Strike | Hidden

But Rashidi knew better. He had not bombed the convoy to kill them. He had bombed it to capture them.

“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.” 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. But Rashidi knew better

“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.” “Rashidi wasn’t after the chip

Korr looked at his team. At the four civilians. At the red emergency lights pulsing like a heartbeat. He thought of the child in Idlib. The choice he’d made. This was another one.

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.

He didn’t run.