Dead branches snapped beneath their boots. The forest was colder at elevation—wind threading needles through pine. Dawn hadn't broken, but Ghost didn't need light. He followed scorched bark and the reek of melted circuitry like a bloodhound.
Soap edged around a snow-coated boulder. "Tell me we didn't hike three klicks for scrap."
Ghost didn't answer. He was already kneeling at the ravine's edge.
The drone lay impaled on a pine trunk, tail cracked like a lobster shell, carbon scoring smeared across its hull. One wing had folded in on itself, the other sagged like broken cartilage.
Ghost drew his combat knife. Dug into the scorched casing. Metal peeled with a shriek.
Inside—crushed housing, tangled wires. And there it was: the black box unit, smoldering but blinking. Alive.
Soap crouched beside him. "Still breathing."
Ghost didn't look up. "So's the question."
Soap exhaled through his nose. "Think Price made it?"
Ghost yanked the unit free, eyes cold behind the mask. "If he didn't, someone didn't want him talking."
---
Soap hunched over the drone's core, fingers moving fast, extracting the blinking unit and wiring it to the decryptor. Blue light flickered against his knuckles as the screen crackled to life.
Ghost's HUD flared—a flash, then gone. Northeast treeline. Movement.
He didn't hesitate. "Two o'clock. Vectors. Suppressed."
Soap dropped the gear and rolled, rifle already up.
The first shot popped like a muffled cough—Ghost snapped his head sideways as a slug grazed bark inches from his temple. He dove behind a split pine, shoulder slamming trunk.
The enemy moved tight—black suits, no identifiers, gear clean and quiet. Spectre. Or worse.
"Cross!" Ghost shouted.
Soap pivoted, firing low through a forked root. One of the attackers staggered, clipped in the hip, then dropped clean with a double-tap to the throat.
Ghost flanked right, adjusted for wind, and fired through a fallen log. The bullet found soft meat—a neck shot. Blood sprayed the snow like ink across paper.
The second operative vanished—hit but mobile. Ghost scanned for drag marks, fresh pressure in the snow, but the forest swallowed him.
Soap stalked forward, sweeping with the muzzle of his rifle. "They tailed the bird. You feel that?"
Ghost didn't answer right away. He reloaded with practiced ease. "Spectre's not just watching anymore. They're cleaning up."
He looked back toward the drone wreckage, smoke curling around the core. "Next time, they won't miss."
---
Soap crouched beside the scorched drone carcass, fingers working fast. Cables snaked from the data core into a squat decryptor unit, its cracked screen flickering to life in the cold dawn haze.
"Still intact," he muttered, more to himself.
Ghost kept watch, rifle low but ready, eyes never still.
The screen buzzed static. Then—thermal feed. Flickering frames spooled backward in time: pine canopy, night vision overlays, crosshairs tracking a convoy through switchbacks.
"Price's route," Soap said, jaw clenched. He tapped to speed up the scrub.
Ghost stepped closer. The convoy filled the screen, heat signatures strong, moving steady—until a stuttered freeze.
"There." He stabbed a finger at the frame.
Soap rewound two seconds, paused.
A side mirror, barely lit. A face reflected, eyes locking with the drone's lens like it could see back. Shaved head. Blank stare. No unit patch. No rank. No fear.
"Freeze that. Zoom on the reflection." Ghost's voice cut stone.
Soap magnified. The face sharpened—distorted in the mirror curve, but clear enough.
Laswell's voice filtered in through Soap's headset, low and tight: "That's one of ours. Recon Group Echo-Four. He was declared KIA in Mosul, two years back."
Ghost didn't flinch, but his breath shortened. He stared at the image like it owed him answers.
Soap leaned back. "How's a dead man tailing Price?"
Ghost didn't blink. "That wasn't surveillance. That was a message."
The decryptor beeped—data burst complete. Soap scanned the new feed. "We've got coordinates," he said. "Live ping. Cache beacon."
Ghost's eyes narrowed. "They wanted us to find this."
He looked up into the trees, jaw flexing under the mask. "Someone's playing both sides."
---
The forest hushed again—no wind, no birds, just static leaking from the decryptor. Ghost stared at the screen like it had lied to him.
"Mosul again," he said, quiet but ironclad.
