Chapter One – Clean Getaway
The explosion sent the remains of the old catamaran rocketing twenty feet up into the sky. The resultant shockwave blasted Clint away fast, and he swam swiftly under the neighbouring floating dock, then kept going, diving under several boat hulls before risking coming up for a breath. He could already hear shouts and the wail of sirens. He trod water for a moment, hidden between a moored boat and a dock, risking lifting his head to look. Damn, that explosion had done a job on the boat. Nothing left but a bit of floating wreckage, still burning.
Had anyone seen him go over the side of the boat? Even more importantly, had anyone seen Jen get taken? Where had the Soldier and Barney taken her to? Clint knew he couldn't afford to get mixed up with the authorities just now. They'd pen him up and ask him interminable questions while Jen's trail went cold. He needed help, and he was half a world away from those who might be able to assist him. Even Jen's parents were away, in England right now visiting Jacques and Darcy. All his equipment had gone down with the boat. His nearest safety-deposit box was in Brisbane, which was still, he thought, about seven hundred miles south of here. Damn ridiculously large, sparsely populated country! There were no cities up here in coastal central Queensland, just small towns, mostly tourism-based.
Clint took a deep breath, caught hold of the edge of the dock with his hands and tried to erase his fear for Jen from his mind. Focus, Barton. List your assets.
A pair of shorts. He'd lost his deck shoes in the dive over the side. Fine, he'd need clothes.
His belt, fortunately his special belt, which had a throwing star and a few drug-tipped darts in the buckle. Hopefully they'd stayed dry during his involuntary dip.
Wallet. Still in his shorts pocket. Okay, time to get somewhere safe so he could investigate that. He wasn't sure what was in it besides a bit of local currency.
Twenty minutes later, Clint slipped quietly aboard a boat moored outside the outer wall of the harbour. There were quite a few here, out where they didn't have to pay docking fees. 'Water rats' lived aboard several of them, mostly solitary men who didn't like much company. The man who lived on this one had taken off in a small dinghy towards the main dock a few minutes ago, probably heading ashore for supplies. Clint reckoned he'd have at least an hour before the man returned.
The first thing Clint did, once he'd slipped into the cabin and found a towel to dry off, was check his wallet. Good; more money than he'd thought, a couple of thousand Australian dollars, and the bills were plastic so completely undamaged. A StarkCorp credit card; brilliant. He'd forgotten Tony pressing that on him 'in case of emergencies' before they left. That meant he could access money not in his own name or any of his aliases. ID and cards in his own name: useless, he didn't dare use that, especially not until he knew what the hell was going on with S.H.I.E.L.D. And a business card, wet, but the numbers on it were still readable. Clint smiled grimly. That might prove to be the most useful thing of all, but he'd save it for a last resort. He'd need an extraction plan, if things went as messy as he anticipated.
An hour later, he was back on dry land, dressed in a blue polo short, khaki trousers and trainers only half a size too big, a baseball cap and sunglasses an excellent disguise, and a necessary one. He'd lost one of the contact lenses that disguised his weirdly metallic purple-and-gold irises (a legacy of Loki's enhancement charm) and needed to hide his eyes until he could find some new coloured lenses. He'd purloined a few things from the boat, wrapped them in a plastic binbag to swim back to shore, and left two hundred dollars behind as compensation.
Next step: communications. If Barney was here, working with the Soldier, that meant HYDRA. Or some other enemy. He couldn't risk a payphone. Needed a prepaid mobile; but there was a law here that meant he needed ID to buy a SIM card, and he couldn't use his ID.
So Clint walked to the centre of town, where there was a decent-sized shopping mall, bought a smartphone without a SIM card in an electronics store and went looking for some kids. He found three boys of around sixteen or so lurking hopefully near an liquor outlet, and while ordinarily the last thing he would have done was encourage them to drink, he cut a deal with them. He'd buy them a bottle of vodka if one of them would go and get him a new prepaid SIM card in the supermarket next door.
Kids being kids, they shrugged and one of them took the bills he handed over. The boy was back in ten minutes, even doing Clint the favour of setting up the account for him. He went into the liquor store and bought the vodka for them, handing it over outside, well out of range of the security cameras. He watched as the boys headed into a local park, shaking his head a little regretfully before turning away. One bottle of vodka between three of them wouldn't lead to a stomach pump, and he'd have to do a lot worse than this in the next couple of days, he suspected.
Clint walked away in the opposite direction, typing in a number on the phone, and pressed Dial.
