Natasha herself had been the last person to fly the quinjet. Jim Chiba was considerably taller than she, and had to move the seat back almost as far as it would go. While he prepped for takeoff, Natasha changed into her tacsuit and got her weapons ready, and quietly cursed Clint and Fury and their stupid secrecy agreement. A normal SHIELD agent would have requested somebody on board to protect their family, but no – in Clint's mind, a bodyguard was just one more person who would then know his most vulnerable spot. Damn him.

"Has Fury confirmed the hijacking?" asked Nat. She didn't believe for a moment that Laura would lie or joke about something so serious, but Fury would double-check everything, just to be sure.

"Yes, Ma'am," said Chiba. "Sydney Airport says the flight departed forty-five minutes late. Several of the flight attendants had been to a party the previous day and developed food poisoning, and the airline had to cover the shifts at short notice."

"That's a great start," Natasha snorted.

"Everything proceeded normally for the first hour of the flight," Chiba went on. He'd closed the ramp, and was now moving the jet onto the taxiway. When using a commercial airport like Santa Monica, a runway takeoff was preferred – verticals got in the way of the existing flight lanes. "They were supposed to make one final check in with Australian Center Control before heading out over the ocean, at just about the time you called Fury. They didn't, and now they've vanished from the controllers' screens, which indicates that their transponder and GPS have been turned off."

The news about the flight attendants hadn't surprised Natasha at all – if one or more crew members suddenly became ill, it would provide hijackers with a perfect opportunity to sneak their own people on board. The transponder, however, made her already chilled blood run even colder. "I thought that wasn't something you could do from the cockpit," she said.

"It isn't," Chiba affirmed. "Somebody would have to remove part of the dashboard and physically cut the wires."

"In flight," said Natasha. That was incredibly dangerous – one wrong wire and you would be nose-down in the sea. Whoever had done this was either incredibly confident or incredibly desperate, perhaps both. "Any claims of responsibility? Demands?"

"Not yet, but it only just happened thirty minutes ago," said Chiba. "Once it hits the news, then we're expecting people to speak up."

And most of those claims, Natasha knew, would be fake – terrorists did things for attention, and they would take any opportunity offered for five minutes in the public eye. It would take the government days or weeks to determine who was really responsible. The Barton family, and the rest of the people on flight 113, didn't have that kind of time.

"Buckle up, Agent Romanov," said Chiba. "We've been cleared for takeoff."

The quinjet roared into a clear blue sky above the Pacific Ocean.

There were some thirteen thousand kilometers between Los Angeles and the last recorded position of the passenger plane. If the Air Aurora 747 continued on the course programmed into its autopilot, the supersonic quinjet would meet it in about four hours. That would put them both right in the middle of the South Pacific, halfway between Australia and Hawai'i with nothing but water for hundreds of miles in all directions. Not a good place for Natasha to attempt an assault on the plane.

But the hijackers probably weren't going to Los Angeles. Their most likely destination would be somewhere in Asia. There would be enough fuel on board to make Tokyo or Beijing, or even as far north as Khabarovsk. Hopefully Fury would get back in touch and let them know what the jet's new heading was. That might give Natasha a clue, also, who she could expect to meet on board.

Nat was studying blueprints of the plane itself when the radio crackled, and she heard Fury's voice. She put her dossier aside and went to see what he'd learned.

"Have you got something for me?" she asked, leaning on the back of Chiba's seat to be heard better.

Fury's face on the screen would have looked as stoic as ever to somebody who didn't know him well – but Natasha could pick out the tension in the muscles around his eyes, and the tiny twitch at the corners of his lips that meant he was nervous. If she'd been in the room with him, he probably would have smelled of it. "I've got our satellites tracking the plane," he said. "It's still on course for Los Angeles. Looks like the hijackers are letting the autopilot take care of things."

"What kind of sense does that make?" Natasha frowned. "If they disabled the transponder, that suggests they didn't want anybody to know where they were going. Why go to the trouble if they're not going to change course?"

"Maybe they don't know how to turn off the autopilot," Chiba suggested. "Or there've been cases where hijackers have ordered a pilot to change course but he only pretended to obey them."

"If the pilot were still in control and wanted to land the plane safely, he'd have turned around and gone back to Australia," said Natasha. That would have been the nearest land, leaving them the most extra fuel. "And I can't believe that somebody who knows how to deactivate the transponder wouldn't know what to do with the autopilot."

