A/N: I write to you from government-enforced quarantine, my dears… in a 5 star hotel! For free! (Guarded by the army and police). This week is going much better than last.
Oh also, quick note on the 'tactical team' thing, apparently it's MCU canon that the name "Howling Commandos" didn't come into use until after the war, so Steve and his pals would not have been calling themselves that. So the 107th Tactical Team it is.
Circe to Odysseus (The Odyssey, Homer): When your rowers have passed the Sirens, two roads will be offered to you.
Peggy returned to London an hour after Steve and his 107th Tactical Team did – they'd just scored an impressive victory in Italy, pushing back the HYDRA front lines and recapturing a town the science division had been using for labor. But Peggy didn't go straight to the SSR underground offices in Whitehall like they had. She instead went to the SSR photography department, waited for Alice's film rolls to develop, then made her way to Whitehall.
As she strode down the steps into the yellow-lit underground offices she spotted the tactical team immediately: they sat around the large planning table at the far end of the cramped space with Colonel Phillips and Howard. From their weary, slouched postures she guessed they'd already given their official briefing. Colonel Phillips was shaking a map at Howard.
Peggy strode across the room toward them. "Back for a little R&R, boys?"
The men all glanced over, and Steve jumped to his feet. "Agent Carter," he said respectfully. Maybe a little nervously. It hadn't been long since she'd shot at him.
"Captain Rogers."
The men of his team also stood to greet her, if a little reluctantly. She nodded in return.
"Not so much R&R, no," Steve answered her original question. "We're not back for long."
Phillips flapped the map at her. "Sit down, Agent Carter, we're discussing our next steps in Italy. The Allies have stalled, HYDRA is everywhere and we have no idea where their base is, and the Wehrmacht are a bunch of stubborn bastards."
"In a moment." Peggy pulled the satchel off her shoulder and set it on the edge of the table. From under her other arm she pulled the folder from the photography department. As she opened the folder and began sliding out photographs, the men around the table leaned forward.
Peggy met Phillips' eyes. "Agent Homer has provided these blueprints about the machinery HYDRA has been using, as well as a clue about another potential HYDRA base." She spread the photographs out in order, exposing the blueprints to the yellow office light and the eyes of the men around her.
"Agent Homer?" queried Steve, as he frowned down at the blueprints.
"One of our informants in the field," Peggy explained. "Here." She finished laying out the blueprints. Howard had initially not paid much attention, but at the sight of machinery designs his hand darted out. Peggy shot him a look and he retreated, but not far. His eyes were glued to the photographs.
"Here," Peggy pointed, "on the bottom of the third page, this handwritten note."
Steve and his men all craned forward, but frowned at the unfamiliar language. Private Gabriel Jones set his elbows on the table and scrutinized the writing. "Die Forschungseinrichtung Nr. 7 verfügt möglicherweise über Ressourcen, die für diese Teile erforderlich sind," he read. "Er... 'Research Facility #7 may have resources necessary for these parts'."
Sergeant Barnes scowled. "That's Zola's writing."
A pause fell. Peggy saw the storm brewing on Barnes's face, and the chill of hatred that stole over the rest of the men. Steve shifted closer to his friend, as if to protect him.
Jones glanced up at his Sergeant, as if to check on him, then slowly turned back to the rest of the writing. "And then under that, this is… French? No – German as well?"
"Dutch," Peggy corrected. "Our agent had a look and says that these are all names of places and companies in Belgium. If we cross reference, we may be able to pin down the facility location."
Stark had started sliding blueprints towards himself, eyes flickering over the designs of firearms, vehicles, and engines. "This is good stuff, with this information I should be able to figure out how to counteract some of their weaponry. I can't recreate it, not without their power source, but…" He held up a blueprint of the HYDRA Uber Tank, his eyes wide, before dropping it to turn to designs for the HYDRA armor. "How did your man get this stuff?" he asked distractedly.
Peggy ignored him. "Colonel Phillips, Agent Badger also provided some more up-to-date information about the Wehrmacht movements around the Winter Line over the next few weeks. I think we had better adjust some of our plans."
Phillips looked annoyed, but he nodded. "Alright then. Rogers, you lot, let's go draw up some battle plans at the map table. We'll leave Stark to his new present."
The men got to their feet with variously loud groans and followed Phillips across the room. Peggy stood a moment later. She'd wanted to impress the value of this information on them all – had been half a second away from saying these blueprints almost cost my agent her life. But that would be… unnecessary. Sentimental. Worse, any information she gave out about Alice increased the potential for exposure.
Peggy shook her head and followed the soldiers across the room. One day, I'll make sure they all know her name.
Excerpt from 'The Scientific Reserve' by Laurence Davies (1951), p. 12
From the beginning, the Strategic Scientific Reserve were friendly (and if not friendly, at least cooperative) with foreign allies: early on they brought in Agent Margaret Carter from the British MI5, made rescuing German scientist Abraham Erskine a priority, and forged multiple other international connections. This served the organisation well in the war, and gave them inroads into occupied Europe.
This author can also reveal that there is significant evidence that the Reserve had Germans working as spies for them. This theory will be extrapolated upon in the coming chapters, but it is plain from the outset, given the benefit of hindsight, that the SSR must have had double agents working for them. There is no other way they could have uncovered such a level of intelligence about HYDRA and the secret workings of the war. This publication will also put forward several theories for the identity of the SSR's undercover man.
