London, House of Commons — 1942
The lamps burned dimly behind blackout curtains. Outside, the night air quivered with the drone of distant aircraft and the sirens that had become as common as the rain. Inside Parliament, every bench was full. The Prime Minister rose slowly, cigar in hand, and adjusted his papers. His face was drawn but his eyes burned like coals in the dark.
The world had fallen.France had surrendered.Europe bent beneath the iron will of the Reich and the shadow of the Great German.Only Russia and Britain still stood.
A low murmur spread through the chamber as Winston Churchill began to speak — his voice low at first, then growing, rumbling through the hall like a storm breaking over stone.
The chamber was a storm.The air shimmered with heat and cigarette smoke, and the smell of wet wool and fear clung to the benches. Outside, the sky over London throbbed with the hum of distant engines — the war never slept anymore.
A murmur rolled through Parliament like wind through ruins.
"The Great German has the fires of heaven in his eyes"
"He destroyed Palestine in just a few hours"
The voices tangled and swelled until the Speaker struck his gavel."Order! Order!"
The door at the rear opened, and Winston Churchill entered — hat in hand, cane tapping once against the floor. He looked smaller than legend, his coat too heavy, his face drawn, but when he raised his eyes, the room stilled.
He lit a cigar, exhaled a slow, deliberate cloud of smoke, and walked to the podium. His steps echoed like hammer blows.
For a long moment, he said nothing.
Only the sound of rain against the old windows filled the silence.
"Gentlemen," he began quietly, "the world we knew has fallen."
A ripple of unease moved through the benches.
"The Reich has swallowed Europe. The banners of tyranny fly over Paris, over Warsaw, over Rome. Cities we once called eternal now burn beneath the hand of a single man — a man who calls himself chosen by God."
He paused, letting the words hang heavy.
"Let us be clear: no god anoints the butcher. No heaven blesses the flame that devours the innocent. This creature they worship — this 'Great German' — is not divine. He is the image of mankind's oldest sin: the dream of absolute power."
He raised his chin, his voice deepening.
"Across the continent, they kneel before him. But not us. Never us."
The benches stirred, quiet murmurs of assent rising.
"We are told we cannot win. That we face not an army, but a myth. That one man has made conquest inevitable. I tell you now, conquest is never inevitable — not while a single soul draws breath in defiance."
His voice grew louder, iron in every word.
"If this island must stand alone, then we shall be the rock upon which their false god breaks himself! We shall not surrender our skies to fear, our hearts to despair, or our children to the fire! We will fight with every ship, every rifle, every hand that still trembles but refuses to yield!"
The chamber roared in approval, fists striking desks like drums of war.
"Let them come," he thundered. "Let their god descend upon our shores. We shall fight him in the air, we shall fight him in the fields, we shall fight him in the ruins of our cities — and if by chance the last man of Britain still breathes, then the world will know: the flame of freedom never dies!"
He leaned forward, eyes burning beneath the dim light.
"This is not merely a war of nations. It is a war for the soul of mankind. And if we must stand alone — then so be it. We have done so before. And we shall do so again."
"How long it will be, how long it will last depends upon the exertions which we make on this island. An effort, the like of which has never been seen in our records, is now being made. Work is proceeding night and day. Sundays and week days. Capital and labor have cast aside their interests, rights and customs and put everything into the common stock. Already the flow of munitions has leaped forward. There is no reason why we should not in a few months overtake the sudden and serious loss that has come upon us without retarding the development of our general program."
"We were told that Hitler has plans for invading the British Isles. This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, some one told him there were bitter weeds in England. There certainly were and a good many more of them have since been returned. The whole question of defense against invasion is powerfully affected by the fact that we have for the time being in this island incomparably more military forces than we had in the last war. But his will not continue. We shall not be content with a defensive war. We have our duty to our Allies. We have to reconstitute and build up the B. E. F. once again under its gallant Commander in Chief, Lord Gort. All this is en train. But now I feel we must put our defense in this island into such a high state of organization that the fewest possible numbers will be required to give effectual security and that the largest possible potential offensive effort may be released."
"On this we are now engaged. It would be very convenient to enter upon this subject in secret sessions. The government would not necessarily be able to reveal any great military secrets, but we should like to have our discussions free and without the restraint imposed by the fact that they would be read the next day by the enemy."
"I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are people affected by the orders which we have made who are passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry from them, but we cannot, under the present circumstances, draw all the distinctions we should like to do. If parachute landings were attempted and fierce nights followed, those unfortunate people would be far better out of the way for their own sake as well as ours. There is, however, another class for which I feel not the slightest sympathy. Parliament has given us powers to put down fifth column activities with the strongest hand, and we shall use those powers subject to the supervision and correcting of the House without hesitation until we are satisfied and more than satisfied that this malignancy in our midst has been effectually stamped out. Turning once again to the question of invasion, there has, I will observe, never been a period in all those long centuries of which we boast when an absolute guarantee against invasion, still less against serous raids, could have been given to our people. In the days of Napoleon the same wind which might have carried his transports across the Channel might have driven away a blockading fleet. There is always the chance, and it is that chance which has excited and befooled the imaginations of many continental tyrants. We are assured that novel methods will be adopted, and when we see the originality, malice and ingenuity of aggression which our enemy displays we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous manoeuvre. I think no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a watchful, but at the same time steady, eye. We must never forget the solid assurances of sea power and those which belong to air power if they can be locally exercised. I have myself full confidence that if all do their duty and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, ride out the storms of ware outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary, for years, if necessary, alone."
"At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. that is the resolve of His Majesty's Government, every man of them. that is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and their need, will defend to the death their native soils, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength, even though a large tract of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule."
"We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old."
The House errupted in claps and cheers, but they did not know that doom had already knocked on their door.
Berlin, Reich Chancellery — Night
The room smelled of tobacco and iron.A single lamp burned over the long table, throwing hard shadows across the faces gathered there. Maps lay unrolled, pins and red thread marking cities now quiet under the swastika. Outside, the city's triumphant cries drifted like smoke.
At the head of the table, in a chair too large for any man, sat Adolf Hitler. His face was pale in the lamp light, eyes bright with the fever of a man convinced he could reshape the world. Around him clustered the senior ministers: Himmler, precise and cold; Goebbels, eyes glittering with calculation; Kraus, steady but taut; Dr. Friedrich Adler, hollow-eyed and drawn; and a scattering of officers who watched but did not speak.
Standing just inside the circle, broad and calm as a statue, was Leutnant Otto Falken — the man the world now called Der Große Deutsche. He was immaculate even here, the faint heat of him somehow making the air shimmer. His cape hung like a dark promise at his back.
Hitler tapped the map with a long finger. "They cling to the island," he said quietly, almost reverently. "England will not bow. Churchill drums for defiance. The British lion resists."
Goebbels laughed, low and cruel. "They will continue their theatre until they are ash. Now they have something to mourn that can never be returned."
Himmler leaned forward. "Their resistance is dangerous only because it inspires others. A symbol survives where a city does not. We must show finality. We must show what happens to those who oppose us."
Kraus watched Falken across the table. "He will obey," Kraus said. "He has obeyed."
Falken's expression did not change. He said nothing at first, as if listening to an invisible clock. When he did speak, his voice was quiet and even — a calm sound that carried like a bell in the room.
