#Fertiliser prices

[farmerstrend]

Record 70Million Bags of Maize Harvest: How Government Policies on Fertiliser Subsidies Are Paying Off

“Discover how Kenya’s record maize harvest of 70 million bags is reshaping the nation’s food security, driven by government subsidies and favorable weather conditions.” “Kenya’s maize harvest hits an all-time high! Learn about the factors behind the bumper crop and its impact on the country’s agricultural future.” “Explore the success story of Kenya’s maize harvest reaching 70 million bags,…

[aaaholdinggroupus]

A Comprehensive Guide to Organic and Natural Affordable Fertiliser Online

Fertilisers that come from plants or animals are known as organic fertilisers, while the ones that originate from mineral deposits or from other naturally occurring resources are called non-organic fertilisers. Through this form of fertilising, the ecosystem receives natural materials containing important nutrients, and nothing toxic or synthetic is introduced to the soil and plants. Usually, you can find informational sites selling promising organic compost as one of the affordable fertilisers that you can buy on the internet. If you want to buy affordable fertiliser online, compost is available at various retailers or homemade by recycling organic matter, the likes of food leftovers, leaves, and grass clipping. Moreover, compost brings up the soil nutrient content, structure, water holding capacity and percolation. Read more: https://www.zupyak.com/p/4090989/t/a-comprehensive-guide-to-organic-and-natural-affordable-fertiliser-online

[notayesmanseconomics]

Will the energy crisis deindustrialise Europe?

Will the energy crisis deindustrialise Europe?

As we head into winter in the Northern Hemisphere we face a lot of concerns about both the reliability of our energy supply and the price of it. This was highlighted by the BBC yesterday. Blackouts would be a last resort this winter if energy supplies run low, National Grid has told the BBC. Its boss, John Pettigrew, said its “base case” assumption was the UK would have enough supplies to meet…

[reasonsforhope]

"When Francois Beyers first pitched the concept of 3D ocean farming to the Welsh regulators, he had to sketch it on napkins. 

Today the seafood farm is much more than a drawing, but if you walked along the Welsh coastal path near St David’s, all you’d see is a line of buoys. As Beyers puts it: “It’s what’s below that’s important.”

Thick tussles of lustrous seaweed suspend from the buoys, mussels cling to its furry connective ropes and dangling Chinese lantern-esque nets are filled with oysters and scallops. 

“It’s like an underwater garden,” says Beyers, co-founder of the community-owned regenerative ocean farm, Câr-y-Môr. The 3-hectare site is part of a fledgling sector, one of 12 farms in the UK, which key players believe could boost ocean biodiversity, produce sustainable agricultural fertiliser and provide year-round employment in areas that have traditionally been dependent on tourism. 

Created in 2020 by Beyers and six family members, including his father-in-law – an ex-shellfish farmer – the motivation is apparent in the name, which is Welsh for “for the love of the sea”. ...

Pictured: Drone shot of Câr-y-Môr, which is on the site of abandoned mussel farms. Image: Scott Chalmers

Ocean farming comes from the technical term ‘integrated multi-trophic aquaculture’, which means a mixture of different seaweed and shellfish species growing together to mutually benefit each other. But it’s not just a way of growing food with little human input, it also creates ocean habitat. 

“You’re creating a breeding ground for marine animals,” explains Beyers who adds that the site has seen more gannets diving, porpoises and seals – to name a few – since before the farm was established.

Ocean farms like Câr-y-Môr, notes Ross Brown – environmental research fellow at the University of Exeter – have substantial conservation benefits.

“Setting up a seaweed farm creates an exclusion zone so fishermen can’t trawl it,” explains Brown, who has been conducting experiments on the impacts of seaweed and shellfish farms across the UK. 

Brown believes a thriving ocean farming industry could provide solutions to the UK’s fish stock, which is in “a deeply troubling state” according to a report that found half of the key populations to be overfished. “It would create stepping stones where we have safe havens for fish and other organisms,” he adds. 

But UK regulators have adopted a cautious approach, note Brown and Beyers, making it difficult for businesses like Câr-y-Môr to obtain licenses. “It’s been a tough old slog,” says Beyers, whose aim is to change the legislation to make it easier for others to start ocean farms. 

Despite navigating uncharted territories, the business now has 14 full-time employees, and 300 community members, of which nearly 100 have invested in the community-benefit society. For member and funding manager Tracey Gilbert-Falconer, the model brings expertise but most importantly, buy-in from the tight-knit local community. 

“You need to work with the community than forcing yourself in,” she observes. 

And Câr-y-Môr is poised to double its workforce in 2024 thanks to a Defra grant of £1.1 million to promote and develop the Welsh seafood industry as part of the UK Seafood Fund Infrastructure Scheme. This will go towards building a processing hub, set to be operational in April, to produce agricultural fertiliser from seaweed. 

Full of mineral nutrients and phosphorous from the ocean, seaweed use in farming is nothing new, as Gilbert-Falconer notes: “Farmers in Pembrokeshire talk about their grandad going down to the sea and throwing [seaweed] on their farms.” 

But as the war in Ukraine has caused the price of chemical fertiliser to soar, and the sector tries to reduce its environmental impact – of which synthetic fertiliser contributes 5% of total UK emissions – farmers and government are increasingly looking to seaweed. 

The new hub will have capacity to make 65,000 litres of sustainable fertiliser annually with the potential to cover 13,000 acres of farmland. 

But to feed the processing hub, generate profit and reduce their dependency on grants, the co-op needs to increase the ocean farm size from three to 13 hectares. If they obtain licences, Beyers says they should break even in 18 months. 

For now, Beyers reflects on a “humbling” three years but revels in the potential uses of seaweed, from construction material to clothing.  

“I haven’t seen the limit yet,” he smiles."

-via Positive.News, February 19, 2024

[probablyasocialecologist]

Since the turn of the millennium, the prices of crude oil and food have evolved almost in sync. This can be put down to the high energy input required for the production of agricultural commodities such as synthetic fertilisers and chemical pesticides. In addition, a huge amount of fossil fuel energy is needed to manufacture and operate farm machinery and to process, package, distribute and prepare food. Food systems consume 15% of the fossil fuel energy used globally, according to estimates. The production of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers is particularly energy-intensive, requiring around 4% of global gas consumption.

Public Food Stocks for Price Stabilisation and their Contribution to the Transformation of Food Systems

[thehopefuljournalist]

This article isn't solely about the environment, but some of the things there are, so I'll summarize them for you :)

Bhutan and India boosted tiger numbers

According to Bhutan's latest tiger census, tigers have increased their population from 103 to 131 since 2015 - which is a rise of 27 per-cent.

This follows the country's major interventions to help the wild tiger population, including community based tiger conservation programmes, habitat improvement and human-wildlife conflict management projects. 

Tigers are, of course, still at risk, but Bhutan's dedication to help and preserve their population is inspiring.

India has also reported a six pre-cent rise in their wild tiger population since last year. The country is believed to be populated by 3,682 tigers now.

Germany’s €49 travel pass

A part of a green new policy in Germany, a €49 (£42)-a-month pass allowing unlimited travel on buses and trains in Germany. 

This will result in about 25 per-cent rise (per year) in the numbers of people choosing public transport instead of cars - a low carbon way of transport (according to the national rail operator Deutsche Bahn (DB)). 

The Deutschlandticket launched on 1 May as a plan to lower the cost of living and encourage people to take the train instead of driving.

It seems to already have some great results: The Association of German Transport Companies says that almost 10 million people had used the pass by the end of June. DB has also said that trains to holiday destinations were busier this summer.

UK crop yields rose despite a fall in fertiliser use

 New data from the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) revealed that UK crop yields rose last year, despite a sharp decline in fossil fuel fertiliser use. Many believed that these fertilisers were necessary, but this data proves that belief wrong.

According to Defra, wheat, barley, oilseed rape and sugar beet yields rose by 2.4 per cent in 2022, while fertiliser use fell by a reported 27 per cent. 

These artificial fertilisers are made using natural gas, and because the prices soared in 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, farmers had to either use much less of them, or embrace more natural alternatives.

England’s plastic bag charge was hailed a success

Since the government in England forced supermarkets to charge 5p a plastic bag, there's been a 98 per-cent reduction of single use plastic bags.

That’s according to figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which introduced the charge in 2015, then increased it to 10p in 2021. 

Environmental campaigners welcomed the figures, but urged the UK government not to row back on other green policies, including a deposit return scheme for plastic bottles and rules to make plastic producers contribute to clean-up costs. Both policies have been delayed until 2025. 

Have a good weekend everyone!

Let me know, what good news have yo read or heard about lately?

[cognitivejustice]

Self-sufficient organic Finnish farm grows its own fuel and a greener future

An award-winning farm has teamed up with Helsinki University to create a symbiotic food production system that is self-sufficient in energy and nutrients. It’s a trailblazer in sustainable agriculture.

Photo above: Farmer Markus Eerola shows visitors the biogas plant that helps make his farm an energy producer rather than an energy consumer.Photo: Wif Stenger

Organic Knehtilä Farm provides its own nutrients and energy, thanks to careful long-term planning and a small onsite biogas plant operated by energy utility Nivos.

The biogas powers his tractor, pickup truck and cars, and is available to others at a commercial filling station on the edge of the farm, although vehicles that can use biogas are still relatively rare. It offers a valuable alternative to meet the growing need for affordable, clean domestic energy.

Demand for organic food continues to grow. “The price gap between organic and standard production is narrowing, partly because we don’t need fertiliser. Our farm has its own product line of oat and buckwheat products, which are produced here using a proven cultivation method known as agroecological symbiosis, where nutrients and energy are efficiently recycled.”

The sprawling 380-hectare farm’s carefully balanced circular economy has developed over a decade and a half, earning a WWF award in 2015 as a model of nature-friendly agriculture. In 2021, the Finnish Organic Association chose Knehtilä for the honour of Organic Business of the Year.

“Biogas production can convert farms from being energy consumers to energy producers, and play an important role in the transition away from fossil fuels. When it’s done in a smart way, it’s also possible to increase biodiversity in farming systems.”

Knehtilä forms part of the Global Network of Lighthouse Farms, a project led by Wageningen University in the Netherlands, involving commercially viable farms that offer “radical solutions to address sustainability challenges.” International visitors frequently come to Knehtilä to learn about unique system.

The rich, vibrant cycle of life at Knehtilä is visible in not only the lush fields, but also in the insects and frogs that frequent them, and in a few animals such as horses, sheep, goats, chickens and rabbits. The farm is also a lively event venue; a high-ceilinged, 80-year-old barn has been converted to a space for up to 100 people for weddings, theatre performances and concerts.

[blackoutspoetry]

The anatomy of starved dogs (part 3)(Ghoap) – FLASHPOINT

This is a chapter of a long form slow burn Ghoap fic I've been working on for the past few months.

This chapter alone is has 16k words, so it might be easier to read this fic on ao3.

Read the first few parts on ao3 here:

WARNINGS: gore and graphic depictions of violence, civilian death, acts of terrorism, torture and permanent disfigurement

4 APRIL 2019

CAPTAIN PRICE'S FLAT, UNDISCLOSED ADDRESS, ENGLAND

The most important thing to remember when it comes to human nature, is that the adult brain is shaped from childhood to pursue something which is mostly unattainable. People are defined by the constant pursuit of what they don’t have. 

The healthy brain, it chases after things it's allowed to get ahold of, grows accustomed to the idea of labour rewarded sweetly at the end of a long day’s work. Even if paid in peanuts, a reward is a reward. 

The unhealthy brain is grown from a childhood bid for survival. The young brain is made to endure and spring up like weeds in concrete, grow through difficulty because it becomes indoctrinated with the aesthetic of suffering. It knows nothing else but the weathering of the storm and has not yet learned the concept of injustice or fairness. 

 It learns its place quickly, grows around the stones and infertile soil and becomes a distended, etiolated seedling in the absence of the sunlight it yearns for. 

But grow, it will, forever doomed to reach with begging arms to sunlight that will not yield, until it begins to view itself as a poetic tragedy, see the beauty in the hollowness of needing and wanting. And once that point is reached, it romanticises having nothing until it  becomes afraid of actually grasping that thing it yearns for. 

There is even a point of hunger where the body has grown so used to not being full, that once fed, it rejects the meal to marinate in its own despair. A work of art, one tragic and beautiful, because it cannot fathom the idea that it was robbed of life. A better life. 

If, however, it realises the injustice, refuses to kneel to its feared master and learns that it too is able to bite, it uses this newfound discovery to its advantage. It cuts off completely from the idea of vulnerability and lashes out at anything that mildly gives it the taste of being subservient once more, so that even things that are only vaguely related to the oppression is now a symbol of the life it had fled from. 

It bites and devours out of fear of returning to that life, over correcting and becoming the very thing it had sworn to destroy. 

In the mind numbing hours following the briefing, Soap thinks Vladimir Makarov might be one of those people, grown from a hard life into a dangerous man, or maybe, he was something more dangerous, one planted in the soil of war fertilised earth from his conception. 

