Wind slices through the cemetery like razors on bone. Frost coats the angel statues—silent sentinels over Warsaw's forgotten dead. One statue near the wall has a chipped wing, its marble face worn down to a smudge by time and weather.
Ghost moves toward it, boots crunching over brittle ice and dead leaves. No rush. No hesitation. Just rhythm.
He kneels. Gloved fingers trace the base, find the notch carved into the stone two decades ago. Still there. Still his.
He pries open a rusted panel, pulls free a vacuum-sealed envelope. Inside: a black flash drive, stamped with NATO clearance. No label. Just the old Task Force 141 insignia—eagle, dagger, lightning.
He plugs it into a scorched burner laptop. The screen flickers. Then loads.
Ten names. Familiar. Trusted.
GARRICK, KYLE "GAZ" – [X]
RILEY, SIMON "GHOST" – [X]
MACTAVISH, JOHN "SOAP" – blinking cursor, untouched
Ghost stares.
"You're next," he murmurs, eyes fixed on Soap's name. "Not if I get there first."
---
The cemetery's iron gate groans shut behind Ghost as he moves down the narrow alley, laptop tucked beneath his arm, drive still humming in the port. He ducks into a crumbling tenement stairwell, climbs past cracked plaster and mold-choked bulbs until he hits the rooftop.
Wind howls over Warsaw. Smoke stacks bleed gray into gray. He boots the laptop again, eyes locked on the metadata under the black list. Lines of encrypted logs flicker. Dates. IP stamps. Auth codes. He decrypts one string—and stops cold.
Access Timestamp: Five Days Ago
Access Point: Secure Vault D4 / NATO Black Archive
Authorization: GROUP ECHO // CIA-OG-E
He frowns.
Group Echo died two years ago. Paper-shredded. Burned to ash after the Mazar-e-Sharif leak. But someone used their clearance to access the archive… and pull the Black List.
"Not dead," he mutters. "Reactivated. Or worse—puppeteered."
He keys deeper, tracing the digital residue like footprints in snow. Files flagged as high-clearance bleed into view—Spectre's touch. An encrypted ghost hand moving inside an abandoned system. Not brute force. Clean. Surgical. Someone wanted him to find this trail.
Ghost exhales through clenched teeth. Someone turned a dead cell into a smokescreen. Someone with the keys to the vault—and a reason to kill everyone who's ever worn a 141 patch.
"Spectre didn't do this alone," he says to no one.
The drive clicks. A secondary flag pops up—embedded GPS coordinates. Outside Warsaw. Old NATO grounds.
He shuts the laptop.
Time to follow the footsteps.
---
Snow curls off the roof of a stolen Škoda as Ghost drives northeast, low in the seat, eyes on the frost-hazed road. The city falls behind, replaced by stretches of old industrial zones and rusting train yards. He cuts the headlights a half mile from the target—just the moon now, cold and sharp over a frozen landscape.
Ahead: the shell of a NATO logistics hub, long dead on paper. Perimeter fencing half-gone, razor wire tangled like forgotten thread. Buildings squatted in the dark like bunkers left behind after some unfinished war.
Ghost checks the geotag on the laptop. Blip matches—Spectre used this place to pull the list.
He parks in the treeline, pops the trunk. Swaps plates. Pulls gear.
Kevlar vest under a fake contractor's jacket. Suppressed M4. EMP slug charge. Burner phone already connected to a NATO ghost net. Mask down.
He watches a security drone drift past—commercial-grade, not military. The shell company's logo flashes faintly on its hull. Legitimate cover… on the surface.
Ghost mutters, "Too clean."
Through the scope, he tracks movement—two men smoking near a loading dock, both too alert to be bored rent-a-cops. One's wearing a SIG in a thigh rig with custom grips. Not local. Definitely not standard issue.
He flanks wide, hugging shadow and snowbank until he finds a weak spot in the fence. Slides through. Heartbeat steady. Boots silent.
---
Wind howls across the logistics yard, dragging snow in sharp, spiraling waves across the tarmac. Ghost ducks under a steel overhang near a service door, frost crackling under his boots. Motionless. Listening.
