Silently, Invisibly
Chapter Twenty-six
Steve sat back in the jump seat that backed up to the cargo jet's cockpit and stretched his legs. He'd taken the protective boot off. His ankle still felt stiff, but the pain was almost completely gone, and everything seemed to be working normally.
In the other jump seat to his left sat Bucky, eyes closed. His broken nose was still vividly bruised and slightly swollen. He hadn't gotten around to removing the adhesive tape. He'd taken off the leg brace and, after some rapid-fire back and forth with Natasha in Russian, the prosthetic arm as well. The exposed skin of his chest and shoulder had been red and, in places, bloody; he'd grudgingly let her bandage it for him.
Natasha sat on a bale of something, leaning back on another, looking over maps or diagrams on her phone. Steve watched her until she glanced up at him.
"I owe you an apology," he said.
"No, actually you don't," she said. "That is, if you're talking about the situation with the prosthesis."
"I made an unjustified assumption," he continued.
"No. It wasn't unjustified. It just happened not to be true, this time."
"The Widow's worried about her reputation," said the Soldier without opening his eyes. "What was it you said, Natachenka? You leave mercy to God?"
"Don't start, Yasha," she said.
"She's afraid you'll think she's soft," the Soldier continued.
"Actually," said Steve, "there's not much danger of that. I've fought alongside her."
"Then you've seen whatever she wanted you to see," said the Soldier, with a slight smile.
"I think both of us were too busy to be second-guessing each other," said Steve, "what with the alien invasion."
"Besides," Natasha said, "Steve has a gift for assessing character."
"No," said the Soldier, "not really. He sees what he wants to see. Or why would he be on a mission with an assassin and a war criminal?"
"For the same reason the two of you are on a mission with a 24-year-old science experiment with an imaginary rank," said Steve. "Because I have skills you need. And you trust me. Are we done now?"
"Bravo," said Natasha quietly. "And Yasha, I'm sorry I don't have anything to give you for the pain."
The Soldier glanced at her, then closed his eyes again. "It wouldn't help if you did," he said, almost inaudibly. "It's in my brain, not in my arm."
She put her phone away and moved over to sit on the floor beside him. She leaned against his leg. "Not much longer now," she said.
The Soldier rested his hand lightly on her hair. After a while he said, "Do me a favor, both of you."
"What?" asked Steve.
"Call me James. Being jerked back and forth between 'Bucky' and 'Yasha' is giving me whiplash."
"Can do," said Steve.
"All right," said Natasha.
The rest of the flight was uneventful. They reached Vienna in the early morning hours; a cab (or what looked like a cab) picked them up from the Stark cargo office and took them to the safe house. When they got to their destination, the driver handed them a hamper with fruit, bread, cheese and a pint of milk.
The house was clean, neat and Spartan: two bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, dining room and a small but comfortable den. There were covers on the furniture, but no dust. There was no perishable food other than what they'd brought with them, but the kitchen was stocked with canned and bottled goods, coffee, tea, and so forth. Steve started a pot of coffee brewing and sliced some bread.
Bucky had donned his arm again just before they landed, and seemed to be feeling better. He'd removed the tape from his nose, and the bruising had faded to the point that it didn't draw attention. The leg brace allowed him to walk with only a slight limp.
Once they'd eaten, Natasha opened a sliding panel hidden in the larger of the two bedrooms and began removing weapons and supplies. For herself, two pistols and two boxes of ammunition, a pair of throwing knives and a pair of the electrified bracelets that Steve remembered from the battle of Manhattan. For Bucky—James—a pistol, more ammo; a semiautomatic rifle with a scope, which he checked over carefully and then returned to storage in favor of his own rifle; body armor, sized for Hawkeye, but adjustable to fit James well enough; night vision goggles, an earpiece and an assortment of small electronic devices. Steve was satisfied with his shield (concealed for now in a garment bag) and his pistol, but he did take an extra box of ammunition and a well-stocked first-aid kit. James and Natasha each took a small daypack loaded with MREs.
