August 2, 2016
Bellona awoke to a sharp pain in her shoulder. She flicked her eyes open and blinked heavily for a few moments before her brain was capable of comprehending her surroundings. She was in the back of a speeding van, masked guards armed to the teeth all around her. Upon awakening, the one on her left immediately raised his gun, ruthlessly pressing its cold barrel against the bare skin of her neck. Her heart raced against its smooth metal, and she dared not move another muscle.
Her hands had been mercilessly tied behind her back, with some sort of metal enclosing her palms. The knife attached to her arm had vanished. Her ankles had also been lashed together with thick chains. Her formerly white dress was stained and ripped, and she was quite sure the guards around her had no complaint about the fact that her shoulders were bare and most of her legs were exposed. Her bag was being ruffled through by one of the guards, who was making pleasantly surprised noises when he discovered the copious amounts of cash in a plethora of currencies. She had the urge to roll her eyes at him before focusing on her shoulder wound. She had surged back into consciousness because one of the guards had gripped the injured shoulder and squeezed forcefully. The wound pulsed in agony, making Bellona grit her teeth, not only at the pain, but at the circumstances she now found herself in. The van tossed about the bumpy road it was flying down with seemingly reckless abandon. Bellona couldn't help the hysterical giggle that escaped her lips at how downhill her situation had gone. This earned her a shouted threat from one of the men in the truck. She snapped her eyes open and shot the man a glare so venomous, the entire back of the van was suddenly experiencing a pressure drop that had the guards squirming in their seats. The snarling barrel of the gun was forced against her neck in response, and she wiggled in discomfort at this. This infuriated her. If only she could think-
An unexpected increase of speed in the van and a subsequent swerve sent her tumbling against the guard to her right. He caught her roughly, grabbing onto her injured right shoulder to steady her. Bellona hissed at the strike of pain that clapped through her upper body and received this guard's gun raised to her neck in response. With guns at point blank range awaiting the slightest movement on either side of her, her hands incapacitated and her lower body immobile, she closed her eyes again and focused on her breathing.
Inhale. Exhale. Think. Why the hell can't I think?! What would Bucky do? Oh, he would just tell you what to do. So what would that be-
Her mental argument was interrupted by a load of shouted orders, followed by the van coming to a gut-wrenching stop. Her eyes flew open in time for the doors of the van to open just as the guard on her right fired his gun into her jugular.
Bellona Drager returned to consciousness to the steady rocking of waves against a hull. Her gut informed her it would be unwise to open her eyes and alert whoever was around her to her awakened state. So she continued breathing in ragged, short gasps and focused her attention on her surroundings.
There were four men guarding her; she could taste the metal of their tranquilizer filled guns — they were very close to her. Her hands were still wrested behind her back, immobilized in a metal contraption. Her ankles still lashed together, her left shoulder was leaning against a cold hard surface. Her right shoulder was still tingling from the bullet wound, the bullet still embedded in her flesh, causing the area to pulse with warm waves of energy that was radiating from across her clavicle, through her throat and down into her chest.
It was evident she was on a boat, cruising north on the Nile, towards the Mediterranean. She could smell the water in the air, mixed with the gasoline of the boat's engine that was chugging away. It was a rather large boat, too. She could detect at least three dozen other men aboard it. A conversation was being held on the floor above her, in a mix of Arabic and English. It was an argument — she focused on the words being said — they were about Iron Man. In another room aboard the ship, a group of men were playing a game, wagering bets using the money retrieved from her bag. The man steering the ship was smoking a cigarette, his third one, judging from the scents of burnt ashes in a tray beside him.
Bellona was almost startled out of her observing into opening her eyes by a sudden statement by a man who walked into the area where she was being held.
"Boss says tranq her again as soon as she wakes up," he uttered in Arabic, and those around her grunted in acknowledgement. "Can't risk what happens if she does before we get to base."
Tony Stark was growing increasingly impatient as he waited for the hotel owner's son to finish explaining the events that had occurred that day to the local police. The tech genius was irritably brushing imaginary dust off his custom tailored mahogany colored Italian silk blend suit. The one that meant he meant business. Leaning against the side of the hotel in question and scuffing his foot against the ground, his dark sunglasses did naught to hide his evident restlessness. He had come to Egypt because something was gnawing at the edges of his mind, and he was determined to either confirm his fears or put them to rest.