"Avengers Tower," JARVIS said after a single ring, "how may I direct your call?"
"JARVIS, it's Clint. I've got a serious problem. Who's there?"
"Good day, Mr Barton. I'm afraid no one is here. Mr Stark is currently recovering from open-heart surgery in Los Angeles and Ms Potts is with him, as is Colonel Rhodes. Mr Banner is in Liberia; he left three weeks ago to join the medical efforts fighting the Ebola outbreak there. Prince Thor is, I believe, currently on Asgard. And Miss Romanoff and Mr Rogers are in Washington D.C. with Mr Wilson. Is there any way in which I may assist you?"
Clint hesitated, wanting to ask a million questions – Tony, having open-heart surgery? And who's Wilson? – but made himself focus. "Is this line secure?"
"Yes, Mr Barton."
"Okay. I need you to get a message to Natasha as soon as possible. Tell her Jen has been taken, by the Winter Soldier and my brother. I need a GPS fix on Jen's necklace."
"Please hold," JARVIS said. "My sincerest hopes for Mrs Barton's safety, sir…"
Clint wanted to tell JARVIS to shut up and call Natasha, but intellectually he knew that the AI was probably already talking to her on another line, so he made himself wait patiently. And then there was a click.
"What the fuck, Hawk?" came Natasha's astonished voice. "I thought the two of you were safely out of this!"
"Possibly if I'd had a clue as to what the fuck 'this' actually was, I might have been able to avoid trouble before Jen was bloody well kidnapped!" he'd found a deserted alleyway behind some shops and felt free to shout.
"Don't blame me for you not checking your email!"
"Don't give me that, Tasha, you could have activated your necklace any fucking time you wanted and I'd have moved heaven and earth to get in touch!"
Natasha sighed. "All right, maybe I should have called you in. But really, this thing has snowballed so fast…"
"Natasha, this shit went down five fucking days ago, I've just been looking at the newspapers!"
"And today I've fronted a Congressional hearing to fucking well argue for all of our lives!"
There was a moment of silence between them then, and Clint said "This isn't helping anything. I'm gonna tell you what's gone down here. We pulled into port today and I went to get groceries. When I came back, Jen was missing and there was a photo on my phone." He could still hardly believe what he was about to say. "The Winter Soldier has her. And he's with my brother. Barney."
"Fuuuck," Natasha said after a few seconds of shocked silence. She didn't bother with the stupid comment of 'but I thought Barney was dead'. Instead she said "What are their demands?"
"There weren't any. They just blew up the boat. They gave me a five second warning so I'm guessing they want me alive, for now at least. If I'm dead Jen loses her value as a hostage. Or bait."
"I've taken my necklace off and plugged it into the Starkphone port," Natasha said then, her voice businesslike, "and I have a GPS trace. It's in motion; looks like helicopter or light aeroplane speed, heading south towards Brisbane from your location. I'll get JARVIS to take over the trace. Clint, you're on your own, I'm afraid, until we can get Steve on a plane, but he'll be at least eighteen hours getting to you. With the Winter Soldier there, Steve will want to follow – Clint, it's the weirdest thing, the guy is that old friend of Steve's he always talks about, Bucky Barnes. Steve thought he died but it turns out that HYDRA got him and they've brainwashed him and turned him into, well, you've heard me talk about him…"
"All too much," Clint said grimly. "So I take it I've no help available immediately?"
"Not from S.H.I.E.L.D. resources, not that you can trust right now."
"Director Fury?"
"Is as dead as Agent Coulson," Natasha said, and by the dry tone of her voice he knew that she had learned Coulson lived. Which meant Fury did too.
"Okay, so if there's no help at that end, maybe I can find some from local resources. JARVIS, are you still on the line?"
"Here, Mr Barton," the AI replied.
"Can you patch me through to Jacques Svendson?"
"Good luck, Clint," Natasha said before hanging up. "Find her quickly."
The phone rang several times before it was picked up with a weary "This better be fucking important," and Clint realised it was the middle of the night in London.
"Jacques, it's Clint," he said without preamble. "Shit's gone down and Jen's been kidnapped."
There were several long moments of silence while Jen's only-just-former Special Forces brother processed that, and then Jacques snarled at the other end of the line, "What the fuck, Barton?"
"I've no time to explain. I'm in a town called Bowen. Jen still has her necklace, or we hope she does, and JARVIS is tracking the trace south towards Brisbane, but they're in a chopper or light aircraft. I only have my own ID on me because our boat got blown up, and for obvious reasons I don't want to catch a commercial flight. Driving will take too long. Any help you can drum up for me around here?"
