Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 152: "He didn’t outmaneuver us. He outthought us."

The plain south of Zaragoza looked dead.

Not quiet but dead.

Heat shimmered off the dirt roads.

The vines were dry.

The olive trees still there.

A few French scouts thought the Nationalists had withdrawn, maybe even fractured.

They hadn’t seen movement for sixteen hours.

Not even patrols.

But Moreau didn’t believe in stillness.

Not from Guderian.

He stood beside an overturned cart, binoculars tight to his face, sweat rolling down his back.

"No smoke. No movement. And no retreat trail," he said. "That’s not absence. That’s camouflage."

Renaud crouched beside him, scanning with field glasses. "You think he’s baiting us?"

"I think he’s waiting to see who bites first."

Two kilometers ahead, a convoy rolled into view slow, vulnerable.

Six Republican trucks, a fuel tanker, a few motorcycles.

The drivers didn’t radio.

They didn’t respond to contact signals.

Moreau stared hard. "Republican insignia. But the pace is wrong. Too mechanical."

"They’re ours?" Renaud asked.

Moreau shook his head. "No. That’s not a convoy. That’s a question."

He didn’t fire.

Not yet.

Elsewhere, under a grove of pine, Guderian leaned over a radio map table.

His fingers traced the approach corridor east of Zaragoza.

"He’s watching the convoy. He’s waiting to confirm whether it’s real."

An aide nodded. "Do we push forward now?"

"No. We don’t move. We stay patient. We are the bait. He has to strike."

Behind the grove, twenty-eight artillery guns sat hidden beneath canvas and brush, dug in on three angles.

Luftwaffe Stukas circled at low altitude, out of sight, ready to dive the moment French positions revealed themselves.

Guderian stepped out into the light. "If he’s truly who I think he is, he won’t attack the convoy. He’ll look for what’s watching it."

Moreau issued no attack order.

Instead, he split his PAP units in three.

One skirting the hills to the west, another advancing underground via a forgotten aqueduct channel marked on Esteve’s flight maps.

The third a decoy squad moved slowly toward the convoy, fully visible, kicking up dust on purpose.

"We’re going to look like we took the bait," he told Renaud. "And while they aim for the decoy, we gut the battery."

"What if the battery’s not there?"

"Then we take their airfield."

At 19:10, the fake French column came into range of the German guns.

No fire.

Moreau waited.

Twenty minutes later, the convoy passed the first impact zone.

Still nothing.

Then it happened.

The ground opened.

From three hills, hidden 10.5 cm leFH 18 howitzers thundered to life.

Shells ripped into the lead French halftrack.

It exploded, tumbling sideways in a plume of fire.

Three men inside never got out.

Stukas screamed overhead.

Six of them.

The decoy column scattered too slowly.

Tracer fire raked the hillside as Messerschmitts dove from behind the clouds, hunting targets through broken pine.

Moreau had already moved.

The aqueduct team breached the German gun line from the rear, emerging like phantoms in the evening light.

They carried satchel charges and suppressed rifles.

The first German gun was destroyed in silence charge on the barrel, kill the crew, vanish.

They kept moving.

To the west, Esteve flew low, less than 50 meters off the ground, his biplane skimming tree cover as he radioed targets to the MB.200s behind him.

"Artillery on ridge three. Fuel dump southeast sector. AA position marked with smoke flare."

The air lit up with flak as French planes banked in.

Outdated, slow, but lethal with intel.

One MB.200 dropped its full payload on the German fuel stock.

It vanished in a roar of heat and smoke, fire climbing a hundred feet into the sky.

Back on the ground, the German artillery crews scrambled to reorient only to find their rear collapsing.

PAP teams used trenches against their diggers.

Flamethrowers lit two of the German gun pits in a brutal spiral of fire.

Screams rang across the slope.

One gun managed a final shot before a charge detonated at its breech.

"Fall back!" a German officer yelled, only to be hit by a silent round to the chest.

The PAP sharpshooter reloaded and disappeared into smoke.

Guderian heard the detonations before being confirmed it.

"Battery Three, compromised. Rear assault. We’ve lost seven pieces. Ammunition dump burning..."

"This isn’t warfare," he said. "It’s prediction."

He turned to the SS liaison.

"Moreau never attacked the convoy. He attacked the observer watching it. We gave him a riddle. He solved the hand writing it."

The liaison hesitated. "Do we retreat?"

"No. We pivot."

He opened a new map.

"Shift Luftwaffe cover north. Cut off their escape before they cycle out."

But Moreau had already anticipated the pivot.

The PAP units didn’t retreat they surged forward, occupying the collapsed German battery and drawing German mobile infantry toward what seemed like an exposed flank.

Then they vanished.

The ground beneath them had been pre-mined with localized charges triggered remotely set by Spanish sappers during the artillery assault.

As German infantry entered the pit, explosions rang out in precise sequence one squad at a time.

A quarter of the German reinforcement force died in under four minutes.

From a distant ridge, Esteve watched the carnage.

He then told Moreau directly.

"They’ve stopped chasing. They’re pulling back into Zaragoza."

By dawn, the battlefield was dead quiet again but now the silence was real.

Moreau walked through the ruined battery site.

Burned steel.

Shattered wheels.

The cost had been high.

Eleven French dead.

Six wounded.

One MB.200 downed.

But the German losses were worse.

Renaud caught up to him, cradling a twisted German helmet in his hand.

"We buried the ghosts again," he said.

Moreau didn’t smile.

"No. We just taught them how to haunt."

In Salamanca, Guderian stared at the day’s loss tally.

Fifty-nine men.

Nine guns.

A third of his mobile strike group disbanded.

He said nothing for a long time.

Finally.

"He didn’t outmaneuver us. He outthought us."

The SS liaison was quiet.

Then.

"If you fail again...."

"I won’t," Guderian said.

"I’ll stop chasing Moreau’s way."

He turned.

"I’ll make him chase mine."