There was an armoured truck waiting outside. It looked like it might have been there to make a delivery – the guards standing around the open doors, rifles in their hands, were simply there to protect the precious cargo. After a brief look around to make sure nobody was watching, Madame escorted Natasha into the back. This time there were would be no breakable handcuffs or cell doors with locks that could be picked. Natasha, in her pajamas, was put in titanium shackles and attached to a ring in the floor. The chains were not long enough to let her stand up.
Nor could she reach the bench across the front end of the compartment. Madame seated herself on that and took off her hotel maid's hat, placing it delicately next to her. Natasha would have to sit on the floor, so she did. There was a nasty metallic smell, like a handful of pennies.
The door closed. From the sound of it there were several locks. The engine started, and the truck drove away.
"Where are we going?" asked Nat. Her throat was so dry she had to swallow twice before she could make the words come out. Her heartbeat was irregular. Her blood was loud in her ears.
"St. Petersburg," said Madame.
"Where are we stopping between now and St. Petersburg?" Nat tried.
"That's irrelevant," Madame replied, voice clipped. "You will not be leaving this cell or my sight until we get there. If nobody else can control you, then I will do it myself."
They wanted her back very, very badly, Natasha thought. Something vitally important was riding on this. Maybe if she could find out what it was, that would give her an advantage. "What happens in St. Petersburg?"
"Why should I tell you?" Madame asked. "You won't remember this conversation anyway."
That was an answer itself: she would be re-educated, as they said. Brainwashed and tormented until she would never dare to disobey them again. That hadn't worked on Nat the first time, and she doubted it would work now... but it was still something she'd much rather not go through again. If nothing else, SHIELD would have to waste time and resources trying to rescue her.
"SHIELD will come for me," she said, testing for a response.
"Is that what you've come to?" Madame demanded, and Nat flinched in expectation of being struck. Madame, however, didn't even stand up. "Waiting for somebody to rescue you? That's an insult to the Red Room – you ought to rely on nobody but yourself!" She glared coldly down at the girl sitting at her feet, and Nat had to lower her eyes as she remembered a dozen incidents from her childhood, when she'd seen somebody else at the receiving end of that stare. Whoever earned Madame's disapproval had usually vanished within a few days, and had never been seen again. Now, at long last, it was Natasha's turn. The thought turned her knees to jelly. She couldn't have stood if she'd tried.
"And no," Madame added, "they won't come for you. Director Fury," she sniffed disdainfully as she spoke the name, "will be much too busy dealing with the escape of our friend from China. We can offer Miss Lin things SHIELD never could... and she can offer us a great deal in return."
Nat shook her head. She had to pull herself together. She could get out of this – she'd escaped from worse earlier that day, without any assistance. Why did she feel so helpless now? Why did she want so badly to give up, lie down, and weep? Was it just exhaustion... or was it because Madame was right there, staring at her? Was it the conditioning that had taught her Madame was the source of all love, and all punishment? For years, this woman had been the goddess of Natasha's world.
But a lot had happened since then. Nat had met gods, and they weren't nearly so terrible as they liked to appear. She didn't need to let her conditioning control her. Earlier, when she'd been only half-conscious, she'd known what she had to do... but that time she hadn't been chained up, hadn't had to look Madame in the eye, and she'd been very close to actually as injured as she'd pretended to be. Now she was fully awake and Madame knew it. What were her options?
The roles of the situation were fairly obvious – Madame was the disapproving mother who hadn't raised her daughter to disrespect her this way. That made Nat the rebellious child. Very well.
"All this just because I tricked you on the ship?" she rasped.
Almost imperceptibly, Madame sat up a little straighter. "You did not trick me!" she snapped. "I knew you were a fraud. I know your every move before you do, Natalia. Do not ever think you can trick me."
What was that line from Hamlet? The lady doth protest too much, methinks. "If you'd thought for a minute I was capable of getting out of it, you wouldn't have tried to lock me in the brig of a navy ship," said Nat.
"It was all I had," Madame informed her. "The more notorious you become, the less respect any of us get! The government fears we're spending their money creating rebellious brats like you who will turn against us!"
Natasha raised her head to stare at Madame, almost as insulted as Madame herself had been a moment ago. That was what this was all about? They'd come all this way, murdered several people, destroyed equipment, gone to such trouble to capture her because the Poliburo was cutting the Red Room's funding?