"I find it… amusing," Falken said. "They think their stubbornness is courage. They hoist their flags and shout into a wind that answers with thunder."
There was a ripple of polite laughter. Hitler's eyes narrowed in delight. "Exactly. Then let thunder be what answers them."
Falken's mouth twitched into what could have been called a smile. "Tell me where to strike," he said. "Give me the coordinates, and I will make their defiance into an example."
A hush fell. Even Goebbels' smile thinned into something more like hunger. Himmler's hand flexed at his side. Kraus shifted, a small, sudden motion of discomfort.
Dr. Adler's voice cut the air, small and brittle. "Otto—"
Falken looked at him, patient. "Doctor?"
Adler swallowed. He had spent months recording vitals and cataloging anomalies; he had watched the man become something else. "If you do this," Adler said, "it will be irreversible. What happens then—how will the world see you? How will you see yourself?"
Falken's gaze dropped to the map. His shadow fell across squares marked with names: Dover, Portsmouth, London. "I do not live for their vision of me," he said. "I live for the orders given to me. If the Führer asks, I will act. I will be what is required."
Hitler's hand landed on Falken's shoulder, fingers light as a benediction. "You will be remembered for centuries," he said softly. "You will be the instrument that shows the world the necessity of our cause."
Falken's eyes rose to meet Hitler's. For an instant there was no man there at all — only a thing of metal and purpose. "Then let us go," he said simply.
Kraus felt something shift in his gut, an old instinct that was no longer comforted by orders. He thought of cities, of men and women he had once sworn to protect under a different banner. "We must consider the fallout," he said. "Strategic, logistical — the eyes of neutrals—"
Himmler cut him off, cold and precise. "We have considered. We have chosen. Fear ends quickly when it is decisive."
Goebbels folded his hands like a child pleased with a new toy. "And think of the story," he purred. "The film reels, the speeches, the symbols. We will dress this act in myth and no one will see the blood behind the curtains."
Adler's face went white. He turned to Kraus as if appealing to the last human in the room. "Wilhelm— you cannot let this be only spectacle. We made him. We must not unmake everything else in the making."
Kraus looked at Falken again. The man was waiting, patient and still, as if standing in a long, empty corridor. "Hitler wants a demonstration," Kraus said finally, and the words felt like a confession. "If we are to do this, we do it once, and completely."
Hitler smiled, a slow, terrible thing. "Then tell him where to go."
Falken stepped forward, the lamp light catching the hard plane of his cheek. He traced a line on the map with a single finger, drawing a silent arc across the Channel toward the heart of Britain. "Here," he said. "Start where their voice is strongest. Let there be no refuge. Let their answer be final."
A silence so heavy it felt physical fell over the room. Outside, beyond stone and banners, the city continued to celebrate. Inside, with the map spread and the decision made, men who called themselves leaders signed a sentence that would echo across the world.
Adler closed his eyes and pressed his hands together until his knuckles whitened. Kraus lit another cigarette and watched the smoke curl away.
Hitler rose, the motion like a benediction. "Do it," he said. "Make the island remember."
Falken inclined his head once, the movement small and decisive. "I will do it," he said. "I will make them remember."
When he left the room, his cape whispered like a closing door. The ministers returned to their plans, the map now a page that had been turned. The laughter and clinking glasses resumed down the hall, but in the long shadow left by the man's departure, something like a chill crept through the marble — the knowledge that a new kind of violence had been ordered, intimate and total, and that nothing would be the same after its execution.
As the laughter dimmed into plotting, Goebbels, still flushed with anticipation, turned the conversation to a subject that had been living like a splinter beneath every triumph: replication.
"We should produce more like him," Goebbels said, tapping a finger on the map as if the gesture would summon men. "Imagine an army of such men. The Reich would be unassailable."
Adler's reply was a thin, exhausted sound. "We have tried. Many times."
He pushed a stack of reports toward the center of the table. "Dozens of trials—different dosages, different carriers, varied physiological matches. Each attempt failed or killed the subject. Sometimes almost instantly. Sometimes after days of pain. There is no reproducible protocol yet."
A murmur went through the officers. Himmler's jaw tightened. "Then we must secure the source and study it more. We must throw more resources at the lab. The Party will fund this."
Kraus rubbed his temple. "Or understand the host," he said. "Falken's biology might be the variable. We can sequence as much as we like, but if his genetic makeup — his protein balances — is unique, we may not be able to copy it."
Adler nodded, too tired for argument. "We have catalogued everything we can measure: enzymes, hormone levels, cellular membranes. There are anomalies in him that do not conform to our models. We are groping in the dark."
Hitler's eyes glittered. "Then let the scientists work. Let the men die. A new future is worth their deaths."
The talk turned next to the East. The old map invited speculation and old ambitions flared.
"Russia remains," Himmler said. "They will not bow."
The whisper in the room hardened into strategy. "We must be careful," Kraus warned. "We know winter in Russia can swallow invaders. Napoleon's mistake is not a myth. We do not repeat his folly."
One of the younger officers nodded. "We should wait for spring. Consolidate supply lines. Do not allow the weather to be our undoing."
Goebbels scowled at the hesitation. "Or we strike now with spectacle. Let fascism's new sun march across the steppes and break their will."
Falken's voice, quiet and sure, cut through the debate. "I could take Russia in a single night," he said. No bravado, no heat—only the same calm certainty he had shown since his awakening.
The room froze. Even Himmler's expression flickered.
A general, older and scarred, leaned forward. "You speak as if you would do it alone," he said, eyes narrow. "But conquest must be seen. When the Reich takes Moscow, it must be with the banners of our army marching through Red Square. The spectacle is the point."
Hitler's fingers drummed the table. "Yes. Let him open the way. Let him reduce their war-making capacity in a night if he can — but when the steppe goes quiet, let the German legions follow and march into Moscow. Let them parade our flag where their flag once stood. That will be the true statement of superiority."
Himmler folded his hands, satisfied. "Victory, and then ritual. We will not allow a single man to claim all the glory. The Reich must be seen to triumph."
Falken looked at the map, then at Hitler. "As you wish," he said quietly. "But if you parade, remember — I am not the puppet of ceremony. I act for orders."
Kraus exhaled, a long, slow sound. "Then we wait until spring to move the ground forces," he said. "And if he can, he will cut their capacity in a night. We will then fashion our march and our myth."
Hitler smiled, and the men around the table smiled with him, caught up in the mechanics of conquest. Outside, the city still sang and the world tilted on a new and terrible axis.
Berlin, Winter 1942
Alexei wakes before the dawn because the city is quieter then, and quiet is easier to lie inside. The room in the boarding house smells of boiled cabbage and the coal dust that finds its way into everywhere in Berlin. He sits on the edge of the bed under the thin blanket and counts the small truths he still remembers: the shape of his mother's hand, the sound of a river from a town whose name he can no longer place. He writes them down in a small pocket notebook — three words, a date — because if he doesn't, the shape of them slips away by noon.
By 06:00 he is Heinrich Kranz again: the collar starched, the boots polished, the uniform folded just so. He practices the smile in the mirror until the lines of it sit in his face. He practices phrases in German until the cadence sleeps in his mouth. He keeps a slip of Cyrillic under the floorboard: the name of a child he can sometimes remember and sometimes not. It is the single rebellion he allows himself — a scrap of Russia under German floorboards.
