Korr cursed under his breath. “They know we’re here. Move.”
A coded signal.
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
“Meier,” Korr whispered. “You still have that C4?” Korr cursed under his breath
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. They found the engineers in a sub-basement control
Korr crawled out of the culvert, gasping, covered in black crude, and looked up at the stars. His team was alive. The engineers were alive. The hidden strike had failed.