Madame could sense she had the upper hand again. "It's almost funny," she sneered. "The girl they worried so much about chained on the floor thinking SHIELD will rescue her. You don't even know what SHIELD is. They're going to be terribly busy for the next few years, and so are we. They won't have time to miss you."
She didn't seem to plan on telling Nat what that meant. Nat didn't particularly care, either – for all she knew, it might be empty bluster. If it wasn't, she would just have to deal with it as it came. A new resolve had settled under her breastbone. There was no way she was going to let herself be dragged all the way back to St. Petersburg and tortured into subservience over budget cuts.
The van pulled to a stop. Natasha expected she would be made to get out, but Madame had said she wouldn't be leaving the vehicle until St. Petersburg. How was that possible when there were some fifty-five hundred miles between there and the Philippines? Madame herself showed no sign of moving. She sat there patiently for what seemed like a very long time, until Nat began to hear the roar of a helicopter rotor. It came closer and closer, and then there was a thump on the roof of the truck, followed by clanking sounds and men moving around.
They were slinging the truck under a helicopter. They were going to airlift it... where? It couldn't be all the way to St. Petersburg. They'd need a long-haul jet, like the 747 Nat had been on all day, to make a non-stop flight that far. The helicopter would be taking her someplace where she could be loaded onto a larger aircraft. The biggest airport in the Philippines, and the one from which international flights usually took off and landed, was Ninoy Aquino International in Manila. That must be where they were going.
Fury would have figured that out, too – when he arrived at the hotel and she wasn't there, he would know something he was wrong. Banner could give him the description of the woman who'd taken Nat away. Even if they were trying to track down the escaped Hu Xian, Fury would probably at least try to meet them there. He couldn't bring the whole Vanguard, because helicarriers were too slow compared to smaller craft, but he had jet fighters and helicopters of his own. There could well be an entire SWAT team waiting for them when they arrived.
What would happen then, though? Natasha had taken a SWAT team herself more than once, and she knew Madame was tougher than she was. They also had military men with them – despite her complaints about funding cuts, Madame clearly had the resources to mount an impressive offense when she had to. She'd commandeered an aircraft carrier, even if it as a very old one. Fury was a planner, an organizer. Could he do this by the seat of his pants?
He probably could, but Madame was generally pretty careful about gathering intelligence before she tried to predict what people would do, and she probably had other tricks up her sleeve just in case. Nat could not depend on help from SHIELD. Once again, she was going to have to help herself, so she prioritized.
Escaping from this armoured truck would have to wait until they were back on the ground, because she didn't want to have to fall ten thousand feed twice in one day. Before she could even attempt that, she would have to get out of her chains. Then she would have to incapacitate Madame, who would certainly try to stop her, and then get out of the truck. Steps one and two could be done in the air, she decided. There probably wouldn't be a lot of time in between landing and being loaded on the waiting plane. Best if she had everything else out of the way before that happened.
Once she was out of the chains, the best way to deal with Madame would probably be to open the door and throw her out. But not from so high, Nat decided, that it would kill her when she hit the ground. Madame didn't want to kill Natasha, so Natasha would give her that much in return – besides, if Madame were dead, she would merely be dead. If she were alive, she would have to go admit to her superiors that she had failed. She would have to live knowing that Nat had beaten her. Madame was the one who'd raised Natasha to be a killer, so killing her would in a way be letting her win. Letting her live to know that Nat was tougher than her, that would be justice.
"I can see those wheels turning," said Madame, waggling a condescending finger. "I told you, I know your thoughts before you do. I'm the one who put them in your head."
Laoag to Manila took a little more than three hours. There was no clock inside the cell, but Natasha knew that the two cities were about three hundred miles apart and the helicopter couldn't fly at full speed when carrying something as unaerodynamic as an armoured truck. That gave her time to think. She tugged on the chains experimentally, disguising the motion as an attempt to get comfortable, but they were securely fastened and the welds held. Titanium was difficult to join, but once joined, it was just as difficult to break.
"Stop that," said Madame. "You're only wasting your time."
The chains were also light – enough so that they wouldn't be a very effective weapon. Steel restraints were much better for hitting people with. Titanium would make a serviceable garrote, though, if she could only get them around Madame's neck.