"You'll have to ask them," said Fury. "If you both continue on your present headings, intercept will be in an hour and half."

"Thanks," Nat nodded. "Romanov out."

"How are you planning to get on board?" asked Chiba. "I've never heard of anybody boarding a passenger jet in flight."

"Lucky you, you're gonna have front-row seats." Natasha patted his shoulder and returned to the back to get her equipment ready.


A jumbo jet was a very large machine on a human scale, but a tiny speck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Even after Chiba had sighted it on the quinjet's long-range radar, she didn't quite feel sure they'd found it until she actually saw the plane. The fuselage was gleaming white with a navy blue tail fin, and painted with an orange and yellow stripe that ran through the lower line of windows and became the letters AA on the tail.

"Get closer," Natasha ordered. She wanted to be able to read the registration number under the upper windows – that would tell her for sure if this were the right plane. "There it is – AU-YBBW. This is it."

The plane was a Boeing 747-400, with the business class section in the characteristic hump behind the cockpit and economy in the main fuselage below. Its capacity was around six hundred passengers, but the manifest in the documents she'd been given had indicated that flight 113, because of its early morning takeoff time, was only about half full. Counting the crew there were less than four hundred people on board, but that was still a lot. The hijackers would have had to overpower at least the cockpit crew to gain control of the aircraft, and would doubtless have worried about the passengers trying to fight back.

"AA-113," said Chiba into the radio. "This is SHIELD Q-12, SHIELD Quebec-One-Two at your four o'clock, please respond."

There was no replied.

"Alpha Alpha One One Three," Chiba repeated, enunciating. "This is SHIELD Q-12 off your starboard side, please respond."

"Get closer," Natasha repeated.

"We're already at risk for running into their wake," Chiba protested.

"Fury wouldn't have sent you if you weren't capable of handling it," said Natasha. "I want to see if I can get a look through the windows."

"What if they make a sudden turn?" he asked. A midair collision at this altitude would leave no survivors.

"They're on autopilot," Natasha reminded him. "They'll keep going straight and level."

Chiba inched the quinjet closer to the plane, staying above and in front of it to avoid the worst of the turbulence, until he was only about a wing's length away. Natasha focused her binoculars on the cockpit glass, but couldn't see anybody in the pilot's seat. Nor were there any faces visible in the row of portal-like windows in the cabins. The passengers and crew, if they were still alive, should have been able to hear the quinjet's engines, even over the roar of the 747's own four Rolls Royce RB211s. They should have been looking for the source of the sound, especially if they knew they'd been hijacked and were hoping for a rescue – but there was no sign of life at all.

"Tell Fury it doesn't look like there's anybody on board," she said, forcing her voice to remain professional despite the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. "Once I'm on board, I want you to head for... better make it Fiji. Get in touch with Nadi International Airport and tell them I'm gonna be making an emergency landing." Nadi would have a runway long enough for a big jet, and facilities to deal with the casualties, whatever sort they were. How Nat would deal with any casualties on a personal level was, of course, another question entirely, and not one she could afford to think about right now. Right now, she had a job to do.

She started buckling herself into a harness. "Maintain our proximity to the jet," she said. "And drop back a little – I need access to the cargo doors.

"We're at forty thousand feet," Chiba warned her.

"I'm aware," she promised him. She clipped her safety line to the floor of the quinjet and put on an oxygen mask, signaling to Chiba that he should do the same. Black Widow agents were trained from childhood to get by on less oxygen than normal people, doped up with extra myoglobin to store the gas in their muscles – but that didn't mean she wouldn't miss it when it wasn't there.

"All right, open her up!" she ordered.

Chiba opened the hatch. The warm air inside the quinjet rushed out all at once, dumping its moisture into a bitter ice fog that lingered for a few seconds and then cleared, leaving Nat blinking in the blinding sunshine and thin, odorless air of an altitude a third again higher than Mount Everest. The white flank of the passenger jet was as bright as a snowbank and perilously close, but not quite close enough.

"Closer!" she shouted at Chiba.

"How close?" he asked, his voice almost lost in the roaring wind.

"Ninety feet!" she said.

"That's suicide," he protested.

