The forest shuddered as steel rolled through it.
From his position in the undergrowth, Christian watched the endless procession of panzers. Each engine growled like an animal, each tread crushed the earth with mechanical hunger. Stukas howled overhead, their sirens tearing the dawn apart as bombs fell into the French lines. The sky burned in flashes of orange and black.
The French had believed the Ardennes a wall of nature, impassable to armies. Now it was nothing but a corridor of fire.
Christian moved with his two-man cell ahead of the armored columns. Their orders were clear: destroy communication, kill officers, and drown the French in confusion. They were not soldiers. They were the shadows before the hammer. At a ridge overlooking a small signal outpost, Christian studied the scene: a few sandbagged emplacements, an antenna stabbing into the gray sky. French soldiers slouched, exhausted, chain-smoking in their posts.
Christian slipped from the brush. The knife kissed the first sentry's throat in silence. The second turned, eyes wide, but Christian's Luger answered before the scream could leave his lips.
Inside, a French radio operator clawed desperately at his headset, trying to call reinforcements. Christian's shadow fell over him, and then there was only the sharp crack of a pistol.
They wired the charges and withdrew. A moment later, fire consumed the mast, sparks raining as the structure toppled. The operator's blood steamed in the morning chill. Another voice silenced. Another warning strangled.
Behind them, the Reich thundered forward. The Maginot Line; proud, monumental, impenetrable just stood empty, its guns pointed in the wrong direction. France's shield was useless.
Sedan burned.
By the time Christian reached the riverbanks, the French defense had collapsed in chaos. Panzers poured across hastily seized bridges, shells rained on artillery emplacements, and thousands of civilians clogged the roads in a tide of panic. Mothers dragged screaming children, priests clutched crucifixes. Farmers pushed wheelbarrows of whatever they could carry.
The columns of refugees mixed with retreating soldiers, stumbling over corpses, tripping over burning wagons.
The Luftwaffe came shrieking down in the middle of it all. Bombs tore apart the fleeing masses. Horses reared and collapsed screaming, their riders crushed beneath them. Children's cries turned into silence beneath falling masonry. The smell of burning flesh clung to everything.
Christian walked among it. His team slipped through the chaos like wolves, slitting the throats of dispatch riders, seeding panic with stray shots, setting off grenades in the crush of men and beasts. They were phantoms, and the refugees never knew which death came from the sky, the panzers, or the silent hands among them.
Christian's boots crunched over the shattered bodies of a French platoon caught in the open by dive-bombers. Their uniforms smoked, their rifles twisted. One soldier still twitched, gasping for water. Christian stepped on his throat as he passed, watching the body spasm once before going still.
There could be no hesitation. Not anymore.
Nights blurred into days. Smoke smudged the horizon wherever Christian looked.
They slept where they could; barns, cellars, burned-out cars. When dawn came, the world was ash.
Near Reims, Christian infiltrated a farmhouse turned command post. French officers bent over maps, their voices hoarse with desperation. The youngest looked barely twenty, his hands shaking as he tried to trace the German advance. Christian planted charges beneath the fuel drums, then slipped through the kitchen where loaves of bread sat half-baked in an abandoned oven. A French major entered suddenly, revolver raised.
For one frozen instant their eyes met. The major's hand trembled; hesitation.
Christian's didn't. Two shots split the silence, and the man crumpled into the flour dust. The maps burned minutes later as the farmhouse erupted into flame. Another French hope gutted.
The Reich moved too fast. Villages surrendered only to find themselves crushed under the next wave of tanks. Fields blackened, livestock roasted alive in barns set alight by stray incendiaries. Refugees flowed endlessly westward, dragging their dead behind carts, only to be strafed again by Messerschmitts.
Once, in the ruins of a bakery, Christian found a boy no older than twelve clutching a pistol. His arms trembled but his eyes burned with hate. The boy pulled the trigger but, the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Christian's Luger roared in reply, and the child sprawled lifeless among the broken loaves.
He stepped over the body without looking back. There was no room for doubt. Not in this flood.
By June, France was broken. The Wehrmacht's iron tide swept toward Paris. Christian moved constantly, silencing outposts, burning depots, scattering units with terror. He was no longer merely an agent of the Abwehr, he was death with a face.
In a ruined church outside Soissons, he stood beneath shattered stained glass. The saints were broken, their faces split into shards of crimson and violet. He remembered Kristina and then her voice whispering of escape, of another life without shadows.
The memory cut like glass. But Kristina was gone, and he remained. The wolf of the Reich. Outside, panzers roared down the roads, their engines echoing like drums of war. France had weeks left at most.
And in the smoke ahead lay Paris.