CHAPTER 23 – FALLOUT
The rotors hadn't stopped spinning before boots hit wet tarmac. Ghost moved first, rifle slung, mask flecked with soot. Soap followed, gripping the intel drive like it could bleed. Price lagged behind, shoulders squared like armor, eyes fixed on the gray horizon.
No one spoke. The cold chewed through their gear.
A wall of NATO MPs waited at the perimeter gate, rifles up but relaxed—just enough to remind them who was in control now.
The commanding officer stepped forward, face unreadable beneath the brim of his cap. "Weapons."
Ghost unbuckled his belt and let the sidearm drop into the offered bin. No protest. No words. Just the mechanical click of steel against steel.
Soap hesitated before unslinging his carbine. Handed it off with a glance at Price. "Standard procedure, right?"
Price didn't answer. He walked past them both, jaw locked, fists clenched tight enough to blanch the knuckles. His boots echoed against the concrete, the only sound louder than the wind.
Soap watched him go, chest tightening. "He's off," he muttered.
Ghost didn't look away from the MPs. "He's breaking."
The wind howled through the chain-link fencing, dragging the silence out just long enough to sting.
They followed Price into the bunker. Into the dark.
---
The debrief room stank of old coffee and stale air. Fluorescents buzzed overhead, cold and flickering. A projector whirred to life, casting grainy footage across the wall—Oslo, 0300. Wide shot. UN convoy moving slow. Then chaos.
A black-clad figure stepped into frame, silencer raised. Three shots. Clean. The diplomat's head jerked back like a snapped cable. Blood painted the snow.
No music. No buildup. Just death, precise and silent.
Laswell stood near the screen, remote in hand, expression locked somewhere between fury and fatigue. "That's not just murder," she said. "That's war bait. And it's wearing our patch."
Soap leaned forward, fists on the table. "That's Spectre. It's a setup."
Ghost didn't blink. "Voss wants the world to see ghosts pulling the trigger."
Laswell tapped the remote. Another frame. A pause. The shooter turned slightly—enough to catch a shoulder patch. Ghost insignia. Clear as day. No blur. No artifact. Deliberate.
Price hadn't moved since the footage started. He stared at the image like it owed him something. "Because they were," he said finally. Voice flat. "Us. That's what the footage says."
Laswell slapped a folder onto the table hard enough to jolt the projector.
"UN transport manifest," she said. "Authorized escort: Task Force 141. Signed. Stamped. Delivered."
Soap grabbed the file. His name was on it. So was Price's. Ghost's too.
Silence fell hard. No excuses. No denial. Just that image burned into all of them—Spectre killing in their skin.
Laswell's voice dropped. "This isn't a black op gone wrong. This is an execution with our fingerprints. Voss isn't hiding anymore."
No one replied. There was nothing to say. The war had already started. And they'd just watched the first shot land.
---
The armory door clanged shut behind Price like a cell locking down. The hum of fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, echoing off racks of rifles and unspoken grudges. Ghost stood at the bench, breaking down a sidearm with mechanical precision, his movements calm, clinical. Like nothing had shifted.
Price didn't knock. Didn't clear his throat.
"You should've told me," he said.
Ghost didn't look up. "About what."
"You know what." Price stepped closer, boots grinding against the epoxy floor. "Mosul. The order. How long have you been hiding it?"
Ghost set the slide down. Wiped his hands with a rag. "Didn't hide it. Just didn't see the use in reanimating corpses."
"You followed a broken chain?" Price snapped. "You were the chain. And that chain ended in graves."
Ghost finally looked up. No apology in his eyes. Just years of static. "I didn't make Voss. The system did."
"You ran that op," Price said, jabbing a finger toward him. "You left our team in the fire. You gave the fallback."
"I didn't green-light the fallback," Ghost said, voice edged with steel. "Command did. I stayed on comms until the building went under."
Price's jaw clenched. "And you didn't push back."
Ghost stepped forward. "I pushed. I got shut down. Then I got told to shut up."