"You fidget like a child," Madame said. "Do you really think I don't know what you're doing?"
"Do you honestly think I'll just sit quietly while you drag me home to torture?" Nat asked. "You didn't raise me that way."
"I raised you to do as you're told!" Madame told her sharply.
Nat wound one chain around her wrist a few more times. This was going to be painful, but after all the damage her left arm had already sustained that day, what was once more?
Madame stood up and put her foot down on Nat's wrist. The truck, hanging under the helicopter, swayed as the weight shifted.
"I said stop," Madame ordered.
With a flick of her wrist, Natasha had the chain around Madame's ankle. Pull her down and go for the neck...
It didn't work. Madame kicked Nat under the chin – her head snapped back and she would have fallen over backwards, but the chains on her limbs caught her and jerked her to a stop before she reached the back doors of the armoured truck. Nat realized she'd bitten her tongue, and could now taste the blood.
Madame gathered up the chains and lifted Natasha off the floor, then dropped her heavily. The truck bounced and shook on the end of its chains. Madame put a foot down on the side of Nat's face.
"I said stop," she repeated. "Why can't you sit still?"
Natasha didn't answer, but if she had she would have told Madame that it was because she was the tough one. She wasn't the smartest, or the fastest, or the strongest, but she endured. She picked herself up again and kept going when she was hungry, or exhausted, or in pain. Because somewhere deep down inside her was that little girl who believed that if she passed every test she would be allowed to go back to the State Home for Girls in Volgograd, and Baba Galina would give her a home.
But why should she go on doing that? That State Home was gone – she'd burned it down. Baba Galina had died long ago. If Natasha had ever properly stopped to think about these facts and deal with them, she probably would have given up. She made herself continue by ignoring them. Now, however, when she desperately needed the motivation, it was draining away. There was nothing waiting for her. Natasha had already lost, because there'd never been anything to win.
Except there was. There was the Barton family. Nat had come here in the first place to save the Barton family, the people who'd taken her in and taught her and helped her when they had nothing to gain by it. The children she could never have, and the woman who'd taught her the handicrafts that Baba Galina had never gotten the opportunity to. And Clint, whom she would always be a little bit in love with even as she knew it could never happen. The Red Room had taken one home and one family from her forever, but the Barton family had given her another.
She had to get up. Madame's foot was still on her face – maybe she wouldn't expect Nat to try the same thing twice. Natasha moved her arm to get the chain around her captor's leg.
Madame kicked her in the face again. "You're impossible," she said, returning to her seat. "All this time you've been calling yourself the Black Widow, as if you were the only one. You're just a black widow. If anyone is the Black Widow, it's me. I will always be greater than you."
"Then you're a terrible teacher," Natasha hissed through the blood in her teeth.
The sound of the rotor blades changed, and after what felt like an endless, drifting descent, the wheels of the truck touched pavement. Nat heard the sounds as the chains holding it to the helicopter were unhooked.
"You were lying about the bombs in the hotel," she realized.
"I could still set them off," Madame told her.
That wasn't true, though – she hadn't threatened Natasha with them once on the entire flight. Having used the ruse to get her target out of the building, Madame had forgotten all about it. A classic liar's mistake, forgetting what your lies were. The truth was so much easier to remember.
The truck engine started, and they drove up an incline. Nat could hear the sound echoing in a large, open space with metal walls. They must be on a cargo plane. More noises represented workers lashing the truck to the floor.
If Fury were going to come for her, now was the time.
She expected the plane to take off right away, but it lingered a while, as voices and mechanical noises were heard outside. They were loading more cargo. The echos made the space sound too large for a passenger plane's hod, so at least there wouldn't be so many civilians on board this time. Perhaps they were passing this off as a shipment of vehicles. Maybe they could fly directly to St. Petersburg with that, but it seemed more likely that they would make a series of stops. That way they wouldn't have to carry as much fuel.
Madame continued sitting in front of Natasha, her lips pressed thin. She wasn't going to kill her, but she wouldn't let her try anything, either.
Finally the cargo doors shut with a deep, shuddering thump. The plane taxied slowly out onto the runway, and the engines revved as they prepared to take off. Natasha hung her head. It seemed like Madame was right. SHIELD was not coming for her. Maybe the Hu Xian's escape had blown a hole in the side of the Vanguard, or filled the ship with gas. Or maybe Nat had simply done her job too well. Maybe they assumed she could take care of it, just as she'd taken care of everything else she'd come up against that day.
