Published at 9th of January 2026 7:22 am

Chapter 819: Cerberus Brigade

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The courtyard was quiet when the final shot fell. Not because the battle had ended, but because it had never truly begun.

The presidential palace stood beneath a new banner, a new sigil, a new promise. The Cuban flag was not replaced; it was torn down and lit aflame. Its ashes scattered to the wind.

A last act of arson by a theater of revolution that had been pre-approved, pre-funded, and pre-calculated by a Reich intelligence division that preferred revolutions burn hot and brief.

Batista was dead, and the revolution had declared itself victorious. All while the fighting of the Cuban Army continued against German regulars, and their allies on the beaches outside Havana.

Kurt walked the palace halls like a man inspecting a puzzle already solved. The rebels were celebrating. Which was expected, revolutionaries always celebrate early.

But as a man who had earned his stripes through decades of service in the infamous Werwolf Group, Kurt did not. Kurt only ever moved forward.

The main hall was thick with cigar smoke, rum fumes, and celebration. Men lounged on velvet chairs looted from the palace interior itself, boots kicked onto marble tables that had once held only generals, ministers, and colonial representatives.

Batista’s own rum was being poured without ceremony. His cigars were being clipped with gold cutters his guard had never earned. They drank like men who had inherited a future instead of paid for it.

José raised a glass, grinning at Kurt.

"We did it, jefe! The tyrant is dead! Cuba is ours again!"

Kurt looked at the glass, then at José, then at the gathered men around him. Not with disdain, not with anger, not even disappointment, only neutrality. The way a man looks at a map legend he already memorized.

"It was never his, José," Kurt said flatly. "It was only ever temporary."

José blinked, confused, glass still raised.

"What?"

Kurt exhaled through his nose, smoke curling past the bridge of his sunglasses.

"You think you killed a tyrant and won a country," Kurt said. "But countries don’t belong to men who plan assassinations in bars and celebrate in palaces they didn’t build."

The rebels shifted, glancing at one another. They were beginning to suspect something. . But suspicion requires time, and time had already run out.

Kurt lifted the Thompson from his hip and rested it on his shoulder. He seemed relaxed to an untrained eye, but his fingers were all but twitching around the trigger guard.

José set his glass down slowly.

"You’re not celebrating with us, jefe?"

Kurt shook his head once.

"No," he said. "I’m counting exits."

The rebels laughed nervously, still not realizing that laughter was the final currency most revolutionaries ever minted themselves before collapse.

A young rebel named Esteban clapped Kurt on the shoulder, rum in hand, eyes bright.

"Come on, jefe! Drink! Smoke! The Germans are gonna pay us for this! You heard the broadcast! They want chaos. We gave them chaos!"

Kurt’s head turned just a few degrees, gaze slow, steady, empty.

It was only now that the rebels began to suspect something was wrong. José reached for his rifle, but he only managed to get three inches off the sling.

Then Kurt fired first.

The Thompson’s muzzle swung down in a perfected motion, and barked a short, deafening reply into José’s chest.

The report echoed through marble halls like a verdict handed down by physics. Esteban dropped his rum while desperately reaching for his own rifle. But Kurt’s gun answered him too, chewing through the young rebel’s bronze torso before his fingers could finish forming resolve.

The other rebels rose in panic, celebration evaporating into gunfire that Kurt delivered with mechanical indifference. This was not battle, it was an execution.

A cleanup job, left to men whose names were not written on ledgers. And yet whose existence was only known to the world by the bodies they buried in the wake of their operations.

The Germans wanted chaos, and Kurt was an agent of chaos. He cultivated it, molded it, and then deleted the source file before it could turn on its master.

Kurt fired through the room, sweeping the rebels down in a spiral of muzzle flashes that left no hesitation, no emotion, and no myth.

Not once did his heartbeat spike, nor did his hands shake. His mind did not even register consequences beyond what he already knew was written into the plan.