"Any word from the rest of the team?" Natasha asked, and Steve frowned, realizing that yes, they should have heard something by now. He pulled out his phone. No service. He switched on his SHIELD comm and glanced at Natasha and James; they switched theirs on. They could receive and transmit to each other, but there was no other traffic.
James switched on the TV. It showed a blank blue screen on every channel.
They switched on the clock radio; a recorded message was playing in German.
"It says all satellite and cell service is down and internet service is severely limited," Natasha translated for him. "They're asking everyone to stay calm and avoid using landlines or the internet except for absolute emergencies."
Steve parted the blinds and looked out the window. Things looked almost normal, but there seemed to be an unusual number of people holding their cell phones and looking worried. At the coffee shop on the corner, a cluster of people were standing around a police officer, talking urgently. Steve glanced into the sky; no clouds, just the usual few high contrails he'd become accustomed to in this century….
"My God," he said suddenly. "Air traffic control. Natasha, how much—"
"Still mostly radar and radio," she said, "but some of the long-distance tracking relies on satellites."
"I think we'd better move our timetable up," said James. "Let's go find a vehicle."
They found, or to be more precise, stole one almost immediately. James drove. On the highway, the automated traffic-alert signs were blank. The car radio was playing news updates on all channels. "They say there's a breakdown in satellite communications; they can't get official confirmation but it appears to be affecting at least all of Europe and the Americas," Natasha translated.
They reached Brno in a couple of hours. Natasha directed James to a seemingly abandoned industrial complex on the outskirts. In a broken-down warehouse they found a very well-maintained little jet. James whistled in admiration. "Where'd you get a Harrier?" he asked.
"Royal Navy surplus, if you can believe it," said Natasha. "The U.S. Marines bought them up. SHIELD diverted this one. It's a trainer; seats two. Tight fit for three, but it'll get us there, and it doesn't need much runway. I can fly it if you can't, but the seating will work out better if you pilot."
"I've got it," said James.
"Steve, hope you don't object to having me in your lap for a while," said Natasha. Steve shook his head, feeling himself blush. No hope of her not noticing, but he trusted she wouldn't give him a hard time about it. James, no doubt, was another matter, but he'd deal with that later.
Four hours passed very, very slowly. They could talk to each other (at least, two of them at a time could) on the plane's helmet mics, but they picked up nothing else on any band except the Emergency Broadcast frequency, which was repeating the same message they'd heard before, in German, Russian, Polish, and what Natasha identified for him as Hungarian.
They switched the radio off. Eventually they came in for a landing on the old heliport at Pyramida. The place was deserted, the thin crust of icy snow undisturbed, though according to Natasha there would be tourists here in the summer.
"Snow's going to make it difficult to get around without leaving tracks," James commented.
"We'll just have to get underground as quickly as possible," said Natasha. "There's no hiding the jet, in any case."
James took the lead now. "Last time I was here, there was access to the underground tunnels through the mine office building," he said. "This way."
The access point that James remembered was still there, and judging by the dust and spiderwebs it had accumulated, it hadn't been used in years. Steve took that as a good omen. The tunnel was structured like a spiral ramp, sharp bends every thirty meters or so. The air was dusty but not stale; there must be ventilation of some sort, though Steve couldn't feel or hear any air movement. They moved downward quietly (well, silently in the case of the other two; Steve as quietly as he could) with only the dim red LEDs of their headlamps to guide them.
James, a few feet ahead, held up a hand to signal 'stop', and Steve and Natasha froze in their tracks. Steve held his breath and gradually became aware of a soft hum, just at the edge of audibility. James edged forward to the place where the tunnel ended in a blank metal wall. He laid his ear to its surface. After a few minutes he straightened up and signaled Steve and Natasha to back up. They retreated around the last corner. There was a brief silence and then a soft, gritty sliding sound. James tapped his comm twice, and they came back around the turn to see a rectangular opening, just barely illuminated.
