Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 209: “I don’t know how you did it, but... they’re coming.”
The wind tore across the outpost.
It screamed like it wanted something vengeance, maybe.
Blood.
Maybe just truth.
No one knew anymore.
Moreau stood under the gray sky, his coat unbuttoned, his fingers bare despite the cold.
The ten letters were gone, hand-delivered by trusted couriers under false identities and forged clearances.
Ten names.
Ten coordinates.
No explanation.
Only a call.
He didn't need to write much.
Each man would understand.
Some had waited for this longer than he had.
The first letter found its way into the scarred hands of Colonel Alexandre "Le Boucher" Delacroix, retired, living on a decaying vineyard outside Bordeaux.
He had once been the hammer of the Legion Etrangère, known for ending three rebellions in Africa without waiting for Paris to give permission.
His men called him "The Butcher," not for cruelty, but because his operations were swift, surgical, and soaked in blood.
When the courier arrived, Delacroix was splitting logs shirtless.
He read the letter, then folded it into his palm.
He looked toward the hills where no one lived.
"About time," he muttered. "I was starting to think the bastard got soft."
He threw the axe into the stump and walked into the house without another word.
The second went to Major Antoine Bellec, formerly of the 2e Régiment de Dragons, dishonorably discharged after a political disagreement with a General who later disappeared under suspicious circumstances.
Bellec now ran a scrapyard in Metz, a place where broken war machines went to rust and men with scars found work.
The envelope was pinned to the wheel of a gutted Renault tank.
Bellec wiped the oil from his hands and stared at the handwriting.
"Moreau…"
He opened it.
Read the single line.
Burn everything.
Come armed.
He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers and walked into the storage shed where a tarped crate waited his old uniform, his pistol, and a grudge with a heartbeat.
The third was for Captain Louis "Singe" Mercier, once the most feared commando in the French alpine units.
He vanished two years ago after a black op in the Caucasus went sideways.
Rumors said he'd become a smuggler.
Others said he'd died.
In truth, he lived above a brothel in Grenoble, training orphans to use knives and disappear.
The girl handed him the letter during breakfast.
No return name, but the paper was military-issue.
He grinned when he read it.
"The ghost wakes," he muttered. "Well then."
He loaded his revolver, kissed the girl on the forehead, and vanished down the stairs without a sound.
Letter four reached Commander Étienne Vautrin, a logistics officer turned war skeptic, living among dock workers in Le Havre.
He had been the man who once kept three regiments alive during the Siege of Amiens by rerouting supplies through illegal fishing networks.
When the brass tried to court-martial him for insubordination, the soldiers mutinied on his behalf.
He hadn't touched a weapon in four years.
But when the boy handed him the envelope, and he saw Moreau's signature mark a double underline beneath the date he dropped the whiskey bottle in his hand.
He walked outside, looked at the harbor, and said, "I knew we weren't done."
The fifth letter was intercepted deliberately by Jacques Duret, the revolutionary.
Duret lived in the sewers of Marseille, behind barricades of scavenged iron and tripwire.
He was the leader of a nameless cell that wanted the Republic dead and buried, and had once offered Moreau a place in the rebellion. Moreau declined.
Duret opened the letter, read the words, and grinned like a wolf.
"So the war hero finally sees it."
He showed the letter to no one, but gathered his inner circle that night.
"We're moving. This is the first fracture in the wall. And we'll be there when it breaks."
The sixth letter reached Sergeant-Major Jean-Pierre Montagne.
After a failed mission where ten men died due to poor intelligence, he resigned and became a fisherman in Brittany.
People called him quiet.
They didn't know he kept his uniform pressed in the cellar, beside a box of medals and an unopened bottle of absinthe.
He opened the letter at sea.
Said nothing.
Pulled the flask from his jacket.
Took a long drink.
Then turned the boat toward shore and didn't look back.
Seventh reached to Lieutenant René Coulombe, former special tactics, now a bitter alcoholic in Lyon, banned from re-enlistment for brawling with MPs and breaking an officer's jaw during a funeral.
He lived in a tenement, surrounded by mold and unpaid bills.
The letter came shoved under his door.
He opened it, then kicked over the table.
The neighbors said they heard him shouting.
"I FUCKING KNEW HE'D CALL! I TOLD YOU BASTARDS!"
He sobered up within the hour, shaved for the first time in a year, and put on boots that still fit.
Eighth went to Captain Baptiste Gaudin, a brilliant logistics analyst who once exposed embezzlement at the Ministry of War and was rewarded by being exiled to a weather station near Chamonix.
The courier left the letter in a tin thermos.
Baptiste read it while watching snow eat the horizon.
He shook his head. "You never were one for subtlety, Moreau."
He packed his maps, coded his resignation in the weekly report, and caught the first train south.
Ninth reached to Sergeant Lucien Rousse, former artillery commander, now crippled and pensioned.
Lost his leg to a shell.
Spends his days playing chess in Montmartre with painters and philosophers who don't know what he's done.
The envelope was slid into his coat pocket by an old comrade.
He opened it slowly.
His eyes burned.
He folded the letter and said to the man across the chessboard, "I'm going to need a rifle."
The man nodded.
"We all will."
The final letter landed in the hands of Major Alain Courbet, a man thought dead.
He'd faked his own death after witnessing war crimes committed by his own commanding officer crimes that were covered by the High Command.
He now ran a printshop in a village no one cared about, under a fake name, growing tomatoes in his backyard.
When he saw the envelope, he paled.
Only one man alive knew that dropbox.
He read the words.
Burned the letter.
And opened the safe hidden behind the shelf of gardening manuals.
Inside were weapons, maps, old photographs.
Time to become a ghost again.
Ten men.
Ten fuses.
Ten reasons to rise.
Back at a small town near the outpost Moreau stood in the dark, staring at the map on the wall.
A dozen red marks.
Routes.
Nodes.
Patterns.
It wasn't rebellion yet.
It wasn't treason.
But it was motion.
The kind that history remembers.
In order to make sure everything goes as planned he called Renaud near him and asnfor the troops near border.
He asked them to be on standby.
Renuad spoke.
"They're moving," he said quietly. "I don't know how you did it, but... they're coming."
A year ago when he suddenly disappeared from Moreau side.
The official reason he gave to the world was death of his father but no.
He went to different places marked by Moreau who wanted to increase his influence and wait for a rainy day.
He met with all these people and spoke the words of Moreau for a future they desperately wanted to see.
Renaud smiled inwardly because no one, not even Beauchamp and Delon were able to truly understand the ambitions of Moreau.
And today Delon just gave Moreau the cause to fulfill his promises unfortunately they will never realise they storm they have created.
"I didn't do anything," Moreau said. "I just told the truth."
Renaud folded his arms. "You think this is going to change anything?"
"No," Moreau replied. "Not yet."
"But it starts something?"
Moreau looked up, eyes cold steel. "It ends something."
He turned back to the map.
Somewhere out there, ten ghosts were waking.
Ten devils.
Ten brothers of war.
And soon, they would all be in the same room.
The Republic wasn't ready.
But it would have to be.
