The NATO base smelled of diesel and steel and too many voices trying to turn panic into procedure. In the command room, Hobbs moved like a man with rope for patience coiled, dangerous, ready. Reports scrolled across screens: convoys rerouted, escorts disrupted, vehicles down. He didn't wait for permission.
"Get me a chopper in the air, now," he barked. Technicians moved like they'd been waiting for that order. Hobbs loaded his gear, kissed Elena's worried look with a grunt that meant he'd be back, and went to join the hunt.
Out on the highway the ambush unfurled with brutal efficiency. Shaw's flip cars lunged from the roadside like weapons, darting under escort vehicles and sending them cartwheeling into metal and flame. The tank monstrous and obscene tore free from its trailer and began to bulldoze everything in its path, chains and treads turning sedans into scrap as soldiers and civilians scattered. From his perch on an overpass, Jeff watched it all through a line of concrete and the matte-grey roof of his own car, the system quietly logging movement and heat signatures.
Dom's team wasn't far behind. The car screamed down the lanes, Dom driving like a man with a purpose carved into his bones, Brian, Roman and Tej punching the throttle beside him. Gisele and Han cut a different silhouette not in cars but on motorcycles leaning into gaps, slaloming through wreckage to reach targets other drivers couldn't touch. Their bikes ducked and weaved, strings of gunfire and near-misses painting the air. Jeff watched them thread the carnage and felt the old, familiar thrill: this was a fight he could read.
The tank's chain snagged Roman's car, and the reaction was immediate and terrible: metal shrieked, tires smoked, Roman's M5 was dragged like thrown luggage across the tarmac. Dom didn't hesitate he answered instinct with action. He clawed the wheel, forced his car into position, and worked a move that turned panic into a chance. The team rallied, tearing at the tank's momentum until it overturned in a thunder of metal and flame.
Then the impossible happened. Letty was launched from the top of the tank in a sudden, violent arc. Time narrowed engine wails, a dropped breath, the sky cleaving into a single path of falling metal and flesh. Dom threw the car into a handbrake turn and leapt, catapulting himself through air and concrete. He met her in mid-flight and crashed both of them down across a hood as if fate itself had agreed to the collision. Letty lay stunned; Dom's grin, bloody and wide, was the kind of ridiculous answer that told anyone watching: he'd do it again.
NATO closed in. Hobbs, arriving by air and dropping into the fray with the kind of presence that made a room or a highway harder to breathe in, helped sweep the wreckage. Shaw was pulled from the ruins, blood on his hands and a smirk that didn't belong to a broken man. For a beat, it seemed the spiral had ended: Owen in cuffs, his crew rounded up, Dom's team breathing ragged and raw relief.
But Owen never left the bank empty-handed. In a cold, measured grunt in the secure compound he dropped the lever Hobbs hadn't seen: he had people holding Mia. Brian's face collapsed into ice. The room moved in that slow, awful way when someone announces a choice no one wants to make. Hobbs clenched his jaw and read the room the way a warrior reads a battlefield. Family first. The deal was made; Owen walked free, slipping back into the night with the pieces of his crew that remained.
From his overpass, Jeff watched the last of it: the tank's smoking ruin, Dom helping Letty to her feet, Brian's silent rage, and Hobbs' tight, resolute face as events tightened into the next move. The system pulsed a new notification through his HUD Cipher's contract still active, the Nightshade vector shifting toward the airport. The airport was where the world would tilt again. Jeff slid back behind the wheel, the matte grey humming under his hands. He'd been excluded from the front line that day, but exclusion had its advantages: he'd seen everything, and that meant he could plan.
He drove down from the overpass as the convoy's lights vanished into the distance. The runway was next.