The walk to duty is deliberate. He knows the streets, the cafés where officers laugh too loudly, the cigarette shops that sell contraband. He gossips when he must — a scar on the face of a veteran here, a complaint about rations there — trivialities that grease him into the machinery. People trust a man who shares the small bitterness of a nation. Trust, here, buys access.
At the barracks he runs through his checks like a man reciting prayers. He greets the same faces every morning, nods to the same guard who will become his eyes and ears if he plays it right. The guard jokes about leave, jokes about wives; Alexei laughs on cue. He files reports, signs for afternoon shipments, carries orders. Each stamped paper is both a promise and a lie.
He keeps two wallets: one the official, heavy with ration coupons and commissar stamps; another lighter, folded thin, containing a tiny scrap of microfilm wrapped around a matchstick, the invisible thing that will disappear if anyone searches him. He wears the second wallet where the uniform can't see it—inside the lining, sewn with a seam he learned to stitch in the KGB safehouse years ago.
His day's work is banal enough to be invisible: escorting crates from the supply depot to Reichs Laboratory IV, signing manifests for instruments, removing the seals on simple instruments and replacing them with the ones he carries from his locker. Routine is a perfect mask. Soldiers come to expect the dull. He gives it. He gives them a man with a steady hand.
At noon he eats with Kraus's aides in the mess. He watches them eat with the practiced detachment of someone who knows how appetite anchors a person to a place. He listens more than he speaks. Information arrives in the gaps between sentences: who got a new ration, which transport was delayed, what doctor stayed late in the lab last night. He makes a mental map: routes, names, times. He repeats them to himself like rosary beads.
Anxieties like small animals.He has learned to tame panic into useful motion. When his hands shake he slaps his palm against his thigh and hums a Russian lullaby under his breath until the tremor loosens. When a memory deserts him, he doesn't reach for it — he writes everything down immediately: the name of a lab, the number on a crate, the color of the vial's seal. Memory is a filing system with teeth; he must feed it daily.
After déjeuner he reports to the lab under the pretense of checking instrumentation. Dr. Friedrich Adler — soft-spoken, exhausted — recognizes him by the way he tilts his head when listening. Alexei uses the tilt to show deference. He asks simple, technical questions that make him look competent; he lets Adler lecture him about stability readings, the failure modes of containment panels. Scientists love to be heard. He lets them talk and takes from them the cadence of technical speech, the small phrases he might later quote at a briefing.
He walks the lab like a ghost. Machines clank, pumps hiss; men insult each other with the same words used in schools. The containment case holds the vial of Primogenium in a nest of lead and glass. He does not let himself stare too long. When he walks past, he notes instead the clamps on its housing, the calibration notches, the scorch marks on the tray. He has learned to gather fact rather than spectate — fact is a weapon that will not melt in a warm palm.
The fragile rehearsals of access.He practices ways to be everywhere at once. He learns the shifts of the cleaning crew and slips a small forged log into the janitor's pocket one evening so that on a chosen Tuesday there will be two empty minutes in the cameras' sweep. He arranges to be the courier who signs for "auxiliary cooling fluid" that will come the day he needs to be near the containment box. He buys the right kind of screwdrivers from the market and leaves them under a loose floorboard he told a friendly guard about; later, that guard will "borrow" them and be grateful. These are trades: favors bought in the coin of human need.
At 16:30 he slips away and eats alone. He goes to a small bakery on a side street, orders black coffee and a roll, and watches the baker's son play with a wooden top. The boy's laughter is a theft of normality. He touches the seam of his inside pocket where the microfilm rests. If he is discovered, it will be the end. He thinks of Russia like a word behind glass that he presses his mouth against at night. The image is ritual: he breathes it in and the trembling stops.
Evenings are the loneliest. He is expected at receptions — banquets where officers sing and the propaganda reels play. He goes because it is part of the role. He drinks only enough to thaw the stiffness in his throat and no more; he must stay lucid. He laughs on schedule and offers stories of the front in a voice that is just credible enough. A woman asks about his childhood; he tells her a story lifted from a thousand other mouths, a village by a river with a willow tree; it's not his and yet sometimes, later, in bed, in the dark, he can almost feel the willow's branches.
The breaking point.Sometimes at night, he returns to his room and takes off the uniform and stares at the floorboard where the Cyrillic slip is hidden. He opens the small tin of water and touches the film to make sure the emulsion still holds. He whispers into the dark the name of his brother — trying names like keys — and some nights one of them fits and a memory blooms: a laugh, a face, a small red scarf. Other nights there is nothing, only silence and the old fear that the person he loved most might be someone he imagined to anchor himself.
At 01:00 there is the drop.
A window on the eastern wall catches him with moonlight as he walks. He loosens his collar and goes out. There is a poet's cafe where a man who writes for the underground will meet him under the guise of arguing about Tchaikovsky. Alexei sits with his hat down and gives a sealed envelope to an old woman who will carry it to neutral ground. Inside the envelope there are typed lines: dates, names, the difference of a few degrees in a containment temperature that a careless hand changed five nights ago. He writes in Russian, then seals the parchment in wax pressed with a ring that looks like jewelry and is instead a cipher.
The courier nods and disappears. Alexei returns to his room and reads again the lists he has made that day. He corrects an error about a shipping crate and mends the fold in his notebook with fingers that smell of coal.
On particularly bad nights he opens the microfilm and looks at the grainy frames: a schematic of a containment lid, a notation in Adler's hurried handwriting about enzyme assays. A color smear, a notation: "reaction stable at 42°C; tissue incubation: observe necrosis after 12h." Details that will become chess pieces in Moscow's hands.
He sometimes imagines standing in a room of computers and analysts as they stare at his notes and nod at last; he imagines them granting him a brief smile and lifting him into the light. The thought holds him through the hollow. But it is a private dream and this life is not built to answer dreams.
Before he sleeps he performs the ritual of denial. He washes carefully, folds his uniform, writes one Russian sentence on a scrap and burns it in the small pot over the stove. Smoke carries away a word he cannot keep and he convinces himself, briefly, that he is in control.
Then the night slips away and he becomes His. Heinrich Kranz will march to the mess hall sanitized and smiling, and the day will run on rails until he can steal another fact and send it home. He will stand in the lab doorways, record the time the cleansing solution was poured, memorize the cadence of Adler's cough. He will be near enough to hear the scientist mutter the word Primogenium under his breath and know that it is a name that will not stand for long in the world.
When he falls asleep it is thin and punctured by dreams of two languages mixing. He wakes and the first thing he does is check whether the coin with his mother's initials is still under the mattress. It is. He breathes and for a minute, the world is whole.
Tomorrow he will sign for another crate. Tomorrow he will smile at the same sergeant. Tomorrow he will move one more piece. The mission is not a single act of heroism; it is a slow, patient weaving until a single thread breaks and the whole fabric shows the right pattern. He keeps weaving because the thought of stopping is worse than the risk of discovery.
And in the window of the lab, where the vial sits and hints at blue, he will stand for a second longer than necessary, feeling the heat that does not touch him, and whisper to the empty room, in a language that is maybe Russian and maybe German: Do not let them make gods.
Alexei had not been born a spy with keys to every locked door. He'd taken them, patiently, one at a time.
