Latvaria, 7/7/14
The man was large, but easily snuck past the guards. Since the mountain had exploded, he had chartered a Kree merchant ship to take him as far as the Earth's troposphere and beam him down to the surface. From there, he had searched for the place that Heimdall had seen while observing Earth, the place where he saw Lady Isabella of Detroit and Hawkeye die.
He had found the place at long last, a cave cut into the side of the mountain, fenced off from the rest of the wilderness and surrounded by armed guards. The mountains were all in alignment from the sketch that Heimdall had drew from his vision, and this had to be the location of the blast as the soldiers were stoically guarding a hole in the ground with Heimdall's own vigilance. Fortunately he had learned some things from his brother, so these soldiers were easy enough to sneak past.
Dressed entirely in black leathers, he snuck further into the decayed inner sanctum of the compound as the walls crumbled around him, and he walked quickly but quietly, searching for clues in this dilapidated complex.
His mission here was to discover what had happened here, before meeting his brother in Washington DC and hoping for a warm reception. Heimdall had not seen what had happened inside this compound in the last few months, he had seen its construction over sixty years ago, and some parts shipments, but none on Asgard were adept in identifying human technology and their uses.
After ten minutes of walking, he pressed himself up against a cracked concrete wall and gripped the handle of his hammer tighter when he heard footsteps approaching him from the front. To achieve his goals, he must not be spotted, so he suppressed his urge to kill them as they walked past him, their automatic weapons slung across their shoulders, clad in black. They were talking; however, he could not identify, let alone understand the language.
A few more minutes and he reached a large circular room, filled with dust and pieces of concrete from the ceiling, held up by several hydraulic lifts. Something shiny winked up at him from the dust, and he bent over and picked it up, rubbing the dust off the object with his thumb.
It was a tag, the type that human warriors wore around their necks, on a chain of metal spheres. However on the chain, there was not only the tag, there was also a plain silver band. He read the script on the tag.
"Gunnery Sergeant Isabella Rodriguez," he hissed. She had been killed here.
On his way out of the compound, he made a stop at a tent that had been erected near the edge of the exclusion zone, and he made his way towards it, using the rocky outcrops as cover. He had to find out what had transpired here, but the way that the scientists were scurrying around with the soldiers, it seemed clear to him that they did not know what had transpired either.
He leaned down by the canvas flap in the bottom of the tent and listened for a moment for any voices. For a moment, he could hear nothing, but then someone's voice rung out.
"Captain, what do you have?" unlike many of the others here, he spoke clear English, and was clearly in charge. He lifted the canvas flap and looked through the hole. The man that had spoken was tall and dark, dressed in a military uniform and clearly in charge. The other man was a little shorter and had a broad face, a fighting man.
"It seems that Sinthea Shmitt crossed our country," the captain said simply, "she chose to destroy the device rather than let it become the property of the Latvarian people or fall into the hands of the Avengers."
"What of the two Avengers?"
"They were fried in the blast," the captain told his commanding officer, "The Avengers are pressuring to be allowed to investigate the crime scene, and Stark is threatening legal and government action against us."
"That does not matter," the commander told the captain, "the Avengers are our enemy. Doom protects Latvaria, and we will not be threatened by Hydra or the Avengers."
The captain snapped a quick salute at his commander, and as he did so, several papers fell onto the ground. He reached through the tent flap as the captain reached for the fallen paperwork as his commander left. He grabbed a sheet of paper from the file and pulled it back through the tent. He stuffed it into a pocket and slipped away into the night.