sovbooks Chapter 9 Ghost Blind Spot
Chapter 9 Ghost Blind Spot
May 29, 1940, 7:15 PM. Unnamed field, thirteen miles west of Azhebreyesus, northern France.
The sky took on a sickly purplish-red hue, the color of the setting sun refracting through the smoke and burning dust.
In an abandoned shrub-covered drainage ditch, a group resembling a beggar gang was trudging through waist-deep mud.
There were no bugle calls, no footsteps, and even breathing was deliberately suppressed to the extreme. More than forty figures, like a group of migrating gray rats, silently crossed this land that was about to be trampled flat by the German iron hooves.
Lord Arthur Sterling walked at the front.
His leather coat was soaked with mud and water, making it heavy and cumbersome. The wound on his left arm, immersed in the mud and water, emitted piercing pain, and with each heartbeat, his nerves twitched.
But he didn't stop. He didn't even frown.
Because in his mind, the RTS holographic map was frantically alarming.
[WARNING: Motorized patrol detected. Distance: 300 meters. Direction: North highway.]
Arthur suddenly raised his mud-covered command staff and made a "freeze" gesture.
The line behind them came to an instant.
This was a chilling level of discipline. After the bloody battle at the monastery and their desperate breakout, these surviving soldiers had evolved from "runaway soldiers" into a "wolf pack." They no longer needed explanations; their commanders' gestures were God's will.
"Splash—"
A few seconds later, a piercing roar of an engine swept across the elevated highway to the north.
Through the gaps in the bushes, Jenkins watched in horror as three BMW R75 motorcycles, painted in dark gray, roared past. The MG34 machine gunners on the sidecars were vigilantly scanning the fields beside the road, their dark muzzles less than ten meters above Jenkins' head.
If they had taken just five more steps, they would have run right into the gun barrels of this patrol.
Arthur only slowly lowered his hand when the sound of the motorcycle disappeared into the distance.
"continue."
Somber and cold.
The line started crawling again.
Sergeant McTavish followed behind Arthur, looking at that tall, upright figure with an overwhelming sense of awe.
This has happened no less than ten times along the way.
This lord seemed to possess a pair of all-seeing eyes. He could always find the one and only gap in the German patrols with unparalleled precision, avoiding tanks, sentries, and even reconnaissance planes overhead.
But such "miracles" come at a price.
"The seriously wounded must be abandoned."
Two hours earlier, Arthur gave this order while passing by a small monastery called St. Mary's.
That was an extremely cruel moment.
More than a dozen seriously wounded soldiers who had lost legs or were shot in the abdomen and were unable to walk during the smoke battle were left there.
"We can't take them with us." Faced with Captain Gordon's questioning, Arthur simply wiped the bolt of his MP40 coldly. "If we take them, everyone will die. If we leave them here, the nuns will take care of them, or... the Germans will capture them. It's a math problem, not a moral one."
The soldiers who were left behind did not cry or complain. They simply handed over their ammunition and rations in silence, and watched their comrades leave.
At that moment, Arthur Sterling's image in the soldiers' eyes changed completely.
He was no longer the kind and amiable nobleman, but a cold war machine that would calculate any cost for victory.
But that's exactly right. On the battlefield, soldiers don't need a kind nanny; they need a devil who can keep them alive.
……
20:00 PM, night falls.
The fog of war on the RTS map has become thicker.
As night deepened, Arthur noticed unsettling changes occurring in the holographic tactical interface in his mind.
This so-called "golden finger" isn't some illogical divine magic; it's more like a sophisticated radar that relies on data input. Its detection radius and accuracy are linked in real-time to the "environmental visibility" and the "reconnaissance capabilities of friendly units."
During the day, when the light is sufficient and the soldiers have a wide field of vision, his command radius can easily cover three kilometers, and even the running of a wild rabbit can be marked by his soldiers.
But now, in this pitch-black bush, with the lighting parameters at rock bottom and the soldiers' perception range greatly reduced due to fatigue and confusion, the system's "rendering capabilities" are physically suppressed.
The once clear 3D topographic map now begins to blur and collapse at the edges.
