Notes: For much of this chapter, I am in debt to Geoffrey Wellum's wonderful book, First Light. If you have any interest in World War II memoirs, I can't express how much I recommend it!
In the real world, no one has flown out of the former RAF Castletown since a Sikorsky Hoverfly helicopter dropped in back in 1945, just before the airfield closed down. The site is now part of a farm (although you can still see the runways and some artifacts.) In H!verse, we'll say things turned out a little differently.
Warnings: Not really a warning except for self-indulgence (too late!), but this chapter is pretty much all Natasha, and was inspired by my recent reading material. Incidentally, Natasha may seem OOC in this chapter, but Natasha is a pilot and, while the Tesseract may affect everyone differently, there is a power in this chapter that affects nearly all pilots in exactly the same way.
Also- Tony's Scottish house is in the Highlands, near Thurso. I have done enough research to know where to find the railway station and the Catholic church, and where Thurso lies relative to the two airfields discussed in this chapter. Alas, I'm handwaving much of the local geography, just assuming it's possible for Natasha to fly quite quickly from the flat area of Caithness into something more mountainous.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The sofas in the formal living room were hard, and the upholstery slippery, so they were not a comfortable place for a nap. George grumbled so much about them that Loki didn't have to, and Annie and Nina agreed to the suggestion they retreat to the television room. Loki expressed no opinion on the matter, but a slight lessening of tension in his shoulders suggested there was, perhaps, a second room in the house he was beginning to consider a safe place.
Annie made a quick side trip to the study and retrieved paper and a pen. It wasn't clear what she intended to do with these, but perhaps she could make a list. Of something.
Loki actually went so far as to stretch out on one of the sofas, the one next to Annie's chair, and when the little cats came hurrying into the room and climbed up on him, he made no attempt to dislodge them. Nina started out by pacing the room like a very small tiger in a very small cage, but when George held out his hand she went to sit with him on a squashy loveseat.
"What did they mean by Doom's allies?" Nina asked, her expression puzzled. She turned to George in surprise when he flinched violently.
Before anyone had to decide how to respond, Steve appeared in the doorway.
"Natasha's going to call in if she finds anything on that aerial recce, so Bruce and I will be upstairs in the security room monitoring the radio. George, you know where that is, right?" George agreed, and Steve nodded as he retreated down the hallway to the stairs.
"Carrot," said Loki, still flattened out on the sofa.
"Pardon?" asked George.
"Earlier I was trying to think who he made me think of," Loki replied as he stared at the ceiling. "Carrot, from the book. Men At Arms. One would think a creature so honourable- and so bulged with muscle- would remind me of Thor, and so he does, in the other realm, but- I think this one reminds me of Carrot."
"Carrot," repeated Annie, frowning in confusion.
"He's a Watchman- a policeman, you know- in the Discworld books. Huge and muscular and honourable and-in spite of corruption all around him- very decent," George explained. Glancing at Loki, he added, "And probably a whole lot smarter than he lets on."
"I shall endeavor to remember that," Loki replied rather waspishly.
There was a pause. Loki closed his eyes and set his jaw, and the others tried not to wonder whether this time he really was thinking of Thor.
After a moment, George tried a peace offering.
"If Steve is Carrot, who do you suppose is Nobby?" he wondered aloud, referring to another Watchman character; a humourously dishonest creature so misshapen he was said to have to carry a special certificate asserting he was human.
"That's unkind," giggled Nina, who apparently knew the stories. Annie, who did not, offered a confused shrug.
"Stark," said Loki, without opening his eyes. George and Nina broke into startled giggles that turned into genuine laughter as they pictured Tony in the role. Annie, who was not a fan of the books and so had no idea what they were laughing at, shook her head in amusement at her friends.
When she looked back at Loki, his eyes were open and he was looking at George and Nina. There was a faint smile- not a smirk, a small but genuine smile- curling the corners of his lips.