Alice and Otto returned to Italy under Peggy's request (and after convincing the Propaganda Department that the German troops in Italy would really benefit from a pick-me-up). So the Siren and her backup singers returned to the country once more, travelling across the northern half of the country from the Austrian border to the front lines. Alice frequently spent time in Florence to record a Christmas record for Otto's production company.
Alice performed the same stage circuit (give or take a few miles of battleground lost), but her work with the SSR had changed overnight. Peggy had encouraged Alice and Otto to stop focusing so much on where the armies were, but on where HYDRA was – this kind of intel was practically in-actionable before, since there wasn't much the SSR could do about it if HYDRA was deep in German territory.
But Peggy hadn't been kidding about their new 'heavy hitter'. They first discovered this when Otto overheard some information about a HYDRA-occupied village on the west coast in Axis territory, they passed it on, and a week later HYDRA had fled from the area. Alice and Otto never got the details. Beforehand, HYDRA had been pretty much safe. They had much more resources than anyone else, and easily held onto their territory whether it was surrounded by Axis or Allied forces. Hell, no one but the SSR was even that worried about them. To everyone else, HYDRA was a bizarre cult to be dealt with later.
But now, Alice and Otto didn't have to worry about their intelligence being useless. They forged together every scrap of information and rumor they could, encouraged by Peggy's profuse reassurances that the SSR could work with whatever they came up with.
Alice wondered if they had come up with a weapon strong enough to counteract HYDRA's eerie blue weaponry. She knew they had Howard Stark on their side, perhaps he'd come up with the key. Whatever it was, she intended to keep pointing the way.
Not that her focus turned solely to HYDRA. Alice found herself mostly in the company of Nazi soldiers and generals; an endless whirl of performances, meet-and-greets, and social functions. There weren't quite as many parties in occupied Italy as in Berlin, but the German top brass still wanted their luxuries. She spent evenings soaked in the smell of dark wine and rich coffee, marveling at the fine Italian dishes which she could have only dreamed about in Brooklyn.
On the other side of the coin, 'Al' slipped through the cobbled, ancient streets of Rome and Florence or stole through country towns, coordinating with the Italian resistance and mutinous civilians. Their connections weren't quite as strong in Italy as in France, Germany, and Austria, but the Italian people were sick of the war and the Nazis. It didn't take much for them to talk.
In amongst the performances, costume fittings, and interviews Alice also occasionally heard about 'Captain America' – but in a much different light. It didn't seem like it was all propaganda now. The German papers spoke about him as a nuisance. The Allies must have been inspired by the propaganda show, dressed up a soldier and sent him into battle. She got scraps of information from the papers and from disgruntled soldiers, but didn't believe most of it.
She worked on, too busy to be scared and too determined to be tired.
Excerpt from 'War on Italy: 1943-1945' by Kate Higgins (1994), p. 55:
The Allied Italian Campaign began in July of 1943, but it did not see a very auspicious start. After the initial Allied invasion of Sicily led to a collapse of the Italian government and the signing of an armistice, German forces reasserted control over northern and central Italy, Mussolini was rescued from imprisonment and reinstated as leader of a new pro-Nazi Italian state, and the Allied leaders prepared for a long-haul fight. One piece of progress was that the government upheaval led to the rise of larger and stronger Italian resistance groups.
Initial landings in September came up against unexpectedly heavy German resistance and treacherous terrain, and by October the German forces had drawn up a series of strategic defensive lines known collectively as the Winter Line, which stretched across a narrow section of the country from coast to coast, strangling the Allied advance north. This series of defensive lines brought the Allied advance to a grinding halt, so come the end of 1943, it did not appear the Italian campaign was going anywhere.
When they returned to Italy, Steve and the 107th Tactical Team moved swiftly around the bogged-down, slow moving armies. With the help of the USAAF and the Navy they launched strike raids into northern Italy, miles behind the front lines. HYDRA had taken up territory in and around the main German forces, making them difficult to get to.
They fought swiftly and explosively, slicing through the HYDRA lines before they even realized who was there. But the main base remained elusive.
Orders came from the SSR command in London, but Steve had been given a loose leash – he and his team undertook raids and patrols outside of SSR purview, helping the main Allied forces as they tried to push through the Winter Line in the south of Italy.
The terrain didn't make it easy. Italy was supposed to be a temperate country, but as November turned into December the air became biting and torrential rains doused the battlefields. Most of the fighting was through treacherous mountain ranges and thick forests. Air raids were near constant. Steve quickly got used to the sound of air raid sirens. What's more, the Allied command were prone to hesitation. More than a few soldiers told Steve they were envious of his ability to choose his own targets.
After their initial teething troubles, Steve's team worked together like they'd all known each other for years. Steve was the strategist and the first one onto the battlefield (since he was also their human cannonball), and Bucky was their Sarge – the one who made them all eat and sleep and go to the medic tent. Dugan had also recently been promoted to Sergeant, and he made a reliable third in command even when he was mouthing off.
As the battles wore on, Steve realized he was getting pretty good at giving speeches.
Steve got to know his men in battle and back in camp, over flasks of bottom-shelf liquor and mind-numbing patrols. Gabe came from Georgia but had gone to Howard University, and he liked playing word games in their down time. Dum-Dum had a girl back home in New York, and he talked about her like she'd hung the moon in the sky. Falsworth was married to an aristocrat in Scotland who wrote him letters that made his ears turn pink, and when he thought no one could hear him he whistled tunes to himself.
