0007 HOURS | NOVEMBER 09, 2014 | BELASICA MOUNTAIN RANGE, BULGARIA-GREECE BORDER

A pair of guards patrolling the top of the eastern tower were caught entirely unawares.

They did not see the two shadows, indistinguishable from the rocks in the dark of the night, prowling down from the mountain side. They did not anticipate gloved hands being clamped over their mouths and dying soon after with knives buried deep into the back of their skulls. The bodies, simultaneously silenced, were caught before they could fall and make any sort of noise that might alert others.

The bodies were lowered onto the flat roof without a single disturbance of sound except for the faintest rustle of shifting cloth, barely even audible over the whistling mountain wind. The killers crouch-walked up to the edge of the tower and went prone at the drop to look out and below. The two had recced the facility and memorized the layout based on their gathered intelligence, both visual and digital, but there was a whole lot of difference between staring at a schematic and looking at the real thing.

The installation was by no means the largest or most fortified, but that did not mean that it wouldn't be a significant challenge for only two – technically three – high-level operators.

It had an asymmetrical layout, built upon the bones of an ancient medieval fortress with layers and layer of modern concrete and steel rebar piled on top of it all. The outer walls were nearly a meter thick. There were three towers, built with peculiar angles and differing heights, that overlooked the exterior approach and the interior compound. And within the walls, to continue with the mismatched design of the base, were two equally disproportionate buildings. One quite large, near ten stories tall, while the other was only half as big.

Through the center of the base there was a road, which outside of the walls was nothing more than a rough gravel track, that split in two and led to two different destinations. The first of these was a garage for motor vehicles, hollowed out beneath an outcropping of stone, while the second branch of the road led up to a pair of heavy, sliding metal blast doors. Beyond those doors there was a series of elevators, two meant for a heavy cargo and vehicles and the other four were meant for personnel.

Those elevators then descended down to a secondary installation built within the mountain itself, which was not much larger than a moderately sized office building. But it was within that place that the true, beating heart of the installation lay. A series of high-security vaults and classified laboratories where HYDRA's ongoing projects were conducted and contained. From that point the elevators descended even further down the mountain to a moderately sized hangar and a short strip of tarmac from which aircraft could land and takeoff.

In total the base couldn't have contained much more than a few hundred personnel. Though perhaps, at the height of their power, the facility could have housed nearly a thousand with a full complement. But HYDRA was a steadily sinking ship and they were now far away from their golden years.

One of the attackers, the larger of the two, shifted on his belly into a more comfortable position as he set his DMR in front of him and peered through the magnified scope. Barely an inch of his skin could be seen beneath his tactical gear, which was a heavy assembly of black, gray and mossy green material, bullet-resistant and liberally covered with ammo pouches, knife holsters and a bandolier of grenades. His ensemble was finished off with a black beanie on his head, a pair of goggles over his eyes – capable of switching to both thermal and night-vision – and a scarf of black and gray covering the lower half of his face.

The second of the team, a slimmer and undeniably feminine figure, slid into a crouch and slunk to the far side of the tower to get a better angle from a different vantage.

She, in contrast to her partner, wore tactical gear that looked to have been pulled right out of science-fiction. A matte black jumpsuit, layered over with a hunter green harness and thin plates of charcoal gray, bullet-resistant armoring covering her chest, shoulders, forearms and shins. She also had many pouches for ammunition and sheathes for her four of knives scattered across her person, but not nearly as many as her companion. Though, the two greatest differences between them were found at the small of her back, where a compact jetpack ran hot and silent, and atop her head, where a helmet encased the entirely of her skull and the vaguely X-shaped visor was aglow with muted blue light.

"Prowler 1-1 to Prowler 1-3. Status?" Rhiannon requested, broadcasting across the encrypted comm channel that had been set up between their rather unorthodox three-man fireteam.

"Prowler 1-3 is in position. One kilometer from the hangar. No signs of detection by the facility's sensor grid and marginal access into their data network," RA-5172, her Titan, confirmed and she let out a brief exhale of relief at the news.

