CHAPTER 22 – SMOKE AND STEEL
The drone skimmed low, almost swallowed by the dark peaks of the Taurus range. No stars. Just the dull orange blink of infrared waypoints tagged across a brutalist sprawl of steel and stone.
The fortress squatted like a dying machine—hunched metal towers stitched from cargo containers, half-buried tanks poking from the gravel like rusted ribs. Rooftop mortars angled toward the sky, manned by ex-Russian ghosts in surplus fatigues. They smoked with one hand, scanned thermals with the other.
A lone antenna twitched against the wind. Scrambled comms jabbered in Turkish, Arabic, and something else—Spectre's encryption protocol bleeding into their net like static rot.
Inside, corridors ran jagged through the converted outpost. Chain-link gates. Cracked concrete. A room lit by a single bulb revealed a rack of modified SAWs. Another, a weapons terminal hooked to external satellite feeds—live-feed overlays mapped convoy routes across southern Turkey.
Smash cut to a NATO field tent somewhere across the ridge, wind rattling the fabric. A corkboard jittered under the LED flicker. Printouts. Satellite stills. One central image: the fortress under moonlight. Labeled:
TARGET – TAURUS RIDGE COMPOUND.
Below it, a hand-scribbled mission order:
"Primary: Exfil Price. Secondary: Seize Weapons Manifest.
Time to Breach: 01:45.
Zero Air Support. No Extraction Net."
Soap's voice, off-screen: "So we're ghosts again."
Ghost: "Weren't ever anything else."
---
The safehouse reeked of oil, gunmetal, and sweat—the kind of air that settled in your lungs and stayed there. A single red bulb buzzed above the gear table, casting long shadows across the concrete floor.
Soap checked the breach kit twice. Thermite, frags, breach foam. No chatter. No jokes. Just the quiet clink of mags locking into plate carriers.
Ghost stood near the back wall, sliding a fresh suppressor onto his sidearm with a precise twist. His skull mask caught the light like bone.
Price sat on the edge of a cot, armor resting at his feet. He stared at it like it was someone else's burden. His fingers hesitated on the straps.
Soap noticed.
"You planning to wear that, Captain?" Soap asked, tone flat.
Price didn't look up. Just muttered, "Don't expect thanks."
Ghost didn't miss a beat. "Wasn't looking for it."
The silence flared again—heavier this time. Ghost kept his eyes on the weapon rack, but the edge in his voice lingered.
Soap stepped in, slammed a fresh mag into his rifle harder than needed. "Maybe save the pissing contest for after we're not all dead."
Neither replied. Just kept moving, their movements sharp, deliberate. Like old wolves circling a kill they no longer wanted to share.
Soap zipped his kit shut. "Good. Then we're clear."
Outside, the wind picked up, dragging grit across the rocks.
Inside, they locked and loaded, three men carrying different wars to the same battlefield.
---
The mountain loomed like a jagged scar against the night. No stars. No moon. Just the black.
They moved up the ridge in staggered formation—Ghost on point, Soap skirting flank left, Price watching their six. No chatter. Just boots crunching dirt and breath drawn slow through gritted teeth.
Soap kept his eyes low, rifle tucked in, scanning the slope for wires, sensors—anything that didn't belong. The fortress up top pulsed dim red under the ridge's crest. Thermal lights. Perimeter trip mines. Human shapes pacing behind welded steel balconies.
Ghost raised a fist. Halt. He angled right, dropped to a crouch, and started up a narrow goat path hidden by a rusted pipe.
Soap followed, muscles tight. He spotted the relay tower—leaning to one side like a drunk, braced with wire and bolted plates. Static crackled in his comms as he approached.
He unpacked the EMP puck and slapped it onto the base plate.
Three beeps. Then silence.
The tower's LED status lights blinked out. A soft whump as the signal dropped. Up top, floodlights flickered. Dead. The whole ridge went dark.
Ghost's voice came low over comms. "Eyes on. No thermals from their sentries. Move."
Price answered with a curt, "Copy."
Soap switched to goggles—thermal mode flared white-hot. He scanned the ridge. Human shapes, armed, confused, pacing. Heartbeats in the open.
Ghost moved like smoke—silent, exact, nearly invisible in IR. He pointed to a ledge twenty meters up, then to the maintenance duct inset below the compound wall.
They climbed.