The hidden panel opened into the side of a corridor: dark, but quite clean and obviously in use. James signaled Steve to go right, Natasha left; they eased down the hallway as James shut the concealed door behind them. Steve peered around the corner. More empty hallway, but stronger light coming from the far end. He signaled 'all clear' and 'light' to James; Natasha gave the former, but not the latter signal. James motioned her to return, and all three of them slipped around the corner and down the hallway Steve had scouted.
The hum Steve had heard before was stronger now, the 60-Hertz noise of cheap fluorescent light fixtures. The next hallway they came to was lit by their harsh glare. There were no other sounds, no signs of life. The corridors were featureless, the doors labeled only with numbers. Every door they passed was locked, except one that led to a stairway heading up.
Eventually they came back to where they had started. James beckoned them into a tight huddle. "Natasha takes the right side. I take the left. We open every door. Steve, you keep watch. I think all the guards are one level up; they probably don't know there's a direct route to this floor."
Most of the doors had simple mechanical locks that yielded to lockpicks. A few had electronic keypads; the gadgets from Hawkeye's cache made short work of them. At first, they found nothing more interesting than filing cabinets, office and cleaning supplies, an empty guardroom and what looked like a holding cell. One room was filled with what Steve recognized, with a start, as radio equipment.
"Who uses shortwave in this day and age?" he asked.
James shrugged. "It's not left over from the old days," he said. "Looks new."
"Maybe HYDRA's responsible for the satellite outage," said Natasha, "and this is their alternate means of communication."
Steve took note of the frequency settings on the transmitter, and they backed out and resumed their search.
Halfway around the circuit, one door led to a room three times the size of any of the others; it was stacked to the ceiling with crates of disturbingly familiar design.
"Phase Two," Steve whispered. James looked inquiringly at him.
"SHIELD's program to collect and replicate HYDRA weapons," Natasha explained.
Steve opened one of the crates. It contained a familiar bulked-up, slightly alien-looking rifle, but it was completely drained of power. So were the next few.
"I'm guessing they're planning on recharging these once they get the Tesseract," said Steve.
Natasha nodded. "Makes sense."
James was looking up at the ceiling, frowning.
"What is it?" Steve asked.
"Those conduits," said James. "They look like…" his voice faded out as he followed the course of the thick, twisted metal tubes to the far wall. Then he bent to examine the joint between wall and floor. He stood and began running his fingertips along the wall, tapping lightly. At a particular spot, he pulled out one of Hawkeye's gadgets, stuck it to the wall and switched it on. Yellow lights began racing around a circular track, then one by one they turned green. There was a click, and a section of wall the size and shape of a door slid back half an inch. James grabbed the edge of it and pulled. The recessed section slid aside, and lights began coming up on the other side of it.
James stepped through. Natasha and Steve followed.
They were in a small chamber, about twelve feet square. The walls were taken up by panels of electronics, with dials, switches and readouts all glowing a soft blue.
In the center of the room was a raised area with a heavy, smooth metal container, like a hybrid between a propane tank and a coffin. There was a glass panel on the top near one end.
"Bozhe moy," said Natasha. "James, did they have another—"
"I thought they killed the program after me," he said. He stepped closer, looked down at the glass. "It's occupied," he said.
Natasha stepped up beside him and then recoiled sharply. She didn't actually gasp, but she held her breath for an instant, and when she looked back at Steve the expression of unguarded shock on her face startled him.
"Natasha?" he said, and stepped up to see for himself.
For a crazy moment he thought, this has got to be some kind of joke.
The readout on the top of the tank showed blood oxygenation at 98% and a glacially slow pulse of 5 beats per minute. The face behind the glass, submerged in some kind of liquid and eerily blue-white in the dim illumination, looked disturbingly like a corpse.
Appropriate, given that it was the face of Phil Coulson.
Huge thanks to Ael_tRlailiiu for beta, and my apologies for the delay in posting (minor illness, all better now).