CHAPTER 25 – THE REAL TARGET

The whine of the rotors thrummed through the bird's frame like a pulse. No cabin lights—just the flicker of a single laptop screen casting hard shadows across the faces clustered around it. Midnight air over the Caspian bled through the bulkhead vents, sharp and sterile.

Soap hunched close, eyes scanning lines of encrypted traffic screaming down the uplink. The keys under his fingers clicked like a trigger primed halfway.

Price leaned over him, arms folded, jaw tight. His breath steamed the screen every time he exhaled.

"Three different override logs," Soap muttered. "All cleared through Task Force credentials. Bravo-Zero-Six, Sierra-Niner-Five, and... Ghost's own tag."

Ghost didn't flinch. He stood just behind them, arms at his sides, staring at the screen like it owed him something.

Laswell's voice rasped through the sat-link headset, no trace of sleep in her tone.

"Telemetry shows the commands were issued inside the NATO grid. But the signals bounced. Middlemen servers. Burned trails."

Ghost's voice came low, dead even. "He's not deleting us. He's reprogramming us."

Soap glanced up. "He makes us the weapon... never pulls the trigger himself."

"Because then the fingerprints are ours," Price said flatly. "Not his."

The laptop pinged again—another line of corrupt access logs. More shells. More ghosts.

Laswell: "He's inside Tbilisi's comms core. If those command logs push past phase two, it won't be your legacy on the line—it'll be your war."

Ghost stepped back, jaw set. He looked out the side window where nothing but black ocean and moonlight stretched beneath them.

"Then we burn the echo," he said. "Before it becomes a siren."

The aircraft banked hard toward Georgia.

---

The compound loomed out of the dark like a fortress that had forgotten there was still a war on. Spotlights swept across the fence line. Guards in NATO blues paced the perimeter, rifles cradled, eyes dulled from routine. They didn't flinch when the black SUV skidded to a stop at the checkpoint.

Price leaned out the window, flashed credentials. "Major Kurashvili. Now."

No delay. The gates rolled open with a whine.

Inside, tension thickened. The hub's operations center glowed with sterile blues and greens—screens mapped with satellite grids and command strings. Dozens of operators tapped at keyboards, heads down, oblivious.

Soap stepped through first, eyes sweeping the room. "Place smells too clean," he muttered.

Major Lena Kurashvili met them near the central command dais, flanked by two MPs with hands hovering too close to sidearms.

"Your arrival wasn't cleared," she said in clipped English. "There's no breach on record. No alerts, no threat vectors."

Ghost's gaze didn't move from the screen showing uplink activity. "Check the access logs," he said. "Three entries cleared through Task Force IDs."

Kurashvili's expression didn't shift. "Your men are already logged in."

Ghost turned, mask angled like a blade. "Those aren't our men."

She bristled. "This base runs under NATO encryption. If your task force is compromised, that's not my—"

Price stepped in, voice like gravel. "Your firewalls folded ten minutes ago. You just didn't notice because the hands doing it wore our gloves."

Silence fell like a dropped weapon. One of the operators looked up, pale.

Ghost moved toward the main console. "Pull every signature in the last two hours. Compare them to KIA 141."

Kurashvili hesitated—then nodded once to her tech. He tapped furiously.

Soap muttered under his breath, "Let's see how deep the rabbit hole runs."

---

Soap crouched beside the mainframe, fingers flying across the rugged NATO terminal patched into the uplink's spine. Fans thrummed inside the rack—hot, old air like a dying breath. The screen flared green, then glitched, spitting streams of raw data across the display.

"Jesus," Soap muttered. "You seeing this?"

Ghost stepped in behind him, jaw tight under the mask. Price loomed over his other shoulder, reading the cascade. No one spoke. They didn't have to.

The access logs didn't just include Soap's credentials—they showed active sessions logged under names that hadn't drawn breath in years.

Miller. Reyes. Makarov.

All dead. All Task Force 141.

"Cross-check the MACs," Ghost ordered.

Soap keyed deeper, ran the query.

"Routed through two bounce points in Azerbaijan. Final hop lands here." He tapped the screen. "Berlin. Draugr Systems."

"Sounds like a startup," Price said.

Ghost's voice cut through, low and sharp. "It's a shell. Voss has cover. He's using the ghosts of the dead to crack open command networks."

Soap leaned back, mouth flat. "Digital necromancy. Bastard's got us walking posthumous."

Price stepped away, pacing. His hand ran through his beard, jaw grinding.

"This isn't just identity theft," he said. "This is tactical impersonation. Voss spoofs our prints, he gets kill-switch access to every asset NATO trusts us with."

Soap's screen beeped. Another ghost signature appeared—this one mimicking Laswell herself.