Before Lab IV, before the false medals and the neat uniform, Heinrich Kranz had a ledger and a radio set. His cover appointment — the one the Soviets had built for him years earlier — read: Oberleutnant Heinrich Kranz, Signals Corps, Luftflotte 6 (communications liaison). It was the perfect role. Signals officers moved between staff rooms and command tents, handled classified manifests, and had excuses to be wherever technology and secrecy met. They were expected to understand instruments, brief commanders, and explain technical minutiae without panicking. That expectation was his passport.
But access was never only a matter of a good cover letter. People let you closer because they liked you, because you sounded like them, or because you could make their conversation better. So Alexei learned to be the kind of man who improved a room.
He spent five weeks studying late at night in his Berlin apartment with books he got from al ocal library, under the pretense of "catching up on civilian engineering" — the old librarian knew him as a respectable german soldier and paid in francs. He devoured German textbooks and translated scientific papers by the lamplight: fundamentals of protein chemistry, basics of hemoglobin and oxygen affinity, enzymology, and short primers on histology and tissue response to radiation and chemicals. He learned the vocabulary he would need — terms like allosteric modulation, isoenzyme profile, substrate affinity, denaturation, incubation, and in vitro assay — and practiced pronouncing them aloud until they rolled naturally off his tongue.
He also read more practical, era-appropriate material: laboratory manuals on containment, notes on refrigeration and cryogenic handling (useful because the Antarctic origin made frost and cold a natural conversational angle), and wartime research summaries about stabilization of biological samples. He learned to sketch a simple spectrophotometer and could explain, in halting German, why absorbance curves mattered. Most importantly, he compiled a small notebook of observable facts he could report without risking speculation: how a centrifuge worked, the smell of ozone when a vacuum pump failed, what a lead-lined containment looked like.
From the Signals desk he cultivated the social life that mattered. He accepted every invitation. He learned officers' favorite wines, the stories colonels repeated until they were myths, the professors who liked to argue over coffee and the SS men who preferred quiet flattery. At mess dinners he kept his questions precise and well-timed: a scientist liked to explain himself; an SS officer liked to be the man who knew how to make the explanation happen.
At one such dinner — a private salon hosted by an SS officer who liked to collect "useful" interlocutors — Kranz listened more than he spoke. The conversation turned to rumors: anomalous energy signatures in the Antarctic, strange shipments marked for "Reichs Laboratory IV," and a scientist's morbid, fascinated aside about "an agent that changes tissue conductivity." Most men laughed it off as speculation; one of the guests, a junior scientist attached to the Reich labs, sighed and began to explain the mechanics of enzyme assays and how, under certain conditions, proteins destabilize.
Alexei tilted his head toward the scientist and asked a single, quiet question: "Have you considered isoenzyme variation under cold stress — whether a unique isoform might confer thermal stability?" It was not brilliant. It was the right question. It gave the scientist something real to talk about.
The man brightened. "Exactly. If there's an isoform that resists denaturation, it might explain why some tissues survive exposure longer."
Alexei nodded and added a small detail he'd learned from a lab manual: "Spectrophotometric shifts at 420 nm might indicate haem-group alteration. A quick screen could show differences." He spoke like a man who had stood next to a spectrophotometer not once but often enough to know how the knobs felt under the fingers.
It worked. The scientist's eyes lit. The SS officer who hosted the dinner watched him as if testing for a trick. It was the smallest thing — a correct technical suggestion, made without grandstanding — but it was the kind of thing that gave a man credibility.
Over the next three weeks he repeated the pattern. He turned up to salons, to officers' smoking rooms, to a Sunday afternoon lecture at a technical society. He asked the right questions about lead shielding, about containment seals, or about the logistics of moving radiological samples. He never pressed for classified details; he never betrayed curiosity that would embarrass his hosts. Instead he let the men speak and supplied a single, useful technical observation at the end, the sort of detail that made their day easier.
The SS liked men who smoothed the edges of their projects. Scientists liked men who understood and therefore listened. Pride and vanity are currency; Alexei spent it like cash. He remembered names, asked follow-ups weeks later, and when a lab technician complained about a broken clamp he "happened" to have a spare in his kit. Small favors accumulate into trust.
At a winter banquet — candlelight, heavy wine, an official from the Ministry of Armaments in attendance — a private circle formed around a crate of technical questions. The conversation turned, inevitably, to Lab IV. The junior scientist's voice carried: "We need more men who think technically but will also conform. The Reich needs people who can translate theory into practice."
An SS officer looked at Kranz and, half in jest, half in test, said: "You speak well, Kranz. You should be in Lab IV. They could use someone who understands the instruments and will not… complicate things."
It was a throwaway line. But in that room a throwaway line could be an offer.
Two days later he received an official summons: a simple letter stamped with the Nazi eagle and orders to present himself at Tempelhof for "temporary reassignment — technical liaison, Reichs Laboratory IV." The paperwork pressed against his palm felt so ordinary it nearly made him laugh: a clean mimeograph form, a signature, a routing stamp. He signed without hesitation.
At Tempelhof he was first assigned to trivial, plausible tasks: inventory of instrument shipments, briefings on radio interference near experimental chambers, keeping communications secure between the lab and the Luftwaffe. He handled the manifests, learned the schedule of deliveries, and spent late nights "auditing" cooling systems. Because he already knew the vocabulary, he could ask for the right schematics and pretend he needed them for "interference mitigation." Because he'd cultivated small friendships, guards now waved him through without scanning his credentials too closely.
Inside Lab IV
Access widened slowly: an escorted walk through security, a tour by an obliging junior officer, a chance to stand near the containment case while the chief scientist babbled about an "unexpected thermal signature." He felt the heat from the glass once — an ordinary, dangerous warmth — and pretended not to notice how his palms prickled.
Alexei never rushed. He knew that his strength was patience. He spent his days in the lab's periphery, offering soldered connectors for a broken relay, borrowing a notebook to test penmanship that would make him appear routinely helpful. He recorded every serial number, every calibration date, every odd scorch on a pan. He learned which technicians left notes in pencil and which kept them neatly typed. He memorized the names of those who controlled access logs.
Two months after the dinner in which someone jokingly proposed him for Lab IV, Alexei was assigned an official liaison post on paper and an unofficial one in practice: he was part of the logistics team that had keys and a reason to be behind the containment door.
He had done what the best spies always do: he turned patience into credentials, small competence into trust, and the vanity of others into the path he needed to walk. When he paused at the threshold and stared at the vial, he told himself it was only information he collected — nothing more. He unfolded the face of the next day and smoothed it flat with the practiced hand of a man who had learned to live between languages.
He haf begun his grand plan.
Alexei sat in the thin light of his room and folded the map until the creases matched the ones in his head. The city outside smelled of coal and triumph; inside, his small space smelled of tobacco and the iron tang of fear. On the table lay everything that mattered: a tiny strip of microfilm rolled around a matchstick, a list of names and shift changes in Adler's handwriting, and a ledger of transport manifests he had copied by hand.
He had rehearsed this moment for months in stolen minutes and whispered hours. He had cultivated friends — the janitor who "borrowed" his screwdriver, the junior guard who liked chess, the technician who'd once owed him a favor. He had learned the lab's rhythms: the times the heating system blasted so it masked other noises, the half-hour when the senior scientist always stepped out for a cigarette, the night of the banquet when half the staff would be drunk in the hall and the security roster stretched thin.