The engines roared and the truck moved slightly as the takeoff roll began – and then everything came suddenly to a violent halt. It felt as if the plane had hit a cliff, so hard that it was tilting up on its nose. Cargo shifted. Chains and cords snapped. A car horn went off, and after a brief moment in which it seemed to be balancing with its tail in the air, the entire aircraft did a somersault and landed on its back with a crash.
It all happened so fast there was very little time to react. By the time Nat knew what was happening, she was dangling upside-down above the fluorescent light fixture in the ceiling, and Madame was lying on her right. Nat grabbed her chains to try to untangle herself, while Madame picked herself up and went for the door.
Nat's head was spinning, but she knew this was her chance. She looped the chain around Madame's neck and pulled as hard as she could, lifting her feet off the ground. Madame did not cry out, but she reached up to put her hands under the chain, trying to break it. She couldn't do so. Natasha used her legs to put more chains around Madame's neck and pulled harder. The woman gasped and kicked for quite some time, before finally going limp.
Outside, Natasha could hear machine guns. She reached into Madame's pocket.
A hand grabbed her wrist, and there was an explosion of pain accompanied by a juicy crunch. Natasha gritted her teeth so she wouldn't scream. Madame slammed her head against the wall.
"You're not the only one who can play possum," she spat in Nat's ear. She broke the truck doors open with a kick, and went to see what was going on.
Natasha hung there and quietly counted to twenty, then opened her eyes and began undoing her bonds with the key she'd snatched from Madame's blazer with her right hand – while Madame had been busy, breaking her left wrist.
It took only seconds to get the chains off. Nat dropped onto the ceiling of the truck and pulled off her pajama pants to make them into a sling for her wrist. Then she climbed out of the truth to see what was happening.
As she'd suspected, she was inside a huge cargo transport plane. It had been loaded up with a variety of vehicles, many of which were now on their sides and partially crushed. The smell of spilled jet fuel was thick in the air, and a large section of the fuselage was missing, torn away to leave rough edges like a sheet of torn paper. What could have done that?
Natasha suddenly felt like she knew.
The back cargo door of the fuselage, where they'd presumably come in, was still in place. The front, however, was open – to open the front cargo door the entire nose of the plane, including the cockpit, had to be folded up. Something had physically torn it off its hinges. When Nat climbed over the wreckage of another truck to get out, she saw that the plane had also lost a wing. It was lying on the far side of the runway.
Just beyond towered the Hulk. He was holding half of an immense jet engine, ripped from the missing ring, using it as a shield against a fire truck that was trying to fend him off with a hose.
The Hulk could take care of himself. As long as he didn't come near her, Nat decided she wasn't going to bother with him. Where was Madame?
As she climbed over the wreckage, Nat observed that in a way, Madame had been right after all. Natasha had been counting on SHIELD, maybe not to rescue her exactly but certainly to deal with the cleanup. The whole time, she'd figured that once she'd beaten the bad guys – be they terrorists, black widows, or something else entirely – Fury would arrive to handle the arrests and make sure the guilty parties never hurt anybody again. If the the Hulk were here, Fury was probably on his way, but Natasha now realized she couldn't wait for him. Like any black widow whose mission had failed catastrophically, Madame had probably decided to cut and run. Natasha would not allow it.
She also observed that this was, objectively, ridiculous. Nat was beaten up and bruised, her wrist broken and stitches in her elbow. She'd fallen from a plane today, and blown a hole in the deck of an aircraft carrier... surely she'd done enough! Yet here she was, wounded and exhausted and still hunting down her target.
Because that was what she did. Natasha wasn't the smartest or the strongest, but she was the one who never, ever stopped. Not when she had a home to go back to.
Madame had said she knew what Nat would do next, because she'd taught it to her. That could work the other way, though – Natasha knew what Madame would do next, because she'd learned it from her. So if Nat had been bringing a slippery target back to St. Petersburg, only to find her final push foiled by an eleven-foot green monster that was probably the precursor to a troop of soldiers coming to arrest her, what would she do?
She was at an airport, so she would steal a plane and escape.