Two guards huddle by a rust-stained barrel fire. No chatter—military silence. One flicks ash off a cigarette, the other keeps eyes moving. Rifles slung low but hands never far. These men were trained, not hired.
Ghost moves when cloud cover swallows the moon.
He crosses ten meters of open ground in seconds, hunched low, one gloved hand gripping the garrote wired through his wrist rig. No sound but the wind and the distant creak of old scaffolding.
The first guard doesn't see him. Ghost loops the garrote over the man's head, yanks hard. A muffled gurgle, one flailing elbow, then stillness. He drags the body into the shadows, cloak of snow already covering tracks.
The second turns—too late. Ghost's blade flashes from the jacket's inner seam, punches into the man's side, fast and clean between the ribs. A grunt. Collapse. Another shadow swallowed by cold.
Inside, the air tastes of rust and oil.
Dim emergency lights flicker overhead, casting long, twitching shadows over crates marked in multiple alphabets—Polish, Cyrillic, NATO codes burned into wood. Black market arms, fresh from forgotten wars.
Ghost stalks between the stacks, each step measured, each movement deliberate. A hallway yawns ahead, half-lit and empty. At the far end: a reinforced door with a thumbprint scanner and keypad.
The server room lies beyond that door.
He pulls the stolen access card from a dead man's vest. Swipes once. The light turns amber.
Ghost exhales slowly. "Not going through," he mutters.
Plan B.
He pulls a thermite wedge from his pack, fits it to the door hinge, arms it. Three seconds. White-hot hiss. The door slumps inward with a screech.
---
The server room breathes cold. Not from the Polish winter clawing at the walls, but from the machines themselves—racks of humming towers spitting blue LED light into the dark. A synthetic jungle, pulsing with encrypted secrets and buried commands.
Ghost moves between the rows like a phantom in a graveyard.
He kneels at the terminal closest to the hardline port. Old-school military gear—obsolete but hardened, made for warzones where satellites fall and wireless dies. He jacks in a custom-built sniffer drive. Lights flicker.
Lines of code spill across the screen in rapid-fire bursts. Datastreams fractured by dead-end file names and military ciphers, all painted with the faint watermark of the CIA. Ghost's mask reflects the screen's glow—his expression unreadable beneath the skull.
"Talk to me," he mutters.
The drive cracks metadata first—Spectre's fingerprints bloom like blood in water. Access logs buried under scrubbed entries. Ten failed intrusions. One success. He tunneled in through backdoors left open by the CIA's own developers. Ghost recognizes the signature—a deep exploit only a handful of operators ever knew.
A cold realization sinks in: Spectre used their own legacy tools against them.
Ghost flips open a side pane. A string of file pulls cascade down, one after the next. Then—highlighted in red—OP-REVISION-ZERO. Locked. Partitioned. Flagged as "Eyes Only – Directive Blackwatch."
He leans forward. "Why you digging this up now…"
The data sniffer strains under the encryption. Subroutines engage—ghost-coded algorithms Ghost stole from an MI6 honeypot four years ago. They slice through the first two barriers, stall on the third.
A warning chirps—someone tried to purge the file two days ago but aborted the command. Sloppy. Desperate.
He watches a thumbnail flicker in the corner of the terminal—archival footage, blurry but stamped with an ops marker: MOSUL-NV-CAM-H4. The image freezes. No sound, just the memory of it, waiting behind the lock.
He reaches to pull deeper—
A footstep.
Soft. Wrong cadence for a patrol.
Ghost slips the drive free, tucks it into his vest, and draws the blade at his hip. Someone's about to walk into the wrong room.
And they'll answer for Spectre.
---
The technician barely has time to register the figure stepping out of the shadows.
Ghost closes the gap in three strides, blade already angled low and silent. A hand clamps over the man's mouth—too late to scream. He slams the technician against the server cage, edge of the blade pressing under the jawline with surgical pressure. Not enough to cut—just a promise.