He called it, to himself, the one clean lie: that a man could move a thing meant to be unseen and turn it into light.
The Plan (at a glance)
Window: During the Reich's Victory Banquet — the one where the Chancellery drank and mythologized Falken — Lab IV's perimeter would be relaxed, cameras adjusted, officers distracted.
Access: He would be the courier who signed for a replacement cooling coil; the paperwork existed in his hand as a forgery only good enough to pass a grunt's glance.
Diversion: He'd arranged, through the janitor, for a brief power cycle in a small wing of the lab — long enough for routine CCTV to loop, not long enough for engineers to notice.
The Take: He would approach the containment box during that loop, remove a single, sealed sample vial from a secondary cache, and replace it with an identical-looking empty vial taken from a waste tray.
The Concealment: The vial would travel in the lining he'd stitched into his jacket — lead-lined cloth purchased as "insulation" in a market stall — and a slip of microfilm hidden inside the wax of the vial's cap.
The Handoff: He would meet the courier at a nondescript shed by the Spree — neutral ground, always busy with river traffic and fishermen — and transfer both the film and the vial for the long journey east.
He breathed through the list and slid the microfilm into a small packet. The handwriting on the manifest looked like everyone else's handwriting: indifferent, mechanical. He practiced the signature and folded the paper until it fit the inside pocket of his jacket.
Alexei's plan was a thing of long rehearsals and patient accumulation: the forged manifest, the janitor's favor, the looped camera, the quiet boat at the Spree. He had folded every contingency into the margins of his notebook and practiced breathing through the moments he could not control.
The chandeliers blazed like frozen suns. The grand hall of the Reich Chancellery pulsed with brass music, polished boots, and laughter as thick as smoke. Portraits of conquest hung from every wall — flags of fallen nations stitched into curtains, their colors muted by candlelight.
The air smelled of cigars, wine, and victory.
Heinrich Kranz — the name Alexei wore tonight — entered with the crate balanced against his hip and his forged documents tucked inside his coat. He paused at the edge of the marble steps, the hum of a hundred voices rising and falling like the tide.Everywhere he looked there was movement: officers in gleaming uniforms, women in silk dresses clinking glasses, and the rhythmic chant of "Heil Hitler!" echoing whenever the Führer's name was mentioned.
The orchestra — a small army of violins — played the Wagnerian March of the Valkyries, the melody swirling through the vaulted ceiling.
"Ah, Kranz!"The voice belonged to Oberst Müller, red-faced from drink. He gripped Alexei's shoulder as though he'd been waiting for him all night."You've come late. The Führer is to speak soon! Have some wine — drink to our victory!"
Alexei smiled, the perfect polite smile of a soldier who belonged. "Only a moment, Oberst. I'm still on duty."
"Nonsense! Even the machines rest when the Fatherland triumphs!" Müller waved over a waitress. A glass was pressed into Alexei's hand before he could refuse.
The crystal caught the light; the red wine looked disturbingly like blood.
Across the room, Hitler himself stood at the head of a long banquet table, surrounded by his inner circle — Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, and Kraus. Behind them, a small platform had been built for tonight's special guest: the Great German.
Falken.He stood motionless as a statue, cape draped over his broad shoulders, his face expressionless. The room's chatter dimmed whenever someone looked at him. Even among monsters, he was something else — silent, radiant, terrifying.
A brass trumpet cut through the murmur. Goebbels stepped forward, his voice sharp and theatrical."Tonight, we drink not merely to conquest," he announced, "but to destiny! To the man who stands as proof that our Reich is chosen by Providence itself — Der Große Deutsche!"
The hall erupted in cheers. Glasses were raised, soldiers pounded the tables."Heil Hitler! Heil Falken!""Heil der Sieg!"
Alexei's heart hammered under his uniform. He forced himself to sip the wine, pretending to join the chant. His eyes flicked toward the side corridor that led to the laboratories. That was his window — the security shift he'd arranged, the loop he'd paid for.
He took a step toward the door.
And then the atmosphere changed.
The side doors burst open. A young communications officer stumbled in, still wearing his headset, face ashen. The orchestra faltered into silence.
"My Führer," he gasped, "— Nachricht aus London! From London!"
All sound drained from the room. Even the glasses stopped clinking.
Hitler's head snapped toward the man. "Speak."
The officer's voice trembled. "The British defenses… have fallen. The Great German has taken London. The city burns, mein Führer."
A collective murmur swept through the hall like wind through dry grass. The orchestra players exchanged terrified glances. Then, slowly, applause broke out. One man, then another, until the entire hall erupted into a roar of "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!"
Hitler stood, hand raised, his smile a blade. "It is done," he said. "The island that defied us for a thousand years kneels before the Reich. God has blessed our cause."
Wine spilled. Men shouted in ecstasy. Women cried.But for Alexei, the sound was deafening chaos.
The security detail — all the officers who were supposed to be drunk and inattentive — were suddenly alert, called to duty. Orders barked through the radio network. Guards doubled at every checkpoint. The corridors that were supposed to be empty filled with footsteps.
No… no, no… not now.
He slid away from the crowd, moving toward the hall's edge. The janitor he'd bribed was gone. A pair of soldiers ran past carrying rifles. The cameras he'd timed to loop flickered back to life. His perfect plan unraveled like a thread burning in his hands.
He pressed forward, through a side corridor lined with portraits. The lab wing was two turns away. If he could reach the secondary cache—
"Kranz!"
The shout cracked like a whip.He turned to see SS-Untersturmführer Reiner Voll, a hawk-faced young officer with ambition in his eyes.
"Where are you going, Kranz? The Führer is speaking!"
Alexei forced a grin. "Ordered to check the communications relay, sir. Temporary signal interference from the east wing. Routine."
Voll's eyes narrowed. "During this?" He stepped closer. "Strange. No one informed me."
Alexei held his ground. "It was direct from the laboratory." He handed over the forged paper — his best work, but the light in the corridor was cruel. Voll stared too long at the signature.
"Communications relay, you said?" he murmured, folding the document in half. "Then I will accompany you. To ensure the Führer's speech isn't… disrupted."
Alexei felt a cold pinprick crawl down his spine. "Not necessary, sir. The line is clear. It's—"
"Lead the way, Heinrich." Voll's tone left no space for refusal.
The music from the hall swelled again — the orchestra, loud and triumphant, masking the tension in Alexei's ears as he led the officer down the corridor. Every step echoed too loudly.He turned left, then right, taking them toward the maintenance wing — away from the lab for now. He needed to lose him.
Voll's boots clicked close behind."You seem nervous, Kranz. Too much wine?"
"Just tired, sir," Alexei said. His hand twitched toward the inside pocket where the stolen microfilm waited, still sealed. "Long night."
"Mm." Voll's gaze was a knife between his shoulder blades. "You know, men who act strangely on nights like this usually have something to hide."
They passed a window where the flames of Berlin's celebration painted the glass red. Fireworks exploded outside — the Reich rejoicing in London's death. In that light, Alexei saw Voll's reflection step closer, suspicion sharpening.
He turned another corner — toward the archives, not the labs. There would be fewer guards there, maybe a door, a moment, anything.
"Sir," Alexei said evenly, "I think the interference is from this junction. Just here." He pointed to a door slightly ajar. "If you'll allow me—"
"After you," Voll said, gesturing with his pistol.
Alexei smiled thinly. "Of course."
