Red America, Chapter Five:

Hook, Line & Sinker

Kitty Pryde sat beside Jamie Madrox as the converted pick-up truck they were riding in drove along the rails of a deserted subway tunnel, trying not to let the creeping rats and cockroaches get to her. She wasn't very happy about being underground again after what had happened with Omega Red and Frank Castle, but as Madrox had told her, this was the safest way to get to Brooklyn – and judging by the brutish gunner in front of them, who was manning a pair of twin-linked machine-guns, that seemed like a pretty accurate assessment. The gunner looked over to where they were sitting briefly, swinging the perforated muzzles of his weapons with him as he did so. Kitty fought the urge to flinch as their blank, deadly gaze passed over her, and the gunner laughed.

"Fear not, dear lady – Hank McCoy shall not soil your beauteous features with the ugly kiss of lead!" he said, before baring his sleeve and showing her the crude tattoo on his bicep that indicated he'd been top of his class as a marksman. "I have a very good eye for who I'm supposed to be shooting at," he added, winking at her, "and I certainly would think twice about shooting in your direction. Your companion, on the other hand…"

Madrox stuck up a middle finger abruptly. "Yeah, yeah, McCoy. Give it a rest already – you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a nuke."

"Don't flatter yourself, Madrox – your evasive skills aren't all that good either, you know," McCoy chuckled, winking at Kitty before turning back to sweep the tunnel ahead of him with his guns. "One wonders how you've survived this long…"

"By being better lookin' than you," Madrox shot back, his grimy face lightening up a little. Then, as if on cue, the driver of the car shouted that they were coming up to their destination and Madrox breathed an audible sigh of relief as they pulled into the disused subway station. As the truck slowed to a halt, Madrox and Kitty jumped down onto the crumbling concrete platform and took stock of their new surroundings. "So this is Brooklyn, huh?" Kitty said, her hands planted squarely on her hips. She whistled in disbelief as she glanced around at the rotting posters that clung to the subway platform's walls, and saw the old platform signs vomiting occasional showers of sparks onto the ground as the lights set into the ceiling sputtered and threatened to die.

"Indeed so," McCoy said. "It's not much, but it's home."

"Ain't that the truth," said the driver of the truck. She was a hard-bitten woman who seemed to be of Puerto Rican extraction, her chest criss-crossed by gun belts and a couple of pistols hanging low at her waist. Paradoxically, Kitty could also see a looted Soviet first-aid kit strapped to her back, along with a pouch filled with what looked like almost obsessively-maintained surgical tools, their gleaming edges shining in the half-light of the platform. She stuck out her hand, which Kitty and then Madrox both shook in turn. "Cecilia Reyes – chief medical advisor to the Brooklyn rebel movement." She paused again, a sardonic smile crossing her lips for a moment or two. "For what it's worth, anyway. So what brings you out here?"

"Reds caught one of our senior guys," Madrox explained. "They're holding him in the Empire State, and we need some big muscle to break him out."

"You… are kidding, right?" McCoy asked, scratching his stubbly chin with one massive hand and adjusting the blood-stained bandanna tied around his forehead a little with the other. "The Empire State's a fortress. The Soviets have that place locked down tighter than any other installation in this city. It's almost impossible to break out – trying to break in is worse than suicide."

"He's right, man," Cecilia said. "I've lost count of the number of times I had to stitch guys back together thanks to that place. Your friend's in that sinkhole, you might as well kiss his ass goodbye right now."

"Can't do that," Kitty replied, shaking her head. "From what I hear, Jim Logan's got the layout of every rebel base in the city in his head – if the Ivans have that information, we're all as good as dead."

"Logan?" Cecilia repeated, her brows knitting together in confusion. "They've got Logan? How'd they manage that?"

"One of their superhumans knocked a building down on his head," Madrox replied flatly, his fists clenching. "Last I saw, the big armoured freak cost us Summers, Blaire, Watson, and who knows who else when they caught Logan and one of my dupes."

"Scott's… Scott's dead?" McCoy put both hands to his forehead in disbelief. "Are you sure?"

