Chapter 28 - The Ghost Reborn
Damon stepped from the shadows behind a towering steel support beam. He didn't raise his rifle, but his posture was that of a coiled predator ready to strike.
"You should have stayed dead in Sevastopol, Victor," Damon said, his voice echoing flatly in the massive silo.
Kowalski turned slowly, exhaling a plume of blue smoke. A thin, cruel smirk touched his scarred lips. "And miss your suburban retirement? A plumber, Damon? Really? Ghost-Six, the apex predator of Task Force Chimera, fixing leaking toilets for housewives and coaching little league?"
"It’s an honest life," Damon replied. "More honest than anything we did in the black ops division."
"You deserted," Kowalski snapped, his voice dropping into a harsh gravel. "You left twenty million dollars in bearer bonds, burnt our extraction vehicle, and left me buried under concrete. The Syndicate doesn't forget deserters, Damon. And they certainly don't let living legends wander free with twelve years of our state secrets locked in their heads."
"The Syndicate is gone," Damon said evenly. "You’re operating on private contractor money. Rogue elements. Desperate men chasing old ghosts."
"Desperate?" Kowalski chuckled, motioning with his gloved hand.
From the upper catwalks fifty feet above, red laser dots pierced the darkness, splashing across Damon’s chest and forehead. Snipers. Two of them.
"You’re outflanked, Ghost-Six," Kowalski said. "I didn't come to hire you back. I came to take your dog tags and make sure the Chimera files stay buried forever. Your wife and that little boy at Lake Clearwater... they won't even hear the shot."
At the mention of Lake Clearwater, something fundamentally shifted inside Damon.
The lingering hesitation of the peaceful civilian dissolved entirely. The eyes that looked at Kowalski were no longer human; they were the calculated eyes of an executioner.
"You shouldn't have mentioned my family, Victor," Damon whispered.
Before Kowalski could register the change, Damon dropped his weight by three inches—the exact movement of *the kinetic drift*.
A sniper round cracked through the air where Damon’s head had been a microsecond earlier, sparking violently off the concrete floor.
Damon rolled left, snapping the HK416 to his shoulder in a blur of motion. *Pfft-pfft.*
May you like
Two suppressed shots echoed like muted claps of thunder. Fifty feet above, a sniper tumbled over the steel railing, screaming as he plummeted into the concrete floor with a sickening wet crunch.
***
