Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 755: The Ghosts of Algiers Part II

The road east of Algiers was a ribbon of dust and heat mirage, a straight line cut into ochre. Wind hissed over the flats, worrying at old tire tracks, lifting grit in thin veils that turned headlights into dull coins.

Hours before the first truck appeared, the ridge shimmered like hammered copper.

The men had been there since dawn, motionless beneath the sun, each heartbeat syncing to the faint click of quartz shifting under their elbows…”

A U.S. convoy moved at blackout pace: seven trucks, two half-tracks, a jeep, all canvas and stenciled numbers and sun-faded stars.

Men rode hunched, helmets low, rifles laid across their knees. It was a tired formation, running a tired route to a tired depot that smelled of fuel and boredom.

The first sound was not a gun but a tap, metal on rock, carried on the breeze from the low ridge that shadowed the road. The second sound was a breath being held across fifty throats.

Feldwebel Klaus Eberhart lay prone behind a slab of sandstone, the ridge’s crest to his right, the valley to his left.

His scope showed figures in grainy green: drivers’ shoulders, a radio man in the second truck with his handset loose against his cheek, the jeep’s officer flicking ash out the side.

The desert washed them all the same color. Klaus lowered the optic, checked his watch, and spoke quietly into the throat mic.

“One, mark. Two, comb position. Three, radio silence. Four, ignition on my signal..”

Acknowledgments came back as breaths, clicks, brief ghosts of syllables.

The men around him, lean, sun-burnished, eyes lost behind smoked lenses, shifted without sound.

They were the Jagdkommando, the namesake the Americans had given them as a warning to one another: Ghosts of Algiers.

The convoy reached the painted rock that served as an invisible milepost. Klaus tapped twice.

A soft thunk, then a white star blossomed on the road ahead of the lead truck, phosphor marker, dull to the eye, bright as noon through night-vision.

The driver didn’t see it. He saw the sudden stiffening of his gunner’s shoulders, and then the road itself heaved.

The shaped charge under the front axle lifted the hood like a lid.

The truck came apart in clean halves, the cab slewing left into the berm, the bed folding onto itself as if kneeling.

Before the echoes finished rolling, the second device punched the half-track’s track sprocket.

Sparks fountained, steel shrieked, the vehicle crumpled and slid sideways, blocking the road.

“Two… left.” Klaus’s voice was glass. ” Three… now.”

From the ridge to the south, a line of claymores exploded with perfect timing. It was almost surgical, tearing a lane through scrub toward the depot fence a kilometer beyond.

On the net, a U.S. radio crackled half a codeword and then silence. The Ghosts had been rebroadcasting false IFF all night; when the American operator hit transmit, he’d received only his own reflection.

Suppressors whispered as assault rifles and machine guns coughed in polite, efficient bursts.

A sniper rifle cracked once from the far right of the ridge and the jeep’s officer spilled over his door, a small red flower blossoming and dying on the canvas.

The convoy tried to answer, but tracers from the half-track’s gun chased phantoms: every silhouette a trick, every muzzle flash already gone. The desert ate sound and gave nothing back.

Sand hissed through flames, mixing with the crackle of burning tar. A man screamed once, cut short as the wind swallowed it.

Through the green lens of his optic, Klaus watched heat shimmer over the corpses like spirits clawing their way out

“Four,” Klaus said, almost kindly.

It lasted four minutes. Then it was done.

Klaus stood, brushing dust from his elbows as if he’d only been resting, and came off the ridge at a measured walk.

His men flowed after him, two by two, stepping where brooms dragged behind their ankles erased each print.

At the road, they moved through the wreckage like surgeons: a tug on a cable here, a snip on a handset there, a quick press of a gloved finger to a pulse that wasn’t.

A wounded American tried to lift his rifle. But was met with the muffled gunfire of a suppressed.

They didn’t stay. They never stayed. They sifted through the wreckage just long enough to take what they needed before disappearing into the desert once more. Like the ghosts they had become known as.

Klaus paused beside the wreck of the jeep.

The officer’s hand still clutched a crushed cigarette, its ember dim against the sand. He thought of how even the desert forgot quickly, by morning, the wind would have buried all proof of the dead.

While the Americans and their allies continued to pour across the Mediterranean into Sicily.

Which itself had become a meatgrinder of unexpected proportions. The Ghosts of Algiers stayed behind with limited support.

Sifting through the sands, and eliminating the Allied troops as they arrived from the new world.

Before they could board their ships and head across the sea, they found themselves another tribute to the Sahara.

By the time Allied search planes circled the wreckage, the Ghosts were already forty kilometers south, their tracks swallowed by wind.

Every day the Americans lost another convoy, another column meant for the Sicilian beaches. Each one meant a hundred fewer rifles to face the Reich across the strait.

They knew the war in Africa was over, knew the front had rolled past them, but every ambush bought a few more hours of calm sea for the convoys already in retreat.

Klaus logged the coordinates in a cracked notebook, marking another route interdicted.

The map was a mosaic of red X’s that crept steadily toward Tunis. He didn’t smile. He simply closed the book, adjusted his rifle sling, and kept walking east.

Behind him, the wind erased their footprints. Ahead, another road waited, another artery to cut before the Allies could bleed north into Europe. And another trail of blood that led to nowhere.