"No, but I'm willing to bet that a few tonnes of concrete falling on him won't have done him much good, either," Madrox snapped, his voice going taut as piano wire. "Look, man, I'd have gone back to help him, but there were dozens of Ivans with tanks and artillery following that monster. What do you think I was gonna do? Stand around and let myself get captured?" He paused and took a deep breath before gripping the larger man's shoulder firmly. "I miss him too, Hank, but this is war. People die in war – you know that. Scott knew that, too. Don't let him have died in vain." The big man took a shuddering breath, wiped at his eyes with a couple of thick fingers, and then drew himself up to his full height.

"All right," he said, taking his bandanna off and running his hands through his shaggy mane of brown hair. "All right." Then he pointed down the platform a little, towards a ramshackle tunnel marked with yellow plastic signs that stated that cleaning was in progress. "That's the way to our HQ. Follow me." Before he could move, Cecilia moved to take up a position at his side, slipping her slender hand into his thick paw. As she did so, Kitty noticed a brief gleam of gold on her left hand's ring finger that corresponded with a similar glittering on the big man's own meaty left hand. She blinked and looked again, wondering if she was seeing things – and the same golden light shone back at her once more. Stranger things have happened, I guess, she thought to herself, still not quite believing it.

When she thought it was safe to speak without the two of them hearing her, she whispered urgently to Madrox "Did you know these two were married?"

"Sure I did," Madrox whispered back with a grin. "I was Hank's best man." Then he raised his voice and called out "Hey, Hank – Kitty here would like to see you and Cecilia's wedding rings!" He basked in the angry glare in which Kitty enveloped him, and gestured to her as Hank and Cecilia turned around and headed back to where Kitty was standing. As they neared her, Kitty could feel a horrible heat creeping up her face, seemingly making her sweat even in the cool air of the subway tunnel.

"I'll kill you," she hissed, as Madrox chuckled indiscreetly. "You're dead." Then she noticed that Hank and Cecilia were standing right by her, and she coughed, straightening out her crumpled fatigues a little. Inside, she wished – not for the first time – that she'd stayed in Chicago. It was a lot less headache-inducing there, she thought.

"So, Miss Kitty, you would like to see our wedding rings, would you?" Hank enquired conversationally. Kitty shook her head.

"No… uh, Hank, I… I was just surprised that the two of you were… you know… married. It just seemed a little… um… out of the ordinary, that's all."

Cecilia laughed, much to Kitty's surprised – and relief. "Oh, that. We get that all the time, kid – don't worry about it." She held out her left hand so that Kitty could see the gold band encircling her ring finger. "It's beautiful, isn't it? It's a one of a kind original." She paused. "Well, two of a kind, really – Hank has the other one." As if on cue, Hank held up his left hand to show off his matching ring.

"It'll be five years next month," he said proudly. "I'm still wondering what to get Cecilia for an anniversary present – I was thinking something along the lines of a new Smith & Wesson."

Cecilia jerked her thumb in Hank's direction, one eyebrow raised. "Isn't he such a romantic?" Then her expression hardened, and she turned back towards the yawning darkness of the tunnel in front of her. "We'd better keep going – there are Russkie patrols coming down here more and more often these days. Better to be safe than dead, I think…"

As the elevator to the prison cells hummed downwards swiftly, Comrade-Colonel Elizabeth Braddock clenched her hands together inside her leather gloves, anxious to get this entire sorry business over and done with as soon as possible, while Major Grey simply cracked her own gloved knuckles and smiled with the cool detachment her position afforded her.

"I hope you know, Comrade Braddock, that I am not here to pass judgement on you today," Major Grey said, adjusting her black peaked cap a little as it sat precisely atop her tightly-bound mass of scarlet curls. "You do not have to feel as if I'm watching you personally."

"Of course not, Comrade Grey," Elisabeth said, "but you must understand how, ah, disconcerting it is for a senior KGB officer to arrive unannounced and then demand access to prisoners who I have already interrogated and judged as being of little more value."

Major Grey's smile widened. Elisabeth could sense the thinly-veiled pleasure in her thoughts as she tasted Elisabeth's own discomfort. "The KGB prides itself on arriving unannounced, Comrade Braddock. It helps us to determine who really needs our… guidance," she replied, chuckling slightly as an almost fiendish light glittered in her delicate green eyes. "Nonetheless, I only want to see this one prisoner, and then I shall be on my way. I don't wish to impose myself on your operation any more than I have to, after all."

