The smell of molten metal and sweat clung to the rafters of the Leclerc Works like the breath of some great iron beast. Girders moaned under the weight of pulley systems and overhead trolleys, and down below, the work of war thundered on. But Emil Dufort felt no pride today as he stood on the observation platform overlooking the main assembly floor.
He felt watched.
Not by the usual factory eyes—Henriette's calculating glances, Bruno's rough appraisals, or the wary respect of the new draftsmen. No, this was colder. Distant. The kind of scrutiny that seeped in through your skin and curled up at the base of your spine.
A few days ago, he would've dismissed it as exhaustion. He hadn't slept more than three hours a night since the Sanglier Mk IV prototype was greenlit. But the intercepted note—a coded German communique hidden in a coil of rivet wire—had changed everything.
They weren't just being observed.
They were being hunted.
Ghosts in the Machine
The Leclerc Works had grown beyond its original bounds. What had once been a modest plow manufacturer now spanned over a dozen buildings, two rail platforms, and a private telegraph tower. Emil had seen to its expansion personally, ensuring each new wing was built not only for efficiency but for adaptability. It was designed to shift with the needs of war—factories within factories, machines nested like Russian dolls.
But now that same complexity was a vulnerability.
Roland, the former intelligence officer turned cryptographer, stood beside Emil in the observation post, adjusting his spectacles and flipping through a thin folder of incident reports.
"Three cases of sabotage this week," Roland said, voice low. "A critical valve in Boiler Room Two deliberately jammed. A signal wire rerouted to overload the north fuse box. And worst of all, a packet of fake blueprints hidden among the real engine drafts."
Emil's knuckles whitened on the railing.
"Any suspects?"
"Plenty," Roland replied. "Too many. We've hired over sixty new workers in the last fortnight. Most came with forged or unverifiable papers. Some speak German with strange accents. And at least one translator we brought in last week is missing."
"So we're bleeding."
"Internally," Roland confirmed.
Countermeasures
That evening, Emil convened a closed-door council in the old boardroom atop the administrative annex. The room, long unused during the company's prewar days, had become a nerve center—chalkboards covered in scribbled schematics, desks cluttered with intercepted telegrams, maps with pins and lines tracking Sanglier deployment routes across France and Belgium.
Seated around the table were his most trusted: Henriette, Roland, Marianne, Bruno, and Jules—the head of fabrication logistics, a man whose uncanny memory for faces had already flagged three impostors.
"I won't insult you by pretending we're secure," Emil began. "The factory's been breached. Not once. Multiple times. And we're past the point where walls and locks can save us."
Henriette folded her arms. "You're proposing a purge?"
"I'm proposing a restructure. Effective immediately, the Leclerc Works will be divided into compartments. No single worker will have access to more than two stages of any production line. Engine and transmission teams are to be kept in separate hangars. Turret teams will work from redacted drawings. Even the rivet patterns will be scrambled between crews."
"That's going to be a nightmare to coordinate," Jules grunted.
Roland smirked. "Exactly. Which means it'll be a nightmare to infiltrate, too."
Henriette gave a nod. "And the ciphering?"
"I've developed a modified Vigenère," Roland said. "Three-layer encoding, with key rotations every 48 hours. Only supervisors will have access to the master keybook, which will be memorized and burned."
"And if we find someone leaking?" Bruno growled.
The room fell silent. All eyes turned to Emil.
"We don't just fire them," Emil said. "We make sure Berlin knows we found them."
The Trap
Three days later, Emil set the bait.
A false set of blueprints was created—marked "Sanglier Mk V," a fabrication of absurd specifications: twin engines, reactive armor, and a railgun turret. The plans were tucked inside a locked desk in the secondary drafting wing, and the key "accidentally" left behind after Emil's staged visit.
It took two nights.
On the second, the intruder came.
The guards reported no forced entry. Nothing on the security logs. But Roland had placed a fine layer of talc over the drawer's edge. By morning, it was disturbed. A single page was missing—page 4, detailing the "experimental propulsion system."
Exactly as planned.
"Time to see where our rabbit runs," Roland said grimly.
The Interrogation
The man they caught wasn't Belgian, though he claimed to be. His ID papers were clean, but Roland recognized the dialect he slipped into under stress—Alsatian-German, with Prussian cadences.
They found him two days later trying to board a train bound for Calais under the name "Erik Strauss." In his luggage: coded transcripts, sketch imprints, and a long-distance signal cipher.
They brought him to a disused cellar under the administrative offices.
"You're wasting time," the man hissed, bleeding from a shallow gash above his eye. "There's no Geneva Convention yet. You can't pretend to be civilized."
Emil stepped into the shadows of the room. He didn't speak. He simply placed the Sanglier prototype's wheel tread on the table.
"Do you know what this is?"
The man blinked. "It's a gear."
"No," Emil said. "It's a symbol. Of the future you tried to break."
Then he turned to Roland. "Make sure he's delivered to Command. Alive. And loudly."
A Message to Shadows
That night, as the workers gathered for the usual shift change, Emil stood atop the blast furnace scaffold and held up the saboteur's forged ID.
"This man walked among you. Worked beside you. Ate in our mess. And he nearly cost us everything."
The workers went silent.
"There will be no next time. From this moment forward, every man and woman in this factory is not just a laborer—you are a guardian of France's future. If you see something, report it. If you doubt someone, speak up. Because make no mistake: they are watching."
A heavy silence followed.
Then Bruno stepped forward and raised his hammer.
"They try again," he shouted, "we forge their bones into spare parts!"
The forge roared in response.
The Cost of Vigilance
Henriette found Emil later that night, alone in the machine shed, staring at the nearly completed hull of the Mk IV.
"You're doing too much," she said softly.
"We're doing just enough," he replied.
"You haven't slept in days. Haven't eaten properly. You bark orders like a general and weld like a grunt. If you keep pushing like this, they won't need to kill you. You'll do it yourself."
He exhaled and looked at her. "I know what's coming, Henriette. I know what Germany is preparing. And if we don't outpace them now, we won't get another chance."
She sat beside him, her hands calloused from months of managing too much, too fast.
"Just… pace yourself. France doesn't need another martyr. It needs a strategist."
🧠 The Web ExpandsBy week's end, Leclerc Works operated under a new system.
Each assembly line operated on a need-to-know basis. The ciphered documents were in use. The guards had doubled. False leaks were planted in distant outposts to gauge German reaction times. Roland developed a surveillance rota, and Henriette began screening all incoming staff with help from Army Intelligence.
And the Sanglier Mk IV? It stood nearly complete, gleaming under canvas tarps, its frame reinforced, its engine compact and deadly. Inside the chassis, Emil had installed the beginnings of a prototype internal comms system—a crude wire-and-amplifier design using scavenged naval headsets.
It wasn't perfect.
But it was revolutionary.
As dusk fell, and Emil walked the catwalk above the assembly bay, he allowed himself a rare moment of silence. For now, the wolves were at bay.
But the web he'd spun was only as strong as its weakest strand.
And the next test would come not from within—but from the field.