Unable to wait for the young man to finish his report to the police, Tony Stark glanced up and down the street before pushing off the building and slipping through the front door into the hotel lobby. It appeared relatively undisturbed to his quick scan, so he proceeded down the hallway, hands in his pockets, sunglasses still perched on his nose.
He was halfway down one hallway when he stopped to glance down at a woman's headscarf that had been tossed onto the floor. He thought it was a rather ugly brown color before he lifted his sunglasses and noted that it was a dark maroon. Giving no further thought to it, he dropped his sunglasses back over his aching eyes and continued his inquisitive stroll down the hallway.
Tony Stark came to a second stop when he stumbled upon a pair of silver aviator sunglasses that had also been tossed haphazardly onto the floor. One of his most stressing concerns suddenly seized a microphone and started shrieking at him upon sighting the glasses on the floor of the threadbare carpet in the hotel hallway somewhere in Cairo, Egypt. His own glasses were snatched off and shoved into a pocket of his suit as he bent down to pick the pair up off the floor. He had no trouble recognizing them.
Tony Stark then let out a violent string of expletives before turning and sprinting back down the hallway, sunglasses in hand.
Bellona Drager knew she couldn't move a muscle lest she give away the fact she was awake. She refused to risk being sedated again, fearing the repercussions the drugs would have on her, and wishing to maintain some sort of control of the situation she was in.
The ship had sailed well down the Nile and was quickly approaching the Mediterranean — she could smell the salt interspersed within the air currents, despite being belowdecks.
Drawing back her attention from her observations, she returned to the battle that had begun raging in her mind before she had been tranqed the second time. Her mind was struggling to come up with a solution as to how to disentangle herself from these rather unpleasant circumstances. Think, goddammit!
"Alright, playtime is over, you're talking to me now," Tony Stark interrupted the police questioning of the hotel owner's son (apparently his father was nowhere to be found). He was in no mood to play nice. "Don't give me that look, you know who I am," he snapped at the officers, who had barked at him in stiff Arabic about how he was disrupting a police investigation.
"You want an upgrade?" Tony pointed at the battered phone the young man was clutching. He still had one earbud in his ear; he couldn't be more than twenty years old. "I'll give you an upgrade, new phone and headphones, one of those nice expensive pairs," he informed the kid, draping an arm around his shoulders and steering him away from the chagrined police officers. "You do speak English, right?"
"Yes, sir," the kid stuttered out, glancing down at his phone as if envisioning what a brand new one would look like in his calloused hand. "You're — you're Iron Man-"
"That's right, but right now I'm more interested in what you can tell me about these," Tony released the kid from his grip and held up the pair of silver aviator sunglasses for the kid to observe.
"Someone came in yesterday, wearing them," he replied nervously, as though having a debate inside his head.
"New phone sounds pretty nice, huh?" Tony cajoled him, "who was it?"
"A girl, a pretty girl," the kid muttered, rubbing the back of his neck and glancing down at the dusty street they stood on.
"I have the feeling you know her name," the billionaire coaxed the Cairo native, dangling the silver sunglasses before him.
"She didn't want me to tell anyone — she, she paid well too-" the kid blurted out at once.
"Then can you tell me what she was wearing?" Tony switched his approach, making a note to check the Drager finances.
"Uh, those glasses," the kid pointed at the sunglasses, "and a red scarf, covering her head, and a white dress, I think."
"If she was so pretty, then you were obviously checking her out, so do you think that's what she was wearing or do you know?"
His cheeks flushed a brilliant red before he murmured, "I know."
"If she didn't want you to tell anyone who she was, how did that gang of thugs know she was here?" Tony's voice dropped an octave, making the kid tense up and begin rubbing his thumb over his phone in a habitual comfort gesture.
"I didn't tell anyone, I swear!" He exclaimed, the whites of his eyes clearly visible in the darkness of the early morning hour. "They just came! Out of nowhere! It wasn't me! Please-"
"Shh!" Tony gestured for the kid to lower his voice, as the officers had turned and glanced over to see what the commotion was about. "I believe you. Did you tell them her name?" He pointed over at the officers, shuffling and coughing a way down the sidewalk.
"No," the kid promised, vigorously shaking his head.
"Good," Tony clapped him on the shoulder. "Keep it that way."
