Chapter 17 – The Archive
The Antonov's rear ramp slammed down with a metallic groan, throwing a blast of icy wind into the cargo hold. Snow whipped across the tarmac, horizontal and sharp. Ghost stepped out first, boots crunching into packed frost. No lights. No tower. Just darkness and a windswept shell of a decommissioned Soviet airstrip carved into the steppe.
Soap followed, slower, adjusting his shoulder rig under a padded thermal. "No reception. No welcoming party."
Ghost scanned the perimeter. Empty hangars. A cracked runway half-buried in snowdrift. Then headlights blinked once from the tree line.
A boxy UAZ jeep growled up the path, tires grinding on gravel and ice. The driver didn't honk. He just parked, engine idling like a heartbeat under the silence. Dmitri Volkov emerged—gray-bearded, crow-eyed, face like split concrete. His parka was stained, his AK looked older than him, and he said nothing until they loaded in.
Inside, heat barely worked. Volkov drove one-handed, the other twitching near a cigarette he never lit.
"Six hours," he muttered in thick Russian-English. "Through black country."
Soap kept his eyes on the mirror. "You always drive smugglers into haunted bunkers, or are we special?"
Volkov didn't smile. "You're not special. You're late."
They passed skeletal birch forests, abandoned radar stations, a frozen river cut by old tank tracks. The jeep's shortwave sputtered with static, then cut dead halfway through a transmission.
Volkov thumbed the dial. Nothing but snow on every frequency. "Oblast-7 swallows signals," he said. "Swallows people too."
No one answered. The rest of the ride chewed through silence and white hell. When the sun finally clawed its way above the ridgeline, it lit up a concrete scar in the valley ahead.
Half-buried under frost and time: a bunker mouth, Soviet steel eaten by rust, marked in faded Cyrillic: Военный объект — доступ запрещён.
Ghost leaned forward, eyes narrowing behind the mask. "Looks like it's still hungry."
---
Soap knelt under the shadow of a rust-caked security panel, gloves stripped off, fingers working fast over frayed wires and corroded circuits. The cold bit at his knuckles. He didn't flinch.
Ghost stood behind him, watching the treeline through the rising mist. Snow hissed against his balaclava. The forest stayed still—too still.
"Should've brought a thermite lance," Soap muttered, biting back a hiss as he shorted a contact. A spark jumped. The panel clicked. "Biometric's tied to a dead system. No central loop."
Ghost glanced at the dented steel door. "Soviet design. Always assumed no one was leaving."
The outer blast door groaned, then shifted—inch by rusted inch. The hinges wailed like something alive. Soap stepped back, rifle raised.
They moved in together, barrels sweeping corners. Past the threshold, a narrow entry corridor opened into an antechamber lined with frostbitten steel and bolted grates. Air reeked of mold, gun oil, and something old.
Then came the hiss. Not from Soap. Not from Ghost.
From the airlock ahead.
The inner door cycled open on its own—too smooth, too sudden. A single strip of red light buzzed to life above them, casting a low pulse down the corridor. Something shifted overhead.
Soap pointed upward. "Camera."
The lens twitched. It moved. Tracked them.
Ghost raised a gloved hand and held it steady in the center of the beam. "We're not breaking in," he said, voice flat. "We're being let in."
A dry click echoed somewhere inside the walls—like a door unlocking where none should be.
Soap's jaw flexed. "That supposed to make me feel better?"
"No." Ghost stepped forward. "It means we walk quiet. And we shoot faster."
They entered the dark, and the door sealed behind them.
---
The elevator jolted once before grinding downward—a steel coffin rattling through decades of rust and silence. Ghost stood still, weapon low but ready, eyes locked on the flickering floor numbers as they descended. Soap checked the breach on his rifle for the third time. His breath fogged the air in tight, sharp bursts.
Level one passed—no lights, just the creak of old metal under tension. Two. Three. Every shaft light they passed buzzed, then died. By Level Five, the lift groaned to a halt, coughed smoke through its vents, and gave up.
"Figures," Soap muttered, prying the doors apart.
The hallway yawned open before them—wide, silent, entombed in frost. Floor tiles cracked under their boots. Old glass crunched beneath Ghost's heel as he stepped into the corridor. The walls bore faded Cyrillic, flaking red paint, and smeared handprints—long dried. A Cold War relic forgotten by time, left to rot beneath a world that stopped caring.