Dernier helped Steve brush up on his French when they had a spare minute, sang bawdy songs with a vivid grin on his face, and could become almost violent when trying to convince others that France was the best country on Earth.
Morita's parents had been moved to an internment camp in California, and when Steve learned that and started pushing the SSR to have them freed, Morita seized Steve in a hug that might have crushed his bones if he didn't have super serum. Morita drank straight whiskey and couldn't be beaten at cards.
The people of Italy were welcoming enough to the American and British soldiers – partly because they weren't Nazis, and partly because they were more than eager to buy food and other luxuries. Bucky and Steve tried pasta the way it was meant to be eaten, and laughed at how similar it tasted to the kind at the Italian place in Brooklyn. They listened to old men playing guitar on the rubble-strewn streets and watched kids play outside the barracks.
In Europe, it was so much easier to hear news about the Siren. Steve wished he could stop noticing (wished he could stop seeking it out) but he had a sick drive to know. He'd hear an Italian mention her name on the street – La Sirena – or see an advertisement for her upcoming Christmas record in an abandoned German newspaper.
Once, when they'd pushed back the German front line a few miles, they walked through the streets of a small town to clear it and Steve had stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of Alice. Her face, in black and white, on a paper tacked to a signpost. He ran over, nearly tripping on the shrapnel-pocked road. It was a poster for a performance in this very town; he couldn't understand most of the German but he scanned for numbers and there: the date advertised was… last week.
Steve let his gaze drift. He imagined her walking these streets, her voice echoing on the stage he'd spotted on the way into town. He imagined her singing Christmas songs.
The Alice of his imagination shifted from the dark-jacketed, smiling one who'd been with him in Brooklyn, and became an untouchable songstress in a sweeping white dress, her expression haughty and utterly impossible to understand. Steve shivered.
He'd torn the poster off the wall and shoved it into his pocket just as the rest of his team caught up with him.
"What's wrong?" Bucky had asked.
Steve shook his head. "Nothing."
It often frightened Alice that she seemed to come across her most valuable intelligence by chance – certainly she put herself in positions where she might hear things, but sometimes mere chances of fate brought her vital information.
So when she finished washing her hands in the bathroom of a Florence manor house and then pushed open the door to hear men's voices in the corridor beyond, she paused.
She'd been invited to a large dinner party with many of the top German military men and pro-Nazi Italian socialites. Alice had come without Otto, and after a long evening of mingling and gossiping she'd allowed herself a moment's reprieve in the bathroom. But now…
The voices in the corridor outside the bathroom were low but close, as if the speakers had ducked out of the party together. Alice kept the bathroom door cracked open with her palms and pressed her ear close to the gap.
"… I just wanted to say, sir, that I'm still endeavoring to implant an agent in the SSR but you needn't worry-"
Alice went rigid, her skin prickling.
"Which one's that again?" came a rougher voice. She recognized it: that was General Fischer, one of the highest Wehrmacht leaders in Italy. He let out a rumbling cough.
"The Strategic Scientific Reserve, sir. American." Alice placed his voice too – Lieutenant Krause, who was officially a Navy officer but who Alice knew was also a Sicherheitsdienst (SS intelligence) agent. "They're more concerned with HYDRA than us, but they're responsible for that new strike team causing strife on the front. The ones who took Chiasto."
"Ah," the General replied with derision. "Well, why didn't we already have an agent handling them?" The voices were fading, as if they were walking back to the party.
"We did, sir, but it seems the agent was HYDRA, so we lost contact with them after the schism. We haven't had any intel from them since September." Alice leaned closer to the door, straining to hear as the voices grew more distant. She could feel her heartbeat in her palms as they pressed against the door.
"Well keep me updated on your progress, you know command's been in contact about…" the words faded into the distant wash of voices, and Alice dropped her forehead against the door.
I might never have heard that.
She opened her eyes, staring at the dark wooden door with her palms pressed against it. She let out a long breath. But I did hear it.
Why do I keep learning important things in the bathroom?
She contemplated the idea that this could be a trap. Intelligence officers didn't normally speak so openly about their undercover operatives. But, she realized, this wasn't classified for them any longer. They didn't have an undercover operative anymore, it was all hypothetical.
But there still was an operative.
Alice straightened, rolled her shoulders back, and then pushed open the bathroom door with a flourish. By the time she'd made it back to the dining room, she had a bright smile on her face and a plan forming in her mind.
Alice considered, for a moment, keeping her information secret from Otto. For all she knew he could be the HYDRA agent. But that thought only lasted a moment. It sounded like the spy was in the main body of the SSR, and if Otto was the spy then she'd be dead in the end anyway. So when they met the next morning for breakfast, she told him everything.
From that moment, they spent six days ruthlessly going after information. They didn't tell anyone else what they'd found out – that was far too dangerous – but they'd perfected the art of learning things without anyone knowing. They traced down dozens of useless leads, asked very carefully worded questions, trawled through pounds and pounds of paperwork. They slept no more than four hours a night.
Alice was the first to get a lead: one of her connections back in Stuttgart had spoken to a drunken Abwehr (German military intelligence) officer, who bragged about how he used to communicate with a HYDRA spy in London. This spy's alias was Argus.
Days later, Otto found himself left unattended in a German Communications office after being invited for a meeting with the radio officer. He rifled through all the files he could reach, memorizing all kinds of useful facts, before coming across a handwritten transcript of an overheard coded radio communique. Someone had written in the top right hand corner: HYDRA BROADCAST, LONDON.