Good, Elisabeth found herself thinking sourly. Catching herself with a start, she realised that letting her thoughts run away with her around a telepath of Major Grey's calibre was a huge mistake. "Won't you want to see the results of the interrogation put into practice, Major?" she asked, perhaps a little too hastily. "I suspect that it will be something you won't want to miss, after all."

"I'll be the judge of that, Colonel," Major Grey snapped, her tone sharp as a surgeon's scalpel. Elisabeth swallowed involuntarily then, as she got just the briefest taste of the strength of Major Grey's formidable psychic abilities. They felt like a cat's claws dragging across an eyeball, or like nettles lashing bare flesh. Either way, Elisabeth found herself feeling extremely grateful that she was not the one who was going to be interrogated in a few moments' time.

"Yes… of course," she muttered quietly, as the elevator sighed to a gentle stop. The door hissed aside after a second or two, to reveal a pair of hulking armed guards, who were each holding bulky assault rifles over the chest sections of their inches-thick body armour. The underslung pump-action grenade launchers on the large rifles, and the numerous extra hollow-point ammunition packs hanging from the men's belts, spoke volumes about how necessary protection from the inmates was. When they saw Colonel Braddock, their heels clicked together reflexively as a result of frequent practice, but their minds still broadcast acrid waves of apprehension when they saw Major Grey's black greatcoat. Elisabeth highly doubted that that would happen – after all, she had hand-picked Comrades Cassidy and Maximov herself, and both were highly-decorated Red Army veterans. Both had been awarded the Order of Lenin during the siege of Warsaw in 1984, when the Poles' feeble uprising against their Soviet liberators was finally choked off for good, and both of them had proven themselves as excellent rebel hunters here in New York, with each of them claiming a dozen rebel kills within weeks of beginning their first tours of duty. She stepped forwards and saluted precisely, moving both men to salute back with fluent efficiency. "At ease, gentlemen," she said reassuringly (while she silently stimulated a slight increase in their brain's endorphin production in order to relax them a little). "You may remove your helmets, gentlemen." At her command, both men reached up to the clasps at their throats and released the catches that kept their headgear anchored to their chestplates, before securing their helmets under their arms, revealing one set of close-cropped red curls and one shock of white hair with two unusually long forelocks. Gesturing to the one on her right, Elisabeth said "Major, may I introduce –"

"No, you may not," Major Grey snapped, irritated. "I am not interested in mindless pleasantries, Colonel. Take me to the prisoner." Her eyes narrowed to burning slits. "Now."

"As you wish," Elisabeth said through gritted teeth. Waving her guards aside, she pressed her hand firmly into the palm-print reader set into the wall beside the door leading to the cell block. There was a soft click as the lock cycled open and then the door swung inwards to reveal the rows of sterile, generic cells inside. Without waiting to be asked, Major Grey stepped through the door, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, taking in the scent of stale sweat and blood that permeated the air of the corridor. To her left, a blue-skinned woman sat rocking back and forth in her cell, dribbling and giggling softly to herself as her naked body remoulded itself into a different form every few seconds or so. Intrigued despite her statement only a few moments beforehand, Major Grey stepped forwards and pointed curiously at the woman with one gloved hand.

"What is this one's name?" she said.

Oh, now you want to know people's names, Elisabeth thought. Make your mind up. "That's Raven Darkholme, Major," she said aloud. "We found her in Eastern Europe, ferrying guns to the rebels there. She was using her shape-shifting powers to avoid detection from everything but our telepaths and mutant-gene scanners."

"And what is she doing here?" Major Grey demanded, gesturing at the drooling woman with an expression of pure, unadulterated disgust.

"She was shipped here as part of our drive to create viable infiltrator agents," Elisabeth explained, suddenly feeling vindicated about Major Grey's apparent lack of consistency. "We had hoped to implant a number of our more skilled and psi-shielded spies with a derivative of her metamorphic powers, so that we could destroy the rebel scum from the inside out." She paused. "The process has so far been… unsuccessful… but my staff's scientists have high hopes it will prove fruitful eventually."

"I hope so too, Colonel," Major Grey mused thoughtfully, rubbing her chin with one gloved hand. "I'd hate to see so much time and effort go to waste, after all. Inefficiency doesn't become you."

Elisabeth faked a humbled laugh. "You flatter me, Major."