Getting a seven-meter mechanical monstrosity like a Titan so close to an installation like this, without being spotted by radar or LADAR or any other sort of scan, had been arguably one of the more difficult aspects of the mission. But so far everything was going according to their plan. And oh, it felt so nice to be back in action. To feel the comforting weight of her armor and jump kit. To feel the familiar shape of a known firearm, a C.A.R. Submachine Gun, in her practiced hands.

Her attention shifted over towards her other partner, even as her eyes and the tech in her helmet continued to study the ins and outs of the HYDRA base and those few personnel that were patrolling on the perimeter and other towers. "Prowler 1-2, how're the ears holding up?"

"So far, so good," Barnes murmured back, unfortunately having to keep his voice down due to a distinct lack of noise-cancelling helmet. "Can't hear anything but you and Rome."

"Received. If that changes you let me know and we'll adjust. We don't know if any of these guys know your magic words, so you make sure to keep them in at all times."

"Affirmative."

It had taken a good two months to get up to this point.

A month of that had been spent just trying to find the place, because HYDRA – as much as she might hate to admit it – knew how to keep themselves under the radar quite well. Not even a blip on any of Rome or the dropship's passive scans, which was as much as they could do without risking their own discovery. But a chance dive into the water off the Port – on a hunch of all things – had her uncovering some surviving technology from the HYDRA Reclamation Team buried underneath the silt and sand.

A tablet, to be exact. The exact one that had been monitoring the tracking device's signal.

It had been an incredibly lucky break in their search.

A bit a repair and some reverse engineering and she had gotten a nice digital map to their top-secret hidey-hole in the Belasica Mountains, nestled cozily on the border between Bulgaria and Greece. The next weekend trip after had Rhiannon and James, who now preferred to be called Barnes in most cases, performing a lovely bit of reconnaissance. And now, two weeks later, had them enacting their plan.

The first of who knows how many HYDRA bases they hoped to destroy to secure Barnes' safety.

Sliding a pulse blade, shaped very much like a Japanese kunai, from one of the ammo pouches at her waist, Rhiannon stabbed the concrete beneath her feet with the point. A wave of orange energy, a sonar pulse, moved outwards from the impact point and highlighted those nearby with a faint outline on her HUD. After the pulse had run its course the total number ended up at nearly a dozen or so hostiles spread out through the uppermost levels of the tower, within twenty meters, and most were in stationary positions and nowhere near the southside windows.

They were probably all sleeping.

How perfect.

"1-1, clear to advance on Bravo," Barnes whispered over the radio and Rhiannon snapped her head up. Fixing her eyes on the stretch of wall that curved between Tower Three, designated as Alpha, and Tower Two, labeled as the aforementioned Bravo. The far tower was assigned Charlie, while the larger building was Delta and the smaller was Echo. The vehicle garage was Foxtrot, the elevators were Golf and the air field on the other side of the mountains was Hotel.

And true to Barnes' word, the way was clear and she was free to move.

Clearing the perimeter guards was their first step. Hitting Bravo and Charlie one after the other. Getting inside Delta was after that, in search of the secondary data center, where she'd be extracting any and all information she could before moving on to the external power generators found in the basement level. Building Echo was to be avoided at all cost for the time being because it was the living quarters for all of those who lived in the base. Better to not immediately go and poke the hornet's nest, right?

They'd end up getting there eventually, but for now… Stealth was key.

"Received. Take Charlie. Moving now," she bid, as an uncontrollably wide grin broke out across her face as she activated her cloak and, with a healthy running start, leapt off of the rooftop.

Tower Three – Alpha – was just over twenty stories and the sudden pull of gravity was an exhilarating rush for her. Two perfectly timed bursts of thrust from her jump kit had her jump extending to cover most of the distance between the towers, nearly a hundred meters, before she shot out her grapple at the nearing wall of concrete. With another quick firing of her jump kit and the faintest whine of the line retracting rapidly, Rhiannon shot back up into the air at well over fifty kilometers per second, swinging up and around onto Tower Two's roof with preternatural grace.

