**Episode 18: The First Strike**
Midnight. The rain fell hard over Dhaka's industrial outskirts — washing blood, secrets, and sin down its forgotten alleys.
Inside an old textile mill repurposed as a data hub, Black Dune operatives worked quietly. The mill's basement stored **critical backups** of Reza Murad's encrypted financial logs — old, redundant, but **untraceable**. It was one of the last untouched sources of his true wealth.
And tonight, it would burn.
---
**The Strike Team:**
* **General Mahmud**, silent as a shadow, oversaw tactics from a van parked nearby.
* **Imtiaz Karim**, patched into the building's internal grid, looped cameras and disabled thermal sensors.
* **Shahana Rizvi**, armed with a hidden bodycam, was capturing evidence to leak immediately after the strike.
* **Elina**, infiltration lead.
* **Ayaan**, field commander.
---
**00:13 Hours — Breach**
Elina picked the lock on the side service entrance with swift precision. The door creaked open.
Ayaan whispered into the mic, "Clear. Move."
They advanced silently, weaving through the rusted machinery and into the stairwell. Imtiaz's voice buzzed in Ayaan's earpiece.
"Five guards near the mainframe room. Armed. One's asleep. You've got thirty seconds until patrol shifts."
Ayaan nodded. "Go loud."
They struck fast. Elina neutralized the first with a dart gun. Ayaan disarmed the next two in seconds. Shahana moved past them, slipping into the server chamber.
"Recording," she whispered, her camera scanning the racks of dusty drives — each tagged with aliases, account trails, shell companies. Evidence the world hadn't seen.
Ayaan's focus stayed on the small hardcase in his hands — a custom EMP detonator. "Once this goes off, every bit of that backup vanishes. No traces. No recovery."
General Mahmud's voice crackled: "Do it."
But just as Ayaan pressed the button—
**An alarm screamed through the building.**
"Breach detected! Third floor!" Imtiaz shouted. "They're here!"
Reza's private security, faster than expected.
Gunfire erupted above. Elina turned. "Extraction route's compromised."
Ayaan grabbed the EMP, slammed it into the floor. "New plan. Burn it."
He lit the accelerant they'd planted near the electrical nodes.
The flames caught instantly. Paper, drives, hardware — all engulfed.
They ran.
Through the chaos, smoke, and gunfire, they burst onto the roof and rappelled down the back wall just as the building exploded into a thunderstorm of light and flame.
---
**Hours later — a safe house.**
Ayaan sat, bruised but alive, watching Shahana's footage already playing on underground news feeds.
Reza's secret accounts? **Gone.**
The shadow fund? **Exposed.**
The people of Dhaka? **Awake and roaring.**
But Reza?
He wasn't just angry now.
**He was hunting.**
**To be continued…**