The mountain had always been sold to them as immortal.

Captain Arman Farhadi first heard that phrase on the day he was transferred into the Imam Ali missile complex outside Khorramabad.

The older officers said it with the kind of pride that left no room for doubt.

The younger soldiers repeated it because that was what survival sounded like in a place like that.

Hundreds of meters below rock and reinforced concrete, inside a labyrinth of missile bays, steel doors, fuel rooms, and command corridors, immortality did not feel like poetry.

It felt practical.

The mountain was their armor.

The tunnel city was their promise.

Whatever happened above ground, the mission below would endure.

For months, Arman had lived by the rhythms of the base.

Artificial daylight.

Rotating maintenance checks.

Warhead inventories.

Fuel line inspections.

Launch drills no one believed would become real.

The complex ran for dozens of kilometers through the mountain, with some sections extending so far that new arrivals lost their sense of direction for weeks.

Forked passages led to hidden launch chambers.

Concealed storage galleries held Shahab missile variants under armed watch.

Communications rooms pulsed night and day.

Ventilation systems breathed like lungs through shafts cut deep into the rock.

The place was not simply underground.

It was a world under a world.

By late February 2026, rumors had started filtering downward from the surface.

Cyber pressure.

Border tension.

Unusual aircraft patterns far away.

None of that mattered much to the men underground.

The deeper they served, the more they believed the sky belonged to somebody else.

Then February 28th arrived, and the first signs of danger looked small enough to dismiss.

Screens went black.

At first it was only the radar feed that cut out.

Then several communication channels began dropping in and out.

A signal officer blamed software corruption.

Another said the jamming would pass.

The senior commander’s office sent a calming message through internal lines: temporary electronic interference, no evidence of immediate strike activity, maintain normal posture.

The wording was careful, almost soothing.

Arman remembered reading it twice because of how hard it tried to sound routine.

He was on corridor inspection duty that morning when he met Sergeant Leila Moradi near a maintenance junction.

Leila was one of the structural engineers assigned to tunnel integrity checks, a quiet woman with the habit of tapping walls with a flashlight and listening before she spoke.

She was staring up at a seam in the concrete and frowning.

This place is hearing things before we are, she said.

Arman smiled at the line, but she did not smile back.

By afternoon, more systems were down.

Surface radar, early warning relays, and backup routing channels flickered or vanished.

Officers above ground still sent reassurance, but now the messages felt thinner, as if they had been typed by men who were no longer seeing the whole board.

In one control room, Arman saw a lieutenant staring at a blank monitor with his mouth slightly open, the way people do when they sense a wall where a window should be.

Nobody below the mountain understood what was actually happening outside.

American cyber operations and electronic warfare were systematically blinding the air defense architecture, stripping away warning and coordination before the main strike package ever arrived.

Underground personnel could