Either way, it only further convinces him that he’d made a mistake agreeing to Price’s terms in that coffee shop. He’s dug himself a grave and he’s damn well made his bed in it too. 

Though Soap is substantially pissed at Price, he honours his wishes and makes a point of laying low until they have to leave for Verdansk at midnight. Price had arranged for him to stay over at his flat for the time being and though his thoughts were consumed with visions of doom, he found it interesting to distract himself by the rare insight into the man’s personal life. 

It's a moderately large place, modestly furnished with two bedrooms, a living room, joint kitchen and dining area, a bathroom barely large enough to stand in and a sofa facing a TV. 

“Make yourself at home, I suppose I don’t need to babysit you, but you might benefit from getting some sleep in before we leave,” Price loosely gestures over to the spare bedroom with the single bed, freshly made and ready for him. 

“Thank you, sir.” 

“Anytime,” Price nods with a hint of guilt. He knows he’s got Soap in over his head but neither acknowledge it, they keep things civil. Whether Price had known about Soap’s talk of retirement remains a mystery to him. 

“I’ve got some work to get done before we leave, so if you need me, I’ll be here,” Price informs him, taking his things and disappearing into the other room where his desk was, leaving Soap standing in the living room.

 

 

It doesn’t take long for Soap to settle into the spare bedroom, throwing his suitcase on the bed with a dejected sigh before beginning to strip out of the thick jacket unsuited to the stale English weather this time of year. 

 

He’s just thrown it on the bed when he hears his phone buzzing with a notification. 

 

He’s put his mother on mute for the time being, so it couldn’t be her, possibly one of his sisters. He supposes he should do some damage control before shit hits the fan, though. 

 

Begrudgingly, he sits down on the edge of the bed and reaches for the phone, swiping at the cracked screen to unlock it. 

 

Five unread messages, better than he expected. Three from his mother, and two from someone he definitely doesn’t have the mental energy to respond to now. 

 

He opens the chat and begins typing back before he’s even formulated what he wanted to say to her.

Elena (barista): heyy so I know its been a while but I wanted to know if you're still interested in that second date?

John: Yes|

‘Yes’ is too short…

John: Ye |

John: |

John: abs |

No, that sounds too enthusiastic and she’ll get the wrong idea. 

John: yes, sure

Before he can change his mind again, he hits send. To his surprise, she begins typing back immediately. 

Elena: Great! How does tomorrow evening work for you??? 

Soap grimaces.

John: I'm actually at work at the moment...

He can almost feel her hesitating on the other end. 

Elena: Work?

Elena: I thought you’re not going back until the 15th??

Soap is unsure how much he should be telling her, but he wants to be as honest as possible. 

John: That was the plan but an urgent last minute thing came up. I only found out about it a week ago.

Elena: oh, okay. But tell me when you think you’ll be available?

John: sure :)

Soap exits the chat and quickly writes back to his mother to confirm to her that he had landed safely, but decides against entertaining the conversation any further after that. 

He tries to get a couple of hours of sleep in before Price comes to fetch him at well after dark for their return to base, but he’s still tired enough by the time they arrive that he has to take two shots of espresso for good measure. 

And then it's off to their designated aircraft, a three and a half hour flight outbound for Kastovia and another promise John MacTavish would inevitably fail to keep. 

 

Its just past midnight by the time Soap finds his seat with Sergeant Burns to his left and Ghost two seats on with Price in between them. Ghost gives Soap a nod of acknowledgement as Soap straps himself in leaning back against the cargo netting behind him and letting his head hit the wall with a thud. 

“You been to Verdansk this time of year?” 

Soap is surprised when Burns asks from beside him. The question is half muffled by the humming of the large cargo door being raised to a close but he shakes his head anyway. 

“Can’t say that I have.” 

“It's nice. Off season so it's not as packed with tourists as it is when all the schools are out. It's beautiful actually, when you’re not working.” 

“You think so?” 

Soap had never had the luxury of being in the city for anything other than a work related crisis. His best memories of Russia and the surrounding countries are the quiet moments when the weapons cease or he’s privileged enough to be in the safety of a fortified military base. 

His worst memories there are by far the most haunting of his career and some of the most life changing. He still has visions of that bomb going off, splatters of blood and shattered bone. He’ll never forget the stillness after Oliver had stopped screaming or the look on his parents' faces when he gave his condolences at the funeral. 

So no, Soap did not consider the idea of finding Kastovia beautiful or inviting in his days off. 

“It’s quite a sight actually. I brought my girl out there to propose last year, to get away from it all.” 

Soap raises an eyebrow. “You’re married?” 

“Almost, the wedding’s in two months. You got anyone waiting for you back home?” 

Briefly the phantom smell of smoke and warm blood fills Soap’s nose and he clutches at the chain around his neck, but the moment’s gone in an instant. 

“Nothing serious at the moment, no.” 

He curses the fact his mind had skimmed over Elena so quickly, but he can hardly call her a significant other. 

“Ah well, I’m sure you’ll find someone soon,” Burns says and reaches into his pocket for a half empty pack of gum. 

The plane had taken off with a rumble and Soap’s ears were having trouble adjusting to the change in altitude. 

“Can I have one of those?” Soap inclines his head to the pack. 

“Sure, but they’re nicotine. I’m trying to quit smoking before the wedding.” Burns tilts the pack in his direction nonetheless and Soap hesitates for a moment, feeling a distant suppressed ache in his chest warning him against it but he silences his concern. 

“That’s alright by me.” 

He takes the stick of gum and pretends not to waver as he pops it in his mouth.

They land in Verdansk three and a half hours later and Shepherd meets them on the ground. Its barely past sunrise and the air is heavy with a piercing cold fog that clouds his measured breaths as Soap steps out of the plane onto the landing strip where a man stood waiting for them. 

The man was around Soap’s height, but he carried himself with an air of authority. Something to indicate he was powerful and very much aware of it. 

He gave them a polite nod by way of greeting. Soap watches his overtly friendly interaction with Price and Burns and then the notably impersonal way he shakes hands with Ghost. 

“Sergeant MacTavish, you come very highly regarded by Captain Price, he’s told me a lot about you.” 

Soap feels himself stiffen but he smiles nonetheless, “all good things, I hope.” 

“ Excellent things,” Shepherd corrects.

“Well, I hope he’s got enough of that in him to live up to the Captain’s expectations,” Ghost chimes in from beside him, not with bite, but Soap can’t decide whether he’s supposed to take the joke as a sign of friendliness or hostility. 

As if sensing the uncertainty in the atmosphere, Price claps him on the back and gives his own response of almost flat feeling reassurance. “He’ll be up for it, I’m sure. But I expect we better get out of the wind before we get into any of the further details.” 

 

The drive takes a while. It isn’t long, but the road out is congested and Soap finds his eyes wandering over the densely packed sidewalks, gaze panning over the figures on the street, blissfully unaware of the danger pending over the city. 

It makes some uneasy feeling run a chill down his spine. An image from the carnage left behind by the street market bomb on Price’s slideshow comes into his mind unbidden and he tries to rid himself of the idea of Verdansk being reduced to rubble. 

The base they’d be operating out of for the next few days was situated on the gentle slope of a hill building up into the nearby mountain range, densely forested with evergreen spruce trees creating a thick coverage for the well maintained dirt road. 

Upon arrival, they pass through heavy security and are let to park on a reserved spot by a painted brick face wall rising into the upper floor of the building. 

Once inside, it is much more temperature controlled and Soap relaxes a bit once they’re through security and the doors are closed behind him. 

General Shepherd’s been in Price’s circle for years. Soap knows about the kinds of things he and Price have buried in the past and he’s got his own theories as to a couple of the more sketchy, off the records things. He gets suspicious about when the talk around base doesn’t match up with what’s on the news, so for him to be standing here in the room with both of them, while official records still have him safely tucked away in Glasgow is disconcerting to say the least. 

He glances to his side at Burns and even gives the futile look over at Ghost on his right, but both of them are tight-lipped and observant, their expressions betraying nothing.

An hour and two coffees later saw Shepherd introducing them to a few men from the local authorities they’d been working with and hurriedly getting them over to a more private room to discuss the details. 

Though Soap is still sceptical of Price’s anonymous source, he keeps his mouth shut for the duration of the discussion, listening intently to the plan for the next day instead. 

The airport had upped its security earlier that month. With Verdansk just gently nudging the border of the country and its frequent conflicts with the nearby Russians, the city has grown desensitised to the sheer amount of military vehicles patrolling the streets at all times. They wouldn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary for there to be a heightened military presence at the airport or the nearby areas. 

The good thing, they figured, would be that Makarov would not be anticipating it either. 

Once more, with detailed information from Price’s informant, they determined that multiple bombs would be left to detonate throughout the airport, but how they planned on getting them through airport security remained unclear. 

By the end of the discussion, they’d concluded that the four of them would enter with the rest of the local team Shepherd had assembled well before the window the informant had provided them with and keep a low enough profile so as to not worry the public but be present enough so that any suspicious activity could be flagged. 

By the time Soap was allowed to leave, he felt as though he was due another coffee with how little sleep he’d gotten in the last few days and the monolith of a task before them. He gets himself a coffee and tries to find some fresh air. 

 

By the next morning, Soap had developed an uneasy feeling about it all, a feeling he doesn’t manage to shake by the time he’s dressed and sharply awake at just before sunrise. 

The sun is high and expectant by the time they arrive at the airport the next morning. The world stands at attention. 

A thin smattering of clouds obscured the sun from view almost entirely and rendered the world washed out and lifeless on the drive out to the airport. 

By the time they’ve parked and Price is well out of earshot, Soap can’t keep it to himself anymore and turns to Ghost nearest to him by the open door of their vehicle. 

“I have a feeling that informant of Price has been feeding us bullshit.” 

“As much as I trust Price, I’m not so convinced either.” 

There isn’t time to talk about it after that. The day at the airport is tense. Speaking is difficult, airport security knows next to no English, with Price and another English speaking security officer needing to translate any time something mildly suspicious turns up. With the extra security keeping a keen eye on the ground, they were sitting in a closed off room watching the security cameras for signs of suspicious activity. 

Security flags a man but it's a bust. He’s pissed and cursing as he’s patted down for the forgotten pocket knife in his coat. A generous amount of similar issues turn up but nothing to write home about. 

A little after that, there was a brief issue on a forgotten suitcase left in a suspicious position on the other side of the airport, but after twenty minutes and broken exchanges, security confirms it was a false alarm. 

Soap doesn’t know if that should disappoint him or not. Even Shepherd starts to look frustrated by the time noon comes around and they’ve noticed nothing else. 

“Any news from your guy?” Ghost asks later and Price gives a frustrated shake of the head. 

“Haven’t been able to get through to him since this morning. Absolute silence.” 

“So he set us up?”

“It's too soon to call any of that, Ghost. Let's not jump to conclusions.”

 

The day’s still young when it all goes to hell. 

Security screens a woman potentially carrying drugs in her suitcase and she is immediately pulled away into a side room and searched. Her suitcase, marked fragile and wrapped in plastic, is thrown onto a table and opened for search. 

“What the actual fuck is wrong with you? There’s glass in there!” 

“An American,” Soap observes, finally glad to be able to understand what was going on around him. 

“Just standard procedure, ma’am,” one of the security officers relay in accented English and indicates for her to hold her arms out for her to be searched. Soap watches her disbelief morph into frustration when her handbag is also tipped out onto the table, sending folded receipts, loose coins and her cell phone clattering out onto the table. 

“Hey, you can’t just mess with my stuff like that,” she says as a man shuffles through her suitcase to find the suspicious item. 

The phone suddenly lights up with an urgent message.

Three missed calls. 

The phone suddenly lights up with an urgent message. 

Three missed calls. 

Mikhail: are you ok? 

Mikhail: answer your phone 

Mikhail: I can see the smoke from my window. Tell me u are ok. 

Mikhail: Jess please, are you at the airport? Did you see it?

 

“Captain, something’s not right here.” Soap reaches for the phone, beckoning Price over to show him the texts. 

“Hey, you can’t just look at my phone. That’s an invasion of my privacy–” 

The phone starts vibrating in his hand as another call comes in, Price turns to her, still kept in place by security. “Who’s Mikhail?” 

“My boyfriend, he’s worried about me.” 

“Why?” 

“Maybe I can ask him if you give me my phone.” 

“Bag is clear,” the man searching her suitcase behind Soap declares and she gives him a harsh glare.  

“I could’ve told you that myself,” she says angrily as she takes her phone back from Soap and calls the number back, hurrying to put her things back into her handbag. 

“I’m fine, I’m fine! Wait, slow down, you’re freaking me out… what… like, actually?”

Soap looks from her to Price. 

“No way… just now?... I didn’t hear anything… are you sure?”  

On the other side of the room, Shepherd’s phone rings in his pocket and he goes to answer it while security escorts the woman out of the room. 

Shepherd’s face morphs into a look of distress and Soap tenses in anticipation. “Say again?” 