He pushed the door open.
Inside, the archive was dark and narrow. Rows of old equipment lined the walls. A single bulb flickered above, painting the dust in pale gold. Alexei stepped in first, then turned halfway, like a man making room for another. His left hand brushed the edge of a table where a heavy wrench lay forgotten.
Voll entered, eyes scanning the shadows. "Strange place for a relay—"
Alexei moved.
A single step, a pivot, the wrench in his hand before Voll could blink. He swung it hard — the sound was dull and wet. Voll dropped to one knee, dazed, blood in his hair.
Alexei didn't wait. He slipped out of the room, heart slamming, the paper still in his hand, his chance evaporating but not gone.
London had fallen. The banquet had turned into madness. His mission — the vial, the film, the truth — was suddenly worth more than ever.
And now someone knew his name.
He couldn't afford to make another mistake.
He had thought the hard part would be the theft — the slow arithmetic of timing and favors, the tiny lies that bought him access and aligned the cameras — but the city taught him differently: that plans could be shredded by a single piece of news and the shredded pieces would cut deeper than any blade.
He moved through the Chancellery's back alleys like a shadow at first, the stolen crate tucked under his arm. The vial hummed faint and impossible in the lining at his chest; the documents — Adler's notes, manifests, the microfilm — were folded inside a waterproof packet and strapped to his thigh. The banquet behind him still roared, brass and wine and proclamations of destiny, but the city had already begun to rearrange itself into a new shape. Men in brown coats ran with radios; sentries rechecked passes; foghorns bellowed across the river.
At the corner of Friedrichstraße and the empty tram line he sensed the first wrongness: the quiet that gathers when something is watching. He smelled—not quite smelling, only an expectation—gun oil, the iron tang of a boot rubbing leather. Two men had split off from a group moving the other way. Both kept glances over shoulders. One carried a rifle too new for a routine patrol.
Alexei's throat tightened. He slipped into a doorway shadowing a closed bookshop and pressed his back to cold stone. He let his breath slow and counted the heartbeats, three, four, five. They passed by and then one of them slowed, looked up, and his eyes fixed on the doorway. The man signalled with his chin. Two more separated from the main flow and moved into the shadow of the streetlamps.
The chase that followed was all small choices: a wrong-turn that felt right, a sprint across wet cobbles, a leap over a collapsed vendor's cart, a hand on a windowsill for purchase, lungs burning with cold. Alexei kept to alleys where his uniform would not show first — where a man could be merely another figure in a city that had given itself to revelry and dread.
He darted into a narrow side street and found a tavern whose shutters were bolted for the night. The door gave under his shoulder; the smell of stale beer and mildew wrapped around him. He crouched behind overturned chairs, palms on the crate to feel the subtle reassurance of the vial. For one wild second he imagined himself a man who had stolen something sacred and therefore not safe — then heard the heavy bootbeats and the shout from the doorway.
They had split up. Two crashed into the tavern door, rifles raised; one stalled in the street outside. He could hear the rasp of a throat and a voice calling his name in German — low, confident. Voll. He had not expected the officer to move so quickly.
Alexei's mind wrenched through options: surrender and explanation (a fantasy), fight and flight (probable), hide and hope (worse). He had a pistol stowed in his boot — a small, clumsy thing that paid for itself in the hands of a man who had learned to use it — and the wrench from the archive lay within reach under the broken counter. He slid it to his hand, feeling the familiar heft, the one blunt object that had saved him once by accident.
The first two men shoved into the room and the air turned thick with shouts. He saw the reflex of one as he raised his rifle to clear the room; Alexei timed the wrench swing to that reflex and the world narrowed to impact. The blow landed on the stock, hard enough to jar and knock the barrel sideways. The man toppled with a surprised curse. Another lunged and Alexei's fist found his jaw; the barbell-thrown momentum of a man trained to lift saved him from being grabbed. A third soldier spun, shot, and the bullet slammed into a wooden pillar. Splinters flew. Alexei dropped, rolled, and the blow of the wrench cracked his shoulder. He moved like a man with no room left for fear.
Two men down, one left. The remaining assailant was better; he had a rifle stabilized, a calm that came from practice. He raised and fired. The shot tore through the wood they had hidden behind. Alexei answered with two exact, economical motions — lunge, grapple the barrel, wrench to the throat — the kind of intimate violence spies learn to use when they cannot signal for help. The man crumpled, breath gone from his body in a single, awful exhalation.
He did not look at their faces long. He did not let himself feel the aftershock that wanted to unfurl inside his chest. He dragged the three bodies into the shadow of stacked crates and jammed a chair against the door. The street outside heaved with the noises of a city in triumph and alarm; someone sang; somewhere an air-raid bell clanged.
He ran.
The port lay three blocks away, a clutter of warehouses and barges and the faint blue light of lanterns that fishermen kept burning all winter. He threaded through bloated market stalls and past a pair of uniformed sentries who were arguing over a radio report — the sort of human argument that can be read as kindness or distraction. He moved like a ghost, the stolen crate a weight he loved and hated.
The quay reeked of salt and diesel. A small boat rocked in the gloom beside the rusting bulk of a barge. He slid the crate into the skiff and crouched, cheeks burning with cold, waiting for the nod he had prepaid for. Had his face been seen as he fled Shutter Street? Had the man he had struck called for reinforcements?
Footsteps. Fast. Too close. The man he had knocked out in the archive — Voll — loomed from the shadow of the warehouses, pistol drawn. His jacket hung open like a threat. His features were white and furious.
"Kranz!" he shouted. "Stop!"
Alexei moved to stand and fight and then the world changed with a single pistol report. A figure dropped between him and Voll — a compact shadow slicing open the night — and another. Two rifles in two hands. Two clean, surgical shots. Voll jerked, doubled, and then fell, a surprised sound torn from his throat as he collapsed into a puddle of alley water.
Two men in rough coats had stepped from behind a pile of barrels, their faces half-hidden under the upturned collars. They were not civvies; the way they moved, the certainty of their weapons, the language in the order one of them barked — Russian, low, clipped — marked them.
"Morozov?" one of them asked, voice rough with urgency.
Alexei could do nothing but nod, the movement a dry crack.
The taller of the two — the skipper the team used for black routes, or one of Zaitsev's shadow couriers — dropped to one knee beside Voll and checked the arm that hung limp. "He'll talk if he breathes," the courier said bluntly. "Too dangerous to interrogate here. We get you to the boat."
Alexei had, in the days when he was still allowed to think of himself as a clean instrument, planned the handover at a pier. He had not planned for the groan of a man he had nearly killed to resurface like a ghost to point a pistol and end the mission in a single breath. He had not planned for the two men with Russian accents and the cold decisiveness in their eyes.
They shoved him into the skiff, the crate between them like an altar, and shoved off. The river took them into fog and light, the city sliding by in a smear of pyres and sentries and the sudden, shocking black absence of the bridges that led toward the center. The courier did not look at Alexei with the warmth of a rescuer. He checked the waxed cap with gloved fingers as if it were a bomb and then, satisfied, let out a long breath that might have been a prayer.
On the low deck a man in a long coat removed his cap and peered at Alexei. It was Zaitsev's aide, the one who once looked at him with pity in the warehouse. "You are bleeding," he said.
Alexei touched his hand and felt a smear of warm, metallic wet. He had been hit in the palm by a splinter of wood during the tavern fight. "Not serious," he lied.
