Hidden Strike -

They found the engineers in a sub-basement control room, huddled behind a blast door. The four of them—two women, two men, all in oil-stained coveralls—looked less like valuable assets and more like terrified rabbits. Their leader, a sharp-faced woman named Dr. Amira Halabi, didn’t thank him. She just said, “About time. The backdoor isn’t in our heads. It’s in a chip we hid in the refinery’s main server.”

“You don’t understand. If we leave it, Rashidi’s hackers will find it within hours. The chip contains the master key. He doesn’t need us alive—just the chip.”

The first kill was silent. Korr’s knife found the carotid of a guard checking his phone. The second was not. Singh’s suppressed rifle coughed, and a Chechen dropped with a hole through his temple. But the third guard, hidden behind a fuel drum, saw the muzzle flash. He didn’t shout. He simply squeezed his radio twice.

Korr crawled out of the culvert, gasping, covered in black crude, and looked up at the stars. His team was alive. The engineers were alive. The hidden strike had failed. Hidden Strike

The next fifteen minutes were chaos. Singh killed the lights. Rashidi’s men opened fire blindly. Meier’s C4 blew a hole in the sub-basement floor, revealing a black, viscous river below. One by one, they dropped into the freezing, suffocating sludge. Korr went last, pulling the blast door shut behind him just as a dozen armed men stormed the control room.

“Meier,” Korr whispered. “You still have that C4?”

“Down? The sub-basement is a dead end.” They found the engineers in a sub-basement control

“Then we leave it,” Korr said.

“No,” Dr. Halabi interrupted, her eyes wide with sudden understanding. “There’s an old wastewater tunnel. It leads under the highway. But it’s flooded with crude oil.”

“Then don’t breathe,” Korr said, and he meant it as both an instruction and a promise. Amira Halabi, didn’t thank him

“The engineers aren’t engineers,” Delgado had said over a scrambled sat-phone, while Korr was still buckling his plate carrier. “They’re codebreakers. Three months ago, they cracked a backdoor in every piece of Russian air-defense software sold to Iran in the last five years. Rashidi wants them to reverse-engineer the crack. If he gets that, he sells it to the highest bidder—Moscow, Beijing, whoever. Our entire electronic warfare edge goes up in smoke.”

“Singh, cut the main power feed to the refinery’s floodlights. Meier, rig the server room with a delayed charge. We’ll let Rashidi think we’re making a last stand. Then we go through the oil. We hold our breath, and we swim.”

“Swim through crude?” one of the engineers stammered. “That’s insane. It’s toxic. We’ll drown.”

He landed with a four-man team: Meier, the demolitions expert with a dark sense of humor; Singh, the comms wizard; and two local scouts, brothers from the border town of Safawi. The refinery was a maze of catwalks, distillation towers, and storage tanks, each one a potential coffin. Rashidi’s men—a mix of ex-Iranian Revolutionary Guards and freelance Chechens—patrolled in staggered pairs, their night vision goggles creating twin green eyes in the darkness.