The original three-kilometer radius "God's-eye view" was forcibly compressed to less than two hundred meters around. Areas further away were no longer transparent grids, but "data blind spots" filled with noise and snow-like images. Even the red dots representing enemies degenerated from precise "individual soldier cursors" into blurry, intermittent "heat source color blocks".
This is like a poorly configured computer experiencing stuttering and texture loss when forcibly running a high-quality game.
This sudden narrowing of his vision made Arthur feel an unprecedented sense of oppression. He had to widen his eyes, prick up his ears, and use his physical senses to fill the gaps in his system.
Because two hundred meters away, in that pitch-black electronic fog, a German tank that could also "disappear" could rush out at any moment.
Arthur led his men through a dense birch forest. According to his calculations, once they passed through this forest, they would reach the flank of a supply line of the German 7th Panzer Division.
Suddenly, Arthur stopped again.
This time, it wasn't because of the patrol team.
At the edge of his RTS field of vision, 150 meters ahead, a very peculiar signal source appeared in a solitary French farmhouse.
That wasn't an ordinary red dot (representing a combat unit), but a golden-red pulse dot that was constantly sending out ripples.
The system tags lit up: [High-value target: German frontline communications relay station] [Defending force: Low (guard squad x 1)] [Signal density: Extremely high]
Arthur's eyes lit up.
It's like finding an unguarded treasure chest in the roadside bushes while playing an RPG game.
In this battlefield where radio communication was severely jammed and intelligence was completely blocked, a relay station responsible for relaying frontline orders was practically a gold mine.
And, more importantly...
Arthur smelled something.
It wasn't the smell of gunpowder, but the aroma of fried sausages and stewed potatoes, drifting on the evening breeze from the chimney of the farmhouse.
For these British soldiers who had been eating hard biscuits for two days, this was more tempting than a woman's thigh.
"Gurgle..."
A collective chorus of swallowing erupted from the ranks behind him. Shaquille O'Neal's eyes were practically gleaming with greed.
"Sir?" Sergeant McTavish leaned in, lowering his voice, "Should we go around it?"
A few hours earlier, Arthur would have chosen to go around them. After all, their goal was to break through, not to cause trouble.
But now, looking at that golden-red signal source, Arthur changed his mind.
"Go around it?"
Arthur glanced back at the group of starving soldiers, then at the farmhouse with smoke rising from its chimney.
"That would be extremely impolite, Sergeant. Since the Germans have prepared dinner, wouldn't it be a disgrace to the Guards if we didn't go in and say hello?"
He drew his Webley revolver from his waist—in close combat, this large-caliber revolver was sometimes more reliable than the MP40, at least it wasn't as prone to jamming as a submachine gun.
"Everyone, take off your backpacks and stay in the woods. Load your bayonets."
Arthur began assigning tasks; he needed to plan a surgical operation.
"McTavish, you take two men—Williams and Miller—and sneak into the barn on the left. Take out that sentry smoking by the haystack. I want him alive, or at least keep him quiet."
"Jeanne, take your Ruger and stay close to me. We'll go through the main entrance."
"Everyone else, spread out and surround them. If even one rat escapes, kill it."
……
Inside the farmhouse.
Corporal Hans was sitting in front of the radio, casually transcribing Morse code messages coming from the front while chewing on a greasy Thuringian sausage.
Through the crack in the window, Arthur, aided by the flickering kerosene lamplight, made out the name tag on the German soldier's chest and couldn't help but roll his eyes inwardly.
It's Hans again.
This gave him a sense of absurd déjà vu.
He clearly remembered that the first German he killed after being transported to this damned era was Hans, the young Bavarian recruit who had tried to throw a grenade in the winery cellar.
It's as if the creators were lazy and used a batch copy and paste function when generating NPCs for the "German Wehrmacht" faction.
In Germany during that era, the name "Hans" was more common than the sourdough bread they were issued. It was the Germanic version of "Zhang San" or the Anglo-Saxon version of "John Smith."
Arthur had no doubt that if you threw a brick blindfolded in Munich's Hofbräuhaus, two of the three people you hit would be named Hans and the other would be named Fritz.
"Looks like I'm going to clash with the 'Hans' family today."
Arthur muttered a cold complaint to himself as he gripped the ebony cane in his hand.
Since you all have the same name, let's go to hell and play mahjong together.
