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.

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

But as he helped Dr. Halabi to her feet, his satellite phone buzzed. A text from Delgado. Korr crawled out of the culvert, gasping, covered

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.” The hidden strike had failed

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.

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.