The whistle of the wind through the mountains had made her approach nearly silent, as she landed with a muted thump on her toes, and dashed quickly forward the assassinate the nearest guard. Another team of two to mirror the first pair, a standard guard posting. The first died beneath the blade of one of her knives and the second got his neck snapped with a sickening crunch of vertebrae. Just in time too, as her cloaking tech – limited to only eighteen seconds of total invisibility – flickered and faded away.

"Bravo clear," she called out as the last man fell, taking a knee to keep her profile low to the ground.

"Charlie clear," Barnes reported, having sniped them from his nest with his suppressed DMR.

"Good. By the way," she said, struck but a mild curiosity. "How're you liking the Longbow?"

"It's okay," he said. "Getting the job done."

"Just okay?" she asked, always knowing the designated marksman rifle to be a remarkably good long-range rifle for anti-personnel operations. But then she remembered how he'd hovered in front of one of the lockers while perusing the dropship's armory while putting together their loadouts. "I mean, of course, it's not nearly so as lovely as the Kraber I saw you making eyes at earlier," she cooed teasingly and got a heavy sigh of exasperation over the comm as her only reply.

Who would've guessed that Barnes had a thing for high-powered, armor-piercing sniper rifles?

But the moment for light-hearted teasing had passed and it was time to continue with the mission.

"Perimeter is clear. 1-1 moving on Delta," she announced, settling back into work-mode, and prepared to make the jump from the tower. She checked below her with the pulse blade and found the tower under her feet to be lightly-staffed, just like Tower One had been. She retrieved a second blade, while the first was recharging, and with precise aim pitched it with all her strength into the nearby building. The blade lodged itself into the concrete without any trouble and the orange sonar ping bloomed out on her heads-up display and showed her the interior.

The top three floors were miraculously empty, at least on the southern side. However, the secondary data center was on the fourth floor and it was quite occupied according to the ping. At least half a dozen on that floor and a dozen, possibly more, spread throughout the other six floors of the building.

"Eighteen hostiles marked inside Delta. Possibly more outside of sonar range. Moving in," And then she sprinted to the edge, activating her cloak once more, and made the jump. Between her kit and grapple she cleared the gap without trouble, landing on Delta with nary a sound. She quickly made her way over to the rooftop door that would let her inside and found it unlocked.

"Sloppy," she murmured, pulling the door open the bare minimum needed to slip inside, before closing it behind her. With her data knife in one hand and her P2016 in the other she prowled down through the empty floors, advancing in time with her cloak's cooldown rate so as to remain undetected by any surveillance cameras.

On the seventh floor she met her first enemy all by his lonesome, seated at a desk and fiddling with his cell phone. He died quickly and she lowered his body to the floor to keep it out of view.

The sixth floor had three occupants and she killed them one after the other without being seen. The fifth floor had two more and they died as well and just as silently. And then she was at her first objective. She threw a pulse blade and watched as the ping revealed the inhabitants of the room. Five personnel were in the outer room with the secondary data center located just beyond, behind a locked door with another two people inside the center itself.

"1-1 to 1-2. Approaching first Delta target. Seven tangoes inside. How's it looking outside?"

"Perimeter's still quiet. No signs of detection. Clear to engage," Barnes replied and she continued to be glad that everything was moving as smoothly as it was.

That could easily change in the next few seconds.

"Copy. Engaging," she said back and as she activated her cloak she swung into the room.

Three pulls of the trigger, muffled by the suppressor at the end of her pistol, had three bodies dropping where they stood. The fourth took one of her boots to his chest, accelerated to beyond lethal levels by her Pilot augmentations and a brief boost from her jump kit. And the fifth died as she swung outwards with her data knife and slashed his neck open. He fell, gurgling and choking on his own blood, as she advanced on the locked door between her and the prize.