Natasha rolled her eyes. "You're a SHIELD pilot, right?" she asked. "Your file says you flew F-18s in Iraq! You were a Blue Angel!"

"Yeah, but..."

"Shut up and fly!" said Nat. She was not missing this because of an aging pilot's sudden attack of cowardice.

The quinjet began to shake as it brushed the 747's slipstream. Nat did her best to ignore it as she mounted an epoxy grapple in a gyroscopic cannon, and took aim. She'd used this device to board ships at sea before, but this was the first time she'd be using it on an airplane. If it didn't hold, there would be some six miles to fall, into an ocean nearly as deep again.

"Have you ever done this before?" Chiba asked. Despite the fact that he had to shout at the top of his lungs, Natasha could still make out the pleading note.

"Nope! I'm improvising!" she replied with false cheer. She aimed for a place next to the rear cargo door, adjusted for the howling high-altitude wind, and fired. A harpoon flew through the air, unspooling kevlar cable as it went, and stuck exactly where she'd wanted it to – within a foot of the door. The point pierced the aluminum hull of the airplane, but the epoxy bubbled out immediately, sealing the whole and gluing the harpoon itself in place. The joint thus formed ought to be able to support a weight of two tons, but it had never been tested at this altitude or these speeds.

Nat hooked her harness to the line between the cannon and the harpoon. "Give me about another twenty feet of altitude," she told Chiba.

The quinjet rose, and the shaking subsided a bit as they left the turbulent air moving over the 747's wings. The line reeled out between the two aircraft. When Natasha glanced back, she could see Chiba's reflection in the quinjet windshield. He was white as a ghost.

"Okay, good," Nat told him. She locked the cable and took a deep breath, then undid the carabiner holding her to the floor of the quinjet, and slid along the line towards the passenger plane.

Natasha had ziplined before, and despite the miles between her and the ocean below, this actually wasn't the worst time. The planes were passing over a layer of cloud, which hid the altitude and looked reassuringly like a giant safety net beneath her dangling feet. The wind was cutting, tearing tears from her eyes and freezing them instantly on her lashes, but it was no worse than some places in Antarctica. But in order to the quinjet to be out of the worst of the turbulence the slope had to be very steep, and when Natasha tried to put the brake on her zipline, she found it frozen solid. She slammed hard against the side of the plane and had to hang there a moment, waiting for her head to stop spinning and the ringing in her ears to pass.

"Romanov?" Chiba's terrified voice asked in her radio earpiece. "Agent Romanov? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine!" Nat gasped, trying to shake herself back to normal functioning. Her hands were trembling a bit, but she managed to clip herself to the harpoon and hit the button that would release the line from the cannon. The wind immediately caught it and blew it back to trail behind the plane, and Natasha saw the back hatch of the quinjet close again. She was on her own now, hanging on to the side of plane moving at six hundred miles her hour, with nothing but air between her and a bone-shattering impact with the ocean.

"That was good flying, Chiba," she said. "I'll buy you a drink in Fiji."

"I'll stay here until I see you on board," he told her, although the quinjet was already moving further away.

"You're not dropping me at the door after a date," Nat scoffed. "I can take it from here. I need you in Nadi explaining this to ATC, got it?"

"Yes, Ma'am," he said reluctantly. The quinjet peeled off, making a wide right turn towards the south.

The harpoon seemed to be holding just fine, So Nat braced herself against the side of the plane with her feet so that she could work on the cargo door. The door opened in – a safety feature to guard against explosive decompression. If the lock broke, the greater pressure inside the plane would force the door to remain shut – which was going to make it very difficult for Natasha to get inside. She began pulling tools out of her belt. She would have to hammer a series of hydraulic wedges into the space between the door and the frame, and then wait while the air bled off.

When she activated them, however, the door swung open at once.

After the transponder and the autopilot, that was the third thing in quick sequence that set off an alarm in Natasha's head. If the door opened easily, that meant the inside of the plane was not pressurized. Natasha could probably manage, at least for a while, but ordinary people would lose consciousness quickly. Was that why she hadn't been able to see anybody in the windows, because they were all asleep from hypoxia?

In a way that was almost a relief – it meant that the hijackers, too, might be unconscious and Nat could easily land the plane at Nadi. On the other hand, how had it happened? A plane ought to sound a warning if it lost pressure, and if there were any capable pilot on board they would know they had to land as soon as possible.

