Play the Price

John   Price (b.  / /19 ) Captain, 22nd Regiment SAS. Aka Old Man, aka Prisoner 627, aka Black Viking, aka a f ing legend on the battlefield.

There are a lot of stories about who he is and where he came from. Some say he was an orphan wandering the streets of Aldershot when he was taken in by an elderly man called Bernard Montgomery. Some say he was born in the back of the Arms Research Center in the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. Others claim he’s the grandson of a member of the 7th Armored Division who died sabotaging the Terpitz in WWII. Then there are those that maintain he wasn’t born, but assembled from left over parts of SAS soldiers. Whichever origin story you believe, there’s no denying he had one helluva storied career.

His file is heavily redacted, so information is scarce at best. While there are reports that he was involved with a number of ops in the 80s & 90s around the world, his earliest confirmed op was in ’96. Then Lieutenant Price was deployed with his commanding officer, Captain MacMillian, to the Exclusion Zone around Pripyat, Ukraine. Their mission: to intercept, observe and eliminate the notorious Ultranationalist Russian arms dealer Imran Zakhaev. Needless to say, the op didn’t go as planned. Price and MacMillian were unable to take out the target and were forced to fight their way through waves of Ultranationalist soldiers to make good their escape through the radioactive ghost town. Their failure to eliminate Zakhaev would prove to be costly.

Then there’s a black hole in Price’s file from the late 90s into the early 2000s. Rumor has it he involved in ops in East Africa, the Middle East, even the States. These rumors could neither be confirmed nor denied. What can’t be denied is where and when Price pops back up: the Bering Strait, 2011. Price, now a Captain, is the commanding officer of Bravo Team, 22nd Regiment, SAS. He and his squad were on a mission that, unbeknownst to them, would set them on a collision course with the beginning of World War III. That fateful night on the high seas, Price and Bravo Team discovered a load of stolen plutonium and its accompanying manifest which named the cargo’s intended recipient: Khaled Al-Asad. That fingerprint would take Price from the Caucus Mountains to Azerbaijan to the Atlay Mountains, ultimately ending with an assault on a Russian ballistic missile facility held by Ultranationalist forces. In that siege, Price’s Bravo Team, along with some US Marines, thwarted a thermonuclear missile attack on the United States’ Eastern Seaboard, saving an estimated 41,000,000 lives.