The air tightened between them, thick with unfinished things. Ghost stared through the mask. Price stared back like he could tear it off and find someone worth trusting underneath.
"You think I wanted this?" Ghost said. "You think I don't carry them with me?"
"You're still carrying it wrong."
The silence was a trigger waiting to be pulled. Then a voice cut in behind them.
"Enough."
Soap stood in the doorway, rifle slung low, face hard.
"He's not the enemy," he said. "Voss is."
Neither of them moved. But something shifted. Fractured.
Ghost wiped his hands clean, turned, and walked past them both.
Price stayed rooted, staring at the spot Ghost had been.
Soap exhaled. "You two keep this up, we'll be burying more than memories."
No one answered.
---
The barracks smelled of oil, sweat, and a silence nobody wanted to break. Soap sat on the edge of his bunk, elbows on knees, rifle resting across his lap. His thumb dragged over the photo in his hand—four men frozen in time, smiling like they didn't know the crater Mosul would leave behind.
Footsteps. Deliberate. Not marching boots. He didn't look up.
"You waiting for them to settle it?" Laswell's voice was low, not unkind—just blunt. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed, not bothering to come in. "Because if you are, one of them's going to use that hatchet before they bury it."
Soap stared at the picture a second longer. "Used to be simple. Follow orders. Watch their backs."
"Still is," she said. "You just need to pick whose back you're watching now."
He slid the photo into his kit. The smile faded with it.
Laswell stepped forward and dropped a hard drive onto his gear. "Intercepts out of Helmand. Spectre lieutenant's been moving between safehouses. We think he's the last link before Voss."
Soap studied the drive for a beat. Then looked up.
"You think he knows what happened in Mosul?"
"I think he helped Voss build the lie. I think you find him, you get truth—before Voss makes his next move."
Soap stood. Slung the rifle over his shoulder, fingers tightening on the strap. "Then we hunt."
Laswell nodded. "You'll be first in. You good with that?"
He didn't hesitate. "Voss wants ghosts?"
He locked the last strap on his vest, clipped the photo inside his collar.
"We'll give him nightmares."
---
Ghost lay flat on his bunk, boots planted, arms crossed over his chest like a corpse waiting for burial. His mask was off—just shadow and silence in the half-light of the barracks.
The past didn't knock. It kicked the door in.
**
Mosul, Iraq – Two years earlier.
Static chewed through the radio. Gunfire crackled beyond the blast walls, close. Too close. Dust clung to the air like fog in a furnace. Ghost—no mask, younger, sharper around the edges—knelt behind a half-collapsed wall with a battered comms pack slung over his back.
"Bravo Three, report," he snapped into the headset, eyes scanning the alley where the extraction should've already happened.
"Bravo Three is pinned—roof collapsed—fuck, we need air!" someone screamed through the line. Panicked. That wasn't part of the plan.
A second voice—command, cool and clipped: "All teams, execute fallback. Asset compromised."
Ghost keyed the mic. "Negative. Team's still inside."
The pause that followed dragged like a blade.
"Fall back. That's an order."
He didn't move.
"Ghost, confirm fallback."
He closed his eyes. The building across the street shuddered. Fire licked out the windows. Then the blast wave hit—a hot, concussive gut punch that knocked him flat. The headset went dead.
When he stood, the alley was gone. Just fire and stone and smoke.
He stumbled forward anyway, boots crunching over scorched debris. Ash clung to his face, sweat carving lines through it. No signs. No bodies. Just one thing caught his eye—curled metal at the edge of the crater.
He dropped to a knee. Picked it up.
Charred. Warped. But unmistakable.
Spectre's old patch. Still smoldering.
**
Present day.
Ghost's eyes snapped open in the dark. His chest rose slow. Controlled.
The burn of that day hadn't faded. He didn't expect it to.
He sat up, reached for the knife on the bedside table—ran a thumb over the etched initials: K.V.
His voice was just a breath in the dark.
"Still following the chain."