Otto copied down the coded message and brought it back to the hotel, where he and Alice stayed up all night working on the fiendishly difficult encryption.
Finally, they cracked it: ARGUSDOVERCASTLE25121500
"Agent Argus to Dover Castle," Otto surmised, leaning back in his seat as he pinched the bridge of his nose. "On the 25th, which is… next Saturday." He let out a tired sigh.
"At 3PM," Alice finished for him, tapping her fingers restlessly against the scrap of paper. She sat on her haunches on the carpeted hotel floor, her clothes rumpled from her sleepless night and her eyes itching with tiredness. "Otto, that's in…"
"Twelve days," he muttered. "I'm aware."
"We need to tell Peggy." They'd both agreed that she was the only one they'd trust with what they found. They couldn't send it through their regular courier route.
"How?" Otto spread a hand. "We can't exactly radio this one in."
"I know, I know." Alice bit her lip. Dawn light began to creep through the gaps in the curtain. "We'll have to talk to her directly, but our next Switzerland meet isn't for weeks. She needs to know about this upcoming meet, it could be the only shot of catching the spy. We could… we could request that she comes here urgently? We've got those Wehrmacht plans-"
"Those plans can wait for the Switzerland meet though-"
"But the SSR doesn't know that," Alice cut him off. "We tell them that we've got extremely time-sensitive plans that need to go to her directly, and once she's here we tell her the real intel."
Otto frowned up at the ceiling. "It's irregular."
"This whole war is irregular. And if the spy at the SSR does hear about this, there's no reason for them to think they've been made."
Otto rubbed his forehead. "I don't know if you noticed, Alice, but spies are paranoid, flighty people. You and I should know." But then he sighed. "It's the best plan we've got, though. I'll set up a telegram to London right away." He got to his feet with a groan. "It's things like this which are making me go bald, Alice."
Alice rolled to her feet, wincing as her back cracked, and leaned over to kiss Otto on the cheek. "We get through this, and the SSR will pin you with enough medals to make a hat."
In the underground offices at Whitehall, Peggy frowned down at the telegram that had just been delivered to her by a nervous courier.
Phillips, on the other side of the table from her, looked up. "What," he said in the tone of a man expecting to be frustrated.
"Agent Badger and Agent Homer have collected time-sensitive documents that they want to deliver to me personally."
"You'll see them in a few weeks," Phillips dismissed.
"They've said it's urgent. They want me to go to Italy right away."
Phillips glowered. "Well, you can't. I need you here for that meeting at the Houses of Parliament on Saturday, and the thing with those RAF bastards next week."
"I know," Peggy said. She didn't take her eyes off the telegram, and the frown didn't leave her face. The language was polite yet firm, phrased as if this were a perfectly ordinary mission request. But Alice and Otto had never done anything like this before. Normally time-sensitive information got radioed back to London under an encryption, or ferried back by their well-established network of couriers. All their other irregular meetings had been called by the SSR, not the other way around. This felt… off. But she knew better than to say so.
She leaned back in her seat and glanced over her shoulder at the wall map of Italy, with its criss-crossing threads of battlefronts and army movements. A circular icon near the center of the map caught her eye.
"You know, I could send someone else in my stead…"
When Alice and Otto got the encrypted details of their information drop the next day, it sent them into a flurry of work. They had very few details: just a location, a time, and some code phrases and details to ensure mission security.
They began their work with a heated argument. The proposed meet was remote, and would require significant travel and covertness. What's more, Peggy had (unknowingly) set the meet on the same night that Alice had a big performance for a Wehrmacht division at the Winter Line, the same night that the whole tour crew would be travelling back to a hotel in Rome to spend a week's break.
They both knew that Otto couldn't make the meet – he rarely did fieldwork as his knee (which he'd injured on an information drop the year before) acted up if he walked on it too much, and he'd also recently come down with a fever.
So it should have been a simple decision – Alice would go – but Otto hated the idea. He argued it was too far, too soon, too dangerous. For the plan to work they'd have to have dozens of moving parts on the go at once, and if just one failed Alice could be hurt or exposed.
Alice, thankfully, had years of practice with stubborn men looking out for her safety, and argued him into submission within twenty minutes. They knew they couldn't trust another soul aside from Peggy with the secret, and Otto's arguments that he could make his way to the meet were patently foolish.
Once he had (reluctantly) given in, the hard work began. They had two days to plan for their one chance at warning the SSR of the spy within their ranks, and they had to do it alone.
Excerpt of a German Wehrmacht Soldier's Diary, 15th December 1943 (On display at the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, 2002) [Translated]:
Despite the upcoming action, all anyone can seem to talk about is the performance we're having at the camp the day after next. The Siren is coming to the front! Müller has been telling everyone for months that he knew her back in Stuttgart. Of course we all know that he's lying, any idiot can find out that the Siren is from Vienna, but now everyone's been asking him to introduce her to us. The poor fool can't admit defeat.
But besides that, we are all very much looking forward to the performance! I have been a big fan of the Siren's ever since her work after the Anschluss, and we all saw 'Love and Victory on the Front' earlier this year. She's very pretty on screen, and I'm interested to see her in the flesh. I also hear her backup singers are pretty! My cousin Heiko said when they came to perform for his regiment, one of them kissed him on the cheek.
Within moments of her last note fading through the makeshift stage's speakers, Alice's audience erupted into applause.
She beamed down at them in the dusk air, and took in a deep breath. Now that her focus on the music had faded she felt the chill of the falling night through her satin dress.