Soap can’t make out anything on the other side but it sounds urgent. Shepherd relays the news as he terminates the call. 

“Reports of explosions at the stadium. No official confirmation yet, but it seems like the news has caught onto it.” 

Immediately, Soap curses himself for not trusting his instinct sooner. He knew something was off 

“Makarov used the airport as a diversion.” 

“He could still be at the stadium, we might still have a chance to nail this bastard,” Ghost suggests and they turn to Shepherd for confirmation. 

“Ghost and I can stay at the airport until security can get a read on the situation,  just in case he decides to double back while we’re out. Price, take Burns and MacTavish. The three of you head out and assess the situation at the stadium.”

 

 

The door shuts with a resounding, anxious thud as Price ushers Soap into the passenger seat and straps himself in behind the wheel, acting on muscle memory alone as he releases the handbrake and reverses out of the parking lot at an alarming speed. He turned towards the exit and gestures wildly for the security guard to raise the boom for him to exit the parking faster.

Within a minute, he has navigated out of the incoming traffic and headed onto the highway. 

“What’s the plan when we get there, Cap?” Burns asks from behind Soap. 

“It's difficult to say now. It's fresh. We’ve got no idea what the conditions are or what to expect. So we try to assess and contain the situation as best possible. But knowing Makarov, it's best to assume he’s not done yet.”

“And if he’s there?” Soap asks and Price’s grip on the steering wheel tightens. 

“Then we bring him back.” 

“And if he’s not?” Soap asks. 

“Then this entire operation is dead the water.” 

 

The over chewed wad of gum was bland in his mouth and did little to soothe the tension in Soap’s system as he cast a glance out at the world beyond the passenger window, seeing it pass in a smear of colour. They’ve been driving for a good five minutes now. 

 Heart racing a mile a minute, his anger was only spurred by the comms in his ear as Shepherd's voice came through, confirming the worst. 

“Gold Eagle to Bravo-6. Security confirms gunfire and at least one explosion in the stadium with multiple injuries, over… “

He watches the world in the muted grey, fade from obliviousness to panic as they neared the stadium, seeing the world descending into chaos around them. 

Price reached to press the button on his mic, face setting into a hard look as he yanked the wheel hard for the upcoming turn. “Copy, we’re inbound now.” 

Shepherd’s response was instant. 

“Be advised, Makarov and his men may still be inside. If he’s there, you bring him out– alive.”

Soap felt uneasy about letting the man go with his life, but pushed the concern down, silencing the thought with his own acknowledgement of the order, but it did nothing to ease the growing concern as he caught onto the shifting energy on the street around them. 

“Roger that. Where’s medical?” 

Soap couldn’t make out any words from the civilians outside or let his eyes linger long enough to analyse any of the reactions properly, but they were close enough to the stadium that he knew they must have heard something. 

“First responders will not enter until the scene is clear. The third floor VIP lounge may be Makarov’s next target.” Shepherd’s voice was clear and calm as he spoke, but it instantly added another thread of anxiety to the mix and Soap couldn't stop himself from cursing as Price took another left, narrowly dodging past a truck on the corner and putting them on a street funnelling to the stadium dead ahead. 

“You said it, son,” Shepherd acknowledges Soap over comms. “Ghost and I are ten mikes out. Let's bag this bastard. Out here.” 

The high rise office blocks seemed to shuffle them forward and usher them out to the open air, now enough for them to smell the acrid smoke emanating from the stadium in a rolling curtain of grey heat.

A car swerves onto the road and shoots past them at a speed as they merge onto the main road, panic palpable in the erratic driving of those still on the road and fleeing the scene.

The fear ripples through the crowd like a curtain of panic holding the world in a vice grip and descending over the street like a dire blanket of fear. Even the dying leaves on the trees seemed more dead and wilted into themselves with an unseen oppression, like an incursion of an unknown force pushing hostile tendrils into the ground that the earth itself, and by extension, the trees on the sidewalk, seemed sharp and alert to the whims of its enemy. 

The bleak sky was barren like the sun had withdrawn into itself to make way for the undulating spire of smoke curling into the sky before them from the blazing inferno that leaked from the burst windows of the structure, weeping fire. 

Unconsciously, his hand went for the chain around his neck, but it was obscured by his vest and the lack of that comfort made him feel like he was floating in a sea of disarray with no anchor point. 

“Makarov threatened the airport and hit the stadium instead,” Soap seethes through gritted teeth. Even Sergeant Burns, who had been quiet up until that point, had something to say to the carnage. 

“He’s a fuckin’ madman.” 

A row of orange boom gates that was meant to be blocking off the entrance to the stadium’s underground parking was raised for the hurried exit of the cars, now descended into complete disarray as a car drives straight out through the wrong gate into the incoming lane and almost collides with their vehicle. 

“Fuckin’ hell!” Price cursed as he swerved aside for it, missing it by a hair’s breadth and gunning it to the middle gate before another car could block them off. 

“Civilians are everywhere,” Burns noted, sounding as thoroughly shaken as Soap felt. 

Soap resists the urge to look back at the blaze beside him as Price turns down the ramp to the parking lot. 

“Alright,” Price begins, gathering their collective attention. “Check your shots. We’ll have a lot of unknowns inside.” 

Civilians are fleeing on foot and he doesn’t stop when a man trips on the incline of the road and scuttles out of the way before an oncoming car has the chance to plough him over. 

“And Makarov?” Soap risks a glance back over to the stadium, now towering over them like a lit funeral pyre. 

“You heard the order. ROE still stands. We take him alive.” 

Soap jolted when two cars collided in front of them and glass skittered across the junction. Price had been so fixated on the collision that he didn't notice the civilian rushing in front of them until Soap shouted at him to stop. 

There’s a heavy thud against the hood of the car and for a sickening moment, Soap worries they’ve hit her, but when she stands up unharmed, he breathes a sigh of relief. 

Irritably, Price gestures wildly for her to get out of the road. “Get out of here! Go!” 

They watch her stumble disoriented from their path before shooting off ahead into a dark tunnel. Cars piled up on the outgoing lane and Soap shouts for Price to watch it when a desperate soul reaching the back of the row decides to take a risk and turn onto the incoming lane, narrowly missing them again.

“Close one,” Soap says, trying to make sense of the cacophony of panic surrounding them as he watches for more civilians on foot and desperate cars. 

“We’re still in one piece,” Price concedes mirthlessly as he turns off from the incoming tunnel into a wider section that splits off to a higher floor. 

“Watch it!” Burns cries from the back. 

The wailing of an ambulance siren cuts through the panic and the oncoming glow of a pulsing red light gives them enough of a warning to get out of the way as it rushes past them and they turn up onto the ramp to the higher floor. 

For a moment, Soap has the chance to think its blessedly empty, save for a parked ambulance in his peripheral vision until he witnesses a speeding car mow down a civilian, letting the rest of the group erupt into panic as he reversed and rerouted. 

Soap curses. He glances back at the contorted form of the man as Price drives them past, determination set in his face. 

They can’t afford to go back for him now, probably dead on impact by the look of it, but that wasn’t their concern now. 

“This is chaos,” Burns says. 

“Yeah, it's what Makarov wants,” Price confirms. 

Right now, their concern was Makarov and getting that sick son of a bitch behind bars. Soap sends up a quick prayer for the man now, knowing he’ll forget to do it when they’re out of here and he has time to think, it will be lost to the chaos of the day. 

Price drives them into a single lane funnelling them to another parking block and Soap is relieved to find a welcome sight waiting for them. “Police up ahead.”

“They got here fast,” Burns says as they’re approaching the uniformed men, trying to talk down panicking civilians. Soap was even surprised to see them here so quickly, but he wasn’t going to ask questions with more hands– 

“They’re killing civilians!” Soap cries right as an officer guns down three people and turns towards them. 

He dodges out of the way, shielding his face from the spray of glass bursting inward. 

“Return fire!” Price shouts as Soap manages to get his bearings, tugging on the door handle and reaching for his gun and releasing the seatbelt clasp. 

He practically falls out of his seat as one of the men turns his gun towards them. 

With renewed fervour and hatred for the man they were after, Soap takes down three of the fake policemen in rapid succession. 

The concrete floor is slick with a mixture of blood and viscera and Soap can feel it clinging to the bottom of his boots as he crosses over to the entrance of the staircase leading into the building. A civilian lies slumped against a cold wall. The back half of his skull shot out and he lies marinated in a pool of his own blood.

Not far from him lies one of the officers Soap shot down, gun still tight in his grip. A bullet to the neck had been too merciful a death. His face has got the hard look Soap has come to know with the enemies they deal with, and his hand’s got an old prison tattoo obscured by the cuff of his sleeve. Soap’s seen them enough to recognise it instantly, though. 

“Inner Circle’s posing as police,” Soap relays as Price comes up beside him with Burns in the back, taking point and leading them up the staircase. 

“They’d have access to the VIP area," Burns confirms Soap’s concern. 

“It's on the third floor, let’s move.” 

Another bullet shoots off from an awkward position at the top of the stairs and Soap and Price make quick work of clearing the staircase before emerging into the furnished concourse. 

If he'd thought the parking lot was chaos, this was a step up. 

Several more of the fake first responders were opening fire on civilians, screaming and running for safety only to be shot down by a careless bullet. They trip each other and slick the tiled floors with red. 

Price says something in his ear, but Soap is too preoccupied to register what it is as another police officer pulls his gun on him. 

Soap takes cover behind an advertising screen as another one of Makarov's men fires on him. 

Soap shoots first and the man falls backward with a jolt. 

"Gold Eagle, Bravo-6, we're internal and pushing to the VIP area. Be advised, Inner Circle's posing as police, over." 

"Copy. All police on target are considered hostile."  

"Roger that," Price acknowledges. 

Soap gritted his teeth as he pushed forward against the torrent of fleeing civilians. A heavy weight knocks him sideways as a  man stumbles into him, eyes wide and muttering distraughtly in Russian as he scrambles away from him. 

Ahead of him, one of Makarov's men hurls something through a window and it erupts into flames. 

He ducks more gunfire behind a vacant information desk, scrambling for safety before he reports back to the others. 

"Fuckers are using grenades." 

His lungs burn from the hazy wall of smoke as he moves forward. The floor is covered in contorted bodies and coagulating pools of blood, smelling so strongly that the air around him is tainted with a stomach churning thick fog of burning plastic and stench of iron. 

Burns isn't far behind him, trying to get a civilian to safety but struggling with the language barrier. 

Price barely has time to warn him of the figure running out of the smoke before another one of Makarov's men emerge like a wraith from the haze and nearly manages to get a shot in. He dies with two bullets to the head and neck, hand still reaching for his gun. 

Another woman is shot down as she flees from her hiding spot behind a counter of glass cases selling refreshments, pitching forward into the smudged floor, a stone's throw away from Soap. 

"Fuck!" 

Soap aims to shoot and curses when it clicks empty, quickly ducking behind the kiosk to reload as he grimly locks eyes with the corpse of the woman. 

He takes a deep breath to steel himself before leaving his temporary safe haven and charging at her killer with a rage he didn't think possible. 

Taking the man down he dodges behind a pillar in the centre of the floor as another charges out of the smoke and fires at him. 

A bullet clips his exposed arm and blood runs a warm crimson trail down his forearm. 

He just needs to make it through the concourse and get to the VIP area. His arm can wait. The dead civilians, the smoke in his lungs causing him to become light headed, the mission's already half-failure– it will have to wait.

To his right, Soap finds an entrance to the gift shop, by no doubt shorter than the path around it. 

Soap coughs against the wave of acrid smoke hitting his lungs before he informs the team over comms of his detour. 

He steps around the mangled body in the centre of the floor. Even through the cacophony of screaming and gunfire, he has half the mind to notice how heavy his boots have become, slaked in the grime and glass littering the floor. 

Soap reconvenes with Price by the entrance of a stairwell, taking point. He dodges pasta man running them down two at a time, resisting the urge to move out of harm's way as a barrage of gunfire from the top of the staircase sends bodies tumbling the rest of the way to the landing and piling up together by Soap's feet. 

He makes quick work of shooting up the son of a bitch, wasting no more than two billets to make sure he was properly dead. 

At the top of the staircase, he's met with a dead end. 

"Exit's locked." 

"On it," Price says, coming up behind him to pry the door open. 

Burns comes to stand beside Soap, observing the words on the door. Clearly, his Russian was better than Soap's. 

"Executive level. VIP level is close." 

The door gives way and Soap quickly confirms the floor is clear. 

There is an eerie silence overlayed onto the shrill, mindless drone of the fire alarm. The entire floor is strewn with casualties, not a living soul in sight. 

Makarov's men had swept through like a pestilence. 

"Eyes on the VIP," Price says as he spots it to their left. "Got movement inside. Stay sharp." 

Price steps away as they reach the door to give way to Soap, inclining his head in Soap’s direction.  

"On you, Sergeant." 

Soap grips the door handle and twists it on the mental count of three. 

