Hidden - Strike

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.

“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.”

He stood on a dune two klicks east, binoculars pressed to his eyes, the thermal glow of the inferno painting his face orange. His men had done their job. The mercenary convoy, hired to escort the last Western engineers out of the war zone, was now a scattering of molten hubcaps and shredded tires. The engineers themselves—four civilians with no combat training—were supposedly dead. That was the official report.

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.” Hidden Strike

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.

“We’re not going out the way we came. We’re going down.”

“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

Korr stared at the burning refinery. Then at the highway. Then at the terrified, oil-slick faces of the people he had just saved.

Korr’s blood went cold. Hidden strike. Not an ambush—a deception. Rashidi didn’t want to capture the engineers here. He wanted to force Korr to lead him to the chip. The general had let them infiltrate. He had let them find the civilians. Because the chip was the real prize, and only the Americans knew where it was hidden.

Three hours earlier, a Black Hawk with no transponder signal had skimmed the Jordanian border, hugging the terrain so low that Bedouin shepherds threw rocks at it, thinking it was a giant, lost beetle. On board was a man named Jake Korr. “No,” Dr

“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.”

“Then we leave it,” Korr said.