Her audience were all German soldiers, some from the Wehrmacht and some from the Luftwaffe, all in dark green uniforms with swastika sleeves to match the massive flag hanging behind Alice. She'd made them cry tonight – she could still see some eyes shining in the audience.
The first row stood up, and a second later the whole crowd were on their feet, roaring their applause up at the stage. Alice's backup singers ducked into curtseys, smiling and waving, and Alice inclined her head with a wide smile on her face. The darkening air felt electric.
Zugabe! [Encore!] they cried, slowly working themselves into a chant.
Alice pressed her hands to her chest, blushing, and made a gesture as if to say Oh I couldn't possibly. Then she heard her backup singers joining in with the call. She glanced around the stage, taking in her chanting backup singers and Otto peering out from the wings, his face pinched. She nodded to them all.
When she turned back to the microphone, she beamed. "Well, I suppose we could have just one more-" the rest of her sentence was drowned out by the gathered soldiers' uproar of applause. A moment later the band launched into the opening of We Work On, from the movie Alice had starred in, and her backup singers steadied themselves – they'd all prepared for an encore, of course.
A moment later Alice opened her mouth, raised her arms, and launched into song.
She might have reached her encore, but her work for tonight had only just begun.
When the performance ended and the stage began to be packed up, Alice and her backup singers didn't go to the dressing room as they usually did. They had a train directly afterwards, so instead of changing first they walked in full stage makeup through the town-turned-camp, escorted by a host of Wehrmacht officers.
Soldiers stared as the vivid retinue passed, making Alice's backup singers laugh behind their hands. The girls were in fine spirits, chatting with the senior officers and talking about the delights waiting in Rome. Alice, the sensible one of the lot of them even though plenty of them were older than her, smiled at their jokes and made some recommendations for sightseeing. The threat of Allied bombing went unsaid.
Alice asked Otto if he'd ever been to the Pantheon, and when he shook his head she gasped and informed him that she'd be taking him.
They made it to the station just as the light sliding below the horizon became a soft purple glow, said their farewells to the officers who'd escorted them, and filed onto the train. Alice drew in a breath of cold, sharp air before stepping aboard, her white dress trailing over the gap between the train and the platform.
Inside, the train was warm and cramped. The girls headed straight for the refreshment car, and barely paused to shout a rowdy goodbye when Alice yawned and told them that she was going to try to get some sleep in her compartment.
Alice dawdled down the train toward her compartment, calm in the knowledge that unlike most other passengers she had a whole compartment to herself, and the porters had already delivered all their luggage to the right compartments. The train pulled away from the station with a judder and a squeak of brakes. Alice slipped past a busy train attendant on her way down, smiling even as she yawned.
But then she arrived at her compartment. She yawned once more for good measure as she stepped inside, but then slid the door shut behind her and lowered the blinds, her tiredness evaporating. She tore off her dress, shrugging off the shoulders and yanking it down in a satin puddle around her feet, before reaching up to grab her suitcase from the luggage compartment.
She unzipped the case and reached in for her 'Al' clothes: a pair of sturdy yet worn trousers, bandages to bind her chest, layers to disguise her figure, a jacket which had the Wehrmacht plans sewn into it (she still needed to maintain her cover for the meet) and a pair of muddy boots. She began pulling it all on, twisting her hair up under her tried-and-tested flat cap.
She overbalanced occasionally as the train drove north away from the front line, navigating the bends in the mountainous countryside. It was already full dark outside, so Alice could only just see the shapes of buildings flicking past, turning into countryside.
As she pulled on her boots, she heard four knocks at the door.
"Enter," she called.
The door slid open to reveal Otto and their stylist/resistance agent Heidi. Otto quirked a brow at Alice – she'd walked in as the white, stylish Siren and become a grubby young man in the space of minutes. Heidi, on the other hand, just tossed Alice a wet cloth. Alice smiled appreciatively and began scrubbing off her makeup.
Heidi was a few years older than Alice, had secretly married a man in the Polish resistance last year, and was tough as nails. More importantly, no one else knew she was on this train. She was officially enjoying a few days off in Bologna.
"Are you ready?" asked Otto as they filed into the compartment and slid the door shut again.
"Yes," Alice replied as she peeled away the smeared cloth. She patted her dark jacket. "The documents are all here." She said that mostly for Heidi's benefit – as far as she knew, this meet was only about the Wehrmacht troop movements they'd uncovered last week. Alice frowned at the sheen of sweat on Otto's forehead. "Are you okay?"
He flapped a hand at her and went to peer out the window. "The fever is passing. And I might actually get some rest in Rome."
Alice knew him better than that, but she let it go. As she pulled a tin of greasepaint from her breast pocket and began dabbing it into her eyebrows to darken them she turned to Heidi, who had pulled down another bag from the luggage compartment. "Are you ready?"
Heidi pulled a pale blonde wig out of the bag. "Yes. Anna" – their only backup singer who also doubled as a resistance agent – "will have those girls so drunk by the time we get to Rome that they won't give two figs about me going straight to your hotel room." She crouched down to pick up the dress Alice had shucked off, and frowned at the wrinkles. "Then I'll just arrange a few Siren spottings in Rome. Do you actually want me to go to the Pantheon?"
"It couldn't hurt," said Otto from where he peered out of the window into the night. "We'll have you wear sunglasses."