"Bloody hell," he said. "He's got her, too."

Ghost didn't flinch. "He's not just copying us. He's becoming us."

Price's voice dropped, cold and level. "Berlin's where he flips the switch."

Soap turned, eyes hard. "Then we pull the plug before he lights the fuse."

---

Price leaned over the terminal, a scowl carved into his face. Laswell's voice crackled through the secure link, low and tight, like she was swallowing a fuse.

"We ran the proxy route. Draugr Systems is a front. Berlin-based, paper trail ends in a dead mailbox in Ljubljana. But that's not the story."

Soap moved to her feed on the auxiliary screen. "Then what is?"

A digital map bloomed—military nodes, red-tinted, clustered across Russian territory. One blinked.

Laswell continued, "Langley picked up traffic on a restricted NATO band. Someone's authorizing a breach of Russia's anti-air grid. The key used was ours—Task Force 141 credentials. Legacy file, burned six years ago. Mosul."

Ghost stood stone still. "He's faking our clearance. Framing us."

Laswell didn't flinch. "He's not faking. He's repurposing real credentials. Reanimated through NATO backchannels using your old biometric locks."

Price's voice was low, razor-edged. "False flag."

"Exactly," Laswell confirmed. "Once that cyberstrike lands, Moscow sees it as a NATO act of war. And when they dig, they'll see it traced straight to you three. Task Force 141—rogue, unsanctioned, off the leash."

Soap exhaled through his nose. "We're the smoking gun."

Ghost checked the time. Midnight UTC. "When?"

Laswell didn't hesitate. "Zero hour's pegged to tomorrow. Anniversary of Mosul. The ghosts he created are the ones he's using to burn down the present."

Price didn't speak. He didn't need to. His silence burned louder than anything else in the room.

Ghost turned from the screen, jaw set. "He doesn't just want a war. He wants our fingerprints all over it."

Soap clenched his fists. "Then we cut off his hands before he lights the match."

--

Soap yanked the access panel open with a snap of his wrist. A bundle of fiber-optic lines coiled behind the casing like nerves—live, pulsing, too clean for old gear. He traced the uplink feed with gloved fingers, locked onto the main node, and slid a knife-blade tool between the connectors.

"Gonna cut the head off before it sends more venom," he muttered.

"Wait—" Laswell's voice spiked in Ghost's earpiece, sharp, tight. "Soap, stand down. Voss seeded a failsafe."

Soap paused. "Define failsafe."

"Logic bomb. Sever the uplink and the system flags it as sabotage. The entire data trace—every log, every connection—gets dumped to a Russian GRU vault. Buried access. Black op server behind an embassy shell in Kaliningrad."

Price's head snapped toward Ghost. "He's wired the bloody evidence to self-incriminate."

Soap dropped his tool. "He's not just ghosting us. He's rigging the frame job to stick."

Ghost crouched beside him, scanning the diagnostic tree flashing across the laptop screen. Strings of code twisted red. One line kept looping in the server logs—an override tag he hadn't seen before. Voss's signature. Hidden inside a dead man's credentials.

Ghost muttered, "He's crawling through our graves."

The command console blinked. Thirty-two minutes to breach execution.

Soap stood. "So what, we just sit here and let him burn it down?"

"No," Ghost said, standing too. "We don't cut the cord. We walk it back to the source."

Price stepped forward. "You mean trace it live?"

Ghost nodded once. "We ride the wire. Track him through his own tunnel."

Soap looked at the uplink like it might bite. "That line leads straight to Berlin."

Ghost's voice dropped to a growl. "Then that's where we drag him into the light."

The countdown ticked on. Thirty-one minutes.

---

Kurashvili didn't speak as she led them deeper into the bowels of the NATO facility. Her boots struck the grated floor like a metronome, sharp, deliberate. Ghost followed her through a security door so old it groaned on its hinges. Beyond it, the air turned colder—dead air, sealed off for decades.

They descended a tight stairwell. Rust flaked from the railings. Faint outlines of Cyrillic warnings clung to the walls in faded red. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY didn't mean much anymore.

Soap eyed the decay. "This place looks like it died in the '80s."

Kurashvili keyed a wall panel. A relay clicked. Lights guttered to life—yellow, sickly, but steady.

"I didn't say it was clean," she said, voice flat. "Just intact."

A long corridor stretched ahead—cables stapled along its ceiling, leading to a reinforced junction box buried at the far end. Heavy conduit snaked out of it, vanishing into a concrete trench that ran beneath the floor.

Price stepped forward. "What is this?"

"Backbone of an old Soviet fiber loop. Hardwired straight to Berlin during the Cold War. They used it to monitor NATO channels. After the wall fell, we buried it—but we didn't cut it."