Soap didn't fill the silence. He waited. Ghost wasn't the type to narrate pain.
A pine needle snapped under Soap's boot. "You think this is payback?"
Ghost didn't answer right away. He pulled his gaze from the screen, scanning the trees as if they'd grown teeth. "No. It's worse."
Soap cocked an eyebrow. "How's that?"
Ghost's gloved fingers tightened on the decryptor's frame. "It's justice—twisted. Weaponized. Spectre's turning ghosts into blades."
A soft ping echoed from the decryptor—another data burst. Soap leaned in, tapped the screen.
"Live beacon. Cache pinged north, near the ridgeline. This wasn't just recon footage. Someone planted this for us."
Ghost straightened, shoulders tight. "Someone with access. Timing. Motive."
Soap's eyes narrowed. "You're saying this wasn't luck."
Ghost looked at him, mask unreadable. "I'm saying someone fed us a breadcrumb. Only question is—"
He racked his rifle, the sound sharp in the cold. "—who still gives a damn which side wins."
---
The drone buzzed in low—fast, twitchy, hunting.
Ghost's eyes snapped to it. "EMP it!"
Soap didn't hesitate. He yanked a pulse grenade from his harness, twisted the timer, and hurled it into the air like a fastball. The grenade cracked midflight—white-hot burst.
The drone screamed, jittered, then spun out. It clipped a pine branch, flipped, and cratered into the snow, its camera lens sparking as it died.
Then came the thuds—mortar impacts, close.
"Move!" Ghost barked, already grabbing the decryptor and slinging his rifle.
Dirt and snow geysered behind them as another round hit the slope. Soap bolted downhill, gear slapping against his frame. Ghost ran cover—eyes scanning, rifle up.
Shapes emerged through the smoke—sleek armor, night visors, suppressors. Not grunts. Kill team. No wasted motion. No hesitations.
Ghost dropped to a knee and fired through a half-rotted tree trunk. Bark exploded. One target folded with a throat wound.
Another flanked left—fast. Too fast.
Ghost pivoted, let off a double tap. The rounds chewed into the man's leg. He dropped, still twitching. Ghost finished it clean.
Ahead, a collapsed cabin loomed—logs canted, roof half-caved.
"In there!" Soap shouted.
They kicked the door in. No time to clear it proper. Ghost shoved a broken chair against the window as cover. Soap rifled through his satchel, yanked free a pressure trigger and a brick of C4.
"Give me thirty seconds!"
"Twenty," Ghost snapped, eyes locked on the treeline.
Bullets hammered the outside wall. One punched through, missed Ghost's shoulder by inches.
He didn't flinch.
Then the breach came—a boot against the rear frame. Ghost met it, blade out. He caught the attacker's arm, drove the knife under the chin. Wet gurgle. Body fell backward.
Another stepped in over him—too late. Ghost fired point-blank into his kneecaps, then his skull.
"Now!" Soap yelled.
Ghost grabbed him by the collar and hauled them both out the side door. They ran five steps—
BOOM.
The cabin shuddered and blew inward, stove pipe punching into the air like a javelin. Flames licked snow.
Neither looked back.
They kept moving—downhill, into dark trees, boots crunching ice and blood-soaked bark.
Breathing hard. No words. None needed.
---
The tower looked like it hadn't mattered to anyone in twenty years—just concrete ribs and rusted lattice swallowed by bramble. Its comms dish hung crooked, dented like it had taken a punch from God.
Ghost pushed open the metal door. Hinges groaned. Inside: cold, dry, dark.
A single desk. A laptop waiting, its black casing taped and re-taped. Solar cells on the windowsill fed a low hum from a battery pack. Whoever rigged this knew the trade—tight, clean, off-grid.
Soap slid the door shut and braced it with a timber plank. "Quiet enough for you?"
Ghost grunted, already plugging in the decrypted drone core. The laptop flickered. No boot sequence, no OS. Just a black window, blinking cursor.
Then Laswell's face filled the screen. Static licked the edges of her feed. Her voice came in low, clipped. "I didn't greenlight that drone."
Ghost leaned in. "Someone did. Ran it through your protocols."
"Not mine anymore." She looked past them, eyes scanning shadows. "You've got something."