Nat swung herself inside, disconnected her line, and shut the cargo door again. For a moment she leaned on the cold metal, breathing heavily. The cargo compartment wasn't lit, but she could tell it must be full of mail – through the stale smell of the air in her oxygen mask she could detect the scenes of paper and ink. If everybody on board were unconscious, all she had to do was get to the cockpit.

She straightened up, took a couple of deep breaths of oxygen, and turned on her wrist flashlight.

The blueprints had shown a hatch that allowed flight attendants to access the cargo hold in case of a fire. Natasha found it and climbed up on top of a cargo container to push it open. There was a carpet on top of it, but that was easy to move, and she climbed up in the rear kitchen area of economy class, around the 48th row of seats.

The first thing she saw there was the shape of a flight attendant – a plump black woman with her many braids gathered into a ponytail, unconscious on the floor despite the breathing mask on her face. The masks that dropped from the ceiling for passengers and flight attendants on a commercial jet contained ten to twelve minutes of oxygen, produced by a chemical reaction. Those would have run out hours ago. Nat checked the pulse in the woman's throat and found it weak, but detectable. There was still time to save these people if she could bring the plane to a lower altitude.

Before she did anything else, however, she was going to find the Barton family. She didn't know if anybody had told Clint about any of this yet, but she wanted her first message to him to be that Laura and the kids were okay.

As the documents had noted, the plane was only half-full, but she had to check every row. Natasha started at the back, where a young Chinese woman was all alone in row 61, stretched out across four seats with a blanket over her, and no mask on. She'd probably been taking a nap when the trouble started, Natasha thought, and had never even realized anything was wrong.

From there, Nat worked her way up, row by row. The fact that economy class had two aisles made it slower. Although there were a few passengers slumped in the aisles and one woman half in and half out of washroom, the vast majority were in their seats with the oxygen masks on their faces. It was a little eerie, as if all these people had simply sat down and accepted their fate.

Finally, she found what she was looking for in the 35th row, just at the back of the wing on the right side. Laura was in the aisle seat, leaning back with her head to the left and her eyes shut as if peacefully asleep. She was breathing shallowly, her pulse weak but steady. On her right, Lila was curled against her mother, draped over the arm of the seat in a way that would probably be very uncomfortable when she woke – Nat gently moved her so she could fold the arm rest away and allow the little girl to rest her head in Laura's lap. Cooper, in the window seat, was against the wall with his eyes shut.

Nat shut her eyes and allowed herself a sigh of relief. They were alive. She could get them home to Clint safely.

She left them where they were and moved forward through economy plus, to the staircase that led up into business class. The cockpit access would be there. After 9/11 planes had been fitted with bulletproof cockpit doors and a number of other security measures to keep passengers from getting in, but Natasha knew she could come up with a way around that.

There'd been no sign yet of any hijackers, and she was almost sure they, too, were asleep – but not completely sure. As she climbed the stairs, she kept alert, constantly looking around for hostiles. She reached the top and peeked over the edge of the railing into the upper deck.

The attack came from behind. Out of the corner of her eye, Natasha just saw a human figure vault over the railing and wrap its legs around her neck. She fell forward, but caught herself and pushed back, preferring to fall down the stairs if she fell – that would hurt more, but hopefully get the other person off her. She vaguely made out dark hair and white teeth as they fell to land in a tangle of limbs at the foot of the steps.

Natasha dug the the tips of her stun gun into the attacker's chest. She heard the snap and smelled the electricity, but it had no effect. The other person – a woman – was wearing a bullet-proof vest under her flight attendant's uniform. The shock couldn't penetrate the kevlar.

If it had just been the one person, Natasha could probably have coped, but as she got up, a second attacker slipped a strap over her head from behind. She grabbed at it, but the unseen individual quickly pulled it tight, while the dark-haired flight attendant ripped off Natasha's oxygen mask. Even if she hadn't, the mask wouldn't have done Nat any good with her airway closed off. Bright spots danced in front of her eyes, and she slipped away into blackness.