---
Laswell didn't flinch at the diplomatic pouch waiting on her desk—no seal, no markings, just weight. The kind that didn't belong in an office.
She unzipped it, slow, deliberate. Inside: a burner tablet and a folded slip of white paper. One line typed in clean block font:
"Thought you'd want the courtesy." —V
She slid the tablet on, thumbprint overridden. The screen flickered, then stabilized—low-res, like it'd been routed through six proxies.
The image sharpened.
Alaric Voss.
Not the man they'd hunted in the shadows. This version stared straight into the lens—calm, direct, already ten moves ahead.
"You taught me how to disappear," he said, voice flat as frost. "Now I'll teach you how it ends."
Behind him, rows of uplink consoles blinked green in a darkened NATO comms room. Real hardware. Real uniforms hanging on chairs—ones she recognized. Ones that didn't belong to Spectre.
Voss continued, motionless.
"Control the satellite, control the world. Control the blame?" He smirked. "Easy. Just make the ghosts fire first."
He stepped aside. A map projected behind him—network overlays, NATO orbit patterns, uplink keys. A countdown in the corner. Ninety-six hours and falling.
Voss faced the camera again. "We don't need a war. We'll just pull the pin... and watch them blame the hand they can see."
The screen cut to black.
Laswell didn't breathe. She stood still for three long seconds, then reached for her encrypted line.
"Get me Ghost. Now."
---
Ghost stepped into the cold bite of rain without a hood. Let it sting.
The helipad buzzed under sodium light, wind chopping the downpour sideways. Price stood near the bird, already geared—rig cinched, rifle slung low. No umbrella, no cover, just hard silence between them.
Ghost slowed his approach. Boots slapped wet concrete. He stopped five feet away.
"You still coming?" he asked, voice flat behind the mask.
Price didn't look at him. "We're not friends. Not anymore."
Ghost's jaw clenched beneath the balaclava. "Didn't ask for that." His hand rested on the grip of his sidearm—not drawing, just remembering. "Asked if you're still a soldier."
Price finally turned. The years showed in the lines, in the blood still crusted in his knuckles from the armory fight they didn't finish.
"That's all that's left," Price said. "Soldiering. Not much else."
Footsteps behind them—Soap. No armor yet, just the undershirt and sling bag, boots unlaced. He walked like a man stepping between landmines, but he didn't speak.
Didn't need to.
He joined them at the edge of the helipad. Just three of them now. What remained of Task Force 141.
Laswell's voice crackled in over comms: "Helmand Province. Spectre's lieutenant. Last link in the chain."
Ghost exhaled. No theatrics. No words. Just a nod.
They boarded.
The rotors screamed to life. Rain blurred into the downwash. And still, no one spoke. Not about Mosul. Not about blame. Not about how it ends. Just the work.
Just the next name on the list.
---
The chopper screamed against the wind, rotors carving the rain-laced sky to shreds.
Inside, red light bathed the cabin in warning. No one spoke.
Ghost sat against the bulkhead, knife in hand—not twirling, not fidgeting. Just studying it. Steel worn but clean. Along the spine: K.V. carved with a shaky hand and a dull file. Ghost ran his thumb across it once. Just once. Then slid it back into its sheath like a quiet promise.
Soap sat across from him, hands wrapping black tape around his rifle grip. Muscle memory. His knee bounced—adrenaline without a target. He didn't meet Ghost's eyes. Didn't have to. The silence between them wasn't cold. Just heavy.
Price didn't move. He stared past them, past the floor, past the storm hammering the fuselage. Helmet beside him. Rifle across his lap. The weight on his shoulders wasn't gear. It was names.
Outside, thunder cracked like gunfire.
Inside, no prayers. Just breath. Just steel.
The crew chief shouted over the roar: "Two hours to LZ. Dust's thick in Helmand. Might lose visibility."
No one answered.
The bird dipped south, punching through cloud cover and static. Black mountains loomed below—silent, waiting.
The past followed them. The storm didn't care. And neither did they.
Not anymore.
---
[This is extra chapter]