"Smells like lead and regret," Soap muttered, sweeping his torch across a shattered observation window. Inside: a lab coated in dust and broken instruments. Stray documents lay scattered like corpses—yellowed, curling at the edges, some scrawled in frantic Cyrillic. One was pinned to the wall by a rusted scalpel: Фаза три отменена — "Phase Three Terminated."
"Someone left in a hurry," Ghost said. He pushed through the next door with his shoulder. Hinges groaned. The air behind it felt colder.
Each level they passed echoed with remnants: coffee mugs half-filled with frozen sludge, an ashtray still smoldered where time forgot to finish the burn. Soap slowed near a shattered bulletin board. Photos had been torn away. Only pins remained—blood-colored rust halos burned into the cork.
"Why wipe this place from the map?" he asked.
"Too many questions," Ghost said, eyes sweeping the junction. "Means the answers mattered."
He stopped at a thick vault door—its surface scarred by decades, but the dual biometric locks still glowed faint green, waiting.
Archive Room D-4.
Ghost placed his palm against the first scanner. "Laswell said D-4 had crossover tapes. KGB, CIA, even MI6."
Soap keyed the second lock. A hydraulic hiss split the silence.
The vault creaked open.
Inside, the air turned dead still—cold and dry like a tomb. The room stretched back in tiers: rows of reel-to-reel canisters, analog terminals stacked with dust, CIA microfiche cabinets, old surveillance drives stamped with blood-red sigils from both sides of the Cold War.
Soap walked past shelves marked Operation Northwoods, MKNAOMI, and Vega Sickle. He ran a gloved hand across the nearest reel, eyes narrowing.
"What the hell was Ward protecting?" he asked.
Ghost didn't answer.
He was already reading the canisters. One label caught his eye—stamped black, lettering scraped at the corners:
MOSUL – 2009 – JOINT TASK OP-RED DUSK.
---
Ghost snapped the canister free, the old latch grinding like bone on stone. Dust clouded the label—MOSUL – 2009, JOINT TASK OP-RED DUSK—but the name burned clear beneath the grime. He didn't need to read it twice.
Soap hovered near an analog console, fidgeting with the archaic playback gear. "We sure this thing'll even run?"
"Just needs power and hate," Ghost said. He slid the reel onto the deck and punched the worn 'PLAY' button.
The monitor wheezed awake. Static bled into grainy helmet cam footage.
Gunfire cracked. Dust choked the feed. A Humvee burned off-screen.
There they were.
Four figures under siege—helmet tags blurred but unmistakable: GHOST, VOSS, and two more. All pinned down in an alley cut with broken rebar and shadow. Voices came in distorted—commands shouted over the radio, gunfire stuttering the signal.
Then the shift.
A calm override from command: "New orders. Exfil denied. All assets hold position."
Ghost didn't speak. His fingers dug into the table edge.
Onscreen, Voss—Alaric Voss—shouted into his mic, veins visible even in grain. "We have wounded! You cut us off! Do you hear me? You cut us off!"
No reply.
Then chaos—an RPG strike, the camera spinning, screams tearing the audio wide open. The last image: Voss dragging a man with one arm, his other bloodied and limp, before the feed blanked to black.
Soap stepped back, silent.
Ghost rewound the footage, paused it on Voss's face—half-covered in dust, mouth open mid-order, eyes lit with betrayal and rage. The old rage. Not forgotten. Just buried.
"They fed him to the flames," Ghost said, voice low. "Command wrote it off. Burned the file. Buried the tape here like it never happened."
Soap exhaled slow. "Jesus."
Ghost didn't blink. "They didn't just abandon him, Johnny. They used him. And then they made sure no one'd remember."
He stood, spine rigid, gaze fixed on the wall behind the screen like he could see through it. "But Voss remembered."
Soap looked around at the frozen chamber, the reels, the silence that hadn't been broken in years. "Ward died chasing this down. Trying to bring it to light."
"No," Ghost said. "Ward died because Voss wanted him to. He left the body staged—made it a message. And this—" he tapped the screen, still frozen on Voss's face, "—this is the reason."
The power flickered once.
---
Then lights cut with a crack like a snapped bone.
Soap flinched, rifle up, sweeping the dark. "Bloody hell—"
Ghost didn't move. Static buzzed in his ear. Then, slow and deliberate, a CRT monitor in the corner guttered to life—old, convex, humming with low voltage and venom.
No one touched it.