Alice smeared greasepaint on her jaw in the shadowy approximation of a beard. She patted down her cap, readjusted her jacket, and then checked her reflection in the window. It was so dark outside that the glass had practically become a mirror. She rolled her shoulders forward into the loping hunch of Al and clenched her jaw.
She turned to Heidi and Otto. "Okay?"
Otto just glanced over his shoulder and nodded, but Heidi cocked her head, reached up to slide her hands along the very top of the luggage rack, then dropped back down to pat her dusty hands over Alice's face.
Alice wrinkled her nose, then sneezed. "… Thanks."
"You looked too clean." Heidi didn't apologize. She never did, and Alice quite liked it.
"I suspect I won't be clean by the time I get to the drop anyway."
"Speaking of which," Otto said, "we're here."
Alice felt herself shift forward in her seat as the train slowed, and half a moment later the car squeaked as it shifted to the right as the train entered a bend.
Alice let out a breath and got to her feet, clutching the luggage rack to keep herself steady. With her other hand she patted her belt and pockets: knife, compass, false papers (according to which, she was a young Italian man from a small town nearby). Ready to go.
Otto slid down the glass and they all winced at the inrush of cold air. Alice's jacket flapped until she buttoned it down. Otto stuck out his head out the window and glanced up the line.
"Alright, here should be perfect." He ducked back inside, looking ruffled, and met Alice's eyes. "Now it goes without saying, but please be careful."
Alice smiled. "I will. I'll see you both tomorrow afternoon."
"I don't want to have to find another singer," Otto grumbled.
She laughed. "That would be tragic." She gripped the window frame and hoisted herself up so she had one leg outside the car and one inside. She pushed her body through and hissed at the sluice of cold air that slammed into her as she sat on the windowsill, making her skin burn. She could hardly see anything around beyond the spill of light emitted by the train. Gravel and grass whisked away beneath her.
Alice knew the train had slowed to take the bend, but it still felt too fast.
She looked back into the car, where Otto and Heidi watched her with concealed anxiety.
Alice met Heidi's eyes. "Don't do anything embarrassing while you're me."
Heidi rolled her eyes. "Don't worry about me, worry about you!"
Alice drew in a steadying breath. She thought about offering more witty words of goodbye, because they made her feel brave, but then she glanced up the line and saw an outcrop of rocks fast approaching. Now or never.
Without another glance back into the train she swung her other leg through and leaped –
She fell, weightless in the freezing air, before thudding to the ground in a roll like Peggy had taught her. As soon as she'd stopped moving she flattened herself face-down to the damp grass and gravel, waiting until she couldn't hear the train any more.
When the only sounds she could hear were the hoot of owls in the forest and the branches rustling in the trees, she lifted her head. She'd expected pitch blackness but her surroundings were better lit than she'd thought; the moon had come out from behind the clouds.
Alice got to her feet, looking around. Her entire front was damp from the dewy grass and she'd skinned the side of her hand in the gravel, but otherwise she'd made it off the train in one piece. Now to make it to the meet.
Her breath came in a cloud of vapor.
By the dim light of the moon she oriented herself. That jagged silhouette cutting into the night sky must be Monte Sirente, and she slowly swiveled until she saw the valley dropping away to her left, with the dark gleam of a river. She brought out her compass, checked her bearing, and then strode down the grassy embankment into the thick forest.
If only this Argus person knew how much trouble they were causing.
Telegram transmission from Agent Margaret Carter to Agent Badger, December 1943 (transmitted via proxy agent embedded in Rome):
B, we received your transmission that H is active, and have urgent information regarding that initiative. A correspondent will be at meeting point X4 in an hour to explain the situation.
Alice battled her way through the forest in the dark, swearing under her breath and flinching at every distant crack and rustle. The terrain was rocky and mountainous, and her view of the starry sky got swallowed up by the thick branches of the forest.
She'd dressed for the weather, but she still ended up having to shove her hands under her armpits to keep them from shaking.
After ten minutes of thick forest she came to an open plain. She hesitated a moment, eyes darting, then ducked down low and sprinted. Her feet flew over the grass and the wind whistled in her face. Halfway across she saw moving silhouettes across the plain and nearly jumped out of her skin until she realized she'd spotted a herd of deer-like animals with strange arcing horns. She raced into the treeline on the other side of the plain, heart in her mouth, and promptly pitched headlong over a fallen log.
Ow.
Alice had never lived this life. She'd hardly seen a forest during her childhood as she'd been very much a child of the city in Brooklyn, and in Vienna her uncle hadn't exactly been outdoorsy. And when it came to her work in the war, usually she was slipping down alleyways and hiding behind dumpsters, not battling through the wilderness.
As she pulled herself to her feet and kept following the ridgeline, she silently thanked Peggy for abandoning her in that field in upstate New York. It meant she knew she could do this. Though she didn't have to imagine that everyone she might meet was a Nazi this time.
Alice hopped over a small stream and scrabbled up an embankment, wincing at the feeling of mud between her fingers. Her lungs burned from the cold air.
She didn't often think of herself as soft, but this journey felt cold and jarring after the life she usually led. The world seemed to stretch wide around her, and she couldn't help but feel acutely alone. If she broke her ankle out here, probably no one would find her. Worse, the Germans might find her.
Alice gritted her teeth as she checked her compass and the nearest landmark (a jagged peak). Chin up, Alice. She could do this. There were boys on the front doing this sort of thing every day, she could manage for a night.
She kept repeating this mantra as she approached the edge of the forest line, where she could see a short rise up to the lip of a ridge. She sank down to the ground and army-crawled up the incline. Gravel scraped against her chin.