Inside the secondary data center, the two remaining personnel – one man and a woman – looked to have been momentarily frozen in shock, before surging to their feet and scrambling around. Whether it was for weapons of their own or the magic button that would set off all the alarms, she couldn't allow them to succeed with either. She sprinted forward, making less than four full strides, before she rammed into the door with her shoulder and smashed it off its hinges.

Pop. Pop. Two shots from her pistol and the last two were down for the count.

"1-1 to 1-2," she called out over the radio, tossing a pulse blade at the floor to see who she might've alerted and if she should be expecting guests anytime soon. "Data Center is secure. Had to get a bit loud so it might be getting busy out there." And true enough the occupants of the floors below her were on the move, but not terribly quickly. Odd. Maybe the walls were thicker than she had assumed them to be.

"No external movement yet," he said just as a radio in the outer room, dropped by one of those she had killed, began to squawk in what she assumed was most likely Bulgarian. She didn't know the language so it wasn't like she could reply and try to fool those on the other end that everything was fine.

"Moving to data retrieval," she announced as she holstered her Hammond P2016. With her data knife back in hand and cleaned of blood, she keyed the switch embedded into the handle to deploy the circuitry that allowed it to hack and moved towards the wall stacked high with computers. She inserted her knife into a suitably sized port and activated the hacking program.

One, two, three and four seconds passed as the holographic display stop her knife scrolled through innumerable combinations of numbers and letters to bypass any and all security that HYDRA might've had around their intel. And then, boom, they were in. She pulled her knife back out and tucked it away, now just having to remain within a certain distance of the computer with her helmet.

"1-1 to 1-3. Secondary server had been hacked. Data's all yours, Rome."

"Affirmative. Accessing feed. Connected. Downloading all contents," the Titan replied, using his personal connection with the hardware in her helmet to siphon the data for storage in his CPU.

For the next handful of seconds, with her eyes flickering between the status bar on the download and the motion sensor in the upper left-hand corner of her HUD, Rhiannon stood at the ready. There were six hostiles moving in on her position, but she still had some time to spare. She shifted to the far side of the room, out of sight crouched down in a corner, and hoping to bottleneck them at the entrance. Her C.A.R. came up, thirty-six rounds set in the mag with the safety off and the firing mode switched over into fully automatic, as she divided her attention between the three simultaneous tasks.

"1-2 to 1-1," Barnes suddenly announced over the radio. "Got movement."

Here we go. Things were about to get spicy.

"Where?" she demanded.

"Perimeter wall between Bravo and Charlie. Two coming up and over. Splitting up. One to Charlie and the second to Bravo."

"Guards?"

"Negative." A brief paused, followed by a sudden inhale of breath. A gasp. "Fuck."

"What?"

"Steve's here."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that Captain fucking America and the Avengers are here," he hissed over the radio, any amount of Zen calmness he had derived from the combat situation was seemingly gone in the face of the new arrivals. "The two that came over the wall. I recognized one. Romanoff. The Black Widow. If she's here then he can't be far behind. Not for a base of this size."

Oh. Well, that was quite a bit spicier than she had been planning on.

Like ass-on-fire levels of spiciness.

"Do you want to abort and exfil?" she hesitantly suggested. "Go back and wait at the rendezvous point for Rome and I to finish up solo? Because we can do that if you don't think you're ready."

Silence rang out over the line for a few moments.

In the sudden onset of quiet she could hear the rushed footsteps and the whispered orders being given amongst those who were about to attack her. They thought they were being quiet, but she could hear them plain as day and could see their little, blurry orange dots on her motion tracker. A bloom of orange sonar from a pulse blade revealed their positions through the wall, in a standard stacked formation, and she sighted down her HCOG with her index finger resting just slightly above the trigger.

"Make up your mind fast, Barnes, 'cause it's about to get very loud at Delta."

Another moment, before a gusty exhale came over the channel. "I'll stay. Figured I was gunna run into him eventually, just didn't think it was going to be today. Don't know how I'll react when I do see him, but I've gotta do this and I'm not cowardly enough to leave you and Rome cleaning up my mess."

