Re: Blood and Iron Chapter 796: Chain of Command

Erich had barely finished his cigarette when the radio on his hip crackled.

"Falke-Actual, this is Mindanao Command. Do you copy?"

He unclipped the handset, already annoyed.

"Mindanao Command, this is Falke-Actual. Go ahead."

There was the faint hiss of encrypted relay bouncing up to the sky and back down again.

"ISR package complete," the voice said. "Orbital and aerial reconnaissance confirm your preliminary assessnt. Repeat: Arican regular forces have fully evacuated Mindanao. Remaining hostile elents are identified as Cuban expeditionary battalions, Filipino loyalist militias, and irregular village partisans. No significant U.S. combat formations remain on the island."

Erich closed his eyes for a beat.

Of course.

"Copy," he said flatly. "How long have you had that confirmation?"

A pause.

"Initial movent indicators were flagged thirty-six hours ago. Full pattern confirmation... approximately eight hours."

Erich’s jaw clenched.

"And when," he asked, voice very calm, "were you planning to share that with the brigade doing the bleeding?"

Another pause. Longer this ti.

"Stand by for senior liaison," the operator said quickly.

The line clicked and reshuffled. A new voice ca on, older, smoother, the tone of a man who spent more ti behind tables than behind rifles.

"Oberst von Zehntner," the voice began. "This is Oberst i.G. Reinhardt, attached to Generaloberst von Witzleben’s staff. You are speaking to the theater command’s operations section. Your report was received and confird. Good work."

Erich stared at the jungle for a heartbeat, then grit his teeth.

"So," he said, "you acknowledge that everything I just risked n to verify was already sitting on your desk."

Reinhardt didn’t rise to the tone.

"Colonel," he said, "ISR data is filtered based on theater-wide necessity. Your brigade’s objective did not change. You were to fix and destroy enemy formations in your sector. Whether those formations consisted of Aricans or Cubans does not substantially alter that directive. They use the sa rifles, the sa machine guns, the sa artillery. They die the sa."

"That’s your justification?" Erich growled. "We’re out here clawing through jungle and booby traps, and you decided it wasn’t ’substantially relevant’ to tell us the main threat already turned tail and ran?"

A nearby corporal tried very hard not to listen. Reinhardt’s voice remained maddeningly neutral.

"From an operational planning perspective, the distinction is minor. The enemy combat capability on the island remained high, regardless of nationality. Your rules of engagent, your mission, and your tempo were unchanged."

Erich laughed once, humorless.

"Tempo," he echoed. "You want to talk to about tempo from your air-conditioned bunker?"

He turned, looking back toward the smoking treeline where his forward companies were regrouping.

"Listen carefully, Oberst," he said. "Had I known we were facing second-string amateurs and not hardened Arican regulars, I would have been pushing twice as hard, twice as fast. We spent the last forty-eight hours treating every engagent like we were up against their best. Careful, thodical, conservative."

He spat into the mud.

"If I’d known we were just putting down strays, I’d have run them over yesterday."

Reinhardt sighed, the slightest crack in his façade.

"Your caution kept your losses minimal, Colonel," he said. "Mindanao Command is not in the habit of complaining when a brigade accomplishes objectives without throwing bodies into the at grinder."

"My n don’t need you to protect them from ," Erich snapped. "They need you to give them accurate information so they can finish the job within optimal paraters."

He took a breath, trying to unclench his teeth.

"You sat on knowledge that the Aricans had already broken. You robbed us of the chance to exploit that collapse at its peak. Every hour they had to dig in their replacents, to rig new traps, to drag more villagers into the fight, is blood I pay now because you didn’t want to adjust your damn briefing slides."

That, at least, seed to sting.

"Colonel," Reinhardt said after a mont, "with respect, you are not the only unit on the island. Information flow must be prioritized."

"I’m not asking for your entire intelligence dump," Erich said. "I’m asking for one sentence: ’Aricans gone. Only auxiliaries remain.’ That’s all. Ten words. You could have fit it between sips of your coffee."

Static hissed in the brief silence that followed.

"You are emotional, Oberst," Reinhardt said tightly. "Understandable. You have been in continuous combat rotation. Theater command evaluates necessity on a strategic level. On that level, who holds a rifle on Mindanao matters less than the fact that soone still does."

Erich smiled, but there was no warmth in it.

"And there it is," he murmured. "Strategic necessity."

He shifted the handset.

"Tell sothing, Reinhardt. When you go ho and write your moirs about how you helped ’coordinate the Pacific campaign from a map room’are you going to ntion the part where you treated an evacuation of Arican forces as a footnote? Or will that be an appendix?"

"Oberst..."

"No," Erich cut in. "You listen to now. I am not asking for a favor. I am telling you how this looks from the ground."

He gestured vaguely at the jungle around him, though the man couldn’t see it.

"Out here, your ’minor distinctions’ are the difference between a hard fight and a rout. Between calculated risk and wasted caution. If I’d known I was fighting puppets with their strings cut, I could have driven straight through them to the coast. Maybe cut off a few more ships before they cleared the harbor. That’s strategic effect."

Reinhardt was quiet for a long mont.

"The Generaloberst will not entertain a complaint frad in that tone, Colonel," he said finally.

"Good thing I wasn’t planning to complain," Erich answered. "I was planning to adjust."

"...Explain."

Erich’s eyes hardened.

"You have confird my assessnt. That’s all I needed from you. From this mont on, my Brigade will not treat these engagents as if we are fighting Arica’s best. We will exploit weakness. We will assu their replacents lack discipline, stamina, and doctrine. We will press every inch. I expect Mindanao Command to keep up."

Reinhardt’s voice went cold.

"Are you implying you will disregard future directives?"

"I will follow my orders," Erich said. "But I will interpret them with the understanding that high command has a bad habit of underestimating how much ground we can take when you let us off the leash."

He let that sit.

"Anything else, Oberst?"

Reinhardt exhaled slowly.

"...Negative. ISR updates will be forwarded to your headquarters as available."

"Wonderful," Erich said. "Try sending them before they beco historical notes next ti."

He cut the connection without waiting for a reply.

For a mont, he just stood there, handset still in his grip, listening to the distant rumble of artillery and the crackle of sporadic gunfire.

One of his captains approached, mud up to his knees.

"Problems from upstairs, sir?"

Erich clipped the radio back on his harness.

"Nothing we can’t solve ourselves," he said. "Pass the word down the line: Aricans are gone. What’s left are Cubans, loyalist militias, and whatever poor bastards got shoved into a uniform after breakfast."

The captain’s brows rose.

"That confird?"

"From the very assholes who didn’t tell us in the first place," Erich replied. "So yes. Confird."

The captain’s grin was sharp.

"In that case, sir... request permission to stop treating them like they know what they’re doing."

Erich actually chuckled.

"Permission granted. Increase tempo. Night pushes, aggressive reconnaissance, no more babysitting the flanks like they’re going to pull off so miracle counterattack. If they break, we don’t let them regroup. We stamp them out."

"Yes, sir."

The captain ran off, already shouting orders.

Erich lit another cigarette, the fla briefly illuminating the hard set of his features.

High above, a reconnaissance plane buzzed invisible in the dark. Higher still, a satellite crept along its orbit, watching everything with indifferent lenses.

They saw it all.

They always did.

The problem was never the watching.

It was who they bothered to tell.

Erich took a drag and started walking toward the front.

"Fine," he muttered. "You sit on your precious intel. We’ll make do with what we have."

The cigarette ember glowed as he exhaled.

"And when this island is finally quiet," he added under his breath, "they can put that in their reports too."