She reached the top and looked down into the slight valley below, immediately picking out the shape of a small train station, long abandoned, with overgrown tracks stretching away down the valley. On the other side of the station the dark mass of the forest grew thick again.
Alice checked her watch, squinting to see the hands by the light of the moon. 11PM. Right on time.
The station was no more than a small brick shack on a platform with a bench outside. There was a slight shift of movement, and Alice picked out the shape she had not seen immediately: a man sitting on the bench, slumping slightly with his hat pulled down, seemingly drunk.
Just like Peggy's message had said to expect. Alice had been surprised to hear that her initial contact would be a man, but she supposed Peggy had brought troops with her; a smart move when travelling behind enemy lines.
Alice whistled six low notes: the opening trumpet riff from Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (which meant she'd had the song stuck in her head all day), and the man sitting at the train station reached up to tip his hat.
Alice allowed herself to draw in a deep breath, checked her cap to make sure none of her hair had escaped, then scrambled over the lip of the rise and down toward the train station. Halfway down, she felt the man's eyes land on her though he hadn't visibly moved. She made sure to keep her gait slouched and youthful.
She hoisted herself up to the concrete platform and said, slightly out of breath: "Stai guardando le stelle?" [Are you stargazing?] Her Italian was pretty convincing; she wasn't fluent but she'd learned a lot from opera and from touring the country.
The man shifted, looking up at her. Under the dark red cap he wore (it had a blank patch where Alice suspected there'd once been an insignia), he had a narrow, handsome face with intelligent brown eyes, a furrowed brow, and a thin mustache. He wore some kind of dark brown uniform.
"No, sto solo prendendo un po 'd'aria." [No, I'm just getting some air]. He spoke Italian with a distinctly English accent, but his pronunciation was pretty good.
Alice let out a breath at the exchange of codewords. I made it.
The Englishman got to his feet with an energized look in his eyes, and the impression of a slumping drunkard melted away. "Thank goodness you made it, we've had intelligence that there's a German military encampment two miles that way" – he pointed east – "meaning this is a hotter area than we thought."
Alice glanced east, her stomach dropping. If she'd taken a wrong turn, she could have ended up right in the Germans' camp. And her extraction point was east - how would she get there now?
The Englishman jerked his head at her and hopped off the platform. "We'd best get out of the open." After a second of hesitation Alice hopped down after him, and he began leading her to the treeline. "They say you're a valuable asset, and we've got orders to escort you to a safe travel point eighty miles north of here."
Dammit. Alice ground her teeth. This wasn't the first time plans had changed unexpectedly, but this likely meant that she wouldn't be back in Rome tomorrow. She was sure the SSR would let Otto and Heidi know, and they would cover for her, but this meant days of pretending to a man. Ugh.
She frowned. "Where's Agent Carter?"
The Englishman cocked his head at her as they entered the treeline and strode through the forest. Their boots sank into the damp ground. "They didn't tell you? Agent Carter can't leave London right now, so she sent us instead. Though – my apologies for forgetting – she did tell us to tell you strudel."
Alice's eyebrows flew up. Strudel was one of the many codewords she and Peggy had agreed upon. This one meant trust. Peggy wouldn't have given it out to someone else unless she truly trusted them completely. Alice eyed the Englishman more closely. Perhaps he was a compatriot of Peggy's from Britain.
"Bene," [Okay] Alice eventually said, keeping her voice low. She frowned. "You keep saying us."
"Yes, we – ah, there they are." He nodded ahead, and Alice followed his gaze to see a wire fence cutting through the forest ahead of them, littered with moss and twigs. A whole portion of it sagged in the middle. Perhaps an old property marker. On the other side of the fence stood two men hidden in shadow. Alice's steps slowed, but the Englishman sped up towards the men.
"Hello again," greeted the Englishman, "see anything?"
The larger silhouette spoke in a broad American accent: "We spotted a German patrol two clicks away, but seems they don't bother with this fence. Got the informant?" Alice drew closer. The speaker was a burly man with a strong jawline, a thick mustache, and bizarrely, a bowler hat on his head. He wore a uniform a shade darker than the Englishman's and carried a shotgun.
"He's here," the Englishman replied, glancing over his shoulder at Alice. Both men behind the fence eyed her.
"Come on then," muttered the smaller one, a Japanese-appearing man with wary eyes. He also spoke with an American accent. As he crouched down to lift up a loose portion of the wire fence, Alice spotted a submachine gun fastened to his back.
The Englishman crawled under the gap in the fence, and after a second of hesitation Alice followed.
"You're a small lad, aren't ya?" said the larger man in surprise.
Alice straightened and shrugged. She sensed them sizing her up.
The Englishman dusted off his hands and glanced at Alice. "The camp's a ten minute walk away." He pointed along the fence line, up the side of the valley.
Alice nodded her assent and they got moving. But it turned out she'd found herself in talkative company.
A large hand appeared in her field of vision. She followed it up to see the large American giving her a friendly look.
"I'm Dugan, but you can call me Dum-Dum." Alice's eyebrows rose even as she shook his hand. She felt glad for the dirt on her hands, which concealed the relative softness of her skin.
Dum-Dum Dugan shrugged. "It's an old nickname, hard to explain. But I figure if we're going to be in kahoots for the next little while we might as well get to know each other." He gestured to the Englishman. "That there is Monty-"
"That's Major Falsworth to you, Dugan," the Englishman replied exasperatedly over his shoulder. Dugan paid him no mind.
