Chapter 25

The ride improved as we moved from forest track to sealed road. After nearly a quarter of an hour we arrived in the small town of Dombay and got out of the truck in front of one of the most bizarre buildings I had ever seen.

It was seventeen stories tall and an unattractive brown color in the beams of the truck's headlights. The building itself was an abstract shape I couldn't name and it looked like someone had glued hundreds of giant cardboard boxes to the outside walls in diagonal rows all the way up the sides. In all, it looked like something a four-year-old would draw.

Clint jumped out of the truck and moved to stand beside me in the snow, staring up at the concrete monstrosity. "That's the Amanauz Hotel," he said. "Soviet-made, but never opened due to faulty foundations. We're using it as a temporary base."

"You said Rogan wasn't at the compound earlier," I said to Natasha as we entered the abandoned hotel's shabby lobby. Trash and graffiti littered the place. "Do you know where he is?"

"No, but we'll find out. Clint had his chopper tracked while he and the rest of the team came to get us."

We took the stairs to the fourth floor and entered one of the bedrooms. It was bare except for a fold-up table bearing radio equipment and a half-empty cup of coffee. A door with a plastic sheet taped over its smashed window led onto a small balcony, which turned out to be one of the box-like structures I'd seen from the ground.

The wounded ISID agent headed to another room that appeared to have been set up as a small medical ward while Clint introduced me to the man sitting at the table of radio equipment. "Bucky, this is Mark. He's in charge of things here while our team leader is at Rogan's base. There's just eleven of us here at the moment."

Mark gave a nod of greeting. "I'll be interested to hear a full report from you and Romanoff shortly," he said, "but first I need to touch base with our man tracking Rogan." He fired up the radio transmitter and put headphones on.

That left Clint, Natasha, and I free to talk.

"Tell me everything that's happened since I left Tehran," I said.

"Well, we dealt with the Molniya at the embassies," Clint said. "Then we went after you. We found the President's daughter in Pardis, and she told us you'd flown off northward in a chopper."

"It took ages to work out that the last place the chopper had been seen was near Dombay," Natasha added. "We didn't want to do searches from the air in case that caused trouble for either of us, so we set up base here and took turns looking around the forest."

She smiled wryly. "Then one day you showed up and took me prisoner. Rogan's men locked me up last night and Clint busted me out in the morning."

"How'd you find Rogan's base?" I asked Clint.

He chuckled. "I put a tracker on Natasha when I found you guys in Rostov-on-Don. But seriously, man, what's your side of the story?"

I told him. By the time I'd finished – filling in the parts that Natasha hadn't known of as well – they both wore expressions of deep worry.

Clint ran a hand through his hair. "This is bad," he said, summing up my own thoughts succinctly.

"If Rogan and a rogue super-soldier are on the loose, then we need to know where they are now," Natasha agreed. She turned to Mark. "What you got?"

He pulled his headphones off. "Our guy tracked Rogan and the clone to the Sochi airport, where they got on a plane to Berlin. Our contact in Germany should have reported back by now."

A slight movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention and I turned towards the open doorway. Nothing was there now, but when I looked down the hall I caught a glimpse of someone's back as they moved quickly and quietly down the stairs. They were wearing ISID tactical gear.

Why was one of our own team members spying on us?

I moved to follow them and Natasha looked up from the conversation with Mark. "Bucky? Where are you going?"

"One of the agents was listening in," I said quietly as I left the room. Natasha followed as I started down the steps.

Clint stayed with Mark to try and get in touch with ISID's Berlin guy, but I had a feeling that line of action was a literal dead end. Rogan had almost certainly gotten to the guy – or, more likely, my clone had.

Natasha and I reached the lobby in time to see the front doors close behind the suspicious agent. We followed cautiously.

It was still completely dark outside, and the strong breeze coming from the mountains surrounding Dombay was bitterly cold. Dawn was still a few hours away.

A torch's low beam bobbed along a few yards to the left of the hotel's entrance and then vanished. The Amanauz was built on thick pillars that held its first floor off the ground, allowing cars to be parked in the shelter underneath to protect them from the worst of Russia's winter weather. The agent had obviously entered that area.

Our boots made only the slightest of sounds as we made our way through the snow to the edge of the building. I remembered what Clint had said about faulty foundations as we stepped into the snow-free space beneath the massive structure.

The ISID agent had stopped by one of the support pillars, and in the light of his torch I saw that it was the man with the injury who'd ridden here with us in the Ural. Only, there was no bandage around his hand now. As we watched, he reached up to fiddle with something fixed to the side of the pillar. We moved closer as he worked.

"What are you doing, agent?" Natasha asked coolly.

He jumped back, startled, and drew a gun instead of replying.

I snatched Natasha out of the line of fire mere moments before the rogue agent pulled the trigger, pushing her behind the shelter of a pillar.

Two shots slammed harmlessly into the concrete floor and then the guy turned his gun on me.

I shielded my face with my cybernetic arm and heard more than felt as the bullets hit.

The agent's brief shift of attention gave Natasha the chance she needed to draw her own gun.

"Don't–" I began as she took aim, but then she squeezed the trigger and my request for her to take the agent alive died with him. I sighed in annoyance as Natasha lowered her gun. "Great. We can't get facts out of a dead man, Romanoff."

She scooped up the agent's dropped torch and shone it on the small device that he'd been messing with. "I don't think we need him to get the facts," she said grimly.

Wires ran up the pillar from the device and fanned out across the roof like the beginnings of a giant spider web, connecting to bundles of what could only be explosives. Together Natasha and I looked back at the screen of the detonator. It was counting down.

We had fourteen seconds.

"We need to run," I said.

Natasha looked up at me, eyes wide with horror. "Clint," she breathed.

The realization that he was still four stories above us was worse than finding the bomb itself, because I knew the terrible truth. "We don't have time," I said. Then before Natasha could offer any sort of protest, I grabbed her hand and began to run, half dragging her with me out from under the hotel until she began to run flat out of her own accord.

I had no idea how far we needed to go to be safe, so I simply kept running, though every part of me ached to go back.

Then the explosives detonated with an earth-shattering roar.

Heedless of the danger to ourselves now, Natasha and I turned back and watched helplessly as the hotel began to crumble, and then collapsed in upon itself.

AN: Dear readers, apologies. XD Anyways, go check out that hotel on Google! It really is super wacky! :D