The room was warm and cozy, with a roaring fire in the fireplace. Several signalmen off duty were playing cards around a table with two bottles of captured French red wine and a large plate of freshly boiled potatoes on it.
"These Frenchmen really know how to enjoy themselves," a private said mockingly as he poured red wine into his glass. "This is much better than the horse piss we drank in Poland."
"Stop talking nonsense and eat," Corporal Hans muttered. "I heard that 'ghost' general of the 7th Panzer Division has ordered another forced march through the night. Don't these tank crews sleep?"
Just then, a very faint muffled sound came from outside the door.
It sounded like a ripe watermelon falling to the ground.
What was that sound?
Corporal Hans alertly stopped chewing and reached for the Luger pistol on the table.
"It's probably a stray cat," the private first class playing cards said dismissively. "I'll go check it out."
He stood up, but hadn't even reached the door yet.
Bang!
The sturdy oak door was kicked open, sending dust flying along with it.
A cold wind, carrying a murderous aura, rushed in.
Before the German soldiers inside could react, two dark figures rushed in.
There was no nonsense, no "Don't move" warnings.
Arthur was like a black lightning bolt. The ebony cane in his hand—that noble toy that everyone regarded as an ornament—was now a deadly blunt weapon.
boom!
The cane, with its heavy silver tip, slammed into the private's temple.
It was a sickeningly loud cracking sound. The private didn't even utter a sound, collapsing to the ground like a bag of flour.
At the same time, Corporal Hans, who was sitting in front of the radio, had just raised his pistol.
puff!
A sharp entrenching tool flew in like a flying axe, striking his wrist precisely.
"ah--!!!"
The scream had barely escaped his lips when it was choked shut by a rough, large hand. Sergeant McTavish, like a brown bear leaping from the shadows, vaulted in through the back window and swiftly severed Hans's vocal cords with a dagger.
In just five seconds.
Of the four German soldiers in the room, one was dead, one was unconscious, and the other two were seriously wounded and subdued.
Arthur stood in the middle of the room, straightening the collar of his somewhat disheveled leather coat. He glanced at the plate of steaming sausages on the table, then at the unfortunate man he had knocked unconscious with a stick.
"Sorry to interrupt your dinner."
Arthur picked up a sausage from the table, smelled it, and then disgustedly tossed it to O'Neal, who was already starving, behind him.
"Jeanne! Forget about the food! Watch the radio and read the documents!"
Lieutenant Jeanne, suppressing her discomfort from the pervasive smell of blood, rushed to the communications table. She quickly flipped through the draft telegrams that hadn't yet been destroyed and the maps on the table.
Suddenly, her hand trembled.
"My God..."
Jeanne's face turned deathly pale, even more so than when she had seen the corpse. She jerked her head up, her amber eyes filled with terror.
"Lord, look at this."
She pushed a map covered with densely packed arrows in front of Arthur, her finger trembling as she pointed to a thick black line on it.
"This is the 7th Panzer Division's attack schedule."
7th Panzer Division. The Ghost Division. Erwin Rommel.
Arthur's pupils contracted slightly. As a transmigrator, he certainly knew what that name meant.
"That mad general..." Jeanne's voice trembled. "The telegram says that just half an hour ago he ordered the entire division to launch a full-speed attack toward Lille and Kassel, ignoring flank security. He wants to cut off the last road for the British Expeditionary Force to retreat westward tonight."
"This means our path forward is blocked too." Captain Gordon slumped into his chair in despair. "Rommel is in front, and Sstránsky is behind. We're really finished."
The atmosphere in the room instantly plummeted to freezing point. The joy of having just snatched the sausage vanished completely.
Rommel's 7th Panzer Division was the fastest and most unpredictable blade in the entire French campaign. To run into them was like running into a high-speed train.
"Finished?"
Arthur, however, laughed.
He picked up the map and, by the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, carefully examined the arrows representing the German advance routes. In his RTS view, the map gradually overlapped with the holographic image in his mind.
Arthur stared intently at the map, his tightly pursed lips slowly beginning to curve upwards.
At first it was just a subtle, restrained curve, but soon the expression spread across his face like some kind of out-of-control virus, eventually evolving into a chilling, almost neurotic maniacal laugh.