Soap's gloves scraped against cold rock. Breath tight in his chest, he hauled himself over the lip, landed low, rifle up.
Price brought up the rear, eyes like steel behind NV lenses.
Ghost tapped his wrist twice. Time to breach.
Soap didn't speak. Just nodded once.
---
They reached the maintenance hatch without a word, crouched beneath a steel lip carved into the outer wall. Paint peeled off the surface like old skin, revealing oxidized panels beneath. The compound above buzzed faintly—generators, patrol chatter, the lull before stormfall.
Price signaled halt. Then crept up behind a lone sentry smoking by a cracked floodlight. No hesitation—arm hooked, blade flashed, cartilage split. The guard folded, twitching once before going still.
Soap caught the body, eased it down.
"Clean," Ghost muttered, already working the hatch panel.
The lock popped. A low metallic groan echoed down the corridor beyond—long, narrow, suffocating. Like crawling into a steel throat.
Soap's nostrils flared. Rust. Old cordite. Sweat from a hundred panicked men who'd passed through, none recently.
Price whispered: "Lights."
Ghost knelt and pried open a junction box just inside. He pulled two wires, twisted them hard. Everything went black.
No more buzzing. No red sensors. Just ink.
Ghost clipped an IR strobe to his vest—low pulse, dim as a heartbeat. Soap and Price followed suit. Three blinking wraiths slipping into the dark.
They moved room to room, boots muted on grooved steel. Shadows writhed on walls, their own outlines sliding along oil-streaked bulkheads.
Soap's breath rasped in his ears. Not fear. Focus. A wrong turn here was a bullet in the throat. A flashbang. A mine.
Ghost paused at an intersection. Listened.
A whisper of boots, too soft to be theirs. One man, maybe two, thirty meters ahead.
Ghost raised a finger, angled left.
They veered into a service conduit, bypassing the corridor. Cut through a vented access shaft—tight enough Soap's shoulders scraped metal. He held his rifle vertical, eyes fixed on the pulsing light ahead. Ghost's silhouette crouched at the far grate, barely a shape.
He unscrewed it slow. One hand on the suppressor.
Then they dropped back into the corridor. No sound. No kill order. The watchers were dead before they even turned.
"Clear," Ghost breathed.
They pushed deeper, one kill at a time.
---
The silence shattered like brittle glass.
A sharp tug snapped at Soap's boot—thin wire, almost invisible in the dark. He froze. A millisecond of dead air, then—click.
"Down!" he barked, already diving sideways.
A burst of muzzle flashes lit the corridor like a strobe. Shadows leapt across the walls. Bullets whined past, sparking off pipework and steel sheeting.
Soap rolled behind a support column, leveled his carbine, and stitched two rounds into a shadow darting from a doorway. The body crumpled. No scream—too fast.
Ghost moved before the echo faded. Low, lethal, silent. He dropped to one knee beside a blinking claymore wired to the wall. Wires hissed under his blade—cut clean. He didn't speak. Didn't need to.
Price thundered past them with a guard's sawed-off shotgun in hand—grabbed from a corpse still twitching. Two quick blasts, no hesitation. One at a crouched figure fumbling with a rifle. Another into the ribs of a wounded fighter crawling toward a sidearm.
Blood sprayed against the corrugated wall like paint flung from a bucket.
"Clear," Price growled, breathing hard, barrel smoking.
Soap stepped over a sprawled enemy—chest rising. Barely.
He raised his rifle.
The man's arm shifted. Not toward a weapon. Just... reaching.
"Don't," Soap warned.
The man's sleeve slid up, revealing scorched skin. A Spectre insignia—blackened, raw, fused to flesh.
Soap didn't fire.
Price did.
The shot snapped the silence. Close-range. Brutal.
"Still Spectre," Price said. Voice flat. Eyes colder.
Ghost scanned the hallway, then looked down at the corpse. No words. Just the look—calculating, detached. But something flickered. Recognition? Resentment?
Soap turned, trying to breathe through the cordite haze. His ears still rang from the firefight. His boot still buzzed from that damn tripwire.
"Next time," he muttered, "I'm blowing the hallway."
Ghost smirked behind the mask. "You almost did."
They moved on. Faster now. The quiet had been broken. The compound knew they were here.
