Ghost's Hide Site, Eastern Highlands, Scotland
The wind outside howled like it knew his name. Ghost didn't flinch. Didn't blink.
Basement stank of mildew, gun oil, and rot—like memory. Candlelight jittered against the stone, shadows twitching over rusted tools and rat traps. A bootlace hung nailed to the rafters, chewed through at the end.
He sat hunched on an ammo crate, half-armored, half-dead inside. Vest still strapped, but the mask lay cracked beside him—split clean through the seal like it had given up first.
Maps spiderwebbed the far wall, each one punctured with red thumbtacks, coordinates, names half-scratched out. Photos bleached by time. One casing taped dead-center: "VOSS-1," etched like a signature.
Ghost hit play.
Helmet cam footage stuttered across a scratched tablet. Green flares. Concrete smoke. Screams under comms.
Spectre's last run.
The audio peaked, clipped, dipped. Then a hiss—like teeth baring through static.
> "—Laswell… not clean… Valk wasn't alone…"
Ghost rewound. Scrubbed. Nothing more. Just bloodlight and silence.
He opened the encrypted drive Laswell handed him in Prague—weeks back, no context, just her eyes avoiding his.
Same Mosul files. Same bones. But this version bled slower. Fewer redactions. More teeth in the gaps.
He stared at the screen, jaw flexing.
Then slid a folder labeled "Echo Black: Dusk Protocol" into the console. Locked. Unreadable.
He didn't swear. Didn't move.
Just dragged the cracked mask back toward him with two fingers, set it upright like a tombstone.
Ghost stared through the visor like it could still see.
> "What the hell did you see, Alaric?"
The candle popped.
And he sat still in the dark, letting the silence finish what the tape couldn't.
---
The basement creaked with wind and old guilt.
Ghost stood motionless in front of the board. Voss's photo stared back—creased at the edges, blood-mottled, taped to a satellite map like an accusation.
He didn't blink.
The flicker came fast—memory, not mercy.
**
Mosul.
Spectre crouched beside a half-buried IED marker, tablet flickering with pixel-sick recon. His jaw twitched, voice low but razor-sharp.
> "This sat feed's from last week. We're shooting ghosts."
Ghost leaned over his shoulder, voice clipped.
> "Orders are orders."
Spectre didn't even look up.
> "And graves get filled by good soldiers swallowing shit they should've spat back."
Later—
Price barking across comms about blast radius and civilian bleed.
Spectre shouting over him.
> "You want neat headlines or clean hands, Captain?"
The comms cut before the answer.
Last flash—Spectre in the dark, eyes lit by firelight, voice near-empty.
> "It's bigger than this war. They sold the outcome before the first bullet."
**
The echo faded.
Ghost stood there breathing through grit teeth, the weight of things unsaid grinding behind his ribs.
He opened his comms tablet. Typed:
> TO: Soap
SUBJECT: Did you know?
Fingers hovered. Cursor blinked like it was daring him.
Then delete.
He shut the device, jaw set, and turned back to the cracked mask.
> "Then why'd you pull the trigger on the truth?"
No answer. Just the wind again—whispering through the cracks like it knew who lied first.
---
The dive bar reeked of bleach, whiskey, and second chances. Neon signs blinked outside, casting bruised light across cracked linoleum. The back room—once a storage closet—now pulsed with a dozen jury-rigged monitors and a humming server rack scavenged from a shuttered precinct.
Ethan sat hunched, eyes bloodshot, cigarette burning down untouched in the ashtray. His fingers danced across keys worn to blank.
He fed another set of scrambled logs into the decoder—a Frankenstein of NYPD cold case code and something... uglier. Black bag logic layered in. The kind of code that didn't come with manuals, just warnings.
The waveform jumped. Chatter spiked.
Clip one: crossfire panic in Arabic. Not useful.
Clip two: an officer barking about "thermal shadows" near a convoy. Wrong year.
Clips three through five—junk noise, drones, crosstalk, entropy.
Clip six hit different.
> "Package ECHO-V, secure by contact 'SENECA.'"
Clean. Precise. Laced with static but undeniable.
Ethan didn't blink. Just leaned back, cracked his neck, and stared at the waveform like it might flinch.
He muttered, voice low, jaw tight:
> "Seneca, Lara... you just made this personal."
He tagged the clip, patched it into his signal tree—Dead Men's Threads—a chaos web of red lines, intel photos, and burnt-out aliases.
In the center: Voss.
To the right: a blacked-out CIA org tree.
Dead center—pinned under a pushpin still stained with dried blood—a photo.
Lara Seneca.
Kevlar vest. Eyes sharp. A recorder in her hand like a scalpel.
Ethan tapped the image once.
> "You always did talk pretty. Let's see how you sound under pressure."
The waveform kept looping.
He didn't stop it.
---
The Highlands rain hadn't let up in days. Cold crept in through the cracks—stone walls sweating, wind pushing at the boards like it knew what was buried here. Ghost sat on a rusted stool, laptop balanced on one knee, relay tether spliced into a military radio rig two decades obsolete.