They were at the foot of the runway, still close to the international cargo terminal where the plane had been parked for loading. There were several cargo craft of various sizes parked there, all ignored as emergency vehicles rushed to deal with the unfolding drama of the Hulk battle. Natasha ran towards the terminal as if she were flying the wreck in terror, but her mind was working.
If she'd been in Madame's situation and had known her target was likely to come after her, she would have set a trap. Nat had gotten up every time Madame had knocked her down so far. Madame was sure of herself, and with good reason, but if she weren't worried about it happening again, she was an idiot. Nat would have to be very, very careful.
She avoided both the nearest plane, and the largest. Those were obvious and Madame would not take them. Something small. Something that could take off quickly and wouldn't attract a lot of attention.
At the edge of the tarmac was a little Cessna Cargomaster with the FedEx logo painted on the side. That was probably used for flying parcels around the islands and perhaps to nearby international destinations like Malaysia. It would get madame out of the country and allow her to get in contact with her superiors. It was exactly what she would need.
Now Natasha needed a weapon. She looked around, and spotted a fuel trick. It was parked nearby, one door open – whoever had been driving it had run to either help or escape from the Hulk fight. Natasha climbed into the cab and looked around. The place stank of fuel, and automatically she checked to see the status of the tanks. They were full. No wonder the driver had fled – if the fighting got this far, the vehicle would become a giant bomb.
As she searched the cab, looking for a fire extinguisher or a crash axe, Nat heard a propeller start. Madame was in the plane, and she was going to take off while Natasha was distracted. Nat did some mental math. A plane that small would have a takeoff speed of around sixty or seventy miles per hour, and Madame would not be able to accelerate even to that until she got to the second runway, which was about a kilometre away at a right angle to the first. Unless, of course, she thought she could take off over the fight going on.
Evidently she did. She turned onto the base of the first runway.
If she got away, that was technically not a loss. Madame would go home to be punished by her superiors and do... whatever it was she did when she wasn't training black widows or hunting Natasha all over the South Pacific. But Nat wasn't going to let that happen. Her insides were boiling now. This woman had taken from Natasha the closest thing to a family she remembered – Baba Galina – and destroyed all records that might have led her to her real parents. Now she'd tried to take her new family from her. Nat wasn't going to let that slide. It seemed as if the most important thing in Madame's life was the Red Room, so Nat was going to make sure she could never, ever go back to it.
She hotwired the truck – painful with her broken wrist, but doable – and started the engine. She would have to catch up before Madame reached the runway, and if anything went wrong she was sitting in a vehicle full of jet fuel. She couldn't dump it because there were fires among the wreck of the giant cargo plane, and people were still firing bullets at the Hulk. In so many ways, this could all go terribly wrong.
The Cessna couldn't move very fast on the ground, but neither could the heavy fuel truck, which had never been intended to be used in a car chase. Natasha pushed the pedal to the floor and did her best, with the truck's entire chassis shaking in the turbulent air that had been stirred up by the little plane's propellers. Madame increased the throttle. Nat moved to the side to get out of the turbulence, and pulled up beside her.
How many damned times, she wondered, was she going to have to climb onto a moving plane today?
Nat grabbed the tip of the wing with her good arm and swung her legs around it. The still-moving fuel truck swung away and rolled off the runway to fall onto its side in the grass. It did not explode, but Natasha could see that one of the tanks had ruptured and was spilling jet fuel out onto the grass. That would not end well.
She had other things to take care of first, though. Nat inched her way up the wing and hung over the side of it to look into the cockpit. She could pick the lock on the door and climb in...
There was nobody in it.
Nat's stomach seemed to drop right out of her and splat on the runaway below. The pilot's seat was empty. Sticks and pedals had been tied and weighted in place to keep the plane going down the runway – directly towards the battle between the fire department at the Hulk. With nobody to raise the plane's nose for takeoff, it would plough right into the wreckage of the larger cargo plane.
She had to get off the plane, but how? Getting into the cockpit would take too long – she had only seconds. Madame had presumably bailed out while the Cessna was still moving at a fairly low speed. If Nat tried to jump out now, she'd be hurt badly, or even killed.
Nat was out of ideas. She just held on as hard as she could, shut her eyes, and hoped Madame was right. Hopefully, she really was made of marble... but even marble could shatter.