Hidden Strike «2026»

“Rashidi wasn’t after the chip. He was after you. He knew you’d come. The engineers were bait. He wants the ghost. All of this was to confirm your location. He has a drone with a thermobaric warhead inbound on your last known position. You have four minutes. Run.”

But as he helped Dr. Halabi to her feet, his satellite phone buzzed. A text from Delgado.

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

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.

They surfaced a quarter-mile away, in a drainage culvert beneath the highway, just as the refinery erupted in a massive fireball—Meier’s delayed charge, detonating the server room and the chip with it. The sound was a physical wall of pressure. “Rashidi wasn’t after the chip

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

“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.” The engineers were bait

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