Snow fell in soft whispers over Mount Kumgang, painting the rugged cliffs white and cloaking the ancient forest in a ghostly veil. The rotors of six stealth Black Hawks rested silent in a clearing below, their blades crusted with ice. Cold wind swept through the pines like distant whispers of the dead.
Hidden in this silence, Task Force Orion moved like phantoms.
Captain Elijah Cross crouched at the edge of a rocky slope, his night-vision goggles casting a green tint across the jagged terrain. Around him, six elite operators shifted into position. Cross held up a clenched fist, signaling a halt.
Below, cut into the mountain's base like a scar, lay a steel-reinforced blast door—frost-covered and humming faintly with the electrical charge of high-security surveillance.
"We've found Facility 934," Sergeant Boone murmured behind him. "Thermals show thirty topside, fifty-plus below. Primary reactor active. Heavy jamming fields coming from the northwest wing."
Cross lowered his hand. "No exfil until we shut it down. Entry plan?"
"Side tunnel," replied Reyes, the team's tech and cyber-warfare expert. "An old mining shaft feeds into sublevel two. We breach from there, then move fast and split. I'll take Data Core, Boone hits the Reactor Room."
"No margin for error. We fail, we lose air superiority over the peninsula—and maybe the entire Pacific," Cross said grimly. "And gentlemen—expect Russian fingerprints on everything inside."
Reyes nodded solemnly. "It's not just North Korea anymore. This is a testbed."
Across the DMZ, South Korea was already shaking.
Inside Seoul's Joint Command Center, radar screens glitched into static. Power grids flickered. Flight control lost contact with several American jets over the Yellow Sea.
General Elise Thorne stormed into the situation room, her uniform jacket half-buttoned, her voice like a whip. "Status report."
"We're under cyber attack," barked NSA liaison Thomas Gao. "Wave patterns match Russian malware signatures, modified through DPRK proxies. EMP decoys are triggering false sensor cascades in our radar systems."
"What about our birds?"
"AWACS are blind. Satellite uplinks have been rerouted through enemy relays. We're tracking… ourselves."
Thorne's expression hardened. "They're painting our jets with our own IFF data."
The President's voice cut through the open line. "How long until our systems recover?"
Thorne didn't hesitate. "Unless Task Force Orion completes their mission inside the next thirty minutes, we'll be flying blind—and that puts our fleet and every city south of the 38th in jeopardy."
Inside Facility 934, steam hissed from overhead pipes and servers blinked in rhythmic pulses of pale blue. The hum of energy—artificial, constant—sounded like a mechanical heartbeat.
Standing at the center of the main server floor was General Yi Hwan, the architect of North Korea's digital warfare division. His fingers glided across floating displays in Korean, Mandarin, and Cyrillic. Data feeds, launch simulations, and signal scramblers danced in layers of luminous code.
Behind him, Russian advisors observed silently.
"Task Force Orion is here," Yi Hwan said in Russian. "Just as we expected."
The older Russian, lean and suited in a gray overcoat, lit a cigarette. "Let them come. You already uploaded the virus?"
"Seventy-nine percent. The payload is designed to hijack Western defense satellites and mimic nuclear launch signatures."
"Washington will think Beijing's launching first."
Yi Hwan gave a small, cold smile. "It won't come to that. This is deterrence by illusion."
"Unless they find the core and burn it to the ground."
"They won't," Yi Hwan replied. "Because I will collapse this mountain on their heads before they reach me."
Cross's team breached the mining shaft entrance with silent charges. The tunnel inside was narrow, cold, and crawling with sensors.
Infrared lasers crisscrossed their path, mapped in real-time through their visors. Reyes crouched near a junction and wired a device the size of a matchbox onto the wall.
"Jammer active. We've got ten minutes before backup sensors kick in," he whispered.
They moved fast.
Every footstep echoed. Every breath sounded too loud. The deeper they descended, the hotter it became—until they entered the underbelly of the facility: a blend of rust, concrete, and plasma tech stolen from both Russian and Chinese black sites.
