put the question into words. “And our strategic objective?”
“To ‘punish’ the Polish armed forces.” Bremer shrugged. “Whatever the devil that means.”
Von Seelow didn’t like the sound of that at all. Without a clear military or political goal, they could easily wind up flailing wildly about inside Poland, wasting precious strength and time pursuing an elusive victory nobody could define.
Bremer saw his uncertainty and nodded. “I don’t like it much, either. But at least our part in all this is clear enough.” He smiled thinly. “So now we try putting this wild-eyed scheme of yours into practice, Willi.”
Army-level plans like Summer Lightning laid out only the broad outlines of a campaign. Operations officers like von Seelow were responsible for crafting the detailed brigade-, division-, and corps-level plans needed to implement their superiors’ grand schemes. II Corps’ current ops plan was largely based on concepts he had evolved during staff exercises earlier in the year.
The knowledge that his bold ideas were about to be tested under fire stirred contradictory emotions. As a soldier, he felt proud that his abilities were finally being recognized by his comrades and by his superiors. At the same time, he couldn’t shake a nagging belief that this war was fundamentally unjust. He’d read and heard enough unfiltered news to know the kinds of pressure the French and many Germans had been applying against Poland and the other small countries in Eastern Europe.
Bremer must have been thinking along somewhat the same lines. “At least we have one consolation. We are soldiers, not politicians. We need only do our duty and let the vote-buyers sort out the rest, eh?”
But Willi von Seelow was not so sure of that. The professional soldiers who had served the Third Reich had also held firm to their duty. They had been wrong. Duty must always be measured against the demands of individual conscience, he thought. Ultimately all soldiers, especially those in command positions, are called on to decide whether or not they are fighting a just or an unjust war.
His superiors, both in the army and in the government, were entitled to the presumption that their decisions met those tests, but he couldn’t help feeling uneasy. The Chancellor’s declaration of martial law had seemed a necessary, though harsh emergency measure at first. As the months passed, though, Willi couldn’t help noticing that laws and methods of governing enacted as temporary seemed increasingly regarded as permanent. That worried him. As a young officer, he’d served one dictatorship, however unwillingly. He did not want to serve another.
Two hours later, the 19th Panzergrenadier Brigade was on the road, a long, blacked-out column of tanks and APCs slowly clanking east toward the border town of Forst. Their route took them through tiny, run-down villages and patches of dead or dying forest. The vast, open-pit brown coal mines that pockmarked the surrounding countryside had wreaked havoc on the local environment.
Other tank and mechanized infantry units filled the roads behind them, funneling into Cottbus in columns that stretched for kilometer after kilometer. Most of EurCon’s II Corps was massing near the city, preparing for the lunge into Poland after a chosen few cleared the way.
It was daybreak.
Although the woods on the Polish side of the Neisse River were still cloaked in shadow, the sun had already