Another long moment of silence. "I'll get back to you. Get to the airfield. It's not a large field, but I'll have someone there for you as soon as I can." And Jacques hung up abruptly.
Clint made a quick stop as he walked out of town towards the small airfield. There was a hardware store; he picked up gloves, duct tape, rope, cable ties, a soft-sided toolbag, a selection of innocuous-looking (in combination) tools he'd be able to get through airport security if he had to. Some decent work boots and socks.
And he talked to JARVIS on the Bluetooth earbug that had come with the phone, getting him to hack the marina's security camera feed, ride piggyback on the police investigation into the boat explosion. He wasn't particularly surprised that a large cruiser – large enough for a helicopter to land on the top deck – had pulled in at the dock alongside his catamaran and pulled out again twenty minutes later. The cameras were too far away to show anything else. Well, the police would follow that up. The boat wouldn't get far, but he already knew Jen wasn't on it.
As it turned out, he didn't have to get through airport security, because Bowen Airport was barely worth the name, and he'd just walked in through the doors of a shed that laughably called itself a terminal when a woman came striding up to him. She looked extremely practical and sensible, wearing khaki cargo shirt and pants, heavy desert boots and a baseball cap with Konrad Aviation emblazoned across the front.
"Jacques says to tell you that he'd have kicked your ass if Steve and Natasha hadn't interfered."
Clint actually laughed, and the woman grinned. "You're the one they call Hawkeye?"
"I am." He held out a hand. "And you?"
"Diana Konrad." She shook swiftly and gestured him to the terminal doors. "I've got your ride."
'Ride' turned out to be – a crop-dusting helicopter? Seriously? Clint gave Diana a dirty look. The spraying gear was disconnected and lying on the floor inside the small hangar, but…
"No, you can't fly her, mate," she swung herself up into the pilot's seat. "This is my livelihood. And she's faster than she looks. Sit down and belt up."
She was definitely a friend of Jacques and Jen, she had the same no-nonsense attitude. Clint liked her already. "So how do you know Jacques?" he asked as the chopper lifted off into the sky.
"Jen and I went to high school together." They were sitting side by side in the small cockpit, and Diana shot him a sympathetic glance. "I am really sorry to hear that she's missing."
Clint's jaw tightened. "Yes. Jacques told you…"
"He told me to do whatever the hell I had to do to get her back and no questions would be asked. I owe Jacques a debt, anyway." She said no more for a moment, but he was looking at her intently, still wondering how far he could trust her, and eventually she lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug, her eyes still focussed forward out of the helicopter's bubble canopy. "My husband. I met him when Jen and I were on a road trip to the AusSAS base outside Perth to visit Jacques, right after we finished high school and he passed Selection. We had all these big dreams, you know, and then I met Paul Konrad. He was Jacques' squad-leader. And all my dreams suddenly changed."
"I've met him," Clint said. "In Afghanistan." He remembered Specialist Konrad well, the leader of the AusSAS troop, the one who had made the decisions and helped with the planning. He'd been a big guy, almost Steve Rogers-sized, and yeah, Clint remembered him mentioning a wife.
"Yes, Jacques filled me in that it was you they met on that mission. Well, his following tour over there, Paul was shot and seriously injured. Jacques carried him out to the extraction point on his back, but Paul was too badly wounded. He didn't make it home."
"I'm sorry," Clint said inadequately after a moment of silence. "He was a helluva soldier."
"Yes he was. But I do owe Jacques, for bringing him out of there. I even got to say goodbye, via Skype. So, you see," Diana glanced sideways at him, "I know what it is to lose the one you love. I'll help you get Jen back, come hell or high water."
"Thank you," he said, looking at his phone again, seeing the GPS indicator still heading steadily south. "It could be both, considering who we're up against."
"So what's your plan?" she asked after a few moments of quiet.
"Have you seen the movie Taken?" he asked in a casual tone.
"Yeah, I have."
"I'm gonna make Liam Neeson look mild-mannered and gentle when I get hold of the people who took my wife." The words were delivered calmly, but Diana didn't doubt for a minute the lethal rage behind them. She closed her mouth and concentrated on coaxing greater speed out of the old helicopter as Clint started working on his phone.
A/N: Finally, I hear you say! Yes, finally, I've got far enough ahead of myself on this story that I'm ready to start posting it. Chapters will generally be longer than Through A Glass Darkly and will probably go up twice a week. Hope you're enjoying the story so far, please let me know in the comments!