Bellona Drager couldn't believe that she blew it. The ship had come to a bumpy halt, and she heard men shouting to throw the lines out when she her nose wrinkled in response to the sudden assault of new scents that came with the new location. Sea salt, sweat on warm bodies, and rotting fish. This slight muscle motion was met with a sharp jab by the guard on her left as he plunged a fresh tranquilizer dart into her neck. She managed to hiss out a few well chosen curses before blackness met her once more.
When she awoke, she was being bounced around in the back of a van again. It was sweltering hot, and it smelled of sunbaked sand and roasting metal. There were ten armed men in the back of the van, plus two in the front, one driving, the other talking animatedly on the phone. He was haggling over prices with someone who was speaking Kurdish on the other end.
Bellona's eyes flew open when someone deliberately applied pressure to the bullet wound in her right shoulder. She glanced around and met the dark eyes of the man who had done it. He had the muzzle of his gun aimed directly at her forehead, it was fully loaded, but she knew he had no intention of firing it. Of greater concern were the two on either side of her, their tranquilizer guns melting into the sweat that had begun to condense on her neck.
"What do you want?" She rasped out to the man in front of her. The lower half of his face was covered with a camouflage patterned cloth, leaving only his eyes visible. But he was not the same man who had spoken to her in the hotel.
"Where is he?" His voice was a deep guttural grunt.
"Who?" Bellona fired back, not daring to wriggle out of the uncomfortable position she was in. Her hands and ankles still chained, she was supported only by the side of the van which her back was against.
"The Soldier," the man snapped, making a show of cocking his pistol in front of her face. "Where is he?"
"I don't know," she answered with a snarl of pain as the man on her right clamped a heavy hand to her injury and squeezed with purpose. A shudder passed through her as a buttery heat began to arise in the location of the injury. It pounded through her upper body, centralizing around her throat and lower neck. When the man removed his hand from the wound, all were dumbfounded when the bullet that had been lodged within her bone and muscle popped out on its own accord with a resounding plunk. It rolled across the floor of the moving van until it came to a stop at the feet of a man sitting in the back. Bellona couldn't see his face, but she could taste the wave of horrified fear that suddenly rolled off him.
Her laugh was sinister, but it quickly faded away as the man interrogating her seized her by the throat and slammed her head against the side of the van. She winced at the contact but his grip on her vanished immediately. Instead, the man screeched a curse in his native dialect and waved his hand around frantically, attempting to cool the second degree burns that had occurred as a result of his brief skin to skin contact with the bewildered, blue-eyed girl before him.
"What the fu-" her exclamation of surprise transformed into a shout of agony when the man, in his pain-induced rage, lowered his gun and fired another bullet into the shoulder that had just healed. Her whole body bucked in reaction to the direct hit, initiating both tranquilizer guns on either side of her to fire.
"What's the location of that boat, FRIDAY?" Tony Stark asked his AI as he climbed back into his private helicopter after interrogating the native Egyptian. He had managed to track the van that had disappeared from the Cairo hotel, to find that it had unloaded its passengers onto a yacht that had begun sailing up the Nile.
"It's docked at a private port in Jableh, Syria, boss."
"Docked?"
FRIDAY was silent for a moment before responding. "No lifeforms detected aboard."
Tony let out a string of words that would have had his mother looking at him in shame. "Do we have any leads on where its jolly sailors went?"
"Satellite was tracking the yacht, its footage shows three different vehicles leave the port," FRIDAY replayed the videos on his helmet's screen. Tony watched them in annoyance as his fingers hovered over a screen, trying to determine what coordinates to next direct himself to. "Replay it to the point they unload the boat," he ordered, and the footage rewound itself. "Any heat signatures on those suspiciously large bags they're carrying?"
"The satellite that took this footage isn't equipped with that technology, boss," FRIDAY reminded him in a quiet voice.
"Goddammit!" Tony shouted, the urge to punch something overwhelming his capacity to think logically. "Put that on the list of upgrades."
"You got it, boss," FRIDAY said. "Reminder that taking any action in Syria and Iraq will be a violation of -"
"Noted, can you let me think for a minute," Tony seethed internally. HYDRA had done it. They had gotten their sticky fingers on Bellona Drager. The one thing he had feverishly tried to ensure would never happen again. Now he was stuck in civilian clothing in Cairo, Egypt while a terrorist organization carried the girl he saw as his sister deeper into the Middle East. And it was increasingly looking like there was nothing he could do about it.