"And our talkative friend here is Morita," Dugan gestured to the other American, who just rolled his eyes. Alice suspected they were both used to Dugan's boisterousness.
"And you are?" Dugan continued, not so subtly peering at her as they clambered up the side of the valley.
"Al," she replied, focusing on her footing.
"That short for something?"
"Si. Alessio." 'Al' was also Alain in France, Albrecht in Germany, Alfred when she was pretending to be English or American, and Aleksander when she went further East.
"You from round here Al?"
Alice nodded, but didn't elaborate further. She was still waiting for them to ask her about her intel – the whole purpose for this visit – but they seemed determined to get back to their camp. Perhaps they weren't in charge.
As they rose out of the valley and into the next one, still forging their way through thick forest, Alice eyed her newfound company. Dugan seemed casual enough, but they moved with trained precision: hands on their weapons, eyes searching the underbrush and scrutinizing Alice all at once.
Now that she wasn't alone Alice could admit to herself that the forest was quite beautiful: the way it clung thickly to the mountains, the fresh air, the distant calls of night birds and insects. She still shivered in the cold, but having others around her made her feel less like she was about to die in a ditch.
"You're awful young to be joining the Resistance," Dugan commented. "Though I s'pose that's the way things have turned out these days."
Alice knew she appeared much younger in her 'Al' disguise, but she avoided the question all the same. "How do two Americans and an Englishman end up in Italy together? What division are you in?" She supposed they could have been SSR agents, but they had the bearing of soldiers.
Falsworth answered with a smile in his voice. "You're right, it's unusual. We're in the 107th Tactical Team."
Steve's dad's regiment. Alice pushed the thought away. She focused on not losing her footing as they ducked past trees on their way down the side of the mountain. The forest was thick here, only flashes of moonlight peeking through the branches.
"Tactical team?" she asked distractedly.
"Led by Captain America," added Dugan with a distinctly bragging tone.
Alice's eyebrows hiked up. What have you gotten me into, Peggy? "I read about you guys. Bane of the Nazis, good for you. They call you the Invaders." She liked the angry and yet dismissive way the Nazis spoke about Captain America and his team, like they were scared but didn't want to show it.
"It's a living," said Falsworth dryly.
"But Captain America? Really? I have trouble believing the things I read about him, even though they're watered down by German propaganda."
To her left, Morita snorted. "Oh, he's real alright."
Alice opened her mouth to pry further, but then she heard the distant rumble of a voice through the trees and stopped dead, heart in her mouth.
Her compatriots didn't seem alarmed though. They kept walking, and as Alice hesitantly followed she spotted a faint glow peeking through the tree trunks. The sounds of teasing and low laughter became distinct as they approached.
Alice focused on her disguise once more: shoulders rolled slightly forward, legs gangly, her jaw clenched to make it more pronounced. First impressions were always most important: if she appeared male from the start, it was easy for others to go on thinking of her that way.
Dugan was the first to slip through the last few tree trunks into a small clearing. "Finally," he sighed, "my feet are killing me."
Falsworth followed, then Morita, then Alice.
"You'd think your feet are more deadly than the Germans," Falsworth retorted, "the way you carry on about them."
Alice hung back, eyes darting. At the center of the clearing lay a firepit glowing with coals (smart: no smoke and little light to be detected by). Alice counted four more men sitting around the firepit on stones, who all glanced up as the newcomers arrived. Low calls of greeting filled the air.
Alice kept her face tilted down and in shadow as a tall, broad man in a weird helmet stood up to face them. He had something circular strapped to his back. Captain America, I suppose.
"Did you pick up the informant?" He asked, and Alice blinked at his voice. Maybe it was just that she hadn't heard an American accent in a while, let alone a New York one-
"This is him," Falsworth said, gesturing back at Alice. Morita and Dugan made straight for the firepit, sighing as the warmth washed over them.
Captain America squinted at her, clearly trying to get a read on her. His back was to the light so Alice couldn't see him clearly, so she scanned the other men around the coals: a black man in a helmet, an older man in civilian clothes, and a man in a blue coat that… that… her eyes flew open.
"Everything alright?" Captain America asked, and her eyes darted back to him. He peered at her, tilting his head so the light of the coals bathed his face, and Alice knew those eyes. She knew that voice, she'd imitated that voice when she felt alone. And that face-
Her mouth fell open.
"Steve?"
Oops.
My planning notes for this chapter said "chapter break here lmao", so who am I to go against my past planning decisions?
Reviews
jul: Sorry it's taken me a while to reply to your review! It is weird finally being up to the movie, it's reminded me that yes, I'm actually writing fanfiction haha. I'm glad you can't tell where it's going! I'm doing okay, by the time you read this I'll be in quarantine in Australia (but right now I'm still in Japan). Hope you're okay! Keep on describing details to your bf haha he'll appreciate it.
Guest (from chapter 36): Hi former Wyvern reader! Welcome! I'm so glad you're enjoying the Siren. As for original writing, hopefully being in quarantine will give me some time haha. Thank you for the ego boost, I appreciate it! Enjoy x
Liz: Thank you so much for your well wishes, it means a lot :)
artemisaim: I'm sorry to hear you also know the feeling, I hope you're okay! Hope you enjoyed this chapter x
Guest: Thank you for the kind words! I'm so pleased you're enjoying the story, I am very happy to be providing a distraction for both you and myself!