---
The firefight's echoes hadn't finished dying when the data pinged in Ghost's comms—low-band NATO burst from Laswell's forward node.
"Server room. Sublevel B. Two hundred meters west. Secure the ledger."
Ghost pivoted. "Bingo's below us. I'm going."
Price didn't move. He scanned the hallway ahead, jaw clenched, knuckles white on the grip of his rifle.
"Negative," Price said. "Aziz is still upstairs. My gear's with him. NATO codes, satellite tags—if that leaks—"
"Then burn it," Ghost snapped. "The ledger nails Voss. That's what matters."
"Don't lecture me on what matters." Price took a step forward. "You're chasing names. I'm ending the war."
"Bullshit." Ghost's voice sharpened. "You want to clean up your own mess. This is about your rep. You left gear behind, now you're crawling back to salvage pride."
Soap stood between them now, shoulders square, gaze cutting between them.
"Enough," Soap said. "We split. Ghost grabs the ledger. You and I—" he glanced at Price, "we take Aziz."
Ghost stared at Soap a beat too long, but nodded once. "Don't wait for me."
He turned, disappearing into the dark corridor like smoke caught in draft.
Soap turned to Price. "You trust him to get it done?"
Price chambered a round with a hard, metallic snap. "I trust him to do what he thinks is right. And that's the problem."
They moved. Separate paths, same war. But now there was distance that had nothing to do with meters.
---
The sublevel stank of coolant and mildew. Pipes wept condensation. Every step Ghost took was measured, silent, predatory. He bypassed a flickering security cam, crushed the lens under his boot.
Two guards ahead, leaning against a bulkhead near the server room's blast door. One smoked. The other scrolled his phone.
Ghost moved.
Hatchet buried in the smoker's clavicle—cut the scream before it formed. Second man turned, half a syllable out.
Too slow.
Suppressed pistol coughed once. Forehead bloom. Dead before he hit the floor.
Ghost exhaled slow, like bleeding pressure from a valve. No drama. Just method.
He reached the blast door—reinforced, fire-resistant, older Russian military grade. Keypad access, but the casing was brittle with rust.
He jammed a black stub into the panel—Laswell's worm drive.
Hiss. Click. Green flash.
The door groaned open. Server racks stood like sentinels in the low blue wash of emergency lights, fans humming in mechanical prayer.
Ghost crossed to the central node. Slotted the second drive.
Lines of code rolled across his HUD. "OPERATION STONEVEIL – 141 ASSET TRANSFER – ENCRYPT PROTOCOL SIGMA-9."
Files. Serial numbers. Supply manifests. Movement logs tied to old NATO operations. His name. Price's. Soap's.
They weren't just disavowed. They were inventory.
Ghost stared at the screen, pulse steady, thoughts not.
He copied everything.
A noise—metal scrape. Ghost spun.
A lone Spectre soldier at the door—mask like his, darker, less soul, more signal.
They stared at each other, two phantoms in the machine.
Ghost lifted his pistol. Fired twice. Chest. Head.
The Spectre dropped without ceremony.
Ghost knelt beside him, peeled back the mask.
Young. Twenty, maybe. Eyes still open.
Nothing behind them.
He slid the Spectre's patch into a pouch. Not for intel. For memory.
Then he stood, sealed the room, and vanished into the dark—one more ghost in a graveyard of steel.
---
The staircase groaned under their boots—rusted steel plates riveted decades ago, now warped by heat and gunfire. Soap gripped the rail with one hand, carbine raised in the other. Price moved like a hammerhead—straight lines, no hesitation.
They hit the second-level corridor—narrow, low-ceilinged, lined with blast doors sealed by locking levers. No numbers. Just dents, bullet scars, and the smell of old ammonia.
Price signaled left. Soap flanked.
The first door blew inward. Flashbang. Screams.
Gunmen poured from the side rooms, shouting in Turkish, maybe Chechen. Didn't matter.
Price fired first. Buckshot at close range—turned one into a wall smear. Another lunged from a corner. Soap stitched three rounds across his chest, dropped him before he could raise the weapon.
One enemy crawled away, dragging a shattered leg, blood pooling fast.
He started to pray.
Price walked past Soap—shot him in the back of the skull. No pause. No glance.
Soap froze.
"You didn't have to—"
Price's voice cut like wire. "He'd tell them we're here."
"That's not the point."
Price reloaded. "Then make a better one."
