With Yelena gone, there were two guards outside Natasha's cell, a man and a woman. The man was a sailor, a stranger to her, but the woman... was that Eglė Mielkutė? It had been so long since Natasha had seen her, she wasn't sure. Her hair had been dyed brown, and there were scars on the right side of her face that suggested an accident or disease had left her in need of extensive plastic surgery. Whatever the cause, the scarring meant she would no longer be useful to the Red Room – not with a face so easily identified. Had she actually been shunted into the navy, or was she just here as a safeguard against Nat escaping?

Nat waited a little longer, humming to herself as she looked at the ceiling pipes and considered her options. The man pulled out a cellular phone and began to fiddle with it. After watching his fingers for a while, Nat decided he was playing some kind of matching game. A few more minutes passed, and then Eglė sat down on the bench across from the cell entrance and began checking her gun, clearly bored.

That was Natasha's cue.

Of course Yelena's beating had winded her. It had nearly knocked her out, and she had a splitting headache even now. But Madame and Yelena were both right – she wasn't nearly as badly hurt as she was pretending to be. She worried she'd overdone it with her staggering around on the deck, but having begun she hadn't dared to dial it down. By calling her bluff, they were baiting her. Natasha had already taken bait once today. She wouldn't do it again.

With that in mind, she began inching on her belly towards the toilet. It was the only thing in he cell besides Natasha herself and a couple of spiders in a corner. Hopefully she could do something with it.

"Hey!" The sailor got to his feet. "What are you doing?"

Nat pulled herself up onto the toilet seat and began taking off her hospital gown. With her hands and feet in shackles this was a difficult thing to do and required tearing a couple of the seams. She pushed the whole thing into a ball around her left arm.

"She's got something up her pizda," the woman sneered, and her voice confirmed Natasha's hunch – it was indeed Eglė.

"Stop where you are!" The sailor raised his taser between the bars and fired it.

Natasha's arms flashed up, and caught the electrodes harmlessly in the balled-up gown. Then she wrapped the wires around her wrists and pulled, yanking the weapon out of the man's hands before somersaulting forward. He was still too close to the bars, and it was easy to catch his arm between her bound feet and slam him hard against the metal. The first blow left him only stunned, so she did it twice more, and he crumpled to the ground.

She then looked up at Eglė. Eglė raised her own taser, but a moment later dropped it and pulled out her gun instead.

Nat turned herself right side up and pulled the soldier's half-conscious body up in front of her to use as a shield. It was awkward to do with her hands bound, but she managed it, and teased the keys out of his pocket with her toes. Then she shoved the body towards Eglė intending to undo her shackles while the other woman dealt with that.

Eglė fired twice anyway. One shot grazed Natasha just below the elbow, scratching the bone and bleeding profusely. The other missed entirely.

The sound of gunfire meant more people would be arriving at any moment, and Natasha was in no condition to fight several at once. She unlocked the cell door and swung around it like a pole dancer, kicking Eglė in the chin. The other woman stumbled sideways and fell against the wall. Nat landed on her feet and took the gun from her hands, then pinned her to the floor with the weapon against her temple.

"I saved your life once!" Eglė reminded her.

"No, you covered your ass," said Natasha calmly. "You didn't speak up until the fight had already started, and then only because you didn't want to get in trouble. If they'd smothered me, the next morning you would have insisted you'd slept right through the whole thing."

Eglė swallowed. She thought Natasha was about to kill her.

But instead, Nat scooped up the fallen taser and shot her with that. While Eglė writhed on the ground, Natasha got up and used the handcuffs to secure the door of the room. By the time they broke their way in, less than two minutes later, Nat had vanished. The sailor was groaning on the floor and Eglė Mielkutė was unconscious, dressed in the tattered remains of Natasha's hospital gown.


Natasha was familiar with the layout of the Tugarin Zmeyevich – she'd been aboard one of its sister ships before as part of a training exercise. That knowledge was going to be essential, because her escape would not be as simple as diving overboard and swimming to land, or even getting in a plane ad taking off. There were several things that had to be taken care of first.

Before she could do anything else, she had to deal with her bleeding arm. That would be a challenge. Getting to the infirmary wouldn't be a problem. There were over sixteen hundred people on board the aircraft carrier and they couldn't possibly all know one another by sight. As long as Natasha looked like she knew where she was going and saluted anybody important, nobody would give her a second look. But in the infirmary she would have to interact face-to-face with people who would already have heard about her escape. She'd be caught within minutes.

So she skipped the infirmary entirely and instead slipped into the women's dormitory. This was close and cramped, with bunks barely far enough apart for two people to pass one another. Everybody kept their eyes down, because being ignored was as close as they could come to privacy. Nat chose an unoccupied bunk and pulled the first aid kit out from under it, then headed for the washrooms, eyes straight ahead. Once there, she locked herself into a stall.

