The wind howled a relentless, icy symphony, stinging my skin even through the reinforced hood of my ghillie suit. Below, nestled like a cancerous growth in the snow-choked valley, lay the facility. A fortress of concrete and steel, spitting heat plumes into the frigid air. Years ago, the contract came in. Five targets. Warlords, smugglers, rats feeding on the conflict in this freezing hellscape. And one complication: whispers said the tech smuggler, Maksim Volkov, was a ghost, an informant for the alphabet soup back home. Deniability wasn't just preferred; it was mandatory. No trace. No fingerprints. No ballistics.
My breath plumed out, thin and white, instantly snatched away by the gale. Ten steps, they said? Sometimes it felt like a hundred. The variables spread out in my mind like a tactical map: thermal signatures, guard rotations, structural weaknesses, potential escape routes, satellite coverage gaps, the specific frequencies of their encrypted chatter. And Volkov. Killing him cleanly was the priority, but the others needed to go simultaneously to prevent panic and data uploads.
They were gathered in the main administrative building, a heavily fortified cube in the center of the complex. Four warlords, thick with ill-gotten gains and paranoia, and Volkov, the weasel supplying them with untraceable comms and weapon components. The plan was simple, brutal, and elegant. Coordinated elimination, triggered by the facility's own systems.
Hours ago, I'd slipped past outer patrols like mist, disabled external comms, and planted charges – not explosive ones, but thermite paste precisely applied to critical server junctions and reinforced door frames. Small, controlled, designed to melt, not blast. Infiltration wasn't about brute force; it was about understanding how things worked and making them stop working just so.
The timing had to be perfect. Server integrity failure when the main power grid momentarily dipped for a scheduled generator swap. Simultaneously, precisely timed electromagnetic pulses from devices I'd hidden would fry their backups and jam any short-range distress signals. The thermite would melt the key server junctions after the pulse, making it look like an electrical fault caused by the grid instability. Clean. Untraceable to external attack.
Positioned on a ridge overlooking the facility, the wind biting through layers of insulation, I watched the complex through my scope. Inside, they were having a late-night meeting, sealing some monstrous deal. My internal clock ticked. Three minutes.
My finger rested on the trigger of a custom-tuned high-powered rifle, but it wasn't loaded with lead. It was a specialized delivery system. My target: a single, specific window on the administration building, third floor. A tiny, almost invisible glass vial, filled with an aerosolized neurotoxin designed to mimic a massive stroke. Dispersal pattern calculated to fill that room and that room only in under ten seconds. Effective range: 300 meters. Wind correction: significant.
My mind was a sterile, logical engine running on pure calculation. The cold didn't register as discomfort, just another input for wind drift compensation.
My wrist-mounted device buzzed silently. One minute.
My breathing was slow, shallow, controlled. Heartbeat steady at 45. The crosshairs settled on the reinforced pane of glass. Calculations ran again: angle of impact, velocity needed to penetrate the glass without shattering the vial prematurely, trajectory accounting for wind speed and density.
Thirty seconds.
The faint hum of the facility's power grid shifted. The scheduled dip. Now.
My finger squeezed. Not a jerk, but a slow, deliberate pressure. The rifle barely kicked. A soft 'thwip' in the wind. The vial, near-invisible, arced across the darkness, a ghost moving through the storm. It struck the glass – a faint, almost inaudible chime against the wind's roar. A hairline fracture appeared. Followed instantly by the synchronized electromagnetic pulse.
Inside, alarms should have shrieked, lights flickered, systems crashed. From my vantage point, I saw only the briefest stutter in the exterior floodlights. It would look like the grid dip exacerbated by an electrical fault chain reaction.
The thermite charges, timed to ignite milliseconds after the pulse, began their silent work on the server junctions. Data uploads cut off mid-packet. Escape routes sealed by melted mechanisms.
The neurotoxin mist blossomed inside the room. Silent. Invisible. Lethal. Four warlords and a tech smuggler, all gone in a matter of seconds, leaving no forensic trace of external interference.
Except... one variable wasn't accounted for. A sixth man? No, one of the five was faster, or perhaps just luckier. A secondary exit from the room I hadn't charted? Maksim Volkov. He burst from a side door, scrambling into the courtyard, heading for the vehicle bay. He'd inhaled a dose, I knew, but maybe not enough for immediate incapacitation. Or maybe his body was a unique anomaly. Another variable to manage.