Annie, as she turned back to her list, wore a smile of her own.
~oOo~
"Isn't Wick Airport somewhere down the A9?" Natasha asked mildly, as Tony turned the Range Rover east along the secondary road.
"We're not going to Wick airport," Tony replied cheerfully. "We're going to the former RAF Castletown, which was built in 1940 as a satellite to RAF Wick- the airport, which was requisitioned by the Air Force during the war." Natasha nodded her understanding and Tony went on, "It was an operational station of 13 Group throughout the Battle of Britain- protected Scapa Flow, among other things- and then was an air-sea rescue base until the end of the war. Nowadays there's a lot of farming around the airport, but two of the runways and a couple of buildings are still serviceable. There's a little flying club based there."
"Which your friends belong to," Natasha prompted, as a hint to move the story along. Ordinarily Natasha didn't hint unless there was a specific tactical reason (for instance, when she was pretending to be someone else entirely, someone who would hint) but there was little urgency to get the facts until they were closer to their destination.
Tony obligingly got on with it.
"My father's friends, actually, although they've always been nice enough to me. I don't think they fly much anymore themselves, but they've still got a plane and when I called they were happy for you to take it up."
"Nice," Natasha agreed, and then Tony was turning into a lane, marked by a sign that read CASTLETOWN FLYING CLUB.
It definitely was surrounded by farms- with the window rolled halfway down Natasha could smell cows, and somewhere in the distance she heard the bleating of an atmospheric sheep. There were a couple of light planes- a Piper Cherokee and what looked like a Cessna 172- in the circuit as Tony parked the Rover next to a shabby little building that might have been an original World War II dispersal hut. Natasha opened the passenger door and stepped out of the Rover. Tony tapped out one sharp blast on the car horn, then followed Natasha.
The door to the little building opened.
"Well, if it isn't young Tony," said a cheery Scottish voice, and two figures emerged from the building.
"Hi Sandy," Tony called. "Natasha, I'd like you to meet Sandy and Leo, who were old friends of my father."
"Hello," Natasha said, with a slightly warmer smile than usual. Stupid of her, but she hadn't realized that Howard's "old friends" were in fact old friends,which is to say, wartime friends. Sandy was short and wiry, Leo a little taller and rather stooping. Both men were silver foxes of at least ninety, and as she shook hands Natasha had one of those moments when her mind tried automatically to picture what Steve would have looked like by now, without the serum or the ice.
It was a fool's errand, of course, since Natasha lacked the imagination to picture Steve minus the serum's effects. Or, rather, her imagination was strictly adapted to deal with mission-specific contingencies, leaving little left over for flights of fancy.
Ordinarily. As she followed Tony and the two old gentlemen toward the one metal hangar, Natasha had the strangest sensation of the airfield itself trying to speak to her.
Loki, she knew, could often tap into the magic of a given place, could sometimes control or at least conduct it. One of the more bizarre incidents during the Hydra/Dire Wraith battles the previous August had involved a squadron of Hydra-controlled fighter jets launching an attack on the British Parliament and then- if the extensive amateur video evidence was to be believed- mysteriously blowing up, one after the other, while maneuvering as if under invisible attack.
Even weirder were the voices on the cell phone videos, bystanders shouting things like, "He's got him, the Hurricane's got him" or "Dad, look out there, it's the Hood" while the amateur videographers persistently pointed their cameras at blank patches of sky or the calm surface of the Thames. With Loki involved she was able to believe in the hundreds of earnest eyewitness accounts of ghostly defenders on the river and in the sky, but her sorcerer comrade insisted that he had not deliberately conjured them, and his friends confirmed that his strongest interest in reading about the specifics of British air and sea power dated from after the incident.
