Page 60 of Hardline Torque
“Wraith.”
“Eyes on.”Drew’s voice came through clear, distant enough to remind them he was elevated and alone.
“Breaker.”
“Out of the van and loving it.”There was no missing the pleasure in Luca’s tone, even filtered through encryption.
“Torch.”
“Hot.”Keanu replied, easy and lethal.
“Mano.”
“Here.”Tane heard the ice in his own tone and let it settle.No heat.No edge.Just control.
“Copy that, team,” Niko said.“I see no immediate threats to your positions.Proceed as planned.”
They moved without urgency.
That was the mistake the Directorate often made—assuming speed meant noise, that violence required chaos.Black Tide had learned long ago that the opposite was true.The quieter the approach, the deadlier the outcome.
The black site sat at the edge of scrubland, half-forgotten infrastructure bleeding into the landscape like a scar that never healed right.Old concrete foundations supported newer prefabricated structures, bolted down fast and meant to be abandoned faster.Portable generators hummed low, the vibration traveling faintly through the ground.Security lights cast wide, comforting pools of illumination that reassured the people inside while leaving deep shadows everywhere else.
Overconfident.
Underdefended in exactly the wrong places.
Tane slowed just enough to read the space.Wind direction.Lines of sight.The way the perimeter fencing sagged in sections where no one expected pressure.He mapped it all without conscious effort, muscle memory and experience layering over instinct.
“They are expecting us,” Wraith murmured over comms.
“No,” Tane replied quietly.“They think they have time and privacy.”
None of that boded well for Victor.
The perimeter went dark in sections, not all at once.Luca’s preset work rippled outward in controlled pulses—cameras looping clean footage, motion sensors sleeping through movement they should have flagged.Nothing obvious.Nothing dramatic.Just blind spots appearing where there shouldn’t have been any.
“Clear left,” Reef said quietly.“Advance.”
The first guard never saw them.
Tane stepped in close, one hand clamping over the man’s mouth, the other driving the blade precisely where it needed to go.No hesitation.No wasted force.He lowered the body gently, controlling the fall so nothing carried beyond the man’s own weight settling into dirt.
No wasted motion.
No wasted sound.
They flowed forward like water finding the fastest path downhill.
Torch ghosted ahead to disable power junctions.Breaker covered angles, weapon tracking invisible threats before they could form.Wraith’s quiet updates filtered in from above, a constant stream of awareness.
“Two more moving on the east side,” Wraith said.
“Copy,” Tane replied.“Torch, hold.Breaker, with me.”
The guards rounded a corner together, mid-conversation, complacent.Torch hit one hard and silently, dropping him in a boneless heap.Tane took the other, snapping his head back and finishing it before the man could even draw breath to shout.
The site’s outer ring collapsed without ever understanding it was under attack.
