“Sit Down, You’re A Nobody ” My General Father Said — Until He Heard My Call Sign “Ghost 13 ”
My father’s orders were clear: find an infiltration route into the Soviet-era bunker in the Carpathian Mountains, and then hand that route over to the CIA so they could leak it into the shadow networks.
He wanted the Ghost to find it.
He wanted the Ghost to secure the nerve gas.
And then, he wanted his specialized Delta Force capture team, waiting at the extraction coordinates, to bag the phantom and bring them to him in chains.
I pulled up the declassified blueprints of the facility, known in old KGB files as Object 404.
It was built into the side of a granite mountain, designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike.
The main entrance was a pair of two-foot-thick steel blast doors guarded by automated sentry turrets and a fifty-man garrison of Trident Security Solutions mercenaries.
Director Clayton was right; a conventional assault would be a bloodbath.
But Soviet engineering always had a fatal flaw: they prioritized durability over efficiency.
By cross-referencing topographic satellite imagery with thermal scans, I found it.
A geothermal exhaust vent, designed to siphon heat away from the bunker’s massive subterranean generators.
It was a vertical shaft, barely wide enough for a human, plunging three hundred feet straight down into the mountain before connecting to the facility’s primary ductwork.
The internal temperature of the shaft would be hovering around 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
It was practically a suicide drop.
It was perfect.
I compiled the data into a crisp, heavily classified dossier and brought it to Conference Room Alpha.
General Mitchell was at the head of the table, nursing a cup of black coffee.
He looked at the blueprints, tracing the red line I had drawn down the geothermal shaft.
“The temperature in this vent is lethal,” my father noted, his eyes narrowing as he assessed the data.
“An operator would have less than four minutes to descend three hundred feet before the heat exposure caused catastrophic neurological failure.”
“Which is why no conventional force would attempt it, General,” I replied, standing at attention.
“But if this Ghost 13 is the anomaly they appear to be… they will see the calculated risk. It is the only blind spot in Trident’s perimeter.”
My father stared at the blueprint for a long time.
Then, he looked up at me.
There was a strange, grudging respect in his eyes.
It was a look I had spent twenty years trying to earn, and now, it tasted like ash.
“Excellent work, Captain Mitchell,” he said quietly.
“You have exceeded expectations.” He turned to a CIA liaison standing in the corner of the room.
“Encrypt this file. Bury it in a honeypot server known to be accessed by black-market intelligence brokers. Make it look like a Russian defector is selling the blueprints. The Vanguard monitors those channels. They’ll take the bait.”
“And the extraction trap, sir?” the liaison asked.
“I am deploying a covert Delta Force element to the valley floor, five miles from the bunker,” my father commanded, his voice hardening.
“They will remain entirely off comms, buried in the snow. Once the Ghost secures the VX gas and exits the facility, Delta will move in. They secure the chemical weapon first. Then, they sedate the operative and bring them to me.”
“Understood, General.”
I gave a crisp salute, turned on my heel, and walked out of the room.
Four hours later, I was sitting in a dimly lit, civilian-owned coffee shop in Alexandria, Virginia.
The man sitting across from me was reading a newspaper, wearing a civilian trench coat.
Colonel Hayes didn’t look like the commander of the most lethal shadow program in the world.
He looked like an accountant.
“The Pentagon leaked the route,” I murmured softly, blowing on my tea.
“It hit the wire twenty minutes ago.”
“I saw it,” Hayes replied without looking up from his paper.
“Your father is a brilliant tactician, I’ll give him that. He’s using a weapon of mass destruction as a cheese cube in a mousetrap.”
“Delta Force is going to be waiting at my exfil,” I said.
“If I go in, I’m sandwiched between heavily armed Trident mercenaries and our own Tier-1 operators.”
Hayes finally lowered the newspaper.
His eyes were cold, calculating.
“We can abort. Let the CIA try to bomb the mountain and hope the VX doesn’t vaporize the civilian populace.”
“No,” I said instantly.
“The chemical compound C11H26NO2PS, known as VX, is the most toxic synthetic nerve agent ever created. Ten milligrams on the skin is fatal. If Trident sells this to a terror cell, thousands will die. We take the mission.”
“And the Delta capture team?” Hayes challenged.
I offered a small, dangerous smile.
“General Mitchell wants to play chess. We’ll play chess. He assumes I’ll need a conventional Vanguard exfil. He assumes I’ll run. But we’re going to use his own men to carry the payload out.”