Boone peeled off to the reactor wing with three men. Cross and Reyes moved toward the Data Core, clearing guards with suppressed rounds and knives.
Then the alarm sounded.
Red lights bathed the corridor.
"Shit," Reyes muttered. "Manual tripwire—we missed one."
They sprinted to the Data Core door. Reyes slammed a disruptor onto the keypad and hacked through the encryption in 20 seconds.
Inside, a massive chamber held rows of servers stacked four stories high. Plasma conduits crackled along the walls. Reyes rushed to the mainframe.
"Upload at ninety-three percent. Another minute, and they'll have our satellite keys," he said, his voice shaking.
Cross scanned the room—then spotted a soldier in North Korean uniform darting toward the far side.
"Cover!"
He fired. The soldier dropped—but not before hitting a secondary switch.
The floor shook. Alarms blared louder.
"They started a meltdown countdown!" Reyes yelled.
"Then we finish this now."
Reyes yanked a black orb from his vest and placed it on the server rack. "EMP burst grenade. This'll fry every board in the room."
He looked at Cross. "But if we're inside when it goes off…"
Cross didn't blink. "Set timer for thirty seconds. We run."
They sprinted back through the corridor as the facility convulsed. The lights flickered. Sirens screamed. Fires burst from wall panels.
A concussive pulse exploded from behind them—then silence.
Facility 934 went dead.
In Seoul, radar feeds reappeared.
Command satellites returned to friendly control. Pilots got pings from AWACS. A carrier strike group off the coast of Busan reestablished uplink with the Pentagon.
Cheers erupted in the command room.
But General Thorne didn't smile.
"What's wrong?" asked Gao.
She pointed to a second monitor. "Look at Pyongyang."
Dozens of missiles were being moved across the capital.
But not pointed south.
They were aimed inward.
In a hidden bunker near Pyongyang, Marshal Sung Tae-Jun stood alone before a steel console with a red switch.
"Facility 934 has gone dark," his aide said. "Seoul has not retaliated."
Marshal Sung nodded. "Which is why they think they've won."
He inserted a key.
Typed a code.
And pressed the button.
"Activate Project Gomorrah."
At Kaesong Forward Operating Base, Sergeant Malik Reyes—still healing from his previous wounds—watched the sky from a stretcher outside the med tent.
He was just starting to enjoy the calm.
Then he saw it.
A flicker on the horizon. No sound. No flame. Just… white light.
It lasted a second.
Then came the wind.
Then the fire.
Then the roar.
An orange dome bloomed over the ridgeline, rising like a second sun. The shockwave flattened the forest. The mountain shuddered. Debris rained like hellfire. Soldiers screamed, stumbled, clutched their ears and helmets as the ground seemed to lift beneath them.
Reyes was thrown backward into the dirt.
He couldn't hear. He couldn't see.
Only one thought burned in his mind: They nuked us. They nuked their own goddamn land.
Back in Washington, silence gripped the Situation Room.
President Hamilton stood frozen before the big screen as aerial footage came in.
A mushroom cloud over North Korean territory. Civilians fleeing in every direction. Radiation spikes off the charts. Estimated yield: 15 kilotons.
"They nuked themselves," said an aide. "To stop us from taking ground."
The President sank into his seat. "Is this what victory looks like?"
General Thorne's voice was hard. "This isn't victory. This is escalation."
"And what happens next?"
Thorne looked him in the eye. "They've changed the rules. If they're willing to burn their own cities, then we're not fighting to win territory anymore. We're fighting to survive."
At Mount Kumgang, Cross and the few survivors of Task Force Orion emerged from the ruins of Facility 934. The sky was overcast, tinged gray by the distant fallout cloud rising miles away.
The snow fell again, soft and ghostlike.
Reyes's voice crackled through the comm.
"We just confirmed the strike," he said. "Nuclear. Localized. But deliberate."
Cross looked back at the scorched tunnel they'd just crawled out of.
"We stopped a cyberwar," he said. "And now we've walked into something worse."
His visor blinked with new orders: Evac to Seoul. Prepare for redeployment.
The war wasn't ending.
It was just beginning.