Chapter Summary: While Clint is recovering, Bruce and Tony discover Hydra's new weapons and track down an invisible train.
The Red Skull Arena
PenPatronus
Chapter 2
Ghost Tracks
When Clint Barton was eight years old he went to the carnival with a temperature of 103.7. He rode everything that tilted, whirled, and / or spun. When he woke up the next day he could barely move. He wasn't dizzy or nauseated. Nothing was sprained, cracked, or fractured. His body just wouldn't cooperate. Both arms felt boneless like Jell-O. Both legs were stiff and heavy like tree trunks. His head felt like a bowling ball one moment and a helium balloon the next. Sandpaper lined his throat and his lungs felt like a blender of porcupine quills.
Clint wished he felt that good in the days following his imprisonment. He'd been tortured to not quite within an inch of his life, but definitely half a foot. Several times he woke up but couldn't stay conscious for longer than a couple of minutes. This resulted in a bizarre montage of moments:
He saw Natasha cleaning the cuts on his arm with such delicate, thorough precision that she might have been working on a priceless piece of art. When she discovered him watching her, Natasha gently kissed his hand between the two middle knuckles and urged him to fall back to sleep.
Next was Steve who sat at Clint's bedside in Avengers Tower drinking coffee out of a cup the size of his head and frowning at a "Harry Potter" novel.
Then there was Banner who replaced Clint's dartboard with one of Stark's computer terminals and stood in the corner of the bedroom staring at blueprints, maps, and train schedules.
Thor took "standing guard" literally. Barton found him planted at the foot of the bed, arms crossed tight against his chest, glaring at every shadow.
Once, Clint discovered Tony Stark beside him in the bed, leaning back against the headboard with his boots on the sheets and his empty hands braided in his lap. "Don't get me wrong, Legolas. I'm not saying you're the first one of us I'd choose to be on my dodgeball team–can you imagine playing dodgeball with Thor? But I have to admit that, yes, you are…useful." Tony winced and frowned down at his hands. "Useful and…Dammit, I can't even admit this when nobody is listening!" Stark hesitated, then said all in one enormous breath, "I know I'm an ass sometimes but I'm glad you're with us, the team wouldn't be the same without you, and I need you to get better soon because I miss your stupid sarcastic comments and all the technology in the world can't see things like you do so wake up soon…you bastard." Clint chuckled at that, but passed out again before he could witness the half startled, half embarrassed look on Tony's face.
Finally—consciousness that he could control. Red lights on his bedside alarm clock confirmed that two days had passed since Steve and Tony rescued him. Whether it was 6am or 6pm, Clint wasn't sure. He tried to smell the sun or its absence beyond the Tower walls but he only sensed the chemicals that everyone associates with hospitals. Three pillows supported his neck and four blankets tucked him in tight. The bandages that crisscrossed his body had been changed recently. Half-eaten sandwiches, pill bottles, and dog-eared books covered every table. Two IV bags flanked him. One was connected to the inside of his right elbow and the other to the top of his left hand. Bizarrely the overhead lights came on the moment his head left the pillow. They glowed brighter as he sat up and dimmed when he leaned back down. Clint never ceased to be amazed by what Tony Stark could come up with.
Clint kicked the blankets off of his naked body. His skin was fresh and clean, as was his hair and teeth. Natasha was probably the one who set out the black sweatpants and the sleeveless maroon t-shirt on a chair beside the bed. He hoped she was the one who gave him the sponge baths, too. A moment later he hoped just as intensely that it was anybody but her. Maybe Tony had a robot. The man had a robot for everything else, why not sponge baths? When Clint dressed himself he got tangled up in the wires connected to a dozen electrodes glued all over his body. Growling, he started ripping them out like weeds from a garden.
At first he didn't realize that Avengers Tower erupted into blaring alarms because of him, but then the God of Thunder arrived hammer-first through the window. Thick violet curtains caught most of the glass but a few shards would've hit Clint if he hadn't covered his head. "Thor, what the hell?" Barton bellowed.