Hayes stared at me for a moment, analyzing the audacity of the plan.
Then, he nodded once.
“Wheels up in three hours, Ghost. Dress warm.”
The interior of the unacknowledged C-17 Globemaster III was freezing, pitch black, and vibrating with the roar of its massive engines.
We were cruising at thirty-five thousand feet over the hostile airspace of the Carpathian Mountains.
The rear ramp was open, revealing a swirling, violent abyss of snow and darkness.
I stood at the edge of the ramp, completely encased in an advanced High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) suit.
The suit was thermally insulated, layered over my standard Vanguard tactical gear, with a specialized rebreather clamped over my face to feed me oxygen in the thin atmosphere.
“Drop zone is zero-point-five miles from the geothermal vent,” Hayes’s voice crackled in my earpiece from the Vanguard command center.
“Trident has radar arrays sweeping the airspace, so you have to pull your chute low. Very low.”
“Understood,” I breathed into the mask.
“Remember the timeline, Ghost. You have four minutes in that shaft before you cook. Once you secure the VX, proceed to the primary blast doors. Do not engage the Delta Force capture team. You outmaneuver them, you don’t fight our own boys. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged. Going dark.”
I stepped off the ramp and plunged into the abyss.
The freefall was violently chaotic.
The blizzard whipped around me, snow and ice crystals hammering against my visor like buckshot.
I was dropping at over a hundred and twenty miles per hour, completely blind in the storm, relying entirely on the altimeter strapped to my wrist.
At two thousand feet, standard protocol dictated pulling the cord.
I let it drop to one thousand.
Eight hundred.
Six hundred.
At five hundred feet, my altimeter blared a red warning.
I yanked the ripcord.
The parachute deployed with a bone-jarring CRACK, violently decelerating my fall.
I had barely ten seconds to steer the canopy before my boots slammed into the waist-deep snow of the mountainside.
I hit the quick-release on my harness, letting the black silk blow away into the blizzard, and immediately dropped into a prone position, raising my suppressed SR-25 marksman rifle.
Through the thermal optics, I scanned the ridge.
Two Trident mercenaries were patrolling a hundred yards away, bundled in heavy white winter gear, their breath pluming in the freezing air.
They were highly trained professionals, moving in a tight tactical formation.
I didn’t have time to wait for them to pass.
Pfft.
Pfft.
Two suppressed rounds cut through the howling wind.
Both men dropped silently into the snowdrifts, neutralized before they even knew they were targeted.
I pushed through the brutal cold, navigating the treacherous terrain until I reached the coordinates I had mapped out in the J2 directorate.
Buried beneath a camouflage net and a layer of snow was the heavy iron grate of the geothermal exhaust vent.
I knelt beside it and pulled a specialized thermal blanket from my pack, wrapping it tightly around my body over my tactical gear.
The heat radiating from the grate was already suffocating, melting the snow in a five-foot radius.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered to myself.
I pried the grate open, secured my rappelling line to a jagged outcrop of rock, and dropped into the shaft.
The transition from sub-zero blizzard to a hundred-and-forty-degree inferno was physically agonizing.
It felt like stepping into an industrial oven.
The air was thick, suffocating, and smelled of sulfur and burning oil.
My thermal blanket reflected some of the heat, but within ten seconds, I was dripping with sweat, my heart hammering against my ribs as my body struggled to regulate its temperature.
I controlled my descent, sliding down the narrow, claustrophobic pipe.
The metal walls burned through my heavy gloves.
One minute.
My vision started to blur at the edges.
Two minutes.
The air in my rebreather was growing hot, burning my throat with every inhalation.
Three minutes.
My altimeter showed fifty feet remaining.
My muscles were screaming, the extreme heat causing my motor functions to become sluggish.
Four minutes.
I hit the bottom of the shaft, kicking through the secondary ventilation grate and tumbling out into the dimly lit, cool metallic corridor of Object 404.
I ripped the rebreather off my face and tore away the thermal blanket, gasping for the cool, recycled air of the bunker.
I lay on the cold steel floor for ten agonizing seconds, letting my core temperature stabilize.
I was inside.
And Trident had absolutely no idea.
I stood up, shaking off the exhaustion, and drew my suppressed Mk23.
I tapped a small device on my wrist, activating a localized EMP jammer that would spoof any security cameras in a thirty-foot radius, looping their footage to show empty hallways.
The hunt was on.