"Good," the courier said. "Morozov, you must stop doing the hero work and start being ours again." The low attempt at a joke was not humor; it was a tether.
They cut through the fog toward the north channel where a freighter — a planned transfer point — would meet them in an hour. The crate sat between Alexei's knees. He placed one hand on the wooden seam that hid the vial and, for the first time since stealing it, let the reality of its presence sink into him. He had taken from those men the one object that could unmake the myth; he had killed, even if his hands had been forced; he had been saved by a current of State that was less warm than it was efficient.
They pulled into the freighter's hold without fanfare. The courier who had driven the boat clambered onto the gangway and disappeared into the night. Alexei stepped down, the swell of the river in his bones, and handed the documents over to a young analyst from Moscow whose eyes were the flat gray of someone who had seen too much. The man checked Adler's pages and the microfilm, the shorthand and the signatures, and his lips pressed into a thin line.
"Good," he said at last. "You did well."
Alexei looked at the men who had just killed to protect him. He wanted to say thank you; instead he said the only thing he could: "Is it enough?"
The analyst did not smile. "It will be enough to make them disturbed," he said. "It will not destroy the Reich by itself. But it will make Moscow believe there is an opening. It is a beginning."
Alexei sank onto a crate and let the freighter rock him until nausea left him like a tired animal. He thought of Voll's face as it had went white in the archive and then gone still on the quay — a human ledger of suspicion he had added to the world.
"You're lucky," the courier said quietly. "Not everyone gets saved."
Luck, Alexei thought, had a cost. His hands still smelled of the tavern's splinters and the pistol's smoke. Somewhere, three men lay hidden in a back room where, if anyone found them, explanation would come easily. Somewhere, in the Chancellery, alarms would go off and a hunt begin, and men would be sent in squads down alleys to cut out the possibility that a lab rat could ever teach the world what it had wrought.
He had the vial. He had the papers. He had a sack of dead men under a tavern table and the taste of their irony in his mouth. He had been saved, but the saving had stretched him thin.
Alexei went with the russian back to the modtherland, his mission was comlplete. He took his nazi banner from his arm a threw ir on the cold water.
The ship cut through gray water, its hull creaking under the weight of ice and distance. Berlin was already a smear behind them, swallowed by fog and smoke. The Russian operatives kept to themselves, whispering orders, checking the crate that held the Primogenium — the prize that had cost too many lives.
Alexei stood alone on the deck, the cold wind tearing at his coat. He reached for the red armband still wrapped around his sleeve — the black swastika soaked with salt and blood. For months he had worn it like a second skin, pretending it was his. Pretending he was one of them.
He tore it off slowly, the fabric stretching, threads snapping like nerves under strain. For a moment he just stared at it — the symbol that had let him walk among monsters. His hand trembled, not from fear, but from the weight of what it had taken to keep wearing it.
Then, without ceremony, he threw it into the sea.
The armband twisted in the wind, a flash of red against the steel-blue horizon, before it struck the water and vanished beneath the waves. He watched it sink until even the ripples disappeared.
The wind howled across the deck. Somewhere below, the engines hummed — steady, mechanical, alive.
He took a long breath, the air sharp in his lungs, and whispered in Russian:"Пусть оно утонет вместе с тем, что я стал."(Let it drown with what I've become.)
For the first time in months, Alexei felt clean — not redeemed, not forgiven, but clean. The cold gnawed at him, but he didn't move. He stood there until the horizon blurred, until the past he'd worn on his sleeve was gone, lost to the black water.
Behind him, a sailor shouted orders in Russian. The Motherland waited.
Alexei turned away from the sea, and the man called Heinrich Kranz ceased to exist.
Murmansk Port, Soviet Union — 1942
Snow fell in slow, heavy flakes, turning the docks into a blur of white and gray. The freighter eased into the harbor, the red star flag snapping in the northern wind. Soviet soldiers lined the pier, rifles slung, their breath rising in plumes.
Alexei stood at the bow with the other agents, the cold biting through his coat. For the first time in years, he breathed the air of his homeland — sharp, clean, and alive. It filled his lungs like fire and memory. The salt of the sea mixed with the frost, and for reasons he couldn't name, his eyes stung.
When the ramp dropped, the soldiers snapped to attention. A chorus of boots struck the wood in perfect rhythm as they saluted.
And then, parting through the ranks, came Joseph Stalin himself — flanked by generals and bodyguards, his mustache outlined with frost. The men straightened even taller, silence stretching over the snow.
Stalin's gaze found Alexei. The dictator approached, boots crunching over ice, and extended his gloved hand."You have done your Motherland a great service, Comrade Morozov," he said, voice low and steady. "You have brought us the truth, and hope."
Alexei swallowed, standing at rigid attention. "For Russia," he managed, his voice breaking despite his discipline.
Stalin nodded once. "For Russia."
The soldiers saluted in unison.Alexei raised his hand to his brow, tears sliding down his face, freezing before they could fall. The sound of hundreds of boots striking the dock filled the air, a single heartbeat of steel and pride.
For a long time, he couldn't move. He had dreamed of this air, of this ground, of these faces. Now that he stood among them again, it felt unreal — too bright, too loud, too alive.
Hours later, a black government car rumbled through the streets of a small village outside Leningrad. Snow drifted over quiet houses and the faint light of oil lamps glowed through frosted windows. Alexei sat in the back seat, one suitcase resting beside him — all that was left of the man who had once been Heinrich Kranz.
The car stopped at a small wooden house with a crooked fence and a single light burning inside. The driver opened the door, but Alexei hesitated for a moment, staring at the familiar porch. His heart pounded like it hadn't since Berlin.
He stepped out. The snow crunched under his boots.
He climbed the steps and knocked.
For a heartbeat there was silence. Then — the sound of hurried footsteps, the clatter of something dropped, a gasp. The door swung open.
His sister, Anya, stood there, older than he remembered, tears already in her eyes."Lyosha…?" she whispered, hand trembling against her mouth.
He smiled, small and tired. "It's me."
She screamed — not in fear, but in joy — and threw her arms around him. Behind her, their mother appeared in her shawl, eyes wide, then broke down, sobbing as she rushed forward.
"My boy! My baby!" she cried, holding his face in her hands, kissing his forehead again and again. "They told us you were dead! My sweet Alexei!"
He tried to speak, but his throat failed him. His sister clung to his back; his mother wept against his chest. For the first time in years, he allowed himself to cry — the kind of tears that come from relief, not pain.
When he finally found his voice, it came out cracked and trembling."I'm home, Ma," he whispered.
The snow fell harder outside, covering the footprints on the porch. Inside, under the flickering light, a son returned from hell, and for one night — just one night — the war felt far away.
Earlier that day in London 8:47 a.m.
Morning in London was gray and damp, the kind of day that never truly began. Vendors shouted in the streets, buses rumbled past bomb-scarred buildings, and children in worn coats ran to fetch the day's bread. The bells of Big Ben, cracked from years of war, still rang over the Thames like a heartbeat that refused to die. Blackout curtains are drawn back from windows, revealing families gathered around wireless radios for the latest BBC broadcast, sipping weak tea rationed to the last leaf. Air raid wardens patrol the streets in their tin helmets, while children in gas masks play hopscotch on cracked pavements, their laughter a fragile shield against the ever-present threat of sirens. In the markets of Covent Garden, housewives haggle over sparse vegetables, and office workers in wool suits hurry to their desks in Whitehall, clutching newspapers headlined with Churchill's latest rallying speeches. The fog rolls in from the river, carrying the scent of coal smoke and wet stone, as Big Ben chimes the hour a steadfast symbol of British resilience.