He keyed in the old channel—one only three men were supposed to know.
One dead.
One missing.
And him.
The screen blinked. Connected.
He waited.
Heartbeat. Breath. Static.
Then—
ACCESS REVOKED. CHANNEL UNDER CIA PURVIEW. THIS NODE IS LOGGED.
No beep. No warning tone. Just a line of text that hit like a closed coffin.
Ghost didn't sigh. Didn't curse.
He stood, unplugged the relay, and without ceremony, chucked the laptop into the cold fireplace. The plastic cracked. Sparks spat as the battery ruptured.
He watched it burn.
Flames licked the edge of a singed photo tucked beneath a brick—a candid of Soap holding a coffee and flipping off the camera, grin like war hadn't touched him yet.
Ghost didn't move to save it.
Didn't look away either.
He muttered, voice sandpaper-rough:
> "She said silence costs. Guess we're all broke now."
Ash clung to his boots as he walked out.
The storm didn't care who was listening.
Neither did he.
---
The dive bar's power grid hummed off a stolen generator, the only light bleeding from twin monitors duct-taped to a liquor shelf. Ethan sat sideways in a busted barstool, one boot up on the counter, a fork jammed in his teeth as he scanned the final frame looping on-screen.
It froze.
Tunisia.
2:17 a.m.
Thermal signature, faint but tracked—someone shadowed Lara Seneca three hours before she dropped off the grid.
He muttered, chewing the fork handle. "She knew she was tagged… but didn't run."
Fingers danced over the keyboard, pulling archived flight manifests, overlaying sat-feed gaps, matching grainy topography to an NSA no-fly corridor.
The ghost in the footage had a flight path. A pattern.
His algorithm flagged it.
> SUBJECT TRAIL MATCH: 82% CONFIDENCE – ID: UNCONFIRMED.
"Close enough," Ethan said, tone dry as sandpaper.
He opened Ghost's last known burner node—dead-end, years-cold. But protocol taught him the trick wasn't the address. It was the rhythm of the call.
He uploaded the tracer file with a handshake ping that mimicked Ghost's old signal cadence—short, clipped, deliberate.
Typed the message:
> "Still think we're alone in this? Meet me. Port of Newark. Midnight. Don't bring ghosts."
Signed: STAR
No encryption. No bounce-back. If Ghost was alive and listening, he'd know what to do. If not—well, Ethan had danced alone before.
He slid the AX-50 from beneath the bar, checked the suppressor, then kissed the cold steel at the scope's base.
Same ritual. Same war.
"Time to stir the ashes," he said, locking the bolt with a click that echoed in the empty room.
Outside, Newark drowned in smog and silence.
He didn't blink.
---
The fire in the hearth had burned low, mostly ember, but the melted plastic from the laptop still clung to the grate like a corpse that didn't know it was dead.
Ghost didn't move for a long time.
He sat on the edge of the broken coffee table, forearms on knees, mask off, eyes sunk—watching what was left of trust curl into smoke.
The field radio lay on the floor beside him. Cold, older than half the satellites still in orbit, but it hummed when he powered it. A static heartbeat. Analog silence.
He tuned the dial by feel—knuckles scraped, fingernails blackened with old carbon. Memory guided him more than sound.
One long chirp. Two shorts. A pause. The code sang back, old-school Ghost Team handshake.
No voice. No trace.
But the frequency was the answer. It meant one thing.
Understood.
Ghost leaned back, cracked his neck, and stared at the wall. A knife was embedded in the plaster—right through an old team photo, point driven between himself and Soap.
He didn't pull it free.
Just muttered, voice dry and cracked:
> "Let's see if stars can still navigate fire."
He stood, grabbed his kit, and stepped into the dark like he never left it.
---
The port reeked of rust, diesel, and secrets.
Cargo containers stood like tombstones under the sodium glare, USAID logos faded and peeling—painted lies for dirty work. A freighter moaned at dock, its hold half-open like a slit throat. Nearby, a smuggler counted cash with his teeth, sliding a battered sat phone across the crate to the buyer.
She didn't speak.
Desert scarf, dusted boots, jacket too clean for the region—every part of her said traveler. But the fingers were steady. Scar on the knuckle. Press badge folded in her grip, soft with age, creased at the photo.
Lara Seneca.
She dialed. No hesitation.
Her voice rasped out, cracked with heat and distance.
> "They buried him twice. I'm still digging."
The signal climbed a cell tower rigged to a fishing boat's antenna, bounced satellite to satellite—then died. Dead line. Dead lead. But she didn't react.
She tucked the phone inside her coat, slipped through a gap in the crates, vanishing into the veins of the port like smoke through mesh.
Behind her, something moved.
Not footsteps. Just pressure. A shape that didn't reflect light the same way.
Gravehound watched from the shadows—hooded, still, patient. Not ready to strike. Just close enough to learn her breathing rhythm.
He didn't need to hurry.
Ghosts didn't run.
They waited.