That wasn't the expression a human should have when facing death; it was more like a crazed gambler revealing their hand and discovering they'd dealt a "straight flush" that never existed before.
The air in the room seemed to freeze.
The crowd exchanged bewildered glances, completely baffled as to what their superior was laughing at. To them, it was a stamped death sentence, but to Arthur, it was like a love letter.
Lieutenant Jeanne instinctively took a step back. She looked at Arthur in horror, only one thought flashing through her mind: It's over. This noble young master, who usually acted so pretentious, finally couldn't withstand the immense pressure of survival. The fuse of "reason" in his brain snapped and burned out completely.
"No, Gordon. You don't understand."
Arthur struck a point on the map heavily with his cane, still stained with the blood of Germans.
"Look at that speed. 30 kilometers per hour. This isn't an attack, this is a race car."
He raised his head, his eyes shining brighter than a kerosene lamp.
"It seems that our Major Strunzsky and the great General Rommel have both made a common mistake—or perhaps it is a common ailment of geniuses."
"What do you mean?" Jeanne asked, puzzled.
"arrogant."
Arthur pointed to the area behind Rommel's attack route, which was a huge empty area.
"Rommel moved too fast. In order to reach the sea before Adolf called a halt, he put all the armored forces on the front line, and even sent the divisional reconnaissance battalion to the front."
"This led to one result..."
Arthur traced the blank area with his finger, which was exactly southeast of their current location.
"...His backside was cleaner than I had imagined. It wasn't just a disconnect, it was a vacuum."
On the RTS system map, the seemingly impenetrable red defensive line was torn open by Rommel's aggressive attack, revealing a thin crack.
This is the eye of the needle. Narrow, but clear.
Its transparency is based on 'target value'.
If this were the main Allied force—a division, a brigade, or even a regiment—Guderian's armored group would close in like a pincer within ten minutes. Because on the German General Staff's maps, those were marked with red arrows.
But what about Arthur's forty-man squad, which looked like beggars?
Even if reconnaissance planes spotted them, the pilots would most likely just mistake them for a group of fleeing French refugees, or a scattered, harmless mob. On the grand battlefields that determine the fate of the empire, no one would stop their advancing tracks to crush a few ants. And that was their cloak of invisibility.
"If we don't head west to Kassel right now, where we'll be cut off, and we don't head north to Dunkirk, where Army Group B is, but instead..."
Arthur drew a strange arc on the map with his finger, passing directly behind the 7th Armored Division's offensive axis.
"...pass through the eye of the needle and crawl between Rommel's legs."
"Crawl through?" Sergeant McTavish was stunned. "Where to?"
"Go here."
Arthur's finger finally stopped at an inconspicuous small-town sign. It was a transportation hub about five miles away—a field outpost near Armandier.
According to the captured document, the location was a designated fuel and vehicle resupply point for the 7th Armored Division, but the main force had not yet had time to take it over due to the rapid advance.
"Gentlemen, you're walking too slowly."
Arthur glanced around at the people in the room, straightened the collar of his leather coat, and gave a smile that was both elegant and dangerous.
"Our transportation was right there. The Germans not only left us dinner, but they also provided us with a car."
"Tonight, we're going to travel in a different way."
"But..." Jeanne looked at the map, "this is too risky. What if we run into Rommel's rearguard..."
"No 'what ifs', Lieutenant."
Arthur interrupted her, rolled up the map, and stuffed it into his pocket.
"In Rommel's dictionary, there was no such word as 'defending the flank.' And that was Ghost's blind spot."
He turned around and kicked Jenkins, who was still in a daze.
"Stop eating! Take the rest of the sausages and red wine with you! That's our midnight snack."
"We're going to steal Rommel's convoy."
……
Half an hour later.
This "British Special Operations Team," well-fed and equipped with German communication codebooks and maps, once again disappeared into the night.
This time, their steps were no longer heavy.
Because they knew that a convoy of trucks belonging to the "Ghost Army" was waiting for them to take over a few miles away.
In Arthur's mind, the tactical plan called "Through the Eye of the Needle" was being simulated to a perfect success rate with the assistance of the RTS system.
"If you want to go to the beach to see the sea, then I'll set fire to your backyard."
Arthur glanced at the dark night sky in the east, his heart filled with a mischievous anticipation for the "Desert Fox."