Natasha had never until recently imagined a place could be alive, but she was far too practical to deny something when it was right in front of her. She therefore accepted that whatever Loki had got hold of- or vice versa- had some sort of mind or memory of its own. Her early life had worked against her developing much sentiment about the land of her birth, but she did sometimes wonder what would happen if Loki ever found himself in St. Petersburg. Because she liked Loki about as well as she liked any of her professional acquaintances, she found herself hoping it would never become necessary to find out.
In the meantime, there was something in this quiet place with its innocent little aircraft, and even Natasha could feel it.
"How did you get to know Howard?" she asked now.
Leo laughed. "Drinking in London," he admitted. His accent wasn't Scottish, in fact it sounded a lot like George's. "He called it gathering intelligence, of course. Whatever use a lot of drunken pilots might be for that."
"Precious little intelligence involved even when we were sober," Sandy added. As Natasha continued to look interested he went on, "Ran into him again after the war, when he bought the place near Thurso. My sister had married Leo by then and when they came to Scotland to live we'd all see a bit of Howard sometimes."
"And his family," said Leo, nodding to Tony, who smiled faintly. Well, he'd apparently had better luck with these friends of his father than he had with... certain others. Leo went on, "And of course we're pleased to help with your little problem now. We've a lovely little aircraft to lend you."
"A perfect lady's aeroplane," added Sandy, with a twinkle. Natasha swallowed that bit of elderly sexism, reminding herself she would definitely be sent to prison- probably Wormwood Scrubs, which with a name like that had to be terrible- if she punched out a member of the Few. The old men seemed to know what she was thinking, because Leo flashed her a mischievous smile that, just for a second, dropped seventy years from his age and made her think of Loki's friend Mitchell.
And in the back of her mind, in fact, she could see Mitchell as if he was standing here- a Mitchell whose hair was clipped off short like George's and was carrying a parachute slung over his shoulder. Only a small effort of imagination put George beside him, in blue Air Force uniforms with wings on the breast. Nobody would call Natasha kind, but some impulse made her insert Loki, similarly uniformed and with a non-regulation haircut, between the two of them.
While she was at it, she also pictured Annie in the uniform of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, her face solemn as she studied a table covered in maps and wooden markers, shifting them with a croupier's rake to show where air activity was taking place.
Right. Time to rein that in, because they had reached the hangar and whatever kind of aircraft these two old codgers thought was suitable to be flown by a woman. Natasha- who was rated to fly multi-engine jets off the helicarrier- was betting on a 172.
Tony and a passing club member jumped to man the rolling hangar doors as Natasha reminded herself that whatever they offered was better than nothing, and certainly better than potentially calling Doom's attention to them with a QuinJet- or Iron Man.
And then the doors parted and Natasha found herself, for the first time in many years and without even drinking anything, doing an actual spit-take.
A Spitfire-take, as it were.
Sitting there in the hangar, slung back on her- always her- tailwheel, with her long nose reaching toward the sky, graceful pointed wings outspread as if impatient with the ground...
Well, she had been described as the modern equivalent of Excalibur. It was suddenly obvious where the swirl of magic and memory had its focus.
"Wow," Natasha said quietly, coming to a halt a few paces from the aircraft, where she could take a good look. After a moment she turned to the two smiling old gents. "Perfect lady's aeroplane?"
"That's what the girls in the Air Transport Auxiliary called them," Leo said smugly. He looked over at Tony and the club member and called, "Can you chaps give us a hand pushing her out onto the flight line?" The club member responded with alacrity, and Tony was right behind him. It crossed Natasha's mind to tease Tony about getting his hands on yet another beautiful female... and then she considered Leo and Sandy were his dad's friends, and she didn't.
However, when the Spitfire was on the tarmac in front of the hangar and Tony had stepped up to peer into the cockpit, Natasha did find herself wrestling down the urge to throw him to the ground and step over his prostrate body to get at the controls.