"Special forces," Price cries as Soap pushes the door open, gun at the ready. There’s several men inside, dressed in blue uniforms and tending to bleeding, half dead men on stretchers. Though Soap is glad for the help, he’s seen enough today to be sceptical of anything. 

Soap shouts for them to show their hands and they’re up immediately, all looking from one to the other with worried expressions. 

 "First responders! Don't shoot!" One of the men steps forward, eyes darting nervously from the gun in Soap's hands, to his face, to Price and back again.

The air conditioning is cold on his sweat damp skin. There’s a handful of TVs in the room, all set to mute, but they’re turned into the news, reporting from the outside of the stadium, still shrouded in a column of rapidly worsening smoke. 

"How did you get in here?" Price demands sternly. 

"Security," he stammers, flustered and shell shocked. "Security let us in." 

"Who are you with?" Price pushes. 

"Please, we are trying to save lives." Another of the paramedics is just barely suppressing the urgency in his voice. 

Soap casts a sceptical glance over to the poor half-dead man on a stretcher to his right. Other paramedics are gathered around him, trying to stabilise his condition as best possible. 

"Shit, I need help over here," A paramedic by the side of the body says as he looks up urgently and finds Soap's gaze locked on him. "Soldier, please?"

Taking a risk while the other is occupied by Price's questioning, Soap moves over to assist as best he can. He's no field medic but he knows the basics if he ever gets himself into a twist. 

"Stand fast, Sergeant," Price warns, but he's already halfway over when the man draws a gun from his drug bag. He's a quick draw, but Soap is just as fast.

Soap fires just as a blow to his chest knocks him backwards with all the power of a freight train and he hits the floor with a painful thud. The bullet proof vest absorbs the brunt of the impact, but the shot still hurts like a bitch. 

It is outnumbered by the adrenaline and he recovers quickly, assisting Price and Burns in taking care of the other Inner Circle scum. 

His ears ring in the absence of the gunfire and his free hand comes to clutch futilely at the phantom pain of the gunshot over the clamouring of his racing heart. The tac vest obscures its path and his fingers grasp at spare magazines, his sidearm, as it tries to tear a direct path to ease the pain. 

The shot is absorbed into the marrow of his ribs and he knows somehow he'll feel it worse tomorrow. 

"You broken?" Price asks in a serious tone and he shakes his head. 

"Just the plate." 

Soap makes his way over to the table where various medical bags and equipment was set out on the pretence of being useful, but upon closer inspection, Soap notices the heart monitor is ancient, at least from the 90s and missing its internal wiring. 

Burns beside him opens one of the bags and turns to Price. “Check it. They had explosives. This was their next target.” 

Price calls it in immediately. “Gold Eagle Actual, explosives located in the VIP area. No sign of Makarov.”

Soap moves over to the window, eyebrows knitting together as he sees the rubble beneath the window from where the roiling mass of black smoke was rising up from. The field was empty, but there were casualties twisted and dead in the seats, either blown to bits or trampled by the masses in their bid to weave through the labyrinth of seats. 

He cuts his attention back to the task at hand when Shepherd returns to comms. “Copy, make it safe. Local set up a cordon, so Makarov will have to exfil fast. We’re five mikes out. Don’t let him escape, son.” 

Soap checks the pulse on the nearest man on a stretcher, but he’s so far gone dead, he knows for sure the Inner Circle just had him up there as a cover. 

“Roger that.” 

“The garage,” Burns says. 

It's the next logical option, Soap reasons and Price seems to agree. “Affirm,” he nods to the bag they’d been looking at earlier. “Secure the explosives and get to the secondary exfil.”

Burns gives him a nod of acknowledgement and Price gestures for Soap to follow him, moving over to the door on the opposite side of the VIP area and back into the concourse, the shrill alarm still insistently echoing through the space. 

Along the inner wall, Price stops him short at an elevator and he and Soap just about manage to pry the doors open with force, only for them to slide open and reveal a dark void plunging down into the abyss beneath them.

The only sign that there was something down there was a dim red glow licking up the sides of the elevator shaft, catching on the rivets and dents in the metal plating. 

 Soap took an instinctive step back from where the polished floor dropped off, giving a sceptical glance up to the elevator’s resting point a fair bit above their heads. 

Wires jutted out from the dark and trembled slightly with a phantom tremor of the cables, like vocal cords vibrating an ominous metal groan. Soap was unsure how safe it was for them to be standing there with the metal contraption suspended in the air by nothing but rickety cold war era engineering and pure faith holding it up, but when Price seizes one of the cold cables and drops down into the darkness, Soap has no choice but to follow. 

He hits the floor below with a force he feels compress into his spine and he grimaces. 

Price meets him at the bottom. “Eyes peeled for Makarov.” 

Soap sets himself with new determination as they emerge into the larger space. Empty buses are parked on either side of the tunnel, forcing them to move away from the walls inward. 

A chill runs down Soap’s spine as he hears the echoing of footsteps ahead, run-shuffle across the cast concrete. He reaches for his gun instinctively but Price halts him in his tracks as the man comes into view at the other end of the tunnel. 

“Check fire, that’s a civilian.” 

His gun lowers, but only slightly. 

Ahead of them around the bend of the turn, the rhythmic pulsing of a red emergency light caught Soap’s attention and he stopped dead for a moment, straining to hear the sirens before Price could confirm his suspicion. 

“Vehicle incoming.”  

It rounded the corner slowly, like it was a cornered animal placing a careful step forward into the crosshairs of its pursuer. 

Soap stepped forward, but Price laid a hand on his shoulder. 

“Maintain distance, Soap. Could be Makarov.” 

An empty bus to his left stood as the only shield between him and the ambulance a couple of metres ahead of him. He takes a cautious step backward as the ambulance inched closer at an excruciatingly slow pace, lurching as it halted. 

Price held his gun at the ready, moving away from the direct line of the ambulance. 

“Step out of the vehicle!” 

Though Soap couldn’t see who was inside, it was as though its unmovable energy almost seemed to mock them. 

It happened almost out of nowhere and predictably quickly at the same time. The engine revved and there was a moment the ambulance reversed sharply, turned on the sirens and ploughed forward. 

“Incoming!” Soap shouts and he and Price move out of the way on either side of the oncoming vehicle, Soap knocking his already tender shoulder against the back of the bus with the force he falls backwards with. 

There's the echoing crush of metal as the careless driving of the ambulance sees it knocking into an abandoned car and barreling over onto its side, ceasing the urgency of the siren to a dead silence. The absence of sound and the shifting of angular shadows from the strobing of the red emergency light mounted on the roof drew on the vastness of the dark parking garage, threatening to send the already heightened atmosphere to a fever pitch. 

“It’s down,” Soap says with only a hint of relief. 

Price was already moving. “Move to secure.” 

Soap bit the inside of his cheek to avoid showing how much the strain was impacting him as he and Price made their way over to the upturned vehicle, wheels still spinning for phantom grasp in the air, like desperate waving limbs that couldn’t grasp the earth to flee. 

The doors remained resolutely closed, but Soap’s stomach twisted at what he knew he would find there. There was no question of it. That ominous energy, the itching of his sixth sense, he knows it in the marrow of his bones. 

“Open it,” Price motioned Soap over to the door. 

Though hesitant, he complied, tugging the dented metal door open with a firm yank and flooding the gutted ambulance with sharp torchlight. 

“Hands! Hands!” Price shouted for the figure in the blue uniform moving from his sprawled position, his face turned away from them for the moment. “Pokazat' ruki!” Soap shouted for good measure, drawing on his limited Russian to make sure the man got the message. 

Dead on impact, there were two fake paramedics sprawled on the now earthside wall, but his attention was fixed on the man crouching towards the back, shielding his face from the glaring light. 

His hand shifted away from his face to raise in vitriolic surrender and Soap cursed, instinctively readjusting his grip on his gun. “It's him.” 

“Vladimir Makarov, step out of the vehicle now!” 

Sending them a searing look, Makarov gritted his teeth and crawled across the uneven side of the ambulance panelling, knees shifting over the bruised, dead limbs of his men. 

“Nice and easy,” Soap warns when he gets a bit too close to the door for his liking. After all, he still had his firearm tucked into the holster on his bullet proof vest. 

“That’s far enough.” Soap held out a hand to halt him when he attempted to take a step further from getting out of the ambulance. 

“Now don’t fucking move.” Makarov’s attention shifted to Price as he ordered Soap to search him. 

Soap immediately relieves him of the gun and tosses it out of reach. Makarov’s face held a discontented but somehow still neutral expression that Soap struggled to read. 

“You scared Captain?” he asks in a condescending tone as Soap went through the cursory motions of patting him down for extra firepower. Makarov takes Price’s silence as a win. “You should be.” 

“Shut up.”

A little grin tucks into the corner of his mouth and Soap has had about enough of it. He’ll take silence, he’ll take anger, but he will not have enjoyment coming from someone on the wrong end of a gun. 

He’s a soldier. He does not play fair in the game of terrorists. 

“Get on your fucking knees!” Soap manhandles him into a kneel on the cold concrete. 

Without the usual decorum, Soap roughly completes the search. “He’s clean.” 

Not wasting any time, Soap reaches into his pocket for zip ties and tightens them a bit more than strictly necessary, using a second one for good measure.

“Are you going to kill me?” Makarov asks evenly, completely ignoring the hard plastic digging into his wrists and focusing his attention on Price. 

“Oh I’ve thought about it, yeah.” 

He scoffs. “I recommend you do.”

“And I recommend you tell your men to stand down.” Price’s eyebrows narrowed at him. The gun now hovered only a foot away from Makarov’s face, but he remained unfazed. His expression remained unimpressed and he shook his head almost imperceptibly. 

“They’re not trained to stand down. That’s more… your strategy.” 

Soap couldn’t believe the audacity of him. Even like this, he thinks he’s got the upper hand. It takes a heavy helping of self restraint for Soap not to knock his teeth out. 

Price ignores him, locking eyes with Soap. “Keep him close.”

Soap tugs on his bound arms to get him to stand, following behind Price as he radios in. 

“All stations. We have Makarov. We’re moving to the extract.” 

“Roger that, John. they’ll fight to get him back…” 

“We’re counting on it,” Soap says bitterly with a bit of a shrug. 

He doesn’t miss the way Makarov turns to shoot him a venomous glance and he gets a bit of a rise out of it. 

“Alright, take him left. We clear these vehicles, we move up,” Price instructs him shortly, taking the lead and Soap acknowledges him, yanking Makarov roughly to his feet and shoving him in Price’s general direction. “Get goin’.” 

Price confirms the area on the other side of the ambulance is clear, and Soap starts them out at an urgent pace, making sure not to give the man any chance at a rest after the tumble he’d just taken in the ambulance. 

“You think you can just walk me out of here?” Makarov’s voice doesn’t have a hint of worry or remorse.

“We can drag you out as well,” Soap reminds him, giving him a rough shove to make him pick up his pace, but if Makarov feels anything at the rough treatment, he keeps it to himself. 

“Capturing me… it means nothing.” 

“It means we beat you, Vlad.” 

Soap can just barely see him shake his head, huffing out a laugh. “Don’t be a fool.” 

“Contact!” Price shouts from somewhere ahead of him and Soap’s first instinct is to duck behind the nearest vehicle as the Inner Circle men Price had spotted come into view, irritably losing Makarov to the confusion. 

 He gets a shot in, risking a glance sideways to Price who reassures him he’s got Makarov secured, but Makarov and one of the men are shouting back and forth for another moment before he gets him down too. 

“We clear?” Price asks him when the last man falls. 

“Affirm.” 

“It's not safe here. Grab Makarov, we need to move.” 

Price waits for Soap to take him before they proceed down the tunnel towards where they would be meeting with the others outside. 

“You’re not safe anywhere,” Makarov tells him and Soap’s just about had enough. 

“Your luck’s running dry, Makarov.” 

They’re coming up by another skewly parked bus, promptly ignoring the dead body of one of the Inner Circle men Soap had shot down, lying slumped behind it, Makarov doesn’t even look in his direction, just keeps his eyes focused dead ahead. 

“I don’t believe in luck. I believe in planning. Bad luck, it's just poor planning.” 

“What part of your plan involves rotting in a prison?” 

“A man can be locked up,” Makarov reminds him. “An idea cannot.” 

Soap keeps him close, tightening his grip on Makarov when they pass a woman trying to flee the building and giving her a jump scare. Soap tries to give her an apologetic look, but she’s clearly shell shocked and just stumbles away from him. 

Price is up ahead, securing them a path through to where they were to rendezvous with the others. 

“Found a way through, Sergeant. Lets move.” 

Up ahead was a blockade of buses, narrowly parked together, pressed into the wall. As Soap neared it, he could see the arms of daylight reaching for them from the gap between the two. 

“I bestow my blessings on your courage, but curse your stupidity.” 

“Worry about yourself.”

“Every man is replaceable, even me.” 

The only way around the barrier would be to squeeze through the narrow gap between the two vehicles, but it appeared Price was willing to bet they’d fit. 

“On me,” Price calls to Soap and slots in first. 

