April 19th, 2025 - 07:02:40, as 95-year old Sergeant Frank Woods (James C. Burns) gets his morning coffee, he gets a surprise visit. A ghost from the past has come back to haunt him with a reminder of what he took all those years ago.

Woods: Raul Menendez.

Menendez: From me and mi hermana. *gives gold heart-shaped pendant* Now it begins...

Woods: *nods*

As the VA-ULT, a.k.a. The Vault's security cameras pick up Raul Menendez (Kamar de los Reyes), security notifies law enforcement and the F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Investigation), and locks the place down. But the man has already left the premises and disappeared.

Regardless, the whole nine yards of the police and F.B.I. are on their way. 07:16:49, the Bureau plans to get some help with the hunt: Lieutenant Commander David 'Section' Mason (Rich McDonald), straight from his home in Virginia Beach, while reconnecting with his wife and daughters.

Jessica: Are you sure you don't want to talk about your dad, daddy?

Section: Yes, sweetie.

Savannah: Was he a good man?

Section: Well... uh... he was...

Catriona: Alright, girls. Time to prepare for school. Come on.

Jessica: *sighs* Whatever. Probably won't even talk about it anyway.

Savannah: Yeah, you're right.

Section: Sav, Jes, wait—

Catriona: David, you know you can't keep hiding this. You gotta find a way to make it right with you, your dad and Woods.

Section: Jesus, Catriona. You're starting to sound like my team.

Catriona: Well, if that's the case, then you really need someone to keep you in check. Your CO wasn't kidding when he said you were unusually fixated when this Menendez character popped up on the Teams' radar. I mean, you stopped being around, you pushed yourself in the range and mat so hard that—

Section: I'll be fine, Cat.

Catriona: Yet, somehow I doubt that.

sirens blaring*

F.B.I. Spook: Lieutenant Commander David Mason?

Section: Yeah?

F.B.I. Spook: Come with us. You're being deployed early.

Section: Do we have him?

F.B.I. Spook: I'll tell you all about it. Come on.

Catriona: I got the kids. Come back, and let's talk about what happened. I can see that this is very touchy for you. But you'll owe me that when you return.

Section: Yes ma'am.

Upon meeting up with the rest of the F.B.I. strike force, Section sees the rest of Trident Team, now a six-man unit. With his CO (commissioned officer) team leader Commander 'King' (voiced and played by Max Martini), the NCO (non-commissioned officer) team leader Master Chief Petty Officer 'Shade' (voiced and played by Max Thieriot), Lieutenant Mike Harper (Michael Rooker), Petty Officer First Class Javier Salazar (Celestin Cornielle) and Petty Officer First Class Luke Crosby (Michael Rodrick).

It seems the Bureau assembled the DEVGRU Team just in time as they were about to be deployed. After getting the mission briefing, which is just a kill/capture order on Menendez, the entire raiding party moves out to the VA-ULT.

07:50:33, the hunt begins as F.B.I. Suburbans, Humvees, MRAPs and VTOLs arrive and deploy dozens of men in blue. With Trident Team following behind.

F.B.I. Team Leader: Let's move out!

Knowing the history Section has with the HVT, Harper, King, Shade, Salazar and Crosby take point to form a perimeter and coordinate with the agents as he steps out.

King: *nods*

Harper: Secure the building.

F.B.I. Team Leader: Secure the perimeter!

Section: *sighs*

King: Section, you still sharp?

Section: I am, sir.

King: Okay. Let's go!

F.B.I. Team Leader: Move in!

F.B.I. Operator: Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!

After less than three minutes of breaching and clearing, Trident Team and the F.B.I. Team Leader reach Woods' room.

F.B.I. Team Leader: We've scoured every inch of "The Vault" sirs, except this room.

With the go-ahead, Harper takes point and sees Woods all by his lonesome, completely unfazed. Then Trident Team starts talking, basically commencing an unofficial SSE.

Woods: Safety's on, dipshit.

Section: Hey, old man. Was Raul Menendez here today?

Harper: Sergeant Woods. Raul Menendez is the leader of Cordis Die, and the most dangerous terrorist since Osama Bin Laden.

While Section receives the pendant from Woods and starts remembering his traumatic childhood, Harper gets impatient. So King steps in to control the situation.

Harper: Fucking waste of time. Guy's a vegetable.

Section: Back off!

King: Easy, Lieutenant. Let 'em process.

Woods: All he said was... "MI hermana...". That's Spanish for sister, Dipshit.

Then the Sergeant stops dragging and gets to the point.

Woods: You boys better get your shit together... he's gonna attack.

Harper: If you have information about a threat to national security, you got to tell us.

Woods: Turn the camera on. Your old man, he was doing okay in Alaska... fucking Hudson showed up...

As Woods tells what happened in Pyrrhic Victory, King orders the F.B.I. Team Leader to secure the building in case Menendez or someone linked to him comes in to assassinate the Sergeant.

Woods: They found where I was being held prisoner with a spy satellite... one of them KH-09s. This baby, it shits out a film cannister 12 miles up, then a C-130 comes by and... pffft... snags it at about 30,000 ft. This was not the digital age. This film had to be processed, analyzed and delivered... all by hand. Our dog in the fight was a guy named Jonas Savimbi. *laughs* You think I'm fucking nuts? This guy...

