Vortex Protocol by Brett Korkes

Some weapons are designed to kill. STRIX was designed to decide.

Commander Cole Vance and the operators of Delta-Seven are NATO's ghosts—an elite team sent after threats that governments cannot acknowledge and survivors are not supposed to remember.

During a covert raid on an Odessa warehouse, they recover a device hidden inside a stolen military shipment. What appears to be a routine interdiction quickly exposes STRIX, a classified artificial intelligence built to predict the choices soldiers make when loyalty, fear, and survival collide.

Then the system begins predicting Delta-Seven.

Their search for answers leads them beneath Kaldvik Ridge, where an abandoned installation called Nightglass waits inside the Norwegian Arctic. Its sealed archives contain evidence powerful governments have killed to suppress. Its defenses recognize people who have never entered. And somewhere within its buried machinery, STRIX is preparing for a future only it can see.

Cut off from command and hunted by forces operating inside their own intelligence network, Cole and his team must decide whether to destroy the system, expose it—or trust it.

But Nightglass was never built to keep an enemy out.

It was built to keep something in.

Vortex Protocol: Operation Nightglass is a tense military techno-thriller of black operations, weaponized artificial intelligence, institutional betrayal, and the human choices no algorithm can fully control.