They cleared the last room. A heavy steel door stood at the far end—polished, guarded.
Two men. Clean kit. Western rifles. Night-vision flipped up.
Not locals.
Soap and Price both ducked behind cover as rounds sparked off the walls. Suppressed fire—tight, professional.
"Mercs?" Soap asked between breaths.
"Spectre's best," Price said, tone like a door closing.
They moved.
Soap went low, flanking wide. Price advanced directly, drawing fire. When Soap popped from the side, he didn't hesitate—two shots, chest and head. One merc dropped.
The second turned, adjusting aim—Price closed the gap and drove a knife under his chin before he could fire.
Blood soaked the floor. The hallway fell silent.
Soap stood over the bodies, chest rising hard. "That was surgical."
Price just stared at the door. "Aziz is in there."
Soap looked at him, wary now. "And after?"
Price racked his shotgun. "After, we make damn sure he doesn't get out."
No nod. No plan. Just momentum.
They stacked beside the door.
Price reached for the handle.
Soap wiped the blood from his grip.
Then they breached.
---
The private suite didn't look like a war room. Persian rugs muted the footfalls. A copper samovar hissed gently in one corner. But the silence was tight. Armed. Price clocked the layout in a second—bookshelf, desk, heavy curtains. No windows. Just a man waiting to trade blood for leverage.
Aziz stood near the desk, sleeves rolled, no weapon in sight. Just the kind of arrogance that got people killed.
Two mercs blocked the approach, both armored, both steady. Eyes sharp under matte-black helmets. Not Spectre grunts—these were contractors with kill-counts and no countries.
Then it went sideways.
One of the mercs moved—jerked toward Soap. The firefight cracked loud in the small room.
Soap took one in the vest. Grunted, fell back. The second merc went for Price—didn't make it. Price dropped him with two tight shots to the chest, then kicked his rifle aside.
The first merc lunged again—close now, too close.
Soap tackled him, rolled, got a knife up. Steel met flesh. Wet breath in Soap's ear before the man went limp.
But Aziz didn't run.
He moved fast—grabbed Soap, yanked him upright, pistol now in hand, muzzle pressed under Soap's jaw.
Price froze mid-step. Shotgun raised but blocked.
"Do it," Aziz said, dragging Soap backward. "You shoot, you kill your man."
Soap's voice was low. Controlled. "He'll do it."
Ghost's voice cut in from the door. Cold. Distant. "So will I."
Aziz turned, eyes ticking toward the sound.
Ghost stood in the doorway, rifle leveled. Covered in ash and blood from the lower levels. Quiet and still as smoke.
"You move," Ghost said, "you die."
Aziz's grip faltered—not much, but enough.
"I've read your files," Aziz said, lip curling. "You're not soldiers. You're ghosts. Chasing shadows. Killing ghosts."
Price moved. One step. Then another.
"Let him go," Ghost warned.
Aziz smiled. "You think killing me ends this?"
He never finished.
Price fired.
The round hit square between Aziz's eyes—his body jerked, then dropped like a cut rope.
Soap collapsed to a knee, coughing, hand over his throat.
Blood pooled across the rug. Spilled into the weft.
Ghost stepped forward, boots soaking red. He stared at Price.
Not a word passed between them.
But it sat there in the space—heavy, loud, final.
Something in the Captain had cracked. And Ghost knew it wasn't going back.
---
The first mortar hit like a god's hammer.
The floor jumped. Steel screamed. A light fixture shattered above Soap's head as the hallway blinked red with emergency strobes. Somewhere deeper in the compound, a siren howled.
"Contact front—two levels down!" Ghost's voice crackled in Soap's earpiece, rough and clipped. "I've got overwatch on the south wall. Move now or don't move at all."
Price didn't answer. He just hauled the server drive tighter to his chest, turned, and ran.
Soap followed, boots pounding over concrete dust and shell casings. The intel was in hand, but the whole compound had turned into a killbox. Every corridor felt like a throat ready to close.
They reached the lower level—the motor pool. Half the vehicles were burning. The other half were riddled with rounds and leaking fuel.
"Plant it here," Price barked, nodding to the fuel tanks stacked along the eastern wall.
Soap set his breaching charges fast, hands steady despite the tremors overhead. He set a thirty-second delay. Long enough. Maybe.