As Woods recounts what his old friend Special Agent Alex Mason (Sam Worthington) told him after getting rescued, King, after getting the HVI's file from the C.I.A., gets curious about something.

King: Wait. I just got your file. Well, only the parts that weren't redacted. It said you were MIA back in 1968. Then you came back in '72. And you weren't active until the Angolan Civil War. What happened back then?

Woods: Ah. I was MIA in 'Nam. But your old man *points at Section* thought I was dead. After all that shit Dragovich, Kravchenko and Steiner did to him... the numbers... Reznov being stuck in his head. He had no idea what was real. How the fuck could he? Kravchenko. When I sliced that bastard open, it saved everyone's ass. He comes to first, BOOM! Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton. Six months later, they shipped me over to Da Nang. And this fucking place made the Hilton look good. We lost 17 in my group. By '72, it was just me. I was not gonna die in a fucking swamp!

King: Damn. Thanks for clearing that up.

Woods: Anytime.

Then Woods continued with his rescue mission in the middle of the Angolan Civil War. And mentions how Mason met and tried to kill Menendez for the first time.

At the end of that chapter, he boils it down to:

Woods: You can't kill me... thanks to your old man. He put it all on the line for me... for honor and friendship. Yeah. He's just like you, kid.

Then he elaborates further.

Woods: And that's how it started. Your old man tries to kill Menendez. Menendez, wants payback... even if it takes decades. Menendez, back then... he was a uh... a big fish in a small pond. He made his cake by running a drug cartel out of Nicaragua. It was a hand-me-down.

Harper: Mm-hmm.

Woods: The C.I.A. smoked his old man. Old Cyclops is pretty pissed at America. While we were fucking around in the Middle East before World War 3, the Russians and the Chinese got real cozy. Now the politicians, they want you to think this is about ideology. That's a lot of horseshit.

Shade: How so, Sergeant?

Woods: Give me your phone.

Shade gives Woods his phone.

Shade: Go ahead.

Woods: Rare Earth Elements. The whole fucking world runs on this shit. Who controls all of it? China.

Then Shade, with his tactical pad, refers to the news report of China leading the Rare Earth Element production back in 2014.

Shade: From here? Them leading the REE production. I guess it was so simple, we were too sophisticated to see it, huh?

Woods: Truth tends to hide in plain sight and most people overlook it, but it's there. So while Corporate America's kissing China's ass...

Woods then borrows Shade's pad, goes to YouTube and shows CNN's recent documentary about Cordis Die. As the news network's Kate Bolduan dates the terror group's origins back to the same year of China's REE production takeover.

Kate Bolduan: Now the mysterious "Cordis Die" social network has crowdsourced simultaneous protests in both Iran and North Korea. Never seen in public, who really is the leader of Cordis Die? He's known only as Odysseus.

Woods scoffs at the notion of Menendez thinking of himself as Odysseus.

Woods: Odysseus?! My ass! Raul fucking Menendez! Asshole.

He then turns to the news report about "The Drone Race" and the email he sent to JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) back in 2021 about the Cordis Die threat that is rising in the midst of this phenomenon. With that, King and Shade start getting suspicions about the winner of that race: The Tacitus Corporation.

A multinational technology-centered laboratory which says that it acts on the world's best interests, but refuses to reveal its origin. Though they said they came from small, independent, struggling tech labs all over the globe.

Woods: I told JSOC, but they were too busy. "You see, The Drone Race has started.".

King: That would have been real useful to know back then. Thanks military intelligence. Now you got me doing your fucking homework for ya. Starting with Tacitus.

Woods: Finally, someone's getting it. I mean. Really guys? You're gonna build an entire military based on a mineral element that is wholly controlled by China?

Shade: Sad, but true. And I hate that fact more than I can tell you. Fuck you very much, Corporate America. You too, Pussy-dent of the United States. You both deserve to be in a strip club, not an office.

Woods laughs*

Section: *shakes head* Who knew these three would become best friends, huh?

Woods: I need a drink. Dipshit!

Harper: Oh, God...

Woods: Go get me a soda. Get it from the nurse's stash, none of that diet crap.

After getting his Coke, Woods goes to the news report about "The Cyber Attack on the Chinese Stock Markets" that happened back in June 19th, 2021. Which is the loss and/or theft of one trillion dollars from the Chinese economy that caused basically the country's exclusive version of The Great Recession.

The moment the headline says that Cordis Die shared a leaked memo that shows the United States as the perpetrator, Woods calls bullshit. And said that this is what Menendez wanted as a billion people, including the United Nations, start to look at America with more disdain and distrust than back then in the Russo-American War.

Thus starting the Second Cold War.

Kate Bolduan: China's Premier Chen is outraged by Cordis Die's leaked memo, alleging the Cyber Attack was covertly ordered by the White House.

Woods: After all the dirty shit the U.S. government has gotten away with, this time they're innocent. And no one fucking believes them.

Shade: Hmm, as much as I wanna see Bosworth burn for making us corporate slaves to China, we'll be next in the graveyard of empires if we let Menendez and his fanatics win.

Woods: Exactly and unfortunately. They take out Cordis Die's network. Two days later, the director of the F.B.I., burned alive. Right now, a billion people believe that Raul Menendez is their savior. Well, guess what boys? He's not. You'd better take him out pretty fucking quick. Bad shit's gonna happen.