She didn't, of course. She conducted herself like a perfect damned lady as she accompanied the Spitfire's two elderly owners on the preflight walkaround, listening to all the tidbits of wisdom they offered. Which, despite the number of flying hours in her logbooks, were still welcome: every aircraft handled differently and the Spitfire being a single-seater, pilot notes were all she'd have to go by.
Sandy patted the old aircraft with obvious affection. "There aren't many Mark I's left in flying condition. This old darling was operational from the summer of 1940 until the spring of '41."
Operational. And wasn't that just British as all hell, to refer to combat flying under desperate conditions as simply operational.
"Once we start the engine you'll want to get airborne as soon as possible," Leo counselled. "The Merlin doesn't like to sit on the ground and is prone to overheating."
"The prop rotation tends to pull her to the left on taxi and takeoff, so you'll need to apply right rudder and a little right aileron to keep her straight on the roll," Sandy added.
Leo: "And you'll need to weave with your rudder on the way to the runway- that long nose makes it impossible to see where you're going otherwise. And do be careful with the brakes except at very low speeds- she's nose-heavy on the ground and you don't want to groundloop onto the propeller."
Sandy: "The guns, unfortunately, are not serviceable- keep that in mind if you run into bandits. We always used to say you should never fly straight and level for more than twenty seconds in combat." Once again, his quick grin reminded her of Mitchell.
"I'll keep that in mind," Natasha murmured, running her fingertips along the leading edge of the left wing and admiring the slight twist as you looked along it. The engineering reason for this "washout" was to cause the wing to stall first at the root, which served as a handy early warning for the pilot, rather than having the aircraft abruptly stall in a steep turn and then whip into a spin. If she remembered correctly, pilots of Sandy and Leo's era would have trained in the North American Harvard, which had a reputation for that kind of bad behaviour.
"She'll warn you before she stalls," Sandy commented as he noticed the focus of her attention. "You can hold her at the shudder point for a surprisingly long time, if you're alert. Very handy, if you've got something on your tail that can't turn inside you. Here, you might like to look over the pilots' notes for the startup procedures." Natasha accepted the yellowed booklet and the others let her spend a few minutes studying it. Finally, she looked up.
"Let's go," she said, trying to sound cool and unruffled despite the way her heart was starting to hammer. Get out of the way, old man, this one is mine. She'd always enjoyed flying, but it had been a long time since she'd been this eager to get into a particular plane.
The flying club guy, whose name she hadn't even asked, smiled at her as he walked away. She supposed she was hardly the first pilot ever consumed by the lust to fly this specific aircraft. She did, however, retain the common sense to ask,
"Has he been with the club for a while?"
"Yes," Tony replied. "And... the security clearances to become members here are, shall we say, higher than average."
"Ah," said Natasha, as Leo tipped her a wink.
She climbed into the snug little cockpit- the old joke was, you didn't get into a Spitfire, you slipped it on, and in fact this really did feel like the airborne equivalent of a little black dress. Okay. Adjust Tony's little snooper device, which was strapped to her leg just above her right knee. Now, pre-takeoff procedures. Oxygen mask. Instrument panel- considerably simpler than the modern jets she was used to, just the basics: compass, altimeter, attitude and airspeed indicators. Throttle, ignition, landing gear...
Okay. Startup procedures... Fuel cock levers ON, throttle open a little, fuel mixture full rich, airscrew was constant-speed so no setting adjustment was necessary, radiator shutter open, prime the engine, ignition ON-
"Clear prop," Natasha shouted, and looked around to ensure Tony and the two old fighter boys were out of the way.
"Clear," Leo called back.
One more shot of primer, press starter button and hold it down-
There was a cough and a ragged rumble from out there down the nose, spouts of flame from the exhaust as the propeller slowly began to turn, hesitation as the old Merlin cleared its throat-
And then the engine caught solidly and the stuttering growl turned into a husky contralto hum. Leo waved her onto the taxiway and Natasha keyed the radio to notify local air traffic around the uncontrolled field that she was on the move. That done, she switched on the Avengers communicator so Tony could talk to her privately.
