Published at 23rd of December 2025 8:18 am

Chapter 794: Goodbye Casablanca

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The night sky over the Mediterranean was velvet-black, punctured only by the distant gleam of stars and the faint silver ribbons of six bombers carving a high arc toward North Africa.

Oberleutnant Keller sat in the cockpit of the lead craft, hands resting lightly on the controls as the delta-winged machine hummed around him.

The aircraft felt less like metal and more like a living thing, a predator gliding across the heavens.

His headset crackled.

"Eagle One, this is Falcon Six. Fighter escort approaching from the north-west. ETA thirty seconds."

Keller adjusted the gain. "Copy, Falcon. Bring them in tight. Enemy intercept capability is low, but we don’t take chances."

Beneath them, the faint glow of Oran’s harbor bled into the desert like a dying ember.

Even at altitude, Keller could see the movement, ships crowding docks, trucks bottlenecked, men swarming toward the piers.

"Looks busy down there," his copilot murmured.

"Desperation usually is," Keller replied.

The navigator, Klaus, leaned forward, tapping a coordinate grid.

"All targets confirmed. Fuel depots, railway junctions, command center, and harbor concentration zones. High command authorizes full payload deployment."

Keller nodded once. "Then high command will get their spectacle."

The fighter escort streaked into formation, sleek, needle-nosed interceptors with swept wings and glowing exhaust.

They slid into a protective screen around the bombers, barely visible shadows guarding steel angels.

A new voice entered the channel, crisp, confident, unmistakably senior.

"Adler Squadron, this is Generaloberst Kesselring aboard command vessel. Final order: no half-measures. North Africa must be rendered unusable for Allied operations. Confirm readiness."

Keller answered immediately.

"Adler Squadron ready with full thermobaric payload. We will initiate saturation pattern upon your mark."

A pause.

Then:

"Mark."

The bombers dipped their noses slightly, beginning their long descent to optimal drop altitude.

The ground drifted closer, still distant, still abstract, but soon to become something else entirely.

"Bomb-bay doors armed," Weiss, the bombardier, announced. "Thermobaric clusters stable. Wind drift nominal."

Keller exhaled slowly.

Tonight would be remembered... not as a battle, but as a cleansing.

"Approaching release corridor," Klaus said. "American radar remains blind."

"Of course it does," Keller said. "Once you cut out the eyes, the beast can only scream."

The coastline stretched before them, dimmer by blackout order, but full of movement, heat signatures, and panic the men below thought was invisible.

Weiss leaned into his sighting lens.

"I have the harbor. Packed tight. Too tight."

Keller didn’t need to see, he could feel the density of targets. When you had dropped as many payloads as he had throughout his career, such things became instinctive.

"Doors open," he ordered.

The aircraft vibrated as the bomb-bay yawned wide, exposing the payload to the thin air.

A soft chime sounded.

"Clusters away."

Weiss pulled the lever, and the bombs fell like dark seeds into the sleeping city.

For a breathless moment, nothing happened... Then light bloomed.

A chain of rolling firestorms unfurled across the outskirts, orange blossoms rising on thick stems of smoke, each one flattening entire blocks beneath invisible fists of overpressure.

"Impact exceeds projections," Weiss murmured. "Harbor braces collapsing. Secondary detonations... everywhere."

A second bomber wing checked in.

"Refinery gone."

A third:

"Rail lines evaporated. Multiple troop concentrations wiped."

Keller watched the horizon swell with fire.

"Begin run two," he said calmly. "Sweep the harbor."

He closed his eyes for one second, just one, to acknowledge that somewhere below, thousands of men had looked up at the same stars he did.

When he opened them again, there was only the mission.

"Adler Squadron," he radioed. "Execute the second pattern."

Keller kept his eyes on the shimmering horizon, watching the rising pillars of flame twist into one another like the spines of great burning serpents.

Even inside the sealed cockpit, he could feel the heat radiating upward through the fuselage, an impossible thing at thirty thousand feet, yet unmistakable.

"Falcon Wing reports no air opposition," Klaus said quietly. "It’s... eerie. They’re not even trying to scramble fighters."

"Would you?" Keller murmured. "If you saw this coming toward you?"

Weiss crossed himself... a small, involuntary motion.

"Sir... do you think anyone survives that?"

Keller did not answer. He simply pushed the throttle forward, angling the bomber for the next run.

"Survival," he said at last, "is no longer our objective. Only finality."