Thor froze, blinked twice, and said, "Um, I have come to save you, Agent Barton."
The bedroom door burst open. Steve, Tony, Bruce, and Natasha came barreling into the room like linebackers. The identical looks on their faces told Clint that they were either mad, scared, or both. He half-expected them to point weapons. "Son of a bitch!" Tony sputtered. He scooped up a fistful of the tangled electrodes and shook them at Clint's nose. "These were monitoring your vitals, dumbass! We thought your heart stopped!" He noticed the shattered window then and his jaw dropped. The color that had fled his face rushed back in. "Couldn't take the stairs like the rest of us?" he asked Thor through clenched teeth.
"I endeavored to reach Agent Barton's side as quickly as possible." Sheepishly, Thor brushed glass off of his cape and then glanced back over his shoulder at the newly visible peach-colored sky. "I shall procure the obligatory amount of currency needed to properly repair the property I damaged," he assured Tony.
"The phrase is 'I'll pay for that,' Thor," Clint chuckled. A moment later he was wrapped in Romanoff's hug. He couldn't see how red her face was but he felt the heat of her cheek against his. "I'm ok, Nat," he whispered, alternating between patting her back and rubbing small circles against it.
"I know." Natasha hid a sniff by wiping her nose against his shoulder. "Your eyebrows were doing that bobbing thing so I knew you'd wake up today. I made your favorite breakfast."
Clint pumped his fist. "Blueberry Pancakes?"
Natasha fondly patted Clint's cheek. "With kiwis and extra cinnamon, weirdo."
"How about some water first?" Steve retrieved a bottle from a mini-fridge and handed it to Clint. When Barton tried to ask questions about what he missed while he was out, Steve ordered the team not to answer him until Banner did a complete examination and Clint got half a gallon of water, pain pills, and an energy bar in his system. "How are you feeling, Barton?"
"I'm good." Clint frowned and thought about the question again. "I was so cold I thought I might lose a finger."
Tony snorted. "I'd build you a new one." He held his trigger finger up in front of his nose and examined the joints.
Steve watched Clint carefully. "You should probably go back to bed. And there's no way you're going out into the field anytime soon."
Natasha shook her head. "The last time someone told Clint to stay behind he hid under the Quinjet cockpit."
Clint chuckled and shook his head. "Remember the look on Coulson's face? I thought he might have to change his pants."
"Well, you did shout boo."
Half an hour later all six Avengers gathered in the lab to continue the briefing that Clint inadvertently interrupted. A silver 3D map of Europe hovered in the center of the room. "As I was saying," Tony said pointedly at Barton, who responded by smirking at him with blueberry-stained lips. "Banner and I have figured out the three types of Hydra weapons we confiscated. First of all, those Frisbee things we thought were landmines are actually remote-controlled air-mines."
Bruce stuffed his fists deep into his pants pockets and shifted his weight as he spoke. "The air-mines are hover-capable. They can float an inch off the ground or as high as two thousand feet. Tony, or Thor, or one of the Quinjets or Helicarriers could easily bump into one hiding in a cloud."
Steve's eyebrows sunk down into a 'v' shape. "How much damage could one air-mine cause?"
Bruce bit his bottom lip and gestured at Tony. "It would turn a flock of birds into ashes," Stark said like he was reporting a dull weather pattern. "Depending on where it hit a commercial airplane the damage could be catastrophic."
Bruce waited for the information about the first weapon to sink in before he started on the second. "We're calling awful-horrible-terrible invention number two 'blinders.' They look like standard grenades about the size of a tennis ball. Once activated they emit a small but concentrated pulse of ionized radiation so powerful that they instantly cause severe nuclear cataracts. Closing your eyes or looking the other way won't protect you."
"Speak English," Thor commanded, repeating the phrase he'd learned from Steve. He grinned, proud of himself, and Rogers gave him a thumb's-up.
