MW3 Easter Egg hints Black Ops Cold War villain is still alive 30 years later

It feels like the whole Call of Duty cast lives and serves and by the words of George R R Martin's House Greyjoy: "What is dead may never die".

Characters seem to come and go, and then return from beyond the grave, and now fans have begun to meme that the most recent death is also going to come back to life.

Yet there might be more twists to the tale so far, where the Modern Warfare series combines with Black Ops, as an MW3 Easter egg makes it look like one antagonist from Cold War has found their way to the modern-day, despite having died.

Click to enlarge

This rebooted Modern Warfare series has been confirmed to also be in the same timeline as the new Black Ops story, with various Easter eggs in the past which have tied the two together.

Yet Modern Warfare 3 kicks it up a notch and one specific Easter egg eludes to another "dead" protagonist still being alive, some 30 years after dying off-screen.

Cold War's antagonist "Perseus" is reported to have died from cancer in the final mission, although we saw him.

However, as pointed out by popular Call of Duty personality Jon "MrDalekJD" Hutchinson, there are a number of Perseus flags located in one of the bunkers within the third mission of the campaign, insinuating that he could still be alive.

Did Modern Warfare 3 just give away the plot of the next Black Ops game?

The inclusion of Perseus flags suggests that the Soviet boss is still alive in the canon and therefore didn't succumb to cancer as we are led to believe. This could then prompt that the next Call of Duty game, which will be a Black Ops title centred on the Gulf War, would then pit the crew against Perseus once again.

What it could also mean is that Perseus isn't a name, but a title or an alias that can be succeeded, meaning we might now see someone adopt the same flagship and carry it forward.

Something that is quite startling though is that this reference would also suggest that Perseus is still at large, meaning it might be the case that at some point in the Black Ops timeline, we might not be on the surviving side. 

Could the Modern Warfare crew then be pulled in to clean up the mess? It's all possible now that this Easter egg has opened up a can of worms.