The tech's name badge flashes in the cold light: EMIL KOZA. Civilian. Late twenties. Eyes wide with the realization he's already dead if he lies.
Ghost leans in, voice low and deadpan. "What the hell are you doing here after lockdown, Emil?"
"I—I forgot my phone," Emil blurts, breath stuttering against the balaclava.
Ghost drives the blade a fraction deeper. A bead of blood wells. "Try again."
Emil breaks like wet paper. "Look, I was paid to unlock one file. No questions. No trace. I swear, that's all I did."
"Who paid you?"
"No name. Just a symbol." Emil's pupils jitter. "A silver skull. One red eye. He sent crypto to a cold wallet—enough to wipe my debt twice over. Said I'd never hear from him again if I did it clean."
Ghost lowers the knife slightly. "You log the access?"
"No. That was the deal. Unlock it. Walk away. Forget it."
Ghost scans his face, weighing the panic, watching for the tells. Nothing false. Just fear and guilt. He re-sheathes the knife but keeps his eyes on Emil. "You're going to give me your clearance codes. Then you're going to take a long holiday. Somewhere with no cameras and no Wi-Fi."
Emil nods furiously, fingers already trembling over the nearby terminal.
---
The access codes drip across the screen one by one—Koza's credentials unlocking something buried under layers of NATO encryption and off-the-books subnets. Ghost stands over the terminal, breath tight, unreadable behind the mask.
OP-REVISION-ZERO opens like a surgical incision.
A folder. No name. Just a string of numbers and an old Task Force watermark.
He clicks it.
The screen goes black.
Then static.
Then video.
Helmet cam. A 141 operator's POV—Ghost recognizes the grain, the field distortion of a TacNet unit five years out of service. Timestamp: Mosul. 0218 Zulu. Five years prior.
Dust and gunfire choke the image. Shouts in comms, staccato and panicked. Ghost hears familiar voices—Soap barking for cover, Gaz coordinating an air corridor. Then a scream. Not one of theirs.
Ghost watches himself from a distance—his own voice giving the call: "Exfil—now! Pull the team!"
But there's one more figure on-screen.
Back turned. Black-clad. Hit in the leg. Dragged behind a wall by insurgents in the chaos. The cam tumbles. Boots. Blood. The view shudders until it locks on the sky.
One last sound before the feed cuts—a crackled voice. The same one that's haunted Ghost in encrypted whispers over the last few days.
Spectre.
The screen freezes on the final frame—Ghost's own silhouette, retreating through smoke.
He steps back from the monitor, pulse pounding beneath the layers of his gear. The realization lands hard and quiet.
They left him.
Left Spectre alive in a kill zone. Unaccounted for. Forgotten by the books. Ghost had pulled the team—standard protocol under threat collapse. But Spectre wasn't just collateral.
He was abandoned.
The lights in the server room hum faintly. Ghost doesn't move for a full five seconds.
Then he turns and drives his fist straight into the screen. It shatters, sparks skipping across the metal rack.
Glass in his glove. Doesn't matter.
Now he understands. Spectre didn't just vanish. He fractured. And every crossed-out name on that list is a scalpel stroke across an old wound.
Spectre isn't hunting 141.
He's sentencing them.
Ghost wipes blood from his knuckles and leans into the dark.
"Now I know why he's coming," he mutters.
"And I know who's next."
---
The shattered monitor flickers weakly, its final image burned into the back of Ghost's skull—Spectre, face blurred by combat static, dragged into the dark. Forgotten. Abandoned.
Ghost's fists rest on the terminal rack, blood smearing across aluminum. He doesn't breathe. Doesn't blink. Just stares through the twisted reflection in broken glass.
"Five years," he mutters. "We buried him in the data."
The rage comes in layers—not loud, not wild, but clinical. Surgical. He begins moving through the terminal banks with methodical precision, slotting in thermite charges at intervals. One. Two. Three.
Flick. Primed.
Data cables hiss as he yanks them from their ports. Drives whine in protest. He empties two clips into the primary servers before the fire even starts.