The screen flickered through lines of scrambled tape, then settled on a grainy frame: Ward. Dead. Back arched unnaturally, head canted sideways like a broken toy. The hotel hallway visible behind him—blood smears, camera timecode running.
Soap stepped forward. "That's—Jesus, that's real-time footage?"
"No," Ghost said. "Playback."
The speakers overhead crackled. Then it came—Spectre's voice. Cool. Familiar. Coated in disdain.
> "Welcome back to the dark, Ghost. You should've let me rot in the sand."
Soap's jaw clenched. "That's him. It's really him."
Ghost watched the monitor. Ward's body stayed still. The angle—cinematic. Framed for maximum effect.
"He staged it. The hallway. The body. Everything," Ghost said, voice hollow. "Like a fucking exhibit."
The monitor jolted—now playing back the moment Ghost and Soap had discovered Ward's corpse at the hotel. Same camera angle. But now Ghost could see it: a second camera, hidden inside the smoke detector. They'd been recorded.
Every second.
"He was there," Ghost muttered. "Watching."
Soap lowered his rifle. "He's not just showing us this, mate. He's feeding it to us."
The lights didn't come back on.
Instead, along the ceiling, dull red strobes blinked to life. Slow. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat made of warning signs.
Ghost turned from the screen. "He's pulling us through a maze. One breadcrumb at a time."
Another monitor came online, this one showing thermal imaging—two white-hot blurs. Them. Ghost and Soap.
Spectre's voice returned, colder now, stripped of theatrics.
> "This place is mine, Riley. Every room. Every corridor. Every choice you've made—I gave it to you."
The speakers popped. The monitors died.
Soap broke the silence. "We're not in his maze."
Ghost opened the next steel door with a hard kick.
"No," he said. "We're in his trap."
---
The blast rolled up from the surface like distant thunder—deep, wrong, and final.
Ghost froze mid-step. Dust sifted from the concrete ceiling, light as ash.
Soap's voice cut through the silence. "Tell me that wasn't Volkov's ride."
Ghost didn't answer. He was already moving—fast and quiet, up the narrow corridor toward the entry shaft. The emergency access door groaned under his gloved hand, then jammed halfway open.
Smoke poured in.
He caught a glimpse through the gap: twisted metal, flames licking what was left of the UAZ's frame. The wind outside screamed through the collapsed mouth of the bunker. Snow drove sideways, thick with debris.
"Jeep's gone," Ghost muttered. "So's the shaft. We're buried."
Soap swore under his breath, pacing back, scanning for alternate exits. None. Just steel bulkheads and scarred Soviet walls, trembling with residual shock.
Then came the hiss.
Down the corridor, the outer blast door slammed shut with a grinding shriek of hydraulics. One by one, doors along the route clamped shut—airlocks engaging, magnetic locks clicking into place like a row of guillotines.
Soap sprinted, tried one. No give.
A light strip overhead buzzed to life. Not white. Red.
"Lockdown protocol," Ghost said flatly. "Manual override's gone."
He turned toward the ceiling as static spat through a speaker grill above them. The voice that followed wasn't a recording.
It was live.
> "This is where you die, Riley."
No bravado. No laughter. Just cold certainty.
Soap flinched like he'd been struck. "That's him. That's Spectre."
Ghost stood still, jaw tight beneath the mask. "He's sealing the exits. Not to keep us out…"
"…To keep us in," Soap finished.
The floor beneath them vibrated—deep structure-level shifts. A system coming alive after years of dormancy.
"We move now," Ghost said, voice edged. "Or we suffocate under fifty feet of Soviet concrete."
Soap adjusted his grip on the rifle. "Where?"
"Laswell's backdoor. Sublevel R. Let's move."
Behind them, another door slammed shut.
---
Ghost led the way through a steel hatch half-welded open, flashlight beam slicing across blackened tiles and frost-choked piping. The air changed—less dust, more rot. Old coolant or worse.
"This the shaft Laird flagged?" Soap asked, low and tense behind him.
Ghost nodded once. "Maintenance tunnel. Sublevel R. KGB didn't build exfil routes for fun."
They dropped into narrow passageways—bare concrete, exposed wiring, frost creeping like veins across the ceiling. Everything smelled dead.
Soap scanned the walls with his rifle's light. "Place feels like it's waiting."
Ghost checked corners as they advanced. "It is."