---

Not long before the bombs fell in Oran, Algeria, Corporal Anthony Reyes shoved through a crowd of soldiers flooding the quay, breath ragged as he tried to keep pace with the torrent of bodies.

"Evacuation is priority! Keep moving toward Pier D!" an MP bellowed over the chaos. "Do not stop! Do not turn back!"

The harbor was a nightmare of noise, engines roaring, sailors shouting, cranes swinging wildly as crews tried to lower the last remaining lifeboats and load the last trucks.

To Reyes, it felt like the entire Eighth Army was trying to escape through the eye of a needle.

A lieutenant grabbed his shoulder.

"You! Radio section! Command wants an update on air threats!"

Reyes held up his broken headset.

"Nothing but static, sir! Radar’s blind, the German missiles knocked out half our towers!"

The lieutenant swore and shoved him onward.

High overhead, faint streaks shimmered across the sky.

A private pointed. "Look! Shooting stars!"

"No," Reyes whispered. "Those aren’t stars."

The base loudspeaker flickered.

"Air raid! Air rai..."

The words cut short mid scream and were replaced by nothing but static.

Someone shouted, "Get to shelter!" While Someone else screamed, "It’s too late!"

Reyes sprinted toward a barricade of sandbags as the first explosion sounded miles away, so deep and resonant it vibrated through his ribs.

"What the hell was that?" a medic yelled.

Reyes didn’t answer.

Because all at once, the horizon lit up. A ring of fire rolled upward like a sunrise made of gasoline. The shockwave hit an instant later.

He was thrown off his feet, slammed into a concrete drainage wall, and swallowed by dust and hot wind.

He pushed himself upright, ears ringing.

Flames climbed hungrily across the eastern districts.

"Jesus..." a sergeant gasped, staring. "They’re burning the whole city."

A second wave of concussive blasts erupted, closer this time, erasing roads, depots, barracks, anything that had once resembled a functioning military base.

Reyes staggered forward.

"We need to get to the ships... now!"

But the piers were already collapsing.

Waves rolled across the water, no doubt caused by the overwhelming pressure of repeated and consistent thermobaric detonations.

They lifted anchored vessels like toys and smashed them sideways into one another. All the while Transport ships split down the middle, and fish leapt dead to the surface in boiling water.

Men jumped into the sea, only to find the surface slick with burning fuel.

Reyes saw an officer waving frantically atop a half-melted Jeep.

"All units! Casablanca reports bombardment! They’re wiping North Africa clean..."

Another blast swallowed him.

Reyes stumbled through the smoke, coughing blood.

Around him, soldiers fought one another for places on lifeboats that were already ablaze. Some tried swimming toward ships farther out. Others simply knelt and prayed.

A new sound cut through the chaos, a rising, metallic whistle.

Reyes froze.

Everyone froze.

A constellation of black shapes fell through the night.

"No..." Reyes whispered. "Not another run..."

No matter how much he prayed, his God did not answer. At least not the way which he expected.

He dove behind an overturned truck just as the second wave hit, and the world burned again.

Heat slammed into him so fiercely his uniform smoldered. The truck lifted, flipped, and tore open like a tin can.

Air vanished, sucked out by the vacuum pulse, then returned as a wall of burning dust that chewed through flesh and steel.

Reyes curled into himself, screaming silently, deafened by the roar.

When he finally looked up, the harbor was gone.

Ships sank stern-first. Piers crumbled. The evacuation zone had become an open-air crematorium.

And still the explosions kept coming.

Somewhere behind him, a major shouted at a group of survivors:

"Fall back west! Casablanca’s still operational, we can regroup there!"

Reyes turned.

He could see the faint flicker of new explosions far, far, to the west.

Casablanca was already dying... there was nowhere left to run. The Germans had rained hellfire down across every Allied outpost across North Africa. Cutting off their escape, after butchering the Allied forces in Sicily.

And it was only now that Reyes finally understood why the order to evacuate North Africa had been given. The destruction of Allied forces wasn’t the cause of some major tactical blunder.

It was civilizational overmatch. Like mortal picking a fight with the god sitting high on mount Olympus. The United States of America had provoked a power so vast, and furious they never stood a chance.

He sank to his knees, staring at the fire reflected in the waves, as if he were watching the end of the world, and the completion of revelation.

Above the smoke, high and faint, six silhouettes banked northward, untouched, invincible, gliding home.

The Germans had launched their attack, and disappeared, all without a single shot being fired in their direction.

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