And yes, she could not see a single damned thing in front of her, so she used the rudder to yaw the aircraft as she taxied, peering out the side of the canopy and very much aware of the engine temperature. Below 100 was the safe zone, still some room to play with-
All other traffic on the little aerodrome paused (paying their respects as the queen passed by) as the Spitfire sashayed toward the triangle of runways. Checking the solid-orange windsock, Natasha chose the active runway, taxied to the button, and turned into the wind.
Final check, including trim and flaps, throttle open and ease off on the brakes- they were rolling, engine uttering a full-blown roar with the musical note peculiar to the Merlin, the Spitfire intent on the sky. Wheels rumbling under her, speed increasing- and then a sudden smoothing-out as the old lady transitioned into her native element and began to climb.
Natasha adjusted the nut holding the throttle open, switched hands on the control stick, and used the hand-pump to raise the landing gear. A common problem with novice Spit pilots was porpoising on takeoff as they brought the gear up, owing to the tendency for both hands to move together. Natasha could hold knife to someone's throat while rifling a desk with the other, so that wasn't much of an issue for her.
Most of Natasha's hours in recent years had been collected on jets, and the Spitfire certainly didn't provide the kick in the ass you got with those. However, the tradeoff with a heavy, stubby-winged jet was the constant awareness of how much depended on the engine. Even the QuinJet- Natasha flew regular emergency procedures check rides in it, both on her own behalf and recertifying other pilots, and she was always aware that without the engine that aircraft had all the flight characteristics of a loaf of bread.
Not this lady.
The thing about more primitive, piston-driven aircraft was, you knew you were flying. Some of them more than others. Natasha looked around for other aircraft, then eased the stick back and to the left, coordinating with rudder as they turned toward the west. The old aircraft reacted as if reading the turn of her head, as if they were one organism, pushing her back into her seat as it rolled into a smooth bank. Natasha felt out the controls, rolling the wings back and forth while maintaining the same heading. The Spitfire obeyed, a series of sinuous movements, followed by a steep 360-degree turn to the right. Far below her, Scotland was green and gray and beautiful.
The temptation to try out some aerobatics was like an itch in her fingers, but now wasn't the time. Instead, she leveled her wings and eased back the stick. The Spitfire did not exactly climb like a homesick angel, to use an expression Natasha had picked up from an American flying instructor, but there was a sense of purpose as the altimeter needles wound around their dial.
"Natasha?" Tony's voice in her ear. "Can you give us your heading and altitude?"
"Passing through angels five," Natasha replied, and reported her heading.
"Snooper working?"
Natasha glanced down. The device was active, a little red light flashing softly in the shadows of the cockpit.
"Affirmative," she replied. "No joy yet. Heading toward high country."
"Stay in contact."
"Wilco. Out."
There was a snort of laughter from Tony on the other end, and the comm went quiet. Natasha almost regretted it, because up ahead were the misty mountains, looking as if they were waiting to be traversed by dwarfs and hobbits. And orcs.
There was no guarantee these mountains were the same ones Loki had seen in his vision, or even if Doom was there- Loki could have traveled a considerable psychic distance from Doom's lair before he was able to look around. Still, it was a place to start, and he'd identified this range as looking similar to the one he'd seen.
As she approached the high country Natasha let down a few hundred feet, needing to give the snooper a chance but still wary of the possibility of wind variations within the mountains. An experienced glider pilot as well, she was familiar with ridge soaring- that is, taking advantage of rising currents of air caused by the winds blowing into the face of a mountain. She was also familiar with the hazards of sink caused by those same winds blowing over the crest of the mountain and trickling down the other side, potentially taking small aircraft with them. She certainly didn't want to end this mission- operation- by failing to find Doom and breaking (pranging) the Spitfire to boot.