They passed scorched filing cabinets, overturned workstations, shattered Petri dishes still marked in faded Cyrillic. Biohazard tape peeled in brittle curls from the wall, fluttering in the draft. A specimen jar clinked under Soap's boot—clouded glass, something vaguely human inside.
Soap grimaced. "What the bloody hell did they build down here?"
Ghost didn't answer. His hand went up—stop.
Ten meters ahead, a red eye blinked to life on a wall bracket. Motion sensor.
"Tripwire," Ghost hissed.
Too late.
A servo whined. The turret dropped from the ceiling like a snake uncoiling—sleek, old, but not dead. Its barrel spun up with a scream of servos.
Ghost dove left, Soap flung himself right.
The hallway lit in strobe-fire as the gun spat lead. Sparks tore from the wall behind Ghost's shoulder.
"Suppressing!" Soap shouted, unleashing a burst that pinged off the turret's casing.
Ghost rolled behind a reinforced strut, yanked out a charge from his vest—C4 already molded and wired. He primed the timer, four seconds.
"Cover me."
Soap leaned out, fired fast and wild, bullets slapping metal and drawing the turret's attention.
Ghost sprinted low, fast, shoved the charge behind a rusted coolant pipe under the turret's blindside. He slid back just as the timer hit one.
Boom.
The hallway rocked with pressure. Turret parts rained down. Smoke filled the corridor, acrid and thick.
Soap coughed hard, then laughed through it. "That do it?"
Ghost didn't respond. He was already moving again, deeper into the dark.
They had thirty, maybe forty minutes before the whole facility folded in on itself—and Spectre didn't leave second chances.
---
The smell hit first—chemical burn laced with mildew and copper. Not rot. Preserved death.
Ghost's boots crunched over shattered tiles as he pushed into Sublevel R. Soap stayed tight on his six, rifle tracking shadows between exposed conduits and broken monitors. The air had weight here. Heavy. Artificial.
Then the corridor widened.
Dozens of containment tubes lined the walls—some intact, most fractured. Frost filmed the glass, veiling what floated inside: limbs curled fetal, skin waxy and pale, tubes snaked into faces that had long forgotten breath. Soviet tags etched into the steel frames: OBYEKT BETA-04, NEURAL LAYER STIM #19, FAILED INDUCTION.
Soap backed away. "Jesus…"
Ghost didn't look at him. "KGB ran psychic programs here. Chemical triggers. Neural overclocking. Project MIRAGE."
He scanned for movement. Nothing but the slow drip of coolant pooling at his feet.
At the end of the hall stood a steel door—reinforced, radiation warnings half-scraped away. Block letters painted over in black: МИРАЖ. MIRAGE.
Ghost approached the lock panel. Old Soviet circuitry meshed with newer parts—Spectre's upgrades. No alarms triggered. No guards waiting.
Too clean.
The lock disengaged with a hiss. Ghost pushed in.
The room beyond was alive.
Satellite feeds flickered across mismatched monitors—thermal imaging, troop movements, NATO relay data tagged by geolocation. Hard drives hummed on metal racks, rigged into cobbled cooling loops. A war room built from scavenged Cold War tech and modern precision.
Soap swept the room, stunned. "This… isn't salvage. This is operational."
Ghost moved to the main terminal. Input required biometrics—Spectre's, likely. But that didn't matter now. He could see what mattered.
Log files scrolled in Russian and English. Communication pings to compromised satellites. A local mirror of Ward's kill feed.
Ghost stared at the screens.
"This isn't revenge," he muttered. "This is coordination. Planning. He's building something."
He pulled the drives—four of them—into a secured satchel. No time to decrypt now.
Soap stood over a flickering monitor showing the blast crater above. Volkov's UAZ was a smoldering husk.
Soap shook his head. "We walked into a f***ing vault. And locked it behind us."
Ghost tapped his comm twice—dead.
He looked back at the tubes lining the corridor. Failed assets. Test beds for something worse.
"This wasn't a hiding place," he said. "It's a nerve center."
---
Ghost swept a gloved hand over the command desk, brushing away dust and dried blood. A single monitor still pulsed green, unlike the rest—set apart. Not decoy data. A node.
"Found something," he muttered, voice low. Focused.
Soap leaned in as Ghost keyed through layers of encryption. Not brute force—deliberate sequencing. Soviet infrastructure married to NATO firmware. Everything about it screamed custom build, not legacy junk. Lines of hard-coded access scripts flashed past. Most were noise. One wasn't.
