Novel Full Chapter 677: Death From Above
Chapter 677: Death From Above
The armored beasts hit the ground with a violence that threw men against straps and rattled ribs.
Composite skin screamed as webbed parachutes snapped taut, then snapped loose, and the E-series hulls skidded across churned sod, spitting up clay and grass.
Erich nearly crashed into the wall of his command vehicle. The impact had jarred him, and he needed a moment to breathe.
The armored vehicles of his combined arms battalion lie scattered around his own.
Sleek, low-slung, angular, these were not the lumbering beasts of an older age.
Their composite casings flexed, absorbing shock.
“Form up on me!” Erich barked into the transceiver. Voices answered: quick, clipped, practiced.
Men moved with purpose. Parachutes flapped like ragged flags behind them.
From the hedgerow ahead there came the pop and staccato rattle of French automatic rifles.
A scout element, young, brave, misjudging the mechanized drops for unarmored infantry, lurched into view and then vanished under a spray of high-velocity fire.
A French armored car tore into sight, its silhouette older, cruder, and instantly punished by the main gun of the E-25 tank.
Metal screamed. Flames licked at the French vehicle’s flank. It tumbled, dead.
Erich’s radio spit reports.
“Enemy recon element neutralized. Two armor contacts bearing east, bearing thirty,” hissed a lieutenant.
Erich’s hand found the map strapped in the mud; his finger traced the roads the French column must use.
If he severed them here, if his battalion cut supplies and slowed the spearhead, the Belgian and Reich heavy forces would collapse the enemy’s flank.
“Move columns Alpha and Gamma to the causeway,” he ordered. “Bravo, screen our flank. Use the thermals, find their crews under cover.
Encircle, destroy and retreat. We do not hold ground; we deny it.”
His voice was the hinge on which men turned.
A thunderhead of artillery barked from the French rear.
The ground shuddered as rounds punched into the earth near the armor.
A hit rocked a nearby infantry fighting vehicle; composite dust blossoms spiraled into the air.
Men were thrown, but the hull held. The new materials had saved lives before, and now again.
“Counter-battery inbound!” one of the comms officers shouted. “Coordinate strikes on the western cornfield, route two.”
Erich felt the old mechanical pull of command replace the sick drop of the stomach.
His hands moved faster, issuing syncopated orders that stitched the battalion into motion.
The German armored vehicles moved like living predators, slipping between farm hedges, presenting small cross-sections to the enemy, then turning broadside to deliver withering fire.
Where earlier mechanized doctrine had been clumsy and lumbering, here it was needle sharp.
A French regiment of armor, older designs but numerous, tried to roll down the road, metal clanking, guns spitting.
Erich fed the coordinates to the anti-armor segment of his battalion.
Seconds later, wire-guided missiles fell upon the French armor from the tree line.
The armored hulls to which they were attached were concealed both beneath camouflage painting and netting.
Dust rose, engines clawed, men spilled into ditches. The French vanguard faltered.
Into that falter, the unit surged. Men dismounted, moving like shadows.
The battalion attacked supply wagons, smashed radio mast trucks, took out fuel trailers.
Each strike was surgical, not for the glory of ground taken, but to turn the French advance into a logjam.
Blood came quick.
A squadron lost a section when an incoming salvo found a soft spot; someone screamed a name and then silence.
Erich felt the old lesson burn in his head, duty above all, but duty did not erase the sight or the taste.
He wiped his hand across his mouth and kept moving.
He gave no grand speeches; there was no time.
He simply did his job. He pushed the radio slider up and issued the order to consolidate a blocking position on the route that ran west of Ypres.
“Hold that axis for ten minutes,” he said, voice taut.
“Then withdraw clockwise to rendezvous point Echo. No heroics. We punch holes and we leave them to bleed.”
They moved like a blade, and for a furious hour they were the anvil. Bruno had taught by example: taking the hammer’s blow and grinding it until the enemy could not move.
By then the sky was a lattice of smoke and tracer, the horizon rimmed with fires that devoured barns and columns alike.
The AFVs took one more hit, a fuel bladder ruptured, and men scrambled to douse leaks, but motors kept turning.
A runner panted up, face streaked with black. “Sir! An armored column was spotted on the ridge, heavy, about two clicks. They’ve been reinforced.”
Erich’s jaw locked.
Two clicks meant the French were trying to press through the gap his men were using to bleed them.
He measured the moment like a chess move.
He could delay and trade ground slowly through attrition… or he could do the thing his grandfather’s doctrine always demanded: break the enemy’s cohesion, even at a cost.
“Call for close air support and set demolition on the bridge,” he said. “If they push through, we deny them every crossing. We buy the army time to link.”
He realized then, the orders were not abstract. They were a calculus of lives. Each decision a subtraction and a saving.
The battalion answered with the metronome of machinery.
AFVs skidded into position, crews slinging grenades, rigging charges on the old stone bridge.
Men braced, faces set into masks of work.
As the French column thundered toward the causeway, Erich stood on the command turret, rain of grit in his face, and watched the line of their progress break and fold.
He thought not of glory, but instead on the objective at hand.
And when the first of the French tanks crested the ridge, the charges detonated, hurling metal and flame, and turning a spear into a broken spine.
The French screamed, slowed, and then the Anvil struck.
The German airborne battalions were scattered across the front lines in Belgium.
Doing exactly as Erich had done.
For the French Army currently in the process of laying siege to Ypres.
They would soon realize they had been completely encircled by their enemies.