Gunfire rattled from the far side of the yard—shouts in Turkish and clipped Russian. A burst chewed up the cement near Soap's knee.
He dove for cover. "Where the bloody hell's our ride?"
"ETA one mike," Ghost came back, voice dead calm. "North ridge. Smoke the courtyard. You've got snipers on the west balconies."
Soap popped a smoke grenade and lobbed it over the burning wreckage. White fog hissed and bloomed—ghost cover in ghost terrain.
Price moved first, low and fast. Soap followed, using the rising smoke to cut the sniper's line. Two rounds snapped past his head. Another hit the radio strapped to his back—dead weight now.
Up ahead, the tower. A lone shadow on top—Ghost.
He picked off a rooftop turret with a single shot. Then another. Methodical. Surgical.
A merc crested the ridge behind them, belt-fed MG roaring. Price spun and took him with a slug to the chest. No hesitation. No wasted breath.
"Charges set," Soap said into the comms, breathing hard. "Ready to light the match."
"Do it," Ghost said.
Soap hit the detonator.
The fuel depot blew like a lung full of fire. The shockwave kicked them both forward, heat rolling over their backs. A gout of black smoke clawed into the sky.
The evac chopper crested the ridge, rotors chopping hard, spotlight cutting the smoke.
Rope line dropped.
Ghost reached them first, rifle slung, face blackened with soot. He didn't speak—just jerked his head toward the rope and covered their six.
Soap clipped in. Price after him.
Bullets stitched the ground below as they lifted off, rising into the fire-lit dark.
Below, Steel Nest burned like a funeral pyre. Above, the night swallowed them whole.
---
The rotor wash drowned most sound, but it couldn't smother tension.
Soap sat opposite Price in the cramped belly of the evac bird, chest heaving under his plate carrier. The hard drive dug into his lap like it weighed more than steel.
Price didn't speak. Didn't blink. Just stared out the open side hatch into the scorched-black sky over the Taurus Mountains. Smoke curled on the horizon, carried like regret on the wind.
Ghost leaned forward between them, voice low but sharp. "This—" he tapped the drive with a gloved knuckle, "—nails it. Operation Stoneveil. Spectre's plan to ghost us and blame the war on our backs."
Price didn't look at him.
Soap broke the silence. "It's enough to burn Voss. Maybe stop what's coming."
Price's jaw flexed. "He won't need to stop us. Not after tonight."
Soap frowned. "What are you saying?"
The captain met his eyes now. No fire. Just flat, dead certainty. "We executed Aziz. Public figure. Financial pipeline to half the Gulf. Cameras'll show a black bag op wiping him mid-sentence."
Ghost leaned back. The tension in his spine didn't.
"We came to pull you out," he said. "Not start a f***ing war."
"You think I started this?" Price's voice cracked then steadied. "He was Spectre. Same as Voss. Same as the bastards who burned Bravo Team alive. We don't get to pick clean exits anymore."
Soap shifted, his boots thudding against the floor. "You shot him with his hands up."
Price stared through him. "And I'd do it again."
Silence pulsed between them—thick, bitter.
Ghost finally said, "Then maybe you don't walk away from this either."
The chopper banked west, blades thrumming like a countdown. Far below, the fire still burned.
None of them spoke for the rest of the ride.
---
The chopper rattled as it punched through stormclouds over Ankara airspace. Sweat cooled on necks. No one spoke.
Soap's headset crackled. A secure tone pinged once, then Laswell's voice cut through, flat as glass:
"You've stirred the wrong nest."
Ghost turned slightly, eyes narrowing. "Define wrong."
Laswell didn't blink. "Aziz was under soft cover. Off-books ties to multiple embassies. Istanbul just locked down its NATO desk. Ankara's calling it a targeted assassination."
Price exhaled slowly, like a man hearing his own funeral rites.
Soap leaned in. "What about Spectre? The ledger, the drives—Voss?"
A pause.
"He's not hiding," Laswell said. "He's hunting. And he just made his next move."
A faint audio cue followed. Then video—grainy satellite intercept. Six figures in Spectre gear dragging a UN security team out of an armored van on a frozen Oslo street. Blood hit the snow before the feed cut to static.
Ghost stared. "They're escalating."
Price didn't flinch. "They're making it look like us."
No one argued. There was nothing left to argue.
---
[This is extra chapter]