Soap gives Makarov a shove, both to move him forward and to shut him up as they come up to the gap, making progress at a snail's crawl. Soap isn’t particularly put off by tight spaces, but this could change that. 

Still, he takes Makarov by the shoulders and forces him after Price, sucking in as far as possible to try to keep his gear from snagging as they move. 

What’s even more unnerving is the pained crying he can hear from inside the bus, a bleak chance that there were still lives that could be saved in this shitshow. They didn’t have the time to stop now. 

“You’re not a soldier, you’re a war criminal.” Price picks up on it too, giving a heated glance in Makarov’s direction as he shuffles sideways. He’s more than irritated with Makarov’s attitude in combination with the injured civilians just metres away from them.

“These people need medical.” 

“What’s stopping you from helping them, Sergeant?” Makarov asks condescendingly and Soap shoves him sideways to keep moving. 

“You.” 

Makarov looks back at Soap. “That's your choice.” 

“You did this, not us…” Price reminds him sharply.

“They’re innocent people,” Soap adds from the side.  

“No one is innocent. War is treachery.” 

“Enough of this shite.” 

Price groans as he squeezes past the last bit and emerges into the open, Makarov –still within Soap’s grasp– follows shortly and Price has them heading for the exit, just to the right, just a little further and they’ll be out of the smoke and into the light. It gives Soap the strength to push on. 

Just to the end of the tunnel. A smoking wreck of a car flickers by the end of it, a false beacon of hope, but Soap knows it's just a little further. He just needs to keep his head on straight. Maybe what he says next is to distract himself, maybe it's because he wants to throw stones at the enemy while there isn’t a glass wall and several government officials between them. 

He doesn’t want to admit that it's probably to cover a chip in his own hope they’ll get out of this in one piece. He’s learned that celebrating the victory too soon only turns a blind eye to the evil building in his peripheral vision.  

“Time for you to meet some friends of mine.” They’re so close that Soap can almost begin to sense the relief of a win drawing close. He’ll get to go home in one piece and he’ll make good on his promises, all the ones he almost failed on. He’ll get time to reconsider his resignation, maybe he’ll let Scotland and its people resculpt him into an honest man. 

“Where are they?” 

Soap doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of a full answer, lips turning into a conceited sneer. “Close.” 

Makarov gave a half-shrug, letting the cuffs jingle a bit behind his back. His hands were balled into tight, tense fists. 

“So are mine.” 

Soap worries it’s too late to save himself now, but he’s twenty-five. A lot of people find their feet at the age of twenty-five. He can still choose to rewrite the ending of his story. He can still return to the nostalgia of his not-yet-past youth, his mother’s home cooked meals. “You should know when you’ve lost.” 

“You’re still thinking about victory. Think about success.” 

It's another pebble thrown against Makarov’s unshakable demeanour, hitting nowhere vital but somehow still spurring him to give Soap a word of advice, sitting on that self-made throne. 

“The wicked prosper. They always will. Peace is invisible. War you can see…” 

Soap hates how evocative it sounds, how a weaker man might have thought it inspirational. Soap just thinks it sounds as though he’s pulled it from a fortune cookie. 

Soap’s nose scrunches up as the smoke thickens and burns at his lungs, blinking as his eyes water from the burn too. 

“Incoming!” 

He’s more prepared for the hits this time when the bullet zips past his head to disappear into the inferno. 

“Molotov!” Price shouts to him and he ducks away behind another wrecked vehicle as a bottle hurtles through the air and shatters on the floor just a couple of metres away, sending flames licking up the side of the wall. 

“I’ve got Makarov, you take ‘em out.” 

Soap swiftly takes care of the man running at him, catching him before he’s even spotted Soap behind the car and turns on the other man running to cover his fallen comrade. 

Soap takes down the next three in rapid succession, sidestepping another attempt at a molotov in his direction and finding the thrower with a bullet to the neck.

The last man catches him by surprise and he takes a hit to the arm before he gets a good shot in. The man slumps to the floor and Soap grits his teeth as he scans around for anyone else to materialise out of the smoke before relaxing slightly. Crisis averted. 

“We’re clear.” 

In his adrenaline high mind, the bullet wound, though only a graze, was a distant low hum, barely offering a distraction from the here and now. He resists the urge to clutch at his chest as he returns to Price. 

He’s by the gate, forcing Makarov to his knees with a gun pressed against his neck. 

“Lift it.” Price inclines his head to the gate and Soap drops to his knees to pull at the edge and lift it just high enough for them to duck under. Once out, he lets it drop with a thundering crash. 

“Gold Eagle Actual, we’re external. East side of the stadium. What’s your status?” 

Soap comes up behind Price, eyebrows drawn together and squinting at the too-bright sky for their helicopter flying over the building to land on the other side. 

“Bravo-6, we’re on station. Be advised, you have enemy personnel moving in from the North. Ghost will provide sniper support.” 

“Copy. We'll meet you at primary exfil. Six out,” Price says and turns to Soap. “I’ll handle Makarov, you clear a path.” 

Soap moves ahead, sticking close to cover as he eliminates those of Makarov’s men still looking to take him back. He’s briefly aware of Price behind him, but he makes sure to cover all their bases before the Inner Circle men can get the better of them. He’s too desperate for a win now. 

To his left, a man emerges from behind a white van, cowering behind a riot shield as he tries to get a shot at Soap. Soap moves back to duck behind a parked car but he lets out an involuntary curse when a neat bullet clips the man in the back of the head and he collapses onto the pavement with a heavy lurch. 

He follows the path of the bullet up to the helicopter hovering above their exfil point, finding the imposing silhouette in the doorway and he acknowledges the man with a nod. 

Ghost may be a bit of a prick, but as Soap looks down at the mess of the man’s skull spattered across the concrete, he can at least acknowledge he’s a good shot. 

“Watch right,” Ghost warns him over the comms and Soap turns and fires at a man ducked behind a parked car.  

There seems to be no further pursuit and Ghost confirms it a moment later, giving them the green light to proceed to exfil with Price and Makarov shortly behind him. 

The helicopter has barely touched down and Ghost is standing guard at the open door, expression completely obscured by the mask, but Soap can sense the tension in his stance as he just barely tracks their movements. 

Soap squints against the torrent of wind coming in his direction, finding Shepherd’s outstretched hand to tug him over the threshold of the doorway. And it's homeward. They made it. 

Price comes in after him, handing Makarov over to Shepherd before he wordlessly taps Ghost on the shoulder to signal him inside. 

The door shuts with a resounding bang and soon, they’re up in the air, watching the smoking stadium recede beneath them. 

Soap steadies himself against the wall to allow himself to catch his breath, resisting the urge to turn and face the monster of a man behind him as Price makes sure he’s secure. He takes a long look at the city beneath him. He can sense it writhing with panic and it itches beneath his skin in a way he cannot put word to. 

“Simon Riley.” Makarov’s accent registers behind him and Soap glances to the left to find Ghost still by the door, now facing Makarov at the mention of his name. Soap turns to meet Makarov’s eye for a moment, but his gaze quickly averted back to Ghost. 

“I expected you to stay at the airport… and die there.” 

“If you wanna live, do not threaten my men, Vladimir,” Shepherd warns him. 

“Are we on a first name basis? Herschel?” 

“So you know names,” Soap cuts in impatiently. “Anyone can read a bloody dossier.” 

A beat passes and when no one makes any move to ask any of the big questions, Ghost doesn’t beat around the bush. 

“What’s the rest of your plan?” 

“This.” He shrugs, almost nonchalant, staged in a way that put Soap’s nerves on edge. Like he knew this was eating at them and he was enjoying watching the scene unfold instead of worrying about the fact he wouldn’t be able to slip through the noose this time. 

Price sits forward. “What do you mean ‘this’?” 

“Amazing. You’re all dumber than you look.” 

“I asked you a question–” Ghost reminds him sharply. 

“And I have a question for you.” he addresses them all, inclining his head in Soap’s direction, hinting at his watch. “What time is it?” 

“What the hell do you care what time it is?” Shepherd asks impatiently and he gives half a shrug as partial explanation. 

“Timing is everything, General. I think we’ll all remember this moment. Some… more fondly than others.” 

It registers first as a distant rumble. A shaking of earth that offsets the balance of the air by such a dire tone it compels Soap to look out the window and find the source of the noise. His heart plummets into his feet. 

“The airport,” Ghost says with more concern Soap thought he was capable of. 

“He pulled us off target.” 

“You fucking son of a bitch!” 

Something in Soap snaps. He’s restrained himself far too long and before he’s even realised what he’s doing, he’s pulling his gun and grabbing Makarov with a fistful of the blue uniform he was wearing, knocking him against the metal wall with a reverberating bang before tossing him to the floor. 

“I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out, I swear I’ll do it.” 

Makarov locks eyes with him over the barrel of the gun, mere inches away from his face and finds Soap’s eyes with an intensity he didn’t think possible. 

“Soap, don’t do it,” Price warns him, but its dead noise in his periphery. Still, he hesitates. He feels the chain chafing against his neck.

The gun waits between them for Soap to pull the trigger. His finger itches, he clutches just a bit, with no pressure. But he could if he wanted to, he feels the impulse curl his finger in his mind’s eye but there is no gunshot and Makarov is still looking at him as though he’s bluffing. 

“Do it, come on,” Makarov taunts him. 

“You shut your mouth,” Price tells him, but his eyes never leave Soap. 

“Let me finish him.” Soap doesn’t know why he’s waiting for permission. He knows what needs to be done, but he can’t. He needs that bit of reassurance that its a necessary evil. 

Makarov gives a cynical laugh but Price pulls his attention. “John, we have him, he’s in custody. He’s not going anywhere. Stand down, Sergeant.” 

With all the self restraint he can muster, Soap pulls back before he can impulsively pull the trigger, reholstering the gun and taking a seat as far away from Makarov as possible. 

Price tugged Makarov up from the floor and into his own seat. 

“I thought you were the good guys.” 

“You gon’ rot in hell for this,” Shepherd tells him. 

“You’ll die in the gulag with the rest of the Russian rats,” Soap adds. 

Makarov glances at Soap, eyes drifting down to the gun now tucked uselessly into its holster. 

“You can lock me away, MacTavish, but I can promise you, the next time we’ll be seeing each other, you better hope your Captain didn’t just sign your death warrant.” 

Soap has learned over the years that the silence after the fact can sometimes be more haunting than the screams that came before it. Silence is a full stop that drives the hope into the ground and smothers any thought of change for the better. 

Silence is the whiplash passing of the first stage of grief and sinking into those later phases, the knowing that nothing can be done once the last breath has passed dying lips and all that can be clung to is the husk of what remains. 

Sometimes the acknowledgement of the silence is the victory for the sadistic intention, so tight lipped, Vladimir Makarov took the lack of words following the skirmish with Soap on the ground as a proof of this victory. 

Soap didn’t let it show, but he felt it in his knees, sinking into acceptance of the horror and he sank to his seat in bitter anger. He would not let Makarov have the satisfaction of being ignored, so he made a point of looking him in the eye as they made their way back to base, from which General Shepherd had informed them authorities were already awaiting their arrival to take Makarov off their hands. 

Halfway through the return trip, Ghost comes to take a seat next to him and Soap shifts an inch or two further away to allow himself to breathe. 

He’s aware of the motion beside him, Ghost clenching and unclenching his fist in Soap’s peripheral vision.

He’s surprised Ghost isn’t more visibly worked up by the situation, but Soap realises that idea might have come from a misjudgement of the man’s character on his part. Ghost was reserved and brash, but he was calculated, something Soap worried he fell terribly short on. 

“You’re a hard man to kill, Riley. My men tell me you’re dead on paper. Suppose it goes to show that even if you read between the lines, most of the story is left off the books.”

“You’ve got nothing to gain here, Makarov. You’ve lost. Throwing stones at us isn’t going to help your case,” Soap warns him harshly, but Ghost holds up a hand to silence him.

From out of the window, Soap can see them coming up on the base and the helicopter begins to turn in for landing. 

“No, let him talk. I wanna know what else kind of shit has been circulating.” 

“Only a fool lays all his cards on the table, but I will tell you this. Your system, your government is lying to you. They’re using you, tell you its for your country. But they’re all the same, your Captain,” Makarov nods to Price, “the General, they’ve got more skeletons in the closet than they’ll let on, just make sure you don’t become one of them.” 

“No one should be taking advice from a madman,” Price dismisses him. “And we’re coming up on your last stop before you won’t be seeing the sun for a long time, so you better take one long look at the world, because it's the last you’ll be seeing of it.”

The helicopter descended on the landing pad. 

A waiting group of armed men in uniforms stood close by and approached with urgency when the doors opened and Makarov was taken into official custody of the Kastovian government. 

The exchange happens in Russian and Soap struggles to follow along with it as they get out with Price after General Shepherd and the men escorting Makarov into the building, following behind at a respectable distance. 

