Hidden Strike (2025)
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.
He turned to Meier and said, “How fast can you turn that highway overpass into a shaped charge?”
Korr cursed under his breath. “They know we’re here. Move.”
“Always.”
“Then don’t breathe,” Korr said, and he meant it as both an instruction and a promise.
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.
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. Hidden Strike
A coded signal.
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.
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. That’s when the lights went out
Korr stared at the burning refinery. Then at the highway. Then at the terrified, oil-slick faces of the people he had just saved.
Three hours earlier, a Black Hawk with no transponder signal had skimmed the Jordanian border, hugging the terrain so low that Bedouin shepherds threw rocks at it, thinking it was a giant, lost beetle. On board was a man named Jake Korr.