"It will damage your vision," Tony explained. "Technically you won't be blind but it'll be like looking at everything through a fogged-up window."
Natasha fingered a knife she kept in her boot. "Is it permanent?"
"Symptoms should last about an hour unless you get dosed by the radiation over and over again for years." A small, half-amused half-depressed smile appeared in the corner of Bruce's pale lips. "Or if the dose is ten thousand times more powerful than expected."
Tony patted Bruce on the arm as he walked past him to a computer terminal. "And, finally, we have the super-tank." A swipe of Stark's forefinger and blueprints of an olive-green tank popped up on a screen that was as long and wide as Steve's motorcycle. "This is the M4 Sherman tank. Built by the United States in 1940. 19 feet long, armor three inches thick, weighs 67,000 pounds. I can neither confirm nor deny that my dad helped design this sweet baby." Tony winked at the group. Half of them rolled their eyes. Tony swiped left on the screen and a gigantic tank replaced the first. "This is Nazi Germany's Landkreuzer Ratte," Tony said with a cartoonish German accent. "It weighed 2000 tons. Five times more than the heaviest super-tank in the world. It would have weighed 2000 tons, I should say, but Hitler never actually built it."
"That's the size of a house," said Clint. "That's the size of your house, Tony."
"There wasn't a tank with the convoy. I would've noticed," Natasha said.
"Not an assembled one. Would you like to take a stab at what I'm going to say next, Cap?" Stark asked.
Steve's lips formed a flat, straight line. "Hitler didn't build one…But the Red Skull did."
"He would've if he hadn't met you," Stark said with his most dramatic sigh. "In fact the tank he designed was even larger, but half the weight because it would've been made of a lighter metal like Vibranium. Red Skull added two more gun turrets and advanced propulsion systems. Modern Hydra scientists have even added retro-reflective panels."
"Hydra is building super-tanks." Steve rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Gigantic, fast, invisible tanks…"
"Tell me we seized 99% of these air-mine Frisbees and blinding tennis balls and super-tanks at the prison," Natasha said.
Tony dropped his eye contact with all of them. "Hill and Fury interrogated The Tycoon. His prototypes are already in Warsaw with some Hydra bigwig called The Superior. He has a freaking army hidden somewhere in that city. This week the final shipments are on their way to him divided between the truck convoy and the train."
Natasha's nostrils flared. "75%?" she hoped.
Tony and Bruce exchanged uneasy glances. "If those weapons—especially the tanks—get to that armory…" Banner sighed, and whispered, "That Hydra base will be unbreachable."
The Avengers wallowed in silence for half a minute. Clint finally finished his pancakes and raised his hand like a schoolchild, but spoke before anyone actually gave him permission. "That's the bad news. The good news is that you know where the train full of scary weapons is, right?"
"Hydra added retro-reflective panels to this train of theirs, too." Stark pivoted and marched to the hologram of Europe. A snap of his fingers and pink lines appeared on the map, crisscrossing each other like blood vessels. "This is every track that goes through both Belarus and Warsaw, including ones that fell into disrepair or were supposedly uprooted after World War Two. The Tycoon's train may be stealth but we can still follow it just by measuring the vibrations it causes on the tracks. Locals have reported hearing a train without actually seeing one."
"This is where it gets complicated," Bruce said, pointing at a crossing three miles west of Belarus. "The vibrations stop here. That means the train must have stopped. We investigated but there's nothing there. Literally nothing. This is deep, empty countryside. The stealth train just disappeared. Er, disappeared more."
Another snap of Tony's fingers. Hundreds of bright blue stars appeared on the map. "These are places we think the stealth train was spotted—er, was heard. And as you can see, none of these locations are on train tracks," said Stark.
"Train tracks that we're aware of," Bruce clarified.
Snap number three. Blue lines connected the blue stars. "What we have here are ghost tracks," said Tony.