Soap let out a low whistle. "You're telling me we've got a hardline to Berlin under our boots?"

Kurashvili nodded. "Low profile. Off-grid. It bypasses modern checks because no one remembers it exists."

Ghost crouched beside the trench, eyes scanning the cabling. Dust coated the sheathing, but the insulation was clean—no corrosion, no breach. It would carry a signal. Would carry them.

"Can it support a data trace?" he asked.

Kurashvili looked at him. "It'll do more than that. It'll get you inside the same backbone Voss is using to mask his traffic."

Price straightened, jaw tight. "You've had this the whole time?"

"Never had a reason to use it. Until now."

Soap cracked his neck. "Then let's wiretap a ghost."

Ghost glanced back at the timer on Soap's forearm display—twenty-eight minutes left. No room for speeches. He locked eyes with Kurashvili.

"You just turned a Cold War relic into a warhead."

She didn't smile. "Then aim carefully."

They moved, fast. The ghost line was alive—and so was the kill switch on the other end.

---

The armory stank of solvent and sweat. Metal on metal echoed sharp as bolts racked and mag plates locked home. Soap knelt beside the table, stripping a compact PDW down to the firing pin. Not out of necessity—habit. Nerves had their own rituals.

Price stood across from him, loading non-lethal overrides into a side pouch. "We're going into NATO airspace flagged as internal threats. One wrong step and we're lighting up friendlies."

"Then we don't take a wrong step," Ghost muttered, strapping a medpack to his thigh.

The silence that followed wasn't peace—it was weight.

Soap slid the receiver back into place, clicked it shut. "You ever think we'd end up fighting our own ghosts, mate?"

"No," Ghost said. "But Voss did."

He pulled a folded mission brief from the bench—Laswell's latest drop from Langley. Satellite imagery, blueprints, IP trees all funneled into one destination: a shell building in Neukölln, Berlin. Draugr Systems. Legit on paper. Phantom in practice.

Price scanned the map. "Tight quarters. Reinforced access doors. One exit, two blind spots, one likely server vault. He's betting no one finds him."

"He didn't bet on us," Ghost replied, pulling his balaclava down.

Laswell's voice crackled through a wall-mounted speaker, tight with static. "Coordinates sent. Transit cleared under Operation Hellshade, German intel flagged your ID as Tier 3 contractors—cover'll hold for a few hours, max."

Ghost responded without lifting his head. "Then we finish it in two."

Soap slid a flashbang into his harness. "Any word on interior personnel?"

"Minimal. Skeleton crew. If Voss is there, he's not expecting a knock."

Price checked his watch. "Ten minutes to lift. Gear tight."

They moved like parts in a weapon—each click, each step meant something. No jokes. No room for them now.

Kurashvili met them at the stairwell with a sealed crate. She cracked it open, revealing signal jammers, cloaking beacons, and microdrones. "Last of our toys. Sov-tech refinished with NATO teeth."

Ghost took one without a word.

"Don't get killed," she said.

He looked her in the eye. "Only kill what deserves it."

---

Rain slicked the runway in a dull sheen, the kind that mirrored the burn of sodium floodlights and turned steel boots into whispers. The NATO airfield pulsed low with distant engines and blinking tower lights—quiet, but watching. Always watching.

Ghost stepped out first, silhouette carved in matte black. Vest buckled tight, mask sealed. His boots hit the tarmac like a verdict.

Behind him, Soap and Price emerged from the hangar's shadow, carbines loaded, safeties kissed to red. No chatter. No nods. The time for words had bled out two continents ago.

"Eyes up," Laswell's voice cracked over the comms, heavy with filtered static. "Draugr Systems is running low-light servers under a dummy VR firm. All heat sigs are cold—or shielded. You're walking into a ghost town, wired for war."

Ghost didn't break stride. "Ghost town's where we live."

Soap racked his weapon as they passed the final perimeter. "If we're flagged on Berlin radar, they'll scramble SWAT in under ten."

"Then we ghost it clean," Price said, voice gravel on steel. "No casualties. No second chances."

Wind caught the edges of their gear, flapping straps and loose webbing like a war drum. Every step toward the VTOL waiting on the tarmac felt like a fuse shortening.

Ghost paused at the open ramp, gaze cutting across the night skyline—black towers, red lights, and the far-off hum of a city with no clue it was seconds from becoming a killbox.

"Laswell," he said flatly, locking eyes with nothing, yet hearing everything.

"Copy."

"We find his hacker," Ghost muttered, fingers curling tight inside his gloves, "we find him."

A beat.

"Then we rip the wires from his skull."

The ramp sealed behind them. The VTOL's rotors flared, drowning the airfield in thunder.