One Day Later — Somewhere in a Middle Eastern Desert
"Peh! Peh! Peh!"
Spitting out a mouthful of sand, Sean glared at the endless dunes surrounding their temporary encampment. "This place sucks. Sand in my mouth, sand in my boots, sand in places sand should never be. Next time? Send me to the Arctic—I'd rather fight a polar bear bare-handed than come back here."
Inside the tent, lounging on a camp chair and scrolling through his phone, Lynn Hall chuckled. "Sounds good. Once we're back, I'll bump you up a rank and ship you off to the Arctic. Let's say… you're not allowed to come home until you've skinned a hundred bears."
Sean laughed—he knew the boss was just messing around.
Still chuckling, he stepped into the tent. "Boss, it's been a full day. What if that contact doesn't come back? Are we really banking on that militia playing nice?"
Before Lynn could respond, Alice—calm and sharp as ever—handed him a cup of coffee and turned to Sean.
"They'll come," she said flatly. "According to our detainee's intel, the group using Stark tech drove them out of their homeland."
"This is their shot to take it back. And with us offering 'support'... Any halfway intelligent leader would see the value."
"Besides," she added, "they know exactly why we reached out. We don't care about turf wars. We want Tony Stark. That's it."
Sean nodded slowly. "So we use each other. Classic trade."
"Exactly," Alice smirked. "Be glad you're with our boss. If it were any other supervisor in charge, they'd have marched us straight into a suicide assault."
"We've got, what—maybe fifty agents and field operatives combined?"
"Sure, our gear's top-tier. We could launch a small war. But rescuing Stark with this crew? That'd cost us half our people. And this ain't New York."
Sean didn't argue. He just took his coffee and shut up.
Because Alice was right—and more importantly, Lynn Hall had never intended to storm the militant compound head-on.
The real plan had been set the moment they took off from New York.
Use one tiger to drive out another.
Let the smaller militia—still smarting from losing their homeland—go to war with the group that kidnapped Stark. Whichever side came out on top didn't matter.
In the chaos, Lynn would move in and extract Tony Stark.
Simple. Clean. Efficient.
And no, he didn't give a damn about "promoting American interests" in the region.
His loyalty wasn't to the flag.
It was to the people around him—those loyal agents with high favorability scores who kept him alive and growing stronger.
> "Boss, incoming. They're here."
The message crackled through his earpiece.
Lynn's gaze sharpened. "Time to get to work."
"Roger that," Alice responded.
Hidden under camouflaged tarps and ghillie suits, a dozen sniper rifles and high-powered weapons trained themselves on the dusty convoy of battered trucks and armed men approaching the encampment.
If anything looked off—even slightly—this meeting would end in a hail of gunfire and explosions.
---
Meanwhile — Deep in a Mountain Cave
Tony Stark stirred the glop in his bowl with visible disgust.
"God, I miss cheeseburgers," he muttered, poking at the gluey mess. "If someone showed up right now selling them at ten grand a pop, I'd buy ten."
Across from him, Yinsen smiled faintly and took a bite of his own bowl of sludge.
"It's been years since I had one," Yinsen said. "But you should focus on figuring out how to get us out of here. You know they're not going to let you go. Even if you finish the Jericho missile."
Tony scoffed. "Of course they won't."
He glanced at the car battery sitting on the table—his makeshift heart, keeping the shrapnel from reaching his heart.
Forcing himself to take another bite, Tony grimaced but swallowed.
"You're right," he said. "Can't escape on an empty stomach."
"And actually…" He dropped the bowl, wiped his hands, and leaned forward. "I have figured something out."
He laid out blueprints on the table.
Yinsen stepped over, intrigued. "Wait… aren't these the Jericho schematics?"
"They look like the Jericho missile," Tony said with a grin. "But look closer. Perception, my friend—it's easy to mislead someone when they think they know what they're looking at."
He layered the diagrams and shifted the lamp.
A new outline appeared—one that had nothing to do with missiles.
Armor.
Yinsen's eyes widened.
"I stopped counting on the military or the CIA finding me a long time ago," Tony continued. "So I've been working out a plan to build my way out."
He clapped Yinsen on the shoulder. "But I'll need your help."
Yinsen looked at him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "I've had enough of this life, too. Maybe once you escape, I can see my wife and daughter again."
There was a subtle shift in his tone—just a flicker of sadness when he mentioned his family.
But Tony didn't notice. His mind was racing with engineering equations and power output estimates.
Then, almost as an afterthought, Yinsen asked, "Don't you Americans have other agencies? Besides the military? What about the CIA or the FBI—could they find us?"
Tony let out a dry laugh. "CIA, FBI? Don't let Hollywood fool you."
"The FBI's a joke. If those clowns could find this place, I wouldn't have been stuck here for two and a half damn months."
He glanced bitterly at the car battery again. "And now I'm paying for it—with my own damn weapons."
With a muttered curse, he grabbed the battery and made for the door, already slipping into his usual mask of sarcasm and manipulation—ready to play his captors again.
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