"An invisible train on invisible train tracks." Cap looked like he was about to storm out of the room. "That's how Hydra has been transporting weapons all over Europe."
Tony followed the blue line with his finger all the way to Germany before it disappeared outside of Berlin. "Here's where it gets even stranger. Witness accounts stop here. Again, we investigated, but again, there's no train. It disappeared from the known train tracks and the ghost tracks. But Banner thinks he found it."
Bruce stepped forward. "I think that people don't hear it anymore because the conventional steel wheel train was loaded onto a magnetic levitation train. Maglevs travel quiet and as fast as two hundred miles per hour. So, to find an invisible maglev, we need to measure ground-level wind speeds."
"Levitation?" Steve's brow furrowed quick and tight. "You mean—you mean a train that floats? Floats on magnets?"
"Whoa," said Natasha, drawing the word out to three syllables. "Maglevs don't run on tracks, but they do need guideways. Somebody would've noticed Hydra burying giant metal coils underground."
"Not if it happened so long ago that the witnesses aren't around anymore," Steve said.
"These so-called guideways were buried when Hydra was first born!" Thor was happy to be able to chime in. "During the dawn of the 1700's."
"1900's," Steve corrected with a smile. "I'm old, but I'm not that old. And it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they had the technology back then."
"How are we going to measure the wind speeds?" Clint wondered. "Even the most vigilant witnesses will just think they felt a strong breeze."
A self-satisfied Stark-esque smile briefly graced Bruce's features. With a snap of his fingers all of Tony's stars and lines were replaced by millions of miniscule yellow dots. "This is every windmill on the continent. I programmed an algorithm that sends all of their measurements straight to JARVIS. We've recorded every instance of 200mph ground-level wind speeds, plus or minus 25mph. JARVIS, show a 72-hour time lapse." The team watched as the yellow dots morphed into lines that danced across Europe over a period of three days. "They've been taking the scenic route since the Tycoon was taken out. Zigzagging detours left and right. JARVIS, insert in the data from the last six hours." Bruce's eyes followed the yellow line as it traveled down through Sweden until it came to a halt at the southern shore. "Oh," Bruce said meekly. "Well…Damn."
Clint pointed out the obvious. "Our invisible train on invisible train tracks just disappeared into the Baltic Sea."
"Trains don't go underwater," said Steve. When nobody confirmed that, he rolled his eyes and muttered, "Trains didn't use to go underwater…"
"You do not have these windy-hills in water?" Everyone ignored Thor as well.
"What do we do? Sonar?" Natasha suggested. "The Helicarriers have echolocation—"
"Too much space to cover, too little time," Tony sighed. "They could arrive in Warsaw while we're still trying to get a carrier to that area."
"I've got an idea." Clint held up a forefinger. "We need some dynamite and a really, really big fishing net. Sure we might shake the seafloor and drain the—"
Suddenly Banner jogged to Tony's side. "JARVIS, extrapolate seismographic patterns," both Bruce and Tony requested simultaneously.
Calculating, the AI reported.
Tony and Bruce bumped fists. "I knew you'd have something to contribute eventually, Barton," Tony joked.
"You're welcome…?" said Clint.
"Seismographs measure underground tremors," Natasha explained for Steve and Thor. "Earthquakes. Vibrations, basically."
"An underwater maglev guideway has to be anchored to the seabed," said Bruce, thinking out loud.
"And a train going 200 miles per hour would cause artificial tremors," Tony continued. "A pattern of them."
Data compiled, JARVIS announced. The yellow line continued into the sea. JARVIS' extrapolated speed and direction and determined that it would make landfall on the north coast of Poland near Mielno. "If we push the jet to its limits we could get there in seven hours. Six and a half if we're lucky," Romanoff calculated.
Stark and Banner shared a skeptical look. "If we leave now we might intercept them right when they emerge from the water," Tony decided. "And I mean now. Right now."
There was nothing more to say. The Avengers sprinted to the Quinjet and took off.
To Be Continued