Soap moved beside Ghost, arms folded. "Footage tags a Recon Group Echo-Four. KIA in Mosul. Two years cold."
Laswell didn't blink. "Then he's not alone. And this breach didn't come from outside. It's inside. Deep. Langley doesn't even know it's bleeding."
Ghost kept his voice level. "We saw his face. Clean. Confident. Not a hostage."
Laswell nodded once. "Then he flipped. Or got buried and crawled out a new man."
Silence dragged.
Soap cracked it. "This tape—they wanted us to find it. Someone's throwing breadcrumbs."
"Or bait," Laswell muttered. "Where was the last ping?"
Ghost glanced at the decryptor. "Ridge above the valley floor. Just before the drone got clipped. It broadcast a live cache signal before it went down."
Laswell leaned closer. "You're not cleared to chase this. This doesn't exist."
Ghost didn't flinch. "It does now."
She studied him. "You go after this, you go dark. No assets. No backup. I can't protect you."
"We're already ghosts," Soap said.
Laswell hesitated. Then: "One more thing. The asset who routed Mosul ops—CIA blackroom tech. Analyst named Sorin Kadar. Last ping, seventy-two hours ago. Went dark near a Soviet rail yard in Romania."
Ghost locked eyes with her. "That's our line, then."
Laswell typed something. A file dumped into the local drive. No headers. Just a coordinate.
She spoke without looking up. "I'll deny this meet ever happened."
Soap. "That's mutual."
---
Ghost didn't hear the rest.
He wasn't in the tower anymore.
He was back in Mosul.
Choked corridors, black with soot and panic. A stairwell smeared with blood. The comms in his ear weren't Laswell's voice—they were filled with screaming. Echo-Four's team, trapped two floors down.
"—We need out! They're in the f—"
"Negative," Ghost had said back then. Flat. Final. "Orders are clear. Extraction denied."
He remembered the pause on the line. The last thing the team leader said before the comms died: "You're just like him."
Then came the sound of steel bursting. And silence.
A surge of rot crawled up his throat. He blinked. The tower snapped back into focus—Soap staring at him like he'd just watched a ghost flatline.
"You alright?" Soap's tone was quiet, but not soft.
Ghost didn't answer at first. He moved to the window, stared at the tree line. The cold punched through his gloves.
"I gave that order," Ghost muttered. "Left them."
Soap didn't pretend to understand. Just let the silence settle.
Ghost turned back, tone clipped, hard again. "We go dark. No digital. No satellites. No signals. Analog only."
Soap nodded once. "Back to the stone age."
Ghost looked down at the burned-in shadows of old comms gear across the dust-covered floor. "Spectre's building an army from ghosts we buried. Now they're clawing their way out."
He grabbed the decryptor, yanked the drive, slid it into a lead-lined pouch. No more data. No more traces.
"From here on," Ghost said, eyes cold behind the mask, "we don't leave footprints."
---
The fire took fast—dry insulation, decades-old paper logs, and one last booted kick into the fuel tank of the generator.
The tower spat flames out the top vent like a signal flare to no one.
Soap didn't look back. "Laswell said the rail yard's defunct. No security grid, no active lines, off-grid since '92."
Ghost slung the pack with the decryptor against his shoulder, tightening the strap. "Still too visible. We go in low."
Soap unfolded the last dispatch from Laswell—a wrinkled field printout, coordinates hand-scribbled in graphite.
"One name's flagged red," he muttered. "CIA analyst. Logged last Mosul traffic, routed it through Langley blackroom. Hasn't pinged since Tuesday."
Ghost leaned in. The name stared back like a bad scar—L. Ryker.
"Dead?"
"Unconfirmed."
Ghost's jaw flexed. "That rail yard's not just a drop. It's bait."
Soap folded the paper, shoved it into his vest pocket. "Then we spring it quiet."
The flames behind them ate the rest of the tower. The laptop cracked in the heat, metal hissing. Static pulsed from the comms as the last signal died.
Ghost turned once, just long enough to watch the structure cave in.
"Whatever's hunting us thinks we're burned."
Soap: "Let 'em think it."
They moved. No chatter. No GPS. No uplink.
Just boots through wet underbrush, rifles tight to chest, and silence stitched between breaths.
The moon split through the clouds in flashes.