Page 10 of Hardline Torque
That was what bothered him.
Directorate operations never looked sloppy.They looked confident.Like they expected no one to interfere.
Tane adjusted his scope and started reading container numbers, committing strings of digits to memory.Shipping manifests flashed through his mind—what should be here, what shouldn’t.High-value military-grade ammunition moved differently.So did restricted tech.So did things that weren’t meant to exist on paper at all.
Ports were perfect for that kind of movement.Too many hands.Too much noise.Too much plausible deniability.
He shifted slightly, lowering his profile, and watched the unloading patterns.Most containers were moved in tight clusters, straight from ship to staging area.But three of them sat apart from the rest, spaced just far enough to avoid casual overlap, close enough to look incidental.
Deliberate spacing.
That was when Keanu spoke.
“Three containers on the east side of the port,” he said quietly.“Stacked wrong.Set apart.”
Tane followed his line of sight.The markings were subtle, but the spacing was deliberate.
“Directorate,” Kael growled.“Has to be”
Tane swept the surrounding terrain through his scope.Nothing.
Then he dropped lower.
There.
A shadow detached from the edge of the yard.Black-clad.Rifle slung.Blade in hand.
Victor.
“I’ve got eyes on him,” Tane said softly.“Nobody moves.If we spook the guards, he’s dead.”
They watched in stunned silence as Victor went to work.
Tane tracked every movement through the scope, his mind breaking Victor down the way he would any hostile.Blade choice first—short, utilitarian, designed for speed over spectacle.Kill order next—outermost guard, then the one with the widest line of sight, then the men clustered closest to the containers.He moved on breath and timing, not force, using darkness and routine as his weapons.
Too precise.
Victor wasn’t improvising.He was executing a plan he’d already run a dozen times in his head.
That scared the hell out of Tane.
Because this wasn’t desperation.This was resignation.
This was a man who had already decided he was expendable.
Bodies dropped without sound, never registering as anything more than a momentary absence to the rest of the port.Victor flowed through them like smoke, never silhouetted, never rushed.
Impressive.
Terrifying.
And utterly unsustainable.
Tane was already moving.
They flowed down off the high ground, shadows among shadows, circling toward the eighteen-wheeler.Victor stood at the cab, muttering under his breath.“How hard can it be to drive a damn eighteen-wheeler truck?”
“Very.”Tane answered quietly