"You flatter yourself well enough without me having to say anything," Major Grey said, like a snake about to strike. "I'm simply stating a fact."

Just then, as if on cue, the blue-skinned woman crawled slowly up to the clear, steel-laced plastic door of her cell and pointed an oozing, spittle-coated finger at Major Grey's shocked face. "Pretty," she gurgled in a sing-song, phlegm-choked voice, before her body shifted itself into an almost exact replica of Major Grey, complete with greatcoat and cap. The only key differences were that the doppelganger had glittering yellow eyes instead of Major Grey's piercing green ones, that the double's cap was perched at a precarious angle on her head, and that the double's porcelain-pale features were still twisted into an insane, drool-soaked grin. "I like pretty things."

Elisabeth was gratified to feel a wave of disgust radiating from Major Grey's mind. Apparently there were some things that a KGB gorgon was afraid of, after all… "Just this way, Major," she said diplomatically, before gesturing down the corridor. Gratefully, Major Grey followed her away from the giggling metamorph, visibly displaying her relief as she did so. A few hundred metres down the corridor, Elisabeth pointed to the battered form lying on the thin pallet in the corner of the cell in front of her. "As you requested, Major," Elisabeth stated briefly before tapping in the door's release code, making it slide gently to one side and the form inside it sit up, "one James Logan, rebel leader."

Jim Logan watched the two women enter his cell, and shook his head. "I ain't got nothing more to tell you," he said, a slight note of fear creeping into the edges of his voice. Major Grey smiled, all her earlier vulnerability vanishing as she did so. For what it was worth, Elisabeth really pitied the rebel now.

"Oh, I think you do, Mr Logan," Major Grey said. "Don't try to fight me. You won't win, I can assure you…"

Kitty sat on an upturned crate and waited until Madrox had finished explaining the situation to the rest of the resistance unit who had made this section of the Brooklyn subway system their home. While he did that, she took in some of the more recognisable fighters – across from her, a huge man stood with his massively-muscled arms folded over his equally muscular chest, a pair of absurdly small, armless sunglasses clipped to the bridge of his nose. Over towards where Madrox was delivering his case, Kitty could see a muscular woman with a ragged, choppy head of purple-hued hair idly pulling a sharp-edged chunk of steel into different shapes with her bare hands, and a silver-haired woman who simply clutched an AK-47 with both hands and seemed intent on listening to Madrox as he made everybody aware of what was happening. Kitty returned her attention to Madrox as he finished speaking, and the local resistance leader, a woman Madrox had identified earlier as Val Cooper, raised her hand for quiet after wiping her hands on her grimy fatigues and running her hands through her blonde hair.

"Well," she began, "I'm not going to lie to you, Jamie – if this were any other man you were talking about, I'd tell you to get out of here and not come back. But knowing what Logan knows, and knowing that the Ivans would love to get their hands on that information, I don't think we have any choice, do you?"

"No, ma'am," Madrox replied soberly. "So you'll give me some of your men to try a rescue attempt?"

Cooper paused. "I didn't say that, exactly. What assurances do I have that you'll bring as many of them out as you went in with?"

"Me," Kitty said, causing every head in the room to turn towards her. Kitty relished the sensation of having every pair of eyes focused totally on her, and continued "I can get us into the Empire State without tripping any alarms, and I can get us out the same way too."

"Really?" Cooper said, sounding intrigued. "And how, exactly, can you do that?"

Kitty pushed herself up off the crate she was sitting on and walked slowly over to where Cooper was standing. When she was face to face with the other woman, she smiled and held up her right hand, phasing it through the nearest wall up to her mid-forearm. "That's how. All the Reds' fancy security systems don't mean shit if we can walk right past them, right?" She paused, thinking that she should probably provide a little more explanation. "I used to run sabotage missions for the resistance out west, and I found out pretty quickly that if I phased through something electrical, it got fried." She shrugged. "Hey, it's better than nothing, right?"

Cooper looked thoughtful for a moment or so, and then nodded. "I suppose it is, yes." Then she beckoned over the hulking giant that Kitty had spotted earlier and said "Guido, I'll need you to hand-pick a squad for this mission. Make sure you're well-prepared for any eventuality."

The huge man saluted with one ham-sized hand and grinned. "With pleasure, boss-lady…"