Apparently she'd judged her distances nicely, because there was little interruption to straight and level flight as she- they, she and the Spitfire- growled and sang their way through the cloudy peaks. It wasn't just the Merlin, either- at some point, to her embarrassment, Natasha heard herself singing, at the very bottom of her vocal range, "Far over the misty mountains cold, To dungeons deep and caverns old- "
Yeah, Thor was definitely never getting to pick the movie again. Thank God she wasn't transmitting right now.
And just at that, the little snooper, like a banjo on her knee, let out a quiet alert beep.
Natasha glanced down and saw the red flashing light had turned yellow. Even as she keyed the comm to report in, the light went green.
Tony's snooper wasn't infallible, of course, but it was calibrated to pick up on energy from any other source- not electromagnetic, nuclear, or whatever. He hadn't devised it specifically to locate magic, although certainly it was something he'd started playing around with since meeting Loki. Right now, in these mountains, the idea was that any kind of power spike was worth investigating, even if it just turned out to be a hydro station rather than a Hydra one.
There was no sign of a power station, or any other reasonable explanation for this by-now significant power surge. Natasha rolled the Spitfire into a gloriously smooth, diving turn. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of something- down there in the foothills, where forests grew. Holding one wing low so as to get a better look, she made another pass and concluded she was seeing a roofline. The snooper was now holding steady at a deep, vibrant green.
Communicator on. "Tony? I think I've got something- "
Rising from the roofline, two tiny shapes getting bigger and closing fast, roughly human-shaped but not Iron Man-
"I've been spotted- " Natasha began, and then, at the thought of Leo and Sandy listening with Tony, corrected herself: "Tally-ho."
The two Doombots, because that was what the bandits were, held their fire as they set a converging course to intercept her. Then a red flash- not simply curious, then. With a regretful thought for the eight Browning machine guns she should have had at her disposal, Natasha waited until what she judged was the last second before flicking into a hard roll to the left.
The Doombots, like Tony's suits, were impressive feats of engineering, but the human form is not an especially aerodynamic shape. Unable to adjust direction quickly enough, the two bots went right past Natasha, then bent their backs and angled themselves to loop back down after her.
By the time they did, of course, Natasha was already climbing again, the fighter pilot's instinct to come at the enemy from out of the sun strong in her. Of course, since Doombots weren't alive it was unlikely they would be blinded by the sun, but if she was above them she wouldn't be, either.
...never fly straight and level for more than twenty seconds in combat.
Pull back hard, G-loading pressing her back into the seat. Quick one-handed yank to tighten straps, both hands back on the stick, pull her over the top- should have practiced aerobatics after all- and roll coming out of it. Merlin snarling as she dove again, weaving hard as the Doombots tried to catch up. They might even be faster than she was, but she could turn inside them. Twenty seconds. She was probably flying level for less than ten seconds at a time, hopefully not in a pattern that permitted a deflection shot-
Quick glance over her shoulder, Doombots trying to converge again, flick the Spitfire over on her back and into a corkscrewing dive. Altimeter unwinding rapidly, Scotland filling the windscreen, ridiculous mental flash of Harry Potter diving after the Golden Snitch, was that howl the engine or the wings? Shudder as the wing root stalled, hold it on the shudder, they can't turn inside you-
Pull out practically on the deck, still weaving, bright flash of a Doombot exploding as it hit the ground just off her left wingtip. Where was the other bastard? Hold her steady, hands independent of head- this was not the time for sympathetic movements- turn to catch a glimpse of the remaining Doombot breaking off pursuit and heading back to base. Must have a pre-set range: maybe anything that blundered into within a certain distance of Doom's hideout would get clobbered. Better warn Castledown FC about that.
Check fuel- plenty to get home on, but she'd used up a lot in the last few minutes. Adjust throttle, fuel mixture.
Communicator on.
"Tony, I'm on my way back to base," she reported.
"Did you find Doom's lair?"
Natasha let out a rather breathless little chuckle. "You might say that."