Batista’s rum spilled onto the marble floors, and his cigars burned still-lit on the tables. The rebels fell to their deaths much in the same way the dictator they had deposed had.

A revolution declared alive long enough for its leadership to be executed before it could metastasize into statehood.

Kurt stepped over the bodies, boots silent on marble, eyes forward. He reached over to grab a shattered bottle of Cuban spiced rum, its remaining contents unspoiled by the two bloodbaths the room had suffered.

He took a sip, and then walked out. The courtyard was still burning from airstrikes that had already been delivered hours earlier.

Fire, not chaos, was now the lasting memory of the Caribbean theater.

Kurt disappeared into a civilian crowd that had already been forced into homes by German marines securing city blocks like a slow-moving tide. He vanished not like lightning, but like paperwork filed into a vault and forgotten.

---

Guantánamo Bay lay still in the distance. Its command center hummed with German radios crackling into disciplined operation.

Kurt’s voice transmitted through a secure channel only long enough to deliver a verdict and a status report.

"This is Agent Charon of Cerberus Brigade... Operation Downfall is complete," Kurt said. "Batista is dead. The revolutionary leadership is dead. The Cuban Army is neutralized, and the city is defenseless. The capital is ripe for the taking, and all of Cuba with it...."

The German admiral on the other end of the line didn’t ask for elaboration. Even he wasn’t authorized to know the identities of the Werwolf Group’s most covert outfit.

All he knew was that when he heard the words ’Cerberus Brigade’, a chill went down his spine. One he could not possibly explain. It took him a moment to regain his composure before activating the radio.

"Confirmed," the Admiral said. "Proceed to safe house Bastion-7. Maintain radio silence unless pinged. Amphibious assault forces are already entering the outskirts of Havana as we speak."

Kurt ended the transmission without saying another word.

---

Bastion-7 was a safe house only Kurt knew, off the books, off the maps, off the intelligence briefs of anyone who believed revolutionaries were anything more than disposable battlefield assets.

The Admiral had only known its name because he had to relay orders from the Reichsmarschall himself.

It was a concrete bunker squatting in Havana’s industrial quarter, built during the Americans’ interwar aid years before but never inspected by them.

In the buildup to the war, the Americans had financed and built many projects. And with Bruno’s operatives having infiltrated the American government and its contractors so thoroughly, it was all too easy for him to build locations like this that nobody remembered ever existed.

Kurt entered through a side door hidden behind a refrigeration unit that had long since stopped refrigerating anything.

Inside, Kurt lit a single cigar. The radio pinged again, German encryption signature clean, secure, procedural.

"This is Hades..." a voice said. "Status."

Kurt exhaled cigar smoke, face neutral, tone flat.

"Batista is dead," he said. "So is the leadership of the revolution. Their job is complete. They will not interfere with invasion logistics, governance, or continental reintegration policy."

The voice on the other end clicked once, amused not by revolution, but precision.

"So you purged the file?"

Kurt nodded, even though the voice on the other line could not see him nod.

"I purged the file," Kurt said.

A pause lingered before the voice spoke again.

"Cerberus will be wanting its remaining heads returned intact. Proceed to exfiltration through the prepared channels. There are more hydras to be slain."

The line went dead before Kurt even had a chance to respond. For years he had spent his life in Havana, under a fake name, a fake appearance, all while living a fake life.

And as he looked around the bunker, which was all that remained to prove he was ever really in Cuba at all. He took in the sights, and the smells one last time before rigging the bunker to blow.

To bystanders on the streets, the explosion was just one of many occurring in the outskirts of Havana as the battle continued. Nobody witnessed the shadow that vanished from the city that night.

Nor did they notice the ghost that had caused the end of the Batista regime, and the death of the Revolution before it could ever truly breathe.

Here in Havana, like half a dozen other Latin American cities over the course of the last decade. Revolutions rose and fell. And few knew the names of those who had inspired them, and eliminated them all the same.

Few would ever know the name of the Cerberus Brigade... But they would feel its reach all the same.

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