"Received," she said, surprised that he had actually chosen to stick around. Every time he'd spoke of Steve Rogers before – the famed Captain America – he'd been so guilt-ridden and terrified at the prospect of seeing him again. But Rhiannon had his back. If the inevitable meeting between the good Captain and Barnes ended up turning bad, she would intervene and try to keep both of them from doing something they may later regret. "Stay in your nest as long as you can, but if you get made go into the tower and we'll meet at the bottom. Maybe, if we get lucky and since you're covered from head to toe, they won't recognize you until we've finished."

"Affirm."

"1-3 to 1-1," her Titan announced suddenly. "Download of all data is complete. Awaiting further orders."

"Hold position until I give the word, Rome."

"Copy that."

And just then the first man of the approaching combat team stuck his head in through the busted down remnants of the door and got a skull full of lead for his troubles. The remaining five opened fire, unleashing a hail of bullets to crash through the entryway and chip away at the wall surrounding it. A quick flick of her wrist had a hologram of herself charging out into the gunfire, drawing their attention, while she quickly rummaged into another one of her pouches. She rolled out into the entryway and flung a throwing star into the crowd of HYDRA goons and watched in glee as they were all caught up in the blue vortex of the Gravity Star.

She rose up onto one knee, lining their flailing bodies up in her sights, and squeezed the trigger. One, two, three, four and five pulls, small and controlled bursts of full-auto fire, and then they were dead. Their limp bodies hung in the air for another handful of seconds before dropping in a series of thuds as the gravitational vortex ceased to be and the throwing star went inert. Another pulse blade tossed into the floor found that the remnants of force within the building, another eight, were lingering two floors down. They were probably waiting for the kill confirmation from the first team or for a set period of time to pass before they would assume failure and advance on her position themselves.

She wasn't going to be giving them that chance.

"1-1 to 1-2. What's it looking like outside?" she asked, standing and swapping out the magazine in her SMG before also retrieving the two pulse blades that had been scattered around the room.

"Gunfire within Bravo and Charlie. No sign yet of…" An explosion interrupted the rest of Barnes' report, loud enough to make even her ears rings inside her helmet and the building shake on its foundation. Shaking her head, she used the sudden burst of noise to make her move to the staircase, hoping to get the drop on the rest of the tangoes in Delta.

"Status, 1-2!" she barked over the radio as she jogged along.

A moment of silence on the other end of the line, before it crackled back to life.

"Green. I'm green," Barnes replied, sounding unharmed and mostly unbothered. "Front gate got blown open by a missile strike. Probably Iron Man's doing." A pause and she could hear the faintest trace of what sounded like jet engines rushing by in the background. "Confirmed. Iron Man and… shit, it's the guy with the wings from DC. Don't know his name, but they're both in the air. Steve and the Asgardian – whatever his name is – are charging through the ruins of the gate. No sign of the Hulk."

The crack of a bullet comes over the comm. A very close bullet.

"Shit! Got spotted. Wing-Guy took a pot-shot at me on a fly-by. Moving inside Alpha. I'll take out anyone inside and then hole up until you're clear of Delta."

"Received," she says, reaching the staircase at last and vaulting over the railing. She dropped down, keying her jump kit at the appropriate floor to slow her momentum and send her up and over onto the landing. A pulse blade revealed the interior, still eight hostiles all grouped up and it looked to her like the layout of this floor was going to be a CQC paradise. Nice and tight. The C.A.R. wouldn't do as well in that environment, so it was a good thing she had brought another gun.

Rhiannon collapsed the submachine gun into a shorter form, slinging it back into the magnetic sweet spot across her back in exchange for her shotgun, a M1901 Mastiff. She activated her cloak and slipped through the door, skirting through the first room and moving into position within range of the eight. Her cloak failed and she quickly sent a holo-pilot careening into the room to draw their fire and tossed an incendiary throwing star – a Fire Star – right on its heels to burn them with a spitting font of thermite.

She took off, at a full jump kit assisted sprint, with the Mastiff tucked into the meat of her shoulder.