A single line blinked: RELAY-SBR-21-A. Next to it, a string of alphanumerics.
"Satellite key," Ghost said flatly. "Not Russian. NATO uplink. Siberian relay."
Soap frowned. "He's jacked a military sat? Why? We're in the ass-end of nowhere."
Ghost stared at the coordinates. The key wasn't for communications. It was for entry—one-time access to something buried in orbit traffic.
"He's not broadcasting," Ghost said. "He's siphoning."
He reached into the console, pulled the primary drive, dropped it into the satchel with the others. "Telemetry logs say the pull started last month. Every five days. Same node."
Soap cocked his head. "Why cycle it?"
Ghost tapped the screen. "To stay hidden. Low signature. Spread the activity thin. Looks like system noise unless you're watching close."
Soap scanned the room, eyes catching a half-burnt note pinned to the wall beside a defunct printer. Russian scribbles crossed out with red ink. But one phrase stood untouched: MIRAGE – МАЯК АКТИВЕН.
"MAYAK," Soap read aloud. "Beacon's active. What the hell's he pointing at?"
Ghost locked eyes with him. "Doesn't matter. It's not here. This place was just the launchpad."
Behind them, a server clicked loudly—fan spooling down. A new warning crawled across the only active monitor: FAILSAFE INITIATED – T-10:00.
"Shit," Soap muttered. "That's not a bluff."
Ghost didn't answer. He was already moving.
"Strip it. Move out. We've got the bone, now we chase the blood."
---
The room stuttered with power as the failsafe engaged. Lights turned blood-red. Sirens stayed silent—too old or ripped out. But the timer glared from the last active screen: T-MINUS 08:59.
Ghost didn't hesitate. He yanked the primary drive, sealed it in the satchel, and bolted for the exit. "We're burning time."
Soap followed, boots thudding over rusted grates, air thick with copper and rot. The walls groaned behind them—pressure shifts. Structural integrity collapsing in stages. Controlled demolition.
"Where's our way out?" Soap barked, vaulting a collapsed pipe.
Ghost skidded into a corridor junction, yanked the map Laird had decrypted from his chest rig. His gloved finger stabbed at the diagram. "Sublevel R has an emergency egress shaft. South wall. Sealed off in '84, but it's still on the schematics."
A blast cracked through the compound, distant but too close. The floor kicked under them. Soap nearly lost his footing.
"Det charges are progressive," Ghost muttered. "Layered collapse. He's funnelling us."
They rounded a corner—smoke already crawling up the corridor. Heat, rising fast. Ghost spotted the steel bulkhead at the far end. Sealed. Worn Cyrillic: ЭКСТРЕННЫЙ ВЫХОД.
"Cover me."
Soap turned, rifle raised. Ghost set the last of his C4, wedging the charge against the seam. Timer blinked red—ten seconds.
Another tremor shook loose a rain of rust and ceiling plaster. Soap fired down the hall—two drones buzzed into view, modified quadcopters, each with strapped charges.
Pop-pop. Soap's shots found both rotors midair. They crashed and hissed. Not big enough to kill, just delay.
Ghost's charge blew. The door groaned, folded inward, barely enough space. No clean breach—just barely open.
"Move!" Ghost shoved him through first.
They hit a ladder shaft slick with condensation. Ascent. No lift. No power.
"Sixty meters," Ghost grunted, climbing hard. "Go!"
Above them, something thundered. Concrete crumbled like dry cake. The failsafe wasn't waiting till zero.
Laswell's voice cracked through the comms—barely intelligible, laced with static: "Blackhawk inbound—ETA sixty seconds. Coordinates locked. You have to reach the beacon."
Soap laughed, breath ragged. "Tell the pilot to hover in hell."
Ghost climbed faster. "We get one shot. You miss that winch cable, you die under thirty feet of ice and Cold War bullshit."
They reached the top—service hatch already breached, blown outward by the tremor. Snow whipped through.
Outside, a silhouette cut through the whiteout—rotors beating the storm, spotlight sweeping. The Blackhawk.
Ghost keyed the beacon. "Now!"
The chopper flared, side door open, winch cable unfurling through the gale.
Another blast below. The ground beneath them flexed, then sank.
Soap grabbed the cable first. Ghost clipped on behind.
The winch screamed. As they rose, Oblast-7 erupted behind them—fire ripping through the snow, smoke clawing at the sky like black veins.
Neither looked back.
---
[This is extra chapter]