Makarov is properly restrained and escorted off base to another facility in an armoured vehicle and Soap feels a strange emptiness settle over him as he watches them leave the premises. They’d gotten Makarov, but he cannot consider this a victory. “You did good today,” Price informs him a while later when they’re alone. “The outcome is far from what we hoped for, but we made sure he’ll never be able to do something like this again.” 

Burns arrives later with questions about Makarov’s arrest and the airport after the bomb squad had successfully taken care of the rest of the explosives on site at the stadium, but he’s got very little to say in return to Soap’s recollection of it. 

 

Finding he can’t manage to catch any sleep after an hour of tossing and turning, Soap supposes he should give up on sleep in general. 

He wants to reflect about the day, but his mind is cluttered with thoughts about the thousand of innocent lives lost in the carnage, its jarring to see those faces from the news, burned into his mind and superimposed over what the airport had looked like when they’d driven towards it just that morning, those people outside, saying goodbye to families, pressing kisses to cheeks with a promise of ‘see you soon’. Most of those people are crushed and buried under rubble and maybe even lost forever. The thought is sickening. 

Though it's futile and seems like a juvenile remedy to a problem that can’t be helped, he replays that moment on the flight out from the stadium over and over again, and in each instance, he pulls the trigger and Makarov is dead on the ground. He doesn’t listen to Price. 

Fuck. If only he hadn’t listened to Price back then. 

It wouldn’t have mattered though, he’d have felt just as guilty seeing it on the news, knowing he could have done something to help as he feels now, knowing that he’d been played for a fool. 

Lying back on the bed, Soap dips his hand under the hem of his shirt and pulls out the tangle of his dog tags with the cross over his chest. It dangles in the artificial heatless glow of the industrial strip light he’d neglected to turn off, clinking together as he holds it just a few centimetres from his face, skin warm and seeming to possess a life of its own. He clutches it all together over his heart and closes his eyes, trying to muster the words for a silent prayer through all the clutter of his mind. 

His mind jumps around, but it's sincere. He prays for the families he knows must be mourning their loved ones, for those in hospitals clinging to life, for the people who’d lost their lives today. He puts a conscious effort to word it understandably despite how utterly exhausted he is, even though he knows that God must already know what he has to say. 

Yes, he should probably stop swearing so much and he’s not proud of his history, but at least he’s trying. His hands are covered in the blood of people that despite their choices, God would have wanted to call his children and he’d killed them for material means. No matter how evil their actions, Soap had killed hundreds if not thousands of people over the years. 

It doesn’t matter how tainted the soul, blood is still blood. 

But he’s doing good with the darkness he’d been born with, the destruction he was always leaning more towards. He’d been entrusted with this attribute like a double edged sword he must use wisely and he reminds himself that he does it so that others can keep their hands clean. 

It's a noble thing to do, to sacrifice your own innocence for the sake of others. It's honourable. 

He can only lie there for so long before his skin itches for something other than the stillness of the stale room. Burns is knocked out on the bunk across from him and Soap gets up and leaves the room, turning off the light upon his exit. 

He decides fresh air might do him good and he takes his chance to slip out onto the roof to catch his breath and collect his thoughts. 

The night sky is almost completely obscured by the haziness of the smoke that had spread out from the epicentre of the airport, only letting in through pinpricks of blinking light from the stars. It takes Soap’s breath away for a moment. 

He hadn’t realised just how easily he could see the airport from the base, especially situated on the hill, overlooking the city. He can’t see all of Verdansk, but he can see enough to know how much the disaster has affected it.

He can hear the wailing of sirens and the dim flashing of red lights responding to the remainder of the disaster. 

Soap sighs heavily as he walks over to the edge of the roof, sinking down to his knees and scooting over to dangle his feet off the edge of the roof, he’s half startled out of the haze when his phone vibrates in his pocket. 

He debates answering the message later but goes to pull out his phone. 

Four unread messages. all from Elena. 

Elena: a guy came into work today and he looked almost exactly like you. It was sort of scary.

Elena: oh btw, you left your sweater at my house the other day in case you were looking for it. 

Elena: hey, how was your day?

Elena: Look, I understand if you’re busy and just don’t have the time to talk to me, but if you don’t want to see me anymore, I’d appreciate it if you told me. I can handle it. I really like you and I thought we had a genuinely good connection the other day, but I get it, the moment’s over and I was clearly reading the situation wrong. It seems like we went into it with two very different intentions and I just don’t think it's going to work. After everything that happened, I think I just need someone that’s present and I need some time to work on myself before I get into anything now. I’m sorry.

Well, fuck. Soap can’t be everywhere, he can’t fix everything, he can’t be there for everyone. Maybe he should’ve tried to respond sooner, but on top of today’s disaster, it stings. 

John: There's nothing to be sorry about. I didn’t mean to give you the impression that I don’t want to talk to you, really, I’ve just had a really long day. And I think you’re right, I don’t think this is going to work. I had a great time getting to know you but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and things are very stressful here. I just have a lot of things to think of right now and I don’t think it's fair to drag you along with me.

It didn’t take very long for her to respond to him, quickly adding a heart emoji in response to his message before she wrote back. 

Elena: thank you for being honest with me. 

There was nothing more after that and Soap stared at the last message for a couple of moments, frowning at it as the screen darkened and died. He sighed heavily, shoving the phone back into his pocket, looking down at the cracked pavement two storeys below him, right to where they had parked coming into base just two days ago and how he couldn’t have ever imagined what was in store for him. 

“Just don’t fall, you’ll cause me paperwork.” 

The voice startled Soap to his core and he almost tipped forward by the sound of it, cursing as he stabilised himself again. 

He turned to find a small pinprick of light from where a dark clothed figure leaned against a wall not far from him. He hadn’t even recognised the smell of cigarette smoke, figuring it was the wind carrying the smoke from the explosion site. 

“Shit, Ghost, you scared me,” Soap laughed uneasily as the man approached him to stand by the railing. 

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he says. Soap gets to his feet and Ghost holds out a half empty pack of Marlboro cigarettes in Soap’s direction, an olive branch. Soap isn’t sure he’ll take it. 

“I don’t smoke. It's a filthy habit.” 

Ghost rolled his eyes, sighing around his own cigarette as he plucked one from the pack, lit it and offered it again, now with a thin curl of silver smoke distending from its orange glow. It highlights the edges of the skeleton motif on his gloves and somehow, Soap knows he’ll carry a part of this day with him for days onwards, because the smell of that cigarette will burn into the fabric of his gloves. 

“I don’t smoke,” Soap insists again with a frown, but all Ghost does is take his hand –not roughly, but not gently either– and puts the thin cigarette between his fingers. 

“After a day like today, everybody smokes, Soap.” 

Soap hesitates with it for a moment, watching the glow eat away at the unburnt part of the cigarette and inching closer away from the ashen end before he gives in and raises it to his mouth for a long, much needed draw. 

He wishes he could wipe the smug look he just knows Ghost has under that mask off his face as he watches the action, knowing how easy it is to fall back into dormant muscle memory. 

“You don’t smoke, huh?” 

Soap pouts, not sure how much he wants to let the strange man in on his past, but he settles for something basic. “I don’t smoke anymore .” 

Ghost nods, whether it was meant to be mocking or genuine is something Soap’s ego can’t discern. “Right.” 

They stand there for a moment in the pseudo-silence, filled with the ambience of night sounds and distant sirens echoing through the ether and surrounding the two of them in a lamentous hum. 

“If it was up to me, I’d have let you kill him today.”

“You would?” Soap asks with genuine confusion. 

“I would. Price doesn’t always think of it that way, but the world’s better off without having scum like him wasting space, even if he’s behind bars.”

Ahead, somewhere from out of the darkness, the glow of the burning airport stood out, a beacon of hellish light that made Soap’s skin crawl. They’re far away and the attack was hours ago, but it lingers on his skin like an itch he can’t run away from. 

He leans on the cigarette for comfort, and just a little, the presence of the taller man beside him helps to ease the loneliness of feeling like one tremendous failure. 

“Don’t think too hard about it Soap, it’ll make your hair fall out and we certainly can’t have that with that illustrious haircut of yours.” 

Soap jerked his head around so fast, he could’ve almost sworn Ghost startled just a little. 

“Oh you’re one to talk about appearances with that halloween costume shite you’ve got going on.” 

It takes two seconds for Soap to realise he’d chosen the wrong option. He’d overstepped one of the rules Price had very clearly set out for him. No questions about his appearance. 

To his surprise, Ghost just gives him a bit of a laugh, albeit a bit of a snide one. “To each their own, but I’m serious, don’t beat yourself up about what happened today, there’s no use in dwelling on it.”

Soap frowns. “How am I not supposed to dwell on it? If we hadn’t responded to the attack on the stadium, if you and Shepherd hadn’t followed after us, we would have died there too,” he gestures vaguely out at the glow of the still smouldering heap of rubble. 

“That’s just the way of the world, Soap. No one gets into this job thinking you’ll walk away with a bruise or a cut you can just slap a plaster over. People die, that’s how it works. We just happen to see more of it because of what we do. We are not entitled to living longer or dying later or easier because we’re supposed to be heroes. We could have died today, but what does it actually matter in the grand scheme of things.” 

“You’re a real ray of sunshine, Lt,” Soap says dryly, bringing the cigarette to his mouth again. In the corner of his eye, he can see Ghost do the same. 

“Maybe I’ve just been screwed over by the system that’s supposed to keep me alive more than I’ve been saved by it.” 

Soap shrugged, but it didn’t sit right with him, the idea that death was just an inevitable fact of life. He’s too stubborn to believe it. For someone who’d spent more than half his waking life trying to change the hand he’d been dealt when he was born to broke college student parents and the expectation to be utterly average, he didn’t take kindly to the notion of just accepting things he can’t change, even if it drives him up the wall. 

There’s a lot of other, more personal questions he wants to ask the man instead, but he settles for something safer. 

“How do you deal with it? Stuff like today?” 

“I’m not the person you should be asking for advice, Soap,” Ghost says with a hint of surprise. “That’s more Price’s thing.” 

Soap turned to face him, trying to analyse what little he could see of his face where the mask was pulled up just high enough for him to smoke. He can just about see the curve of his lip around the cigarette and the edge of what seemed to be a jagged scar extending from the corner of his mouth. 

Just as quickly as Soap had seen it, he lowered the cigarette, holding the smoke for a moment before he released it in a slow exhale. 

“I’m not asking for advice, I’m asking how you cope.” 

“I keep going. Sometimes the only way to cope is to endure.” 

The silence that followed thereafter was more comfortable, more settled. Soap could begin to see why Price had told him Ghost was an acquired taste. For all his cold facade, he was really just a man with a grumpy disposition. Maybe even one with a personality outside of work, but Soap struggles to comprehend what that might be. 

Reminded of work and everything they’d discussed in the wake of the attack, Soap frowned as he took another drag from the cigarette, now on its last breath.

“What do you think ended up happening to Price’s informant?” 

Ghost scoffed, stubbing out his own cigarette against the rail and crushing the rest under his boot for good measure. “Fuck if I know.” 

Soap shook his head, feeling himself getting riled up just at the thought of it. “Bet you the arse is sitting somewhere comfortable, getting piss drunk, laughing at the news.” 

Ghost shrugs. “Reckon you may be right about that one, sergeant.” 

“Wherever he is, I hope karma comes back to get him good.”

 

MOSCOW 

 

The man convulsed with a cry of pain as another shock of electricity surged through him, curling in a distortion of twitching muscles through the point where the cattle prod made contact with his bare, singed back and burned another snakebite pattern onto what remained of the undamaged skin. 

The small, uninsulated barn stank of singed hair and burning flesh, all emanating from a centre point where a young man, beaten and tortured beyond recognition, was bound to a bloodied kitchen chair. 

He shivered and twitched from the aftershock of electricity under the glaring warm buzzing of a bare filament bulb, fixed to the rafters above his head. 

Six other men, still residually wearing police uniforms and paramedic overalls, were gathered around him in a semicircle. 

The one in front of him, Andrei Nolan, was not holding the cattle prod. His hands were clean of blood, though there was a light spatter across the front of his body from his earlier beating, inflicted by the man now standing behind the chair, resting a gloved hand dutifully on the wooden backrest, waiting for further instruction. 

“I’m not going to say I’m surprised, Dmitri. But I expected better from someone like you,” Andrei says with mock pity, crouching down to find the swollen eyes of the young man. A trickle of pinkish saliva traced down his trembling lip and dripped to the cold floor by his bare feet. 

“Not even twenty with a whole life ahead of him. You could’ve gone and married that pretty young thing you’re hiding in the city. Could have fathered children to carry that name since the anti-communist rats snuffed out the rest of your Soviet supporter family and executed them like dogs, but your bloodline will end here because you wanted to be a bootlicker.” 

Dmitri flinched as Andrei pressed a calloused thumb into the burn on his inner thigh, drawing out a pained noise. He leaned away from the hand, but stripped naked and bound, there was little he could do to avoid the pain of Andrei’s finger scratching open the blistered skin and causing it to bleed again. 

