Re: Blood and Iron - Chapter 701: Resist and Bite
Chapter 701: Resist and Bite
The plaza outside the Palácio do Planalto overflowed with flags and fanfare.
Tens of thousands had gathered in Brasília to witness the live national address by President Calheiros, an address that would, for the first time since the Great War, bind Brazil to the fate of the Western Allies.
The stage was framed in blue and gold banners.
Soldiers in crisp dress uniforms stood in formation along the front, flanking a temporary grandstand erected for foreign dignitaries.
A red carpet stretched across the steps.
Television cameras panned the cheering crowd.
And above them all, from the broken spire of an abandoned clocktower four blocks away, Fritz watched through the glass of an optic, mounted with crude elegance atop a relic of a previous war.
The Brazilian Model 1908 Mauser, rechambered in 7.62×51mm, had been restored and modified.
The bolt handle bent clear of the optic’s path. And no markings remained to identify origin or owner.
It was, like all Werwolf tools, a ghost.
Fritz lay prone beneath a moth-eaten canvas sheet, surrounded by pigeon droppings and sun-bleached roofing tile.
His spotter, Manfred, checked windage with an analog gauge and fed coordinates into a battered notebook, no electronics, no trace.
“Wind three, east to west. Temperature’s holding steady.”
Fritz gave a grunt. “He’s almost at the mic.”
Down below, Calheiros stood before the crowd in a white ceremonial uniform, medals clinking, hand raised for silence.
His voice crackled over loudspeakers, amplified across the plaza, the city, and across the continent by live broadcast.
“Today, Brazil stands proud alongside the free nations of the world…”
Fritz exhaled slowly. Not yet.
“…in the face of tyranny and aggression, we shall not waver…”
His finger rested on the trigger.
“…for democracy must not be afraid to raise its voice…”
He squeezed.
The rifle barked once. Just once.
Calheiros’s body jolted unnaturally as the round punched clean through his left temple, exploding outward into the national crest behind him.
The crowd didn’t react at first.
The shot echoed off the concrete and steel buildings, swallowed by the roar of applause.
Then someone screamed.
Then another.
Calheiros crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut.
The guards froze. A child began crying. Panic spread like fire.
By the time someone shouted, “Sniper!” Fritz and Martin were already gone.
They didn’t run. That would attract attention.
Instead, they descended the stairwell like maintenance workers, toolboxes in hand, sleeves rolled up to show sun-weathered forearms and grease-stained shirts.
They blended.
On the street, police sirens howled.
No one noticed the two men vanish into the old drainage tunnel beside a rusted electrical substation, another pre-scouted route, another buried trail.
The Mauser stayed behind, wiped clean, disassembled, and placed in the wall cavity behind a sealed metal panel.
It would never be found.
By nightfall, Brasília burned.
Looting broke out in the southern districts.
Dozens of fringe parties blamed one another.
The military declared emergency powers, then split into factions arguing over whether to stay the course with the Allies or remain neutral.
Rumors swirled. Some claimed it was the Germans.
Others, rogue monarchists. Some even whispered it was an inside job, Calheiros had enemies in every direction.
But no proof emerged.
No shell casing was recovered. No witness saw the shooter.
No surveillance camera caught a face, a movement, or even a glint.
The Allies, already stretched thin, were thrown into disarray.
In Ottawa, the Canadian Parliament called it “a violation of hemispheric sovereignty.”
In Washington, intelligence reports flooded in, each more speculative than the last.
The FBI suspected sabotage.
The OSS whispered of a phantom network trained in Eastern Europe, now unleashed on the Western Hemisphere.
President Roosevelt held an emergency meeting of the Allied Security Council.
“What do we know?” he asked.
“Nothing,” came the reply from Director Lawson. “No footprint. No chatter. No trail.”
“So you’re telling me the Reich just assassinated the leader of a sovereign democratic ally, on live television, and we can’t prove a goddamn thing?”
“Not the Reich, sir,” Lawson said grimly. “At least, not officially.”
The silence in the room said the rest.
In a safehouse outside Rio de Janeiro, Fritz lit a cigarette and watched the news in silence.
Martin leaned against the wall, sipping cold beer from a bottle with a chipped label.
“Think they’ll figure it out?”
Fritz exhaled smoke through his nose. “Doesn’t matter.”
He turned off the TV and stood.
“We don’t need credit. We need collapse.”
Across Latin America, Werwolf cells activated.
Substations exploded in Argentina.
Trains derailed in Colombia.
A refinery fire shut down all gasoline exports from Ecuador for a week.
Leftist militias, monarchist separatists, indigenous uprisings, old wounds were torn open with surgical precision.
Some were framed. Some were useful idiots. None knew they’d been nudged by German hands.
It was never about killing one man.
It was about unraveling the whole hemisphere, one thread at a time.
And as the Allied high command scrambled to put out fires across three continents, a message echoed in the silence behind each flame and bullet:
The wolves were among them.
And they would not howl until it was far too late.
Across Brazil, confusion turned to fury.
Protesters clashed with soldiers in front of government buildings; old party banners were pulled out of storage, and monarchist cockades appeared alongside republican flags.
Police convoys were ambushed on the highways. Within hours, the government’s own ministries no longer trusted each other.
In Washington and Ottawa, embassy cables became frantic, full of words like “insurgency” and “shadow network.” Latin American attachés demanded protection.
Security at Allied embassies doubled overnight.
No one wanted to say the word “assassination” on the record, but every conversation circled back to it.
In the safehouse, Fritz could hear the noise of Rio even through the walls: distant shouting, a car backfiring, sirens in the distance.
For a moment he allowed himself to imagine what the continent would look like in a month. Ports closed.
Rail lines sabotaged. Presidents too afraid to speak publicly. Nations paralyzed by suspicion.
He crushed out his cigarette.
“This isn’t the end,” he said quietly, though no one had asked. “This is the opening act.”
Martin looked up but said nothing.
The wolves had come to the New World. And before they ever howled, the herd would already be running.