Two men that were grouped together on the far-left side were both caught in the chest by her first spray of plasma shotgun pellets. Six left, though one was currently writhing and shrieking next to the pool of hissing thermite. He'd probably be dead before she was even done. The next shot took another guy across the neck and head and he dropped like a stone with a fine red mist where his face had been. She dropped into a quick slide across the floor to avoid haphazard gunfire from the those still alive, but she was moving far too fast for these normal grunts to keep up with.

Four left and two more shells. The third round took out two more who had also clustered together, with the horizontal spread of energized pellets searing through them at center mass. Two left and one more shot. They were spreading out. She focused on the closer, rushing forward in the blink of an eye to slam the barrel of her shotgun into his abdomen before pulling the trigger.

He screamed in agony for a hot fraction of a second before his torso all but exploded outwards.

One more.

She stood and watched him for a moment, taking a sick pleasure in the fear on his swarthy face, before she was on him like a rabid dog. The shotgun was empty, so she dropped it, drawing her secondary sidearm, a B3 Wingman Elite, as she pinned him down under her boot. In the blink of eye and with the lightest squeeze of her finger, she put a .50 caliber round right between his panicked, brown eyes with a thunderous bang.

Room cleared and a precautionary pulse blade showed that the remainder of the building was also clear all the way down to the basement level.

"1-1 to 1-2. Delta is clear of hostiles," she reported, holstering her heavy revolver. "Heading down to the generators now. How's Alpha?"

"Not very busy," Barnes replied, not even sounding even the slightest bit out of breath. "Only run into thirteen so far and I'm already on the ninth floor. Most seem to be rushing the main gate."

"Well that's a good place for them to go," she quipped, retrieving her Mastiff and reloading the under-barrel tube magazine with the shells looped through one of her harness straps. Her feet carried her quickly back at to staircase, even as her hands were busy reloading, and she started jogging down the spiraling concrete steps. "Means there's less between us and the elevators when the time comes."

A hum of agreement came over the channel, before he said, "Got tangoes. Going silent."

"Received. Good hunting," she replied and channel went quiet, leaving Rhiannon alone with her thoughts as she finally arrived on the lowest level of the building.

It was mostly just one thought, really.

Everything else running through her mind – the mission and the killing – was nearly entirely muscle memory, so thorough and ingrained was her training and her years of experience. But this singular thought was something might need to be addressed very, very soon.

Should she – and how should she – go about announcing her team's presence to the Avengers?

They were by all accounts a friendly force. Allies against HYDRA and Rhiannon didn't really feel like getting shot by the good guys. Or letting Rome get damaged by them. Or having Barnes get hurt by what was technically friendly fire.

It made a hell of a lot of sense to introduce themselves to prevent accidental injury. It wasn't like she was going to say right from the get-go who they were and why they were there. That would have been fucking stupid. So, even as she shoved her data knife into the control panel of the generators supplying the power to this level of the installation, Rhiannon continued to mull over the question.

"1-1 to all Prowlers. Opinions on telling the Avengers that we're here so we don't get shot at?" she ended up asking after a hot minute of going nowhere with her internal deliberations. Waiting for their reply as she slaved the base's power supply to follow her commands and began to head back towards the roof of the building to make her exit.

"You want to do what now?" was Barnes' reply, loud with disbelief, before being cut off by her Titan.

"Plan of action is advisable," Rome replied, ever the voice of level-headed reasoning and cold-hard facts. "Logical to avoid unnecessary risk of injury by possibly friendly elements."

Well that was that, then.

"I don't…"

"Two to one, 1-2. You've been outvoted. Rome, patch me into their comms," she commanded.

A moment passed.

"Successfully patched into Avengers communication network. Transmit when ready, Pilot."

Rhiannon took a deep breath, preparing herself to make contact.

"Attention, Captain Rogers and the Avengers," she announced, hoping with a wish and a prayer that her idea paid off without grievous repercussions. "This is callsign Prowler 1-1. We are a friendly fireteam on mission within this AO. I repeat, we are friendlies. Please confirm."