Even Yuri, the man that had inflicted the burn waiting behind him with bated breath, began to feel nauseated at the sight of his own handiwork, but it did not show. He kept his expression even and serious. 

Andrei was a dangerous man and Yuri knows better than to cross him when he’s already angry. Andrei might think of Dmitri as a bootlicker, but he was just as much the same to Makarov. Still, Yuri stood by, idle, complacent. The cattle prod in his other hand was heavy and had more weight to it than it should have had. 

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Andrei asked. 

Mustering the last of his strength, Dmitri lifted his swollen face to look Andrei dead in the eye and spoke around a mouthful of busted teeth. 

“Preserving innocent lives… is not… the same… as bootlicking.” He threw in as much venom as he could into the words, punctuating it by spitting blood and phlegm into Andrei’s face, mere centimetres away from him. The man recoiled with a curse and reacted with a harsh backhanded smack to his already busted face. Andrei wiped at his face with the edge of his sleeve. 

“It would’ve been better for you if you begged for mercy,” he says, getting to his feet and moving a safer distance away. 

“Fucker thinks he’s Pavlik Morozov,” one of the other men laughs, shaking his head pitifully and the others join in. “But by all means if he wants to die a young hero, we give him his martyr fantasy,” another says. 

 Yuri feels himself stiffen. He agreed to rough up the kid, already uncomfortable at the thought of hurting him to teach him a lesson. He gave in when the Inner Circle wanted to use his house to lay low after that afternoon's situation with Makarov’s arrest, but he did not consent to killing a man that had seen him as a mentor. He’d practically fathered him from the age of fifteen when his parents were killed. 

“Don’t be so hasty, Pyotr,” Andrei scolded him. “Now that Makarov is in federal custody, we must make extra sure not to lose his sentiments to our own vision. We must be patient.” 

“We still have Zakhaev,” the first man suggests and Andrei turns to him, unimpressed. 

“Zakhaev is a puppet on a string. He knows what Makarov wants and he’ll be better in executing that vision than any other of his affiliates, but we must not forget that though Zakhaev was Makarov’s predecessor, he still had a different vision for Russia.” 

“It's better than letting the cause die off.” 

“Makarov has planned for this. The system has not failed us. All the more to show that this little stunt of yours has meant nothing,” Andrei directs his attention back to Dmitri, kicking his bare foot roughly. 

“But seeing as this stint didn’t play out as you planned and you have nothing meaningful to say, perhaps you shouldn’t be able to say anything at all.” 

Yuri frowned, unsure where this was going as Andrei addressed one of the men beside him. “Go to the van and fetch the white jug in the back. Should be under the spare uniforms. Don’t let the woman in the main house see you.” 

Andrei tossed his keys to the man. 

“What are you planning to do to him?” Yuri asks, now visibly becoming unnerved. 

“Nothing extravagant.”

“I am not going to kill him with my wife and child barely two hundred metres away,” he said sternly and Andrei scoffed. 

“He won’t die immediately. I’m counting on the secondary complications to do that. Keeps the hands clean and the conscience clear.” 

“You fucking murderer,” Dmitri says as loud as he was able, struggling against his restraints. “All of you will burn in hell.” 

“At least you’ll be there to welcome us,” Andrei says dryly. 

They all turned in tandem to face the creaking of the barn door behind them, just a little way away, the man how having returned and holding up a heavy, half-empty bottle that at first sight seemed to be some sort of laundry detergent, but Yuri’s heart dropped through the floor as he realised exactly what it was. 

“You can’t be serious– that’s insane,” he stammers as the man hands off the bottle to  Andrei, now making a play to thoroughly check the label. 

“Thirty-seven percent hydrochloric acid. A lower concentration is an irritant to the skin, but undiluted, it’ll corrode right through to the flesh. I wonder what it’ll do to those vocal cords of yours.” 

He roughly shoves the bottle in Yuri’s direction. “If you would do the honours.” 

“I am not going to pour hydrochloric acid down his throat.” 

“You’re not really in a position to negotiate here. It would be a shame if I were to show your little girl what her daddy is really capable of.” 

“You leave my family out of this,” Yuri warned. 

“Then you wouldn’t mind teaching the rat here a lesson?” 

Gritting his teeth and avoiding eye contact with a panicked Dmitri, Yuri took the bottle from Andrei and slowly unscrewed the cap. It looks just like water. 

 He moved over to Dmitri with much trepidation. 

“Don’t fucking come close to me– you asshole, I thought I could trust you–” he thrashes, scooting the chair back and lurches back with so much force, the chair tips and he crashes to the floor. He cries out in more pain as he takes his weight on his bound arms behind his back, no doubt dislocating his shoulder in the process. He’s still thrashing and crying out as Yuri approaches him.

He freezes, standing there with the open bottle, not sure what to do now. 

“Dinner’s almost ready Yuri, your wife might come out and fetch us soon. You better get a move on.” 

Torn between what he knows is right and the very real possibility that his family could walk in and see what he had done, he kneeled down by the upturned chair and reached for Dmitri��s face, still trying to move away from him. 

“I’ll fucking bite your finger off! Don’t touch me!” 

“Someone hold him still,” Andrei orders and one of the men dutifully comes over to roughly yank him by his hair into a flat position against the dirty floor, tugging his mouth open with a gloved finger. 

“I won’t be able to hold him like this for long,” the man says plainly, clearly struggling to hold him still but Yuri didn’t move. 

“I can’t.” 

“This isn’t a choice,” Andrei says sharply. 

“I let you stay in my house, share my food with you. I am not getting blood on my hands in my own house.” 

Andrei’s eyes narrowed at him, but he stepped forward nonetheless, taking the bottle from Yuri’s hands and knocking him out of the way. 

“I’m starting to question your loyalty, Yuri.” 

Yuri ignores him, pushing past the five other guys to leave the barn as soon as possible. He doesn't get out before the screaming starts, wet choking around the sound. 

He leaves the barn with his head in his hands. He can still hear him, now, halfway to the house. 

Yuri thinks he might continue to hear that scream five, six years down the line. 

It's not completely stopped by the time he reaches the kitchen and finds his wife standing there over the simmering pot on the stove, shoulders stiff and mouth pressed into a tight white line as she stirs the mix once more and forcefully knocks the extra broth from her spoon on the lip of the pot, clearly demonstrating her discontent while refusing to meet her husband’s gaze. 

“Anya–” 

“Don’t even begin,” she warns sharply. She doesn’t look at him, instead, shutting off the stove and looking out at the uneven plain of dying grass between the house and the barn that had now gone eerily quiet and empty in the symphony of night crickets. 

The barn door opens and five out of the six men still in the room step out and begin making their way over to the house. In the background against the chattering of the TV, Yuri can hear the little girl in the living room, playing with the scatter of toys on the carpet and giggling, blissfully unaware of the conversation unfolding in the kitchen and the horror on the other side of the lawn. 

He turns back to his wife, unsure of what to think, but she gives him something to hold onto. “We’ll talk about it later.” 

She gets him to set the table, clearing all the leftover clutter from the time he’d been away. He’s missed so much over the past few years in Makarov’s ranks, he’s hardly been around to see his child growing up. Still, she draws him in her wobbly doodles of the family. 

He gathers all the drawings together in a stack and goes to shove it in one of the cupboards in the living room, ruffling the kid’s hair as she doesn’t even bother to look away from the TV as he is passing–

“What happened to your hand?” 

Yuri goes back to the kitchen when he hears Anya’s concerned voice, now looking down at Andrei’s freshly bandaged arm as she began ladling soup into the bowls on the counter. 

“Cleaning accident,” he laughs it off, making eye contact with Yuri. “Was struggling with a tough stain that didn’t want to go out without a fight, but it gave in eventually.” 

Dinner after that was painfully quiet, interspersed with a few crude jokes and inappropriate glances in Anya’s direction every now and again when she went to fetch something from a cupboard that one of the men would order her around for, and though Yuri was having none of it, there was little he could do about the situation while being on such thin ice with Andrei and the others already. 

But he knows now, with how deep he’s getting into this, with the incident from earlier that day on the news, his furious wife and his oblivious daughter in the living room, that he has to make a plan to dig himself out of this hole. 

It's only later that evening, when the other men had retired to the spare bedrooms and guest cottage that came with the old farmhouse, that Yuri found his wife in their upstairs bedroom, gathering a bundle of stuffed animals into her arms and throwing it on her side of the bed. 

Their en suite bathroom door was closed and he can hear the faucet of the bathtub running. 

“I’m having Nadya sleep here tonight. I’m too worried about leaving her alone with them,” She informs in a hushed voice, fluffing up one of the pillows and arranging the stuffed animals accordingly. 

“I’m sorry about everything,” he begins to say but she holds up a hand to silence him, still too angry to give him the time of day. 

“Save it. People make mistakes. I didn’t marry you to sit at home alone for half of my life wishing you were here to see your child growing up, I didn’t marry to sleep in an empty bed and wander around in an empty house until the next thing I know is that my husband’s on the news because he was part of a terrorist attack on an airport. I made that mistake, and I have to live with that, but I swear on my mother’s grave, Yuri, you bring these people into my house again, and I divorce you, for real this time. So either, I go back to Kastovia to live with my family, and you forfeit your rights as a father, or you come up with a plan.”

[glitterarygetsit]

We often treat commenting and kudosing as transactional, but I’d like to propose a different perspective.

A fandom is like a community garden; the plants and trees are fanworks, the paths and benches are structures like ao3 and kinkmemes and themed weeks or months. Comments, and kudos? Those are fertiliser. You don’t necessarily see them at work, but they make the trees grow stronger and the flowers bloom brighter. When you comment on a fic or piece of fanart, you are nourishing our shared garden and helping to make the soil fertile for future works.

I want commenters to feel proud of that contribution. Whether you turn up with a wheelbarrow of the stuff to tip on your favourite flowerbed or just drop a heart emoji in the donations box, you are helping to make the soil richer, the garden more beautiful.

And you know what? Sometimes you need to just sit in the garden without feeling obliged to do anything to maintain it. That’s okay. It’s your garden too! As an author, I don’t want people coming to my stories with a sense of obligation; I want them to be able to enjoy them and be restored by them. If they don’t have the energy to comment right now, that’s okay.

But a comment isn’t the price of an entry ticket to someone else’s garden; it’s an investment in your garden, in your community. You won’t always see it bear fruit, won’t always know what part of the whole it helped grow. But you can know what you put in, and feel proud of being part of the team nourishing and maintaining this wonderful space we all share.

And whatever you do, please—don’t litter.

[honourablejester]

I’m reading back over my subterranean fantasy/D&D setting of Osh Derrinalina, the Land of the Lightless Sea, and you know what? It still makes me really happy. It’s a whole bunch of city states, island nations and fungal hinterlands focused around an 80 mile long, 40 mile wide abyssal sea 6 miles down under the surface of the world, and it makes me happy.

Some highlights:

The oldest people to call the sea home are a race of midnight black translucent bioluminescent abyssal merfolk that were inspired rather strongly by black dragonfish (Idiacanthus atlanticus), because I just really wanted some terrifying abyssal mermaids who are actually quite friendly. Also the image of a subterranean pitch black sea where bioluminescent mermaids live and trade.

The second oldest people are a race of pale bioluminescent spider people who powerfully believe in community, because if I’m making a subterranean setting, by god I’m getting all the mileage I can out of bioluminescence.

There’s also a tribe of pale goblins from the island of death that tattoo themselves with phosphorescent fungal ink from a vast, possibly sentient pit into the realm of the dead. They’re also pretty chill guys.

Half the sea is fed from a vast fungal forest on a shelf around the cavern, at the center of which stands a vast and sacred mound of bat poop that provides 90% of the fertiliser and protein for the nations of the Lightless Sea, and the price for killing one of the sacred bats is death in half the cavern. This is because I watched a David Attenborough documentary one time about cave ecology that featured something similar, and it’s the sort of image that sticks with you.

The main cities of the sea are Ysea, the city of black stone and bioluminescent spider silk that is the primary home of the spider people and the main trade hub of the region, Durgenrath, a clifftop dwarven trade port further down the sea, Muarra, the unfathomably ancient merfolk capital that covers 50 square miles of the sea floor near Ysea, and Tchorit, the glowing crystal stalactite city on the ceiling.

Ysea and Muarra started trading thousands of years ago when the abyssal mermaids came to the black stone shore to trade, and the spider people went underwater in return in diving bells made of their luminescent silk, because I was inspired by the diving bell spider, and it’s such a fantastic fucking image. Pale spider people being towed into the black depths in webs of luminescent silk by translucent abyssal mermaids. I wanted it. I wanted it so bad.

Tchorit is an industrial hub city and was made by ceiling gnomes who call themselves Starbuilders and who are currently in what is essentially a religious cold war with the merfolk over bringing light, in the form of crystal luminescence, to the sacred darkness of the Lightless Sea.

They are also in a cold war with the ancient shadow dragon of the northern wilderness of the sea over the same issue.

The gnomes have made a lot of enemies and are basically the most contentious inhabitants here, in other words.