Then comes the hum—deep and slow. The thermite catches. White-hot fingers snake along the floor racks, melting through terabytes of intel, ghost archives, and sins no one wants to remember.
Ghost watches the burn spread, eyes locked on the server that housed OP-REVISION-ZERO. No expression. Just the quiet knowledge that Spectre's wound began here—and now this place dies for it.
Smoke thickens. Lights blink out one by one. Ghost turns his back on the blaze and vanishes down the corridor, leaving nothing but fire and guilt to chew through the past.
---
The fire paints the inside of the server room in shades of hell—molten reds and collapsing whites. Ghost doesn't look back. He's already halfway through the corridor, smoke curling at his heels like it wants to follow him out.
The data's gone. So is the past. But the list—that lives.
He moves with intent, methodical as clockwork. At a maintenance substation near the exit, Ghost opens a shielded panel and connects his data vault—a hardened drive coated in reflective foil, smaller than his palm. One by one, he transfers files: Spectre's symbol, OP-REVISION-ZERO, the list of names. Names that bleed like open wounds. Names crossed out like someone's to-do kill sheet.
Last: he scrubs the vault trail with a burn script—deep-clean, black ops level, no logs, no shadows. Just absence.
Outside, the storm has thickened. Snow muffles the world into silence. Ghost shoulders his pack and steps into the white—
—just as twin headlights slash through the dark.
He drops low, finger twitching near the M4's grip. A black truck barrels around the far end of the loading bay. No plates. Military-grade tires. Engine tuned for torque, not speed.
Ghost doesn't hesitate.
He sprints into the blind zone beside a snow-cloaked crate, rips a flashbang from his belt, and sets the fuse with a twist of his thumb.
Tick. Tick.
Clink.
The grenade arcs clean through the passenger window. Ghost flattens himself against the crate as white light detonates. Muffled shouts. Gunmetal slams against steel.
Ghost rolls out, rifle up.
---
Snow drinks sound. Flashbangs don't.
The blast concusses the night—metallic, sharp. One of the mercs stumbles from the cab, blinded, rifle half-raised. Ghost moves first. Two rounds punch through the man's chest, dropping him into the snow like a marionette with cut strings.
The second merc swings around from the back of the truck, silhouetted by brake lights and steam. Muzzle flash spits fire. Rounds chew up crates, snap past Ghost's head.
Ghost dives left into a drainage ditch, knees buckling on ice. His breath fogs as he rolls, snaps up the M4 with practiced calm. NVG flips down. The world turns green and grim.
The merc's heat signature pulses behind cover—too slow. Too loud.
Tap. One round through the thigh. He collapses, screams muffled by blood and snow. Ghost's boots crunch through crusted ice as he closes in.
The merc coughs red, wheezing through a punctured lung. Still clutching his weapon. Still defiant.
Ghost plants a boot on his chest, forces eye contact.
"Who gave the order?" His voice is steel and storm.
The merc blinks blood. Smiles crooked. "Spectre… already watching the next one."
Ghost doesn't flinch. He pulls the rifle's suppressor close to the man's temple.
One shot. No hesitation.
---
The wind claws at the open truck doors, dragging snow into the blood-slicked interior. Ghost climbs into the back, boots leaving prints across a dead man's last breaths.
Inside: a black duffel. Nondescript. Too clean. Ghost unzips it slow.
False passports, unmarked currency bands—euros, zloty, USD. A burner cell vibrates once, screen lit like a cold eye. One message.
> "Spectre meets a contact tonight in Lviv. Intel says he's buying a name."
Ghost stares at the screen, expression unreadable behind the skull mask. His thumb hovers for a beat, then scrolls through a second file—metadata from the sniper's uplink. Coordinates. Confirmed identity match.
He checks the Black List again. Soap's name: still untouched. Still next.
Ghost mutters under his breath, more vow than thought. "Not this one. Not him."
He pulls the duffel shut, slams the truck door, and disappears into the snow.
Behind him, flames rise from the thermite blaze, chewing the compound to ash. No trails. No mercy.