He wasn't getting away. Not with the data he might carry, not with the contract incomplete.
He reached a reinforced SUV, guards piling in. The engine roared to life. The vehicle skidded on the ice, headlights cutting twin paths through the swirling snow as it sped towards the main gate, probably hoping the 'electrical failure' had left it operational.
My position was compromised if lingered. But the mission wasn't finished. Adapt. Low resources, high success.
I packed the rifle, slung it across my back, and began moving along the high ridge, paralleling the road leading down from the facility. My mind wasn't focused on pursuit, but on geography. The road below wound through treacherous passes, crossing deep ravines via hastily constructed overpasses. One specific overpass, a few kilometers down, was notorious. Structurally sound, mostly, but built over a steep, unstable slope known for seasonal avalanches. And it was currently covered in a thick, precarious layer of ice and freshly fallen snow.
The convoy, headlights tiny dots in the distance, was moving fast. Too fast for a direct shot, even if I wanted to leave a trace. But I didn't need a shot. I needed physics.
I reached my pre-calculated vantage point above the overpass. I placed small vibratory charges along the rock face below the overpass support pillars. Not enough to bring the structure down directly, but enough, when magnified by the weight of the snow and ice and the vibrations of a vehicle crossing above, to trigger a natural collapse.
The SUV hit the overpass. I triggered the charges.
Not a blast. Just a deep, resonant rumble from the mountain's core. The earth groaned. The snowpack above the slope fractured. Then, with a sound like tearing fabric followed by the roar of a freight train, the entire hillside gave way.
A white wave, heavy as concrete, surged down. It hit the overpass supports like a tidal wave, undermining them instantly. The structure groaned, twisted, and then gave way. The SUV headlights pitched wildly as the vehicle plunged into the abyss, swallowed by snow, ice, and rock.
Silence returned, broken only by the wind. The mission was complete. Five targets. Clean. No bullets found. No bomb craters. Just an unfortunate, perfectly timed avalanche on a structurally questionable overpass during a storm. Nature, it would seem, had settled some scores.
My objective was achieved.
The sheets are soft. Too soft. The air is still. Too still. My eyes blink open, staring at the textured ceiling of my bedroom. The rhythmic beep of a distant clock radio replaces the howl of the wind. Sunlight, weak but steady, filters through the blinds.
The mission is over. It was years ago.
This is the boring life. The one outside the storm, outside the kill zones, outside the calculation. Here, I am not The Ghost. I am just... me. A man in a quiet house, in a quiet neighborhood.
A floorboard creaks down the hall. Sarah. My daughter. Ten years old now. She'll be up soon, needing breakfast, needing... something from me I don't know how to give.
Emily's side of the bed is empty. She's been sleeping in the guest room for months. We tried. God, we tried, after I 'retired'. To be normal. To be a husband, a father.
I can dismantle a fortified facility with physics and timing, but I can't navigate a simple conversation about school politics. I can remain ice-cold under fire, but I freeze up when Sarah looks at me with wide, expectant eyes, searching for something I can't produce. Affection? Spontaneity? Apathy is the only constant emotion I have left, and that's a desert unsuitable for growing relationships.
When I try to smile, it feels like a mask. When I try to engage, the words are measured, precise, tactical – like planning an infiltration, not talking to my daughter. It feels artificial, even to me. Especially to me.
The self-loathing is a dull ache beneath the ribs. This life, this softness, this lack of clear objectives – it exposes what I am. A weapon designed for a war that ended, left to rust in peacetime. The Ghost hates this idleness, this mundane impotence. But I hate what the Ghost had to become to be so good at his job. And because that part of me is all that's left, the hate turns inward.
I swing my legs out of bed. The floor is cool beneath my feet. Another day. Another mission I'm failing. Sarah will emerge soon, and I will have to perform. I, the ultimate operator of death and disruption, will attempt the most impossible mission of all: pretending to be human. And I know, with the certainty of a perfect kill shot, that I will fail. Just like yesterday. Just like the day before. The cold on the mountain was external. The cold here is inside, and it's far more powerful.