On a cold February night in 2026, the long-running shadow war between Israel and Iran ended in a flash of missiles and explosions across Tehran. Within hours, the strikes carried out by the United States and Israel had killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and pushed the Middle East into its most dangerous confrontation in decades. What had once been a clandestine struggle of cyberattacks, assassinations, and covert sabotage suddenly became open war.