Noonan switched to the G-PALS command circuit. “You ready, Zack?”
The colonel manning the space defense system duty station answered immediately. “Yes, sir. My boards confirm selective release authorization.”
“Good.” Noonan swept his eyes over his own monitor and the main display one last time for a final check on weapons status and target positions. Everything looked set. He sat up straighter. “Okay, Colonel, let’s do it. Commence firing.”
Four hundred miles above the blue-green, white-flecked earth, a cloud of fifty tiny bullet-shaped interceptors orbited together — circling the globe at seventeen thousand miles an hour.
Each “Brilliant Pebble” was barely three feet long, a foot in diameter, and weighed just a little more than one hundred pounds. Inside the casing, advanced microminiaturization techniques packed enormous computing power into a few tiny silicon chips. Each fist-sized supercomputer drew its tracking data from a nose-mounted, miniaturized television camera equipped with a wide-angle, fish-eye lens. Maneuvering rockets and their propellant filled the rest of the remaining space.
The order relayed through the G-PALS command net activated five of the interceptors, triggering a new engagement program uploaded less than sixty minutes before. Minute clouds of vapor puffed into space as maneuvering thrusters fired in a preset sequence. Slowly, inexorably, the five Brilliant Pebbles drifted out of the main cloud — moving into a new orbit. Seeker heads that had been focused on the earth below were now locked on an empty point several hundred miles above the surface.
A tiny shape appeared there, rising quite suddenly above the earth’s curvature and closing rapidly. Sunlight sparkled off solar panels deployed on either side of a two-ton, box-shaped satellite. HELIOS was a French military reconnaissance platform. Its sophisticated cameras could take detailed pictures of objects smaller than a baseball bat — even from orbit.
It was dawn over Eastern Europe, and the low sun would make the long shadows so loved by photo interpreters.
With their prey in sight, the tracking and guidance systems aboard each Brilliant Pebble went into high gear. On-board supercomputers took the images supplied by their TV cameras, matched them against an approved target set, and cycled into attack mode.
More vapor puffed into space as each Brilliant Pebble’s main motor fired. All five darted forward, racing toward the oncoming photo recon satellite. They covered the distance in sixty-eight seconds.
The HELIOS satellite vanished in a single, blinding flash — hit head-on by an interceptor at a relative speed of more than thirty thousand miles an hour. Millions of metal fragments spread over dozens of square miles. Two Brilliant Pebbles a microsecond behind the first plunged right into the heart of the expanding debris cloud and disintegrated. The last two missed by somewhat wider margins and plunged toward the atmosphere, where they 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.