But this ordinary day shatters in an instant. A searing beam of crimson light erupts from the sky, slicing clean through the iconic clock tower of Big Ben like a knife through butter. The upper half of the structure groans and crumbles, massive chunks of stone and twisted metal plummeting to the ground below, crushing vehicles and sending pedestrians scattering in terror. Screams pierce the air as dust clouds billow upward, and then he appears: The Great German, the Reich's twisted paragon of Aryan supremacy, a superhuman abomination forged in secret labs under Hitler's mad vision. He streaks across the city at Mach speeds, a blur of invulnerable might while lasering everything on his path.
His eyes glow with infernal heat as he unleashes torrents of laser vision, carving fiery swaths through London's heart. Historic landmarks vaporize in his wake—the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral cracks and melts, the Tower Bridge buckles into the Thames with a thunderous splash, sending waves crashing against the banks. Residential streets erupt in flames as row houses explode, their occupants fleeing or perishing in the inferno. The Great German laughs, a booming, guttural sound that echoes over the chaos, his flight path a trail of destruction: museums reduced to ash, factories detonating in secondary blasts, and the screams of the dying blending into a symphony of despair.
The British Army mobilizes with desperate speed, anti-aircraft guns swiveling skyward and infantry units pouring into the streets. Rifles crackle, machine guns chatter, and artillery shells whistle through the air—but it's futile. The Great German descends slowly, hovering mid-air like a god of war, his chiseled features twisted in contempt. Bullets ping off his impenetrable skin, flattening harmlessly against his chest before clattering to the pavement. Shells burst around him in futile blooms of fire and shrapnel, leaving him unscathed. The city burns behind him, flames licking the skyline, black smoke choking the once-foggy air.With a casual wave of his hand, he retaliates. Soldiers are torn apart in droves—some vaporized by his eye beams, others crushed under superhuman fists that punch through tanks like paper. He moves with blinding efficiency, a whirlwind of death, leaving fields of mangled bodies and smoldering wreckage. The few survivors retreat in horror, their morale shattered as they realize no weapon in their arsenal can touch this monster.
The Royal Air Force scrambled within minutes. Dozens of Spitfires climbed into the gray, circling the burning city. They opened fire — tracers, rockets, everything they had — but the bullets might as well have been raindrops. The Great German hung in the air, unmoving, as the rounds ricocheted harmlessly from his body. Then he turned his gaze upward.
A second later, the sky lit red. The planes vanished one by one, exploding like paper lanterns.
Down below, the city was fire.
Then, a dark gleam enters his eyes. He remembers his primary directive, whispered by the Führer himself: eradicate the symbols of British defiance. The royal family. He rockets toward Buckingham Palace, the wind of his passage fanning the flames higher.Inside the palace's fortified war room, deep in the bowels of the building, King George VI huddles with his family and a cadre of elite royal guards. The air is thick with tension; the king's face is pale but resolute, his stammer momentarily forgotten as he discusses evacuation plans with his advisors. Queen Elizabeth clutches her daughters—Princess Elizabeth, 14, wide-eyed and trying to project the stoicism she'd one day embody as queen, and young Princess Margaret, 10, trembling but defiant. "We must get to Windsor," the king urges, maps spread before them under dim electric lights. Guards stand at attention, rifles ready, their faces etched with grim determination. The distant booms of destruction grow louder, shaking the foundations.
Suddenly, the heavy oak door explodes inward in a shower of splinters and dust. The Great German strides through, his massive frame filling the doorway, eyes pulsing with red menace. The guards react instantly, charging forward with bayonets fixed and pistols blazing. But he dispatches them without breaking stride—twin beams from his eyes lance out, piercing chests and heads in precise, fatal strikes. Bodies crumple, charred and lifeless, as acrid smoke fills the room.The king stands protectively before his family, but it's hopeless. The Great German lunges, his fist rocketing forward with supersonic force. It plunges through the king's chest in a spray of blood, emerging from his back clutching the still-beating heart. George VI gasps, eyes bulging in shock, as the superhuman squeezes, crushing the organ into pulp. He yanks his hand free, and the monarch collapses in a heap, blood pooling around his crown.
The queen screams, rushing forward in a futile bid to shield her daughters, but The Great German seizes her by the throat with one iron grip. He lifts her effortlessly off the ground, her feet kicking wildly. The pressure builds relentlessly—veins bulge, her face turns a sickly purple as capillaries burst. Blood trickles from her nose, eyes, mouth, and ears in rivulets, her gasps turning to wet gurgles. With a final, sickening crack, her neck gives way, and he releases her. The queen's body slumps to the floor, lifeless eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
The princesses cower in the corner, huddled together on the cold stone floor, tears streaming down their faces as sobs wrack their small frames. Elizabeth clutches Margaret close, whispering futile reassurances. The Great German turns to them, his eyes igniting with that hellish glow, casting crimson shadows across the room. He steps forward slowly, savoring their terror, his boots echoing like the toll of doom. He goes to another room with bloody hands and reaches a radio, he patiently searches for the righr frequency to talk to his fellow nazi and says "Its done."
The fires still smoldered days after the fall. Columns of black smoke coiled into the gray London sky like the ghosts of everything that had burned. Streets once filled with carriages and laughter were now seas of rubble and ash.
When the convoy arrived, the world held its breath.
Armored trucks rolled through Westminster, SS banners flapping from their sides. Soldiers marched in perfect rhythm down streets where no British voices remained. At their head, seated in an open-top car, was Adolf Hitler himself — smiling faintly, his gloved hand raised in triumph.
They stopped before the ruins of Big Ben. The tower lay on its side, split in half, a monument crushed beneath its own pride.
Photographers and propaganda officers scrambled to set up their cameras. The moment had to be eternal.
Hitler stepped out of the car, straightened his long black coat, and looked up at the fallen clock. Time itself, it seemed, had surrendered.
Then, the crowd of officers parted.
Descending from the smoke above came The Great German — his cape rippling, eyes glowing faintly even in daylight. He hovered a few feet off the ground beside Hitler, the perfect image of divine power serving mortal command.
Flashbulbs exploded.
A single photograph was taken — Hitler standing before the shattered Big Ben, the banner of the Reich fluttering behind him, and The Great German hovering at his side like an angel of ruin.
That image spread across the world. Newspapers from Tokyo to New York printed it under one headline:
"The God of War Walks Among Men."
For the first time, the Allies faltered. Fear spread faster than truth. Some said resistance was now pointless. Others whispered that perhaps God truly had chosen Germany.
And as for Churchill — no one knew.
British broadcasts fell silent after the bombardment. No government, no parliament, no radio. Rumors spread like wildfire: some said Churchill had died in the bunker beneath Whitehall; others claimed he'd escaped through secret tunnels to board a ship bound for America.
But in the pubs and cellars of the free world, one belief lingered — that the Lion of Britain still breathed somewhere, waiting for the storm to pass so he could roar again.
For now, London was silent. And under that silence, the Reich celebrated.