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.
Korr was a ghost who occasionally worked for the CIA’s Special Activities Division. His last assignment had ended badly—a village in Idlib, a child with a grenade, a choice that still woke him up at 3:00 AM drenched in sweat. Now he was being sent back into the grinder for a reason that his handler, a woman named Delgado with a voice like crushed gravel, had only hinted at. Hidden Strike
“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.” They surfaced a quarter-mile away, in a drainage
Korr’s mission was simple: infiltrate the captured refinery, find the four “engineers,” and extract them before Rashidi’s torturers arrived. Standard rescue. The kind he’d done a hundred times. His last assignment had ended badly—a village in