She came to in darkness, with a splitting headache, and tried to take stock of her surroundings. She was on the floor in a tiny, cramped space with her cheek resting against metal. It smelled of bleach and scented soap... jasmine. Her hands and feet were tied. Above her and to the right, a tiny bit of sunlight was coming in and illuminating brushed metal cabinets. It was difficult to breathe, and the floor was vibrating in time with a far-off rumbling sound, with a definite sensation of motion. As she lay there, swallowing hard against the desire to vomit, the entire room tilted to the left. That changed the angle of the light, and the beam fell across a paper napkin lying a few inches from Natasha's face. On the corner of it, she could see the embossed Air Aurora logo.

The washroom. She was tied up on the floor of the airplane washroom. The plane was still in flight, and making a turn – its original heading had been northeast, so it was now adjusting to the west... assuming this was the first course change it had made, which was not necessarily so.

Nat concentrated for a moment on wiggling her hands out of their bonds, but couldn't do it. What was holding her wasn't a rope or a zip tie, it was some form of handcuff, not the same shape as she was used to escaping from. Her stings and her guns had been taken away. A bit of squirming told her that several other items on her person had been removed, including her pepper spray and the taser disks she kept behind her belt buckle. They hadn't found the two emergency ones inside her collar, though, so she had those. She needed to get out, and once she was out the first thing she'd have to find was oxygen.

Whoever had done this knew their enemy – they'd known what her arsenal was like and had been prepared for it, and now that they had her they were changing the plane's course. Had it all been a trap? If so, Natasha had walked right into it.

"Ona ochnulas'," said a soft voice outside. "Ya mogu slyshat' yeye." That was Russian. She's awake. I can hear her.

Natasha quickly sat up – she might be dizzy, not to mention trussed like a pig on a spit, but she was going to look her captors in the eye when they opened the door. The light that came in as the door swung out was for a moment utterly blinding, but once her eyes adjusted, she made out three women standing outside.

They were all dressed, as she'd expected, as Air Aurora flight attendants, in white pants suits with neckerchiefs in the airline's colours of yellow, navy, and orange. All were wearing oxygen supplies – a tank on a belt and a tube down the nose that looked more like hospital equipment than anything found on an airplane. The one on the left had long black hair in a ponytail. She was the one who'd attacked Natasha at the top of the steps. Her nametag said Milly. In the middle was a tiny, freckled brunette with a pixie cut. Elaine, the nametag said. On the right was a woman with hair so blonde it was almost white, tucked up in a tidy bun. Trina.

"Zdravstvuyte, Natalia," said the one with the pixie cut. "Do you know who we are?"

Natasha's eyes narrowed. Of course she knew who they were – she'd slept in the same bedrooms with these women for years. They'd been her best friends at a time when there'd been no difference between those and her worst enemies. "Zdravstvuyte, Yelena," she replied to Yelena Belova, and nodded once each to her companions: Kamila Ibrayev and Triinu Kaasik.

"Oh, she remembers us!" Yelena smiled and clapped her hands in imitation of childish delight. "We were worried you'd forgotten, or that they'd brainwashed it out of you."

"No, I remember," said Nat. She felt the plane tilt again. "Where are we going?"

"You're smart," Yelena replied. "You figure it out."

Nat bit her lip. "Vladivostok," she decided. "Air Aurora flies there anywhere, so the plane won't stand out like it would in Khabarovsk or Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk."

"Good girl," said Yelena with a smirk. Nat clenched her jaw, but did not otherwise respond. Yelena had always been a gloater, and Natasha wasn't going to give her the pleasure of a reaction. "And what will we do with you once we get you there, smarty-pants?"

"I imagine you're going to take me to Moscow, where you'll either re-educate me, try me for treason, or just execute me," Nat replied. Any were a possibility... they might even try all three.

Yelena nodded. "We'll let Madame decide, once she's seen you for herself."

Natasha took a deep breath. She was going to escape from this, obviously, but she had to prioritize. "I have one condition," she said.

"No tricks," said Yelena. "No conditions."

"I want you to land in either Japan or South Korea, and let the passengers off before we go on," Natasha said. "If you do that, I'll come quietly. If you don't," she added, "I will fight you every step of the way."

"You're in no position to fight anybody, and definitely not to make demands," Yelena sneered. "How's it feel, Natalia?"

Natasha ignored the question. "Letting the passengers off won't take long, and I've got a friend who can arrange for you to refuel." Fury would do as she said if it would save the civilians on board.

"No friends," Yelena repeated. "No tricks, no conditions, and no requests." And with that she shut the bathroom door, leaving Natasha bound in the dark.