The first strike hit just after 0200.
It wasn't artillery.
It wasn't even an armored column.
It was silence, followed by lights cutting through the mist outside a command station near Zaragoza.
By the time the sentries reacted, the tanks were already past the outer perimeter.
What he wanted was already on the ground airstrips, rails, fuel depots, food caches, communications nodes.
Spain, or at least the central vein of it, had been retrofitted in advance.
Now came the break.
At 0200, Zaragoza's eastern command center vanished from Franco's chain of communication.
At 0214, the main junction to its northern fuel line was cut.
At 0235, the infantry moved in from the hills Moreau's engineers had surveyed weeks before.
There were no last stands.
No heroic radio calls.
The command post surrendered in twenty-seven minutes.
Three hours later, Valladolid's central headquarters found its phone lines dead.
Thirty-two minutes after that, all the radios went quiet.
