Hidden Strike -
That’s when the lights went out. Then the emergency generators kicked in, casting everything in a bloody red hue. Over the refinery’s loudspeakers, General Rashidi’s voice echoed, calm and unhurried.
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.”
But Rashidi knew better. He had not bombed the convoy to kill them. He had bombed it to capture them. Hidden Strike
The oil refinery at Al-Tafilah wasn’t just burning—it was screaming. Twisted metal shrieked as secondary explosions tore through the desert night. To anyone watching from the nearby highway, it was a disaster. To General Amir Rashidi, it was music.
“Swim through crude?” one of the engineers stammered. “That’s insane. It’s toxic. We’ll drown.” That’s when the lights went out
“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.”
“Down? The sub-basement is a dead end.” They found the engineers in a sub-basement control
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.
“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 we leave it,” Korr said.
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.