They are allied with the dwarves. And with the crystal elementals who taught them how to grow luminous crystal cities in the first place. So there’s that.

There’s a secret path somewhere above the cavern roof that leads back to the crystal home caverns of said elementals, and it is ferociously defended. If you haven’t seen pictures of real life crystal caves, you’re in for such a treat. No subterranean fantasy setting would be complete without whole caverns full of vast white crystals, so I made them glowing crystals, because yes, we’re still getting all possible mileage out of subterranean luminescence.

The dwarves have a much less secret, though no less defended, passage from Durgenrath through the stone to Durgendelf, a dwarven city in its own cave that is famous for its artificial suns, because I really, really, really liked that element of Blackreach in Skyrim. Durgendelf has six massive artificial suns, and Durgendelf dwarves are famous farmers and gardeners as much as miners and tunnellers. So they also have a happy friendship with the mushroom people of Derrinalina’s fungal shelf.

The above-mentioned shadow dragon has a very friendly relationship with the above-mentioned cheerful death island goblins, and regularly goes on religious pilgrimages to the island’s temple town to pay his respects to the impossibly deep dry well into death at the centre of the island.

This pit into death is one of two in the Lightless Sea, though the other is underwater. The merfolk commend their dead to the Fathomless Delve, a gaping underwater chasm with an upcurrent that only allows the merfolk dead to actually sink. The merfolk believe that this upcurrent is where all the waters of the sea originate.

The gnomes, on the other hand, believe that the waters of the sea come from the massive fucking waterfall that pours from the ceiling above the northern half of the Lightless Sea, all the way down from the seas on the surface miles above. This titanic waterfall is slowly but surely tearing through the ceiling on that half of the cavern, and has eaten a massive pit in the sea floor below it as well.

It is also possibly the origin of Zarathea, the Lightless Sea’s legendary albino (or possibly undead) dragon turtle that drifts around the wild, black, uninhabited northern half of the Lightless Sea, occasionally pretending to be a rocky island to fatally surprise sailors. One of the theories is that Zarathea fell through the waterfall from the surface seas as a baby dragon turtle. Or, given how weird it is, possibly it’s a native of the Lightless Sea. Nobody knows, and the shadow dragon at the very least would very much like to.

The massive waterfall, if it does finally collapse the ceiling on the northern half of the sea and dump the entire contents of its higher reservoir into the sea at once, could well cause a massive tidal wave that would destroy everything closer to the sea’s surface than Durgenrath. The gnomes, despite living on the ceiling, are extremely worried about this. The spider people and death goblins, despite living directly on the shore, are not. Whether that’s blind optimism or they know something the gnomes don’t is anyone’s guess.

I said the Lightless Sea is 80 miles long, but the northernmost reaches of it haven’t actually been discovered yet by anyone from the southern end of the cavern, so the exact extent of the northern shore isn’t actually known. And the sea floor on that end of the cavern goes deep, and stays going deep, a vast sloping descent to the north. There could be just about anything down there.

I had so much fun with this setting. Also, worldbuilders note: watch nature documentaries. And history documentaries. Just history and nature and geology and science and archaeology in general. There’s some really cool and inspiring shit in them. Our world is really weird and really cool, and I promise you that a lot of fantasy worlds are nearly boring by comparison. Pick one really weird little thing, bat dung, or spider diving bells, or bioluminescence, and build some funky societies around them, it’s so much fun.

I am still so proud of this setting. I love it.

[aaaholdinggroupus]

The Benefits of sulphate fertiliser in Agricultural Practices

The use of chemical fertilisers has enabled farmers to increase crop yields significantly over the past decades. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) are the three key macronutrients essential for plant growth and development. While nitrogen is supplied through urea, ammonium sulfate is an important source of sulfur and ammoniacal nitrogen for crops. Here is an overview of ammonium sulphate fertiliser, its benefits for crop production, and optimal management practices. Read more: https://folkd.com/blog/The-Benefits-of-sulphate-fertiliser-in-Agricultural-Practice

[notyourtoday]

Caption on post -

The consequences of the 300-day lsraeli military attack on the Gaza Strip are horrifying, both in their scope and their deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians. This is particularly alarming given the shameful lack of global pressure on Israel to adhere to international law and the rulings of the International Court of Justice and to halt the ongoing crime of genocide against the Palestinian people. Palestinian civilians have been the primary and real target of Israel's crimes in the Gaza Strip from the first day of the assault. They have paid a heavy and unprecedented price as Israeli forces systematically and extensively targeted them as part of a comprehensive revenge operation aimed at dehumanizing them, and ending their existence through killing and displacement.

The Israeli army commits various crimes of destruction and actual obliteration against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. These include mass killings with heavy and indiscriminate weapons, ammunition, rockets, and bombs, including U.S.-made munitions that have been gradually supplied to Israeli military warehouses. The crimes of the lsraeli army have also caused severe physical and mental harm by deliberately inflicting serious injuries and depriving the Palestinian civilians of medical care, arbitrarily arresting and torturing them, intentionally subjecting them to catastrophic living conditions by besieging them and cutting off their access to water, electricity, and fuel, forcibly displacing them, starving them, and destroying all means of life and livelihood. Additionaly, Israel has also imposed measures aimed at preventing reproduction by dispersing families, killing thousands of men and women in their reproductive years, and thousands of children and newborns. The latest of these atrocities includes the killing of thousands of frozen embryos through direct targeting of fertilisation centers, depriving hundreds of Palestinian couples of their last chance to Conceive.

By @euromedhr on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (@euromedhr)

Link to post.

[lethimfertilise]

I reckon a proficient fertiliser trader should stay updated on commodity prices and trends. Wheat, soya, and corn are displayed on my second screen.

So, a few reflections on last week's corn fluctuations. This past Friday, corn at CBOT surpassed a psychologically significant level of $4.00 per bushel, concluding the week at $3.99 per bushel. This marks the first time since November 2020, and it's happened relatively fast: at the end of October 2022, corn cost $7.00 per bushel!

However, I'd like to highlight a couple of crucial points:

- $4 in 2022 doesn't carry the same purchasing power as $4 in 2020.

- Let's compare the prices of fertilisers now and in November 2020 (the first number corresponds to 2020):

NOLA UREA $224 vs $346

NOLA UAN $125 vs $257

NOLA DAP $351 vs $560

AG UREA $259 vs $380

EGYPT UREA $252 vs $400

Furthermore, consider the fact that the net position of funds in corn is showing the largest negative number in the past 12 years - 340,742 sales contracts.

It seems like there's little hope for corn price recovery, but fertiliser prices continue to hold steady. Nonetheless, one way or another, something ought to change. And in my personal opinion (which may be wrong, of course) - fertiliser price correction would happen rather soon this spring.

[secularbakedgoods]

Last month, the African Centre for Biodiversity released a report that sought to answer a question: Is Zambia’s food system collapsing? The country is suffering through one of its worst-ever droughts. Nearly half of maize under cultivation has been lost, while the price of this staple food has risen by 30%. More than six million Zambians, from a population of 20-million, are at risk of acute food shortages and malnutrition.

This was not part of Bill Gates’ vision. Successive Zambian administrations have been among the most enthusiastic adopters of the kinds of policies recommended by the Gates Foundation. The country is a poster-child for Agra’s drive to industrialise African agriculture, having implemented in 2009 a new subsidy programme to incentivise farmers to switch to commercial seeds and intensive fertiliser use. More than a million farmers did.

But, instead of increasing yields, the new approach simply increased farmers’ vulnerability to climate shocks like the current drought, the new report concludes. The use of hybrid seeds and imported fertilisers has degraded the soil, making it difficult to grow anything else; and the push to replace subsistence crops with cash crops, which then failed, means that farmers and their families are going hungry.

“We used to grow diverse crops,” said Mary Sakala, a Zambian farmer and chairperson of the Rural Women’s Assembly, which commissioned the report. “But now governments and agribusiness have pushed farmers into monoculture that depends on inputs. Their programmes have made us all vulnerable.”

(Simon Allison, The Continent)

[probablyasocialecologist]

The World Food Summit of 1996 approached food security through the principles of ensuring there is enough safe and nutritious food that can be accessed daily to meet healthy dietary needs and food preferences. By definition, this is a desirable and worthy goal. However, in the years since, food security has developed into a paradigm which does not question the underlying power dynamics and the reproduction of material conditions that make food insecurity a permanent feature of the global order. At its core, the food security paradigm deals only with access to food, without challenging the political and economic structures that determine and control access, as well as distribution.  By failing to address the root causes of hunger and famine, the food security paradigm makes it impossible to end hunger globally. Of course, many people worldwide possess food security, but this is restricted to increasingly limited geographic pockets. In terms of the people localised in one area, food vulnerability is influenced and determined by class, race, gender and, of course, citizenship status. Globally, “underdevelopment” and “de-development” lead to widespread food insecurity across areas. Another problem with the food security paradigm is that it is easily co-opted to generate partial answers that pose no threat to the corporate food system, or worse, that even open up new profit opportunities. Accelerated by other crises, the food security paradigm becomes ever more dependent on aid, be it through direct food delivery, cash transfers or small development projects that cannot compete with the food giants and their price-setting powers. In practice, a “science of food security” emerges, one which takes as its focus calories and the output that is compatible with precision agriculture having the aim to increase crop yields and to assist management decisions using high technology sensor and analysis tools. This model tends to be reliant on “Green Revolution” technologies that rely on chemical fertilisers and pesticides and that are tied to colonial projects and corporations, in order to optimise resources in aid response and/or development projects.  In this rationale, food insecurity can be addressed by reaching optimum yields of certain crops that should meet the demand for fats, fibres and protein. All of this is carefully managed and data-driven. Precision farming is advocated by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) with the objective of optimising, “agricultural value chains […] critical in advancing food and nutrition sufficiency without increasing the size of land under cultivation.” The framing of food that reduces it only to “optimal input” relegates vital elements of food production and the culture of eating, like territory ownership, taste, heritage, care, well-being and connection as secondary. This reductionist approach has, though, proved useful to corporate agriculture, since it reinforces the case for genetically modified crops (GMOs), more efficient fertilisers, and the standardisation of food production for market purposes. Advocates of plant breeding technologies (including GMOs and hybrid seeds) argue that government overregulation is an obstacle to achieving food security. Overregulation, as the argument goes, denies populations the opportunity to grow crops that have increased nutrient use efficiency and are more resilient to climate shocks. 

[...]

The paradigm of food security is about optimising productivity. It’s true that productivity matters – after all, feeding the world requires enormous quantities of food. But if productivity is approached solely as a technological problem, it reinforces the tendency to fragment the quantitative and qualitative aspects of food production and consumption. On the quantitative side, production for food security is viewed as a challenge of multiplication. Whereas division, that is, distribution of food, is left to logistical planning. This ignores what Raj Patel identified in his influential 2007 book Stuffed and Starved, as the bottleneck of power that concentrates international food distribution among a small set of corporations. This bottleneck excludes the poor and small-scale food producers from decision-making. It also normalises worrying tendencies, such as an overreliance on industrial animal exploitation as a protein source, which has direct health implications, as well as longer term consequences like the proliferation of new viruses, greenhouse gas emissions and inefficient use of water and soil.

28 May 2024

[cathkaesque]

There’s a lot of research on banana production out there, especially from this great organisation called Bananalink which supports banana workers’ unions in the UK supply chain. Most the facts here are from these two pages on their website. I just wanted to ground some of the discussion around bananas in the production process, labour and environmental conditions, and who benefits from this process.  The above diagram might not be very clear so I've reproduced the text below:

1. Banana production takes approximately nine months. It starts with the preparation of the soil including the clearing of land, drainage, installation and fertiliser application. Then planting and field work, such as weeding, pest and disease control, and irrigation, take place. Bananas are harvested while still green [you can watch a video of this process here]

2. The harvested bunches are transported to a packing shed where they are divided into smaller market-friendly bunches, inspected, sorted, washed, treated, labelled, and boxed for export. Bananas that do not meet the quality standard are usually sold locally at a much lower price or used for livestock feed.

3. Some bananas are pre-packed into bags according to the specifications of individual retailers. Pre-packing is used to differentiate bananas such as Fairtrade organics or small bananas from the bulk supply of loose bananas. It can be an opportunity for the grower to add value, but it also offers advantages in controlling quality and reducing wastage.

4. Bannas are then transported by truck to ports, placed in sheds, and packed in refrigerated ships or refridgerated containers. Bananas take between six to 12 days to get to the UK/Europe. They are shipped at a controlled temperature of 13.3 centigrade in order to increase their shelf life. Humidity and ventilation are carefully monitored to maintain quality.

5. When the bananas arrive at their destinaation port they are first trucked to warehouses where they can be kept in cool conditions and then ripened - using ethylene - when they are needed for delivery to retailers. Bananas may also be bagged at this stage. They are then delivered to retailers' regional distribution centres before final delivery to individual stores.

The local population eat different varieties of bananas grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here's a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country's GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is 'growing' and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.