Hidden Strike Review

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

Under the earth, in total darkness, they swam. The crude oil clung to their skin like death. Lungs burned. Eyes stung. One of the engineers, a young man named Phelps, started to panic and thrash. Korr grabbed him, pressed his own regulator—the one from his emergency oxygen tank—into the man’s mouth. He shared the last of the air. Hidden Strike

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. But Rashidi knew better

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. Under the earth, in total darkness, they swam

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