All the fresh water on a ship this big had to be recycled, and different batches would be used for different purposes. The Soviet navy had once liked to boast that it could turn sewage into drinkable water, but Natasha still wasn't going to use toilet water to wash out her wound. Instead, she stuck to the peroxide from the first aid kit, which stung but did the job. Once she was sure it was clean, she used more peroxide to sterilize a needle, and began sewing herself up.

It would have been nice to have a local anesthetic, but a moment after that thought occurred, she snorted at it. There had been a time when Natasha Romanov wouldn't have been at all bothered by the idea of tearing out her own fingernails. Now a few pinpricks were making her squirm. Maybe SHIELD really was softening her.

As she worked, an alarm began to blare. Attention! Attention! a voice announced in Russian. All crew are advised that Natalia Romanova has escaped from the brig. Be on the lookout. Romanova is one point six metres tall and weighs approximately sixty kilograms.

"Fifty-seven," Nat muttered, continuing to sew up her arm.

She has dark red hair and blue eyes, and may be dressed as a petty officer first class. She is armed and extremely dangerous.

Natasha tied off her thread, cut it with her teeth, and wound a bandage around her elbow. The announcement had told her what she now needed to do next: she had to hide her hair, and find some different clothing.

Since she was already in the washroom, a temporary solution to these problems was easily at hand. She discarded Eglė's uniform and grabbed two towels, one to wrap around her chest and one around her hair, as if she'd just come out of the shower. Then she walked casually back out into the dorm and chose an unattended foot locker. Hopefully it didn't belong to another petty officer first class.

It didn't – the locker contained a pilot's flight suit. It was a bit too big, but Nat did some tucking and rolling and tying of knots, and soon it looked fine. Black Widows were taught how to make clothes fit. She tucked her hair up under a knitted cap and put on a pair of aviator sunglasses, only for her stomach to lurch as she realized they had a prescription. For a moment she considered leaving them, then decided that hiding was more important than comfort. She didn't have far to go. She would cope.

One errand down, two to go. The second stop Nat had to make wasn't one she could avoid with improvisation and detours. She had to go to the main superstructure of the carrier – the island was the technical term – and get a look at the planes. The Tugarin Zmeyevich carried twenty Kamov K-27 helicoptrs and twelve Yak-38M fighters, all of them as outdated and rusty as their mother ship, but they'd have to do. The problem was that not all of them would have fuel or armaments on board. She would have to find out which ones did.

She found the main staircase and headed up to the deck. The sunglasses made the floor seem to bow up towards her, and she stumbled a bit on stairs that weren't where she expected them to be. When she stepped outside, she found it was a chilly, windy day in this part of the pacific, with low gray clouds overhead. The sunny weather around flight AA113 seemed like part of another world.

The prow of the Tugarin Zmeyevich was occupied by weaponry and equipment that made the ship both carrier and destroyer, and eliminating the need for an expensive escort like American aircraft carriers had. The flight deck was angled to port, and a few planes and helicopters were parked in the out-of-the-way spot in the lee of the island, leaving the runway clear. Nat's odds of being able to get a plane out of one of the hangars below decks all by herself were close to zero, so she would have to take one of the ones that was already out.

The island itself was several storeys tall, bristling with antennae and satellite dishes to watch the ocean and air around it. On the fourth level, facing the back where the planes took off and landed, was the row of windows that represented the equivalent of the control tower at a land-based airport. That was where Natasha had to go.

She jogged up a flight of stairs, ignoring the pain in her elbow and ribs as best she could. Like the infirmary, the control centre wasn't a place Nat could just walk into and take a look. The people who worked in there were a very small percentage of the ship's entire crew – they would all know one another, and if a stranger came in they would want to know why. When she reached the right level, Nat turned away from the door and instead went out onto the walkway for servicing the radar equipment. From there she climbed a ladder to the next level up, and stepped softly out onto the control centre roof.

This high above the deck, the pitching of the giant ship on the ocean waves was magnified. Combined with the distortion of the sunglasses it made Natasha feel downright ill, and she had to hang on to the ropes and railings as she worked her way to the edge. Part of her wished she'd forced herself to throw up as part of her show for Madame, just so she could have emptied her stomach.

At the edge of the roof she took off the sunglasses – their lenses would block her view of the polarized display screens inside – and chose a window that faced away from the sun. If it were to peek through the clouds, she didn't want to cast a shadow inside. She leaned over the edge, took a quick peek inside, and then straightened back up again.

That glimpse was all she'd needed. A man who must have been the chief flight controller had been having some kind of argument with Madame, who'd been pointing a finger angrily at the table in the centre of the room. People at the windows were going down checklists and talking on radios. Radar screens showed the positions of three other ships nearby – a Slava-class cruiser and two Sovremennyy-class destroyers, all heading in the same direction as the Zmeyevich. That was a pretty typical battle group. They were probably pretending they were just playing war games, but they would also have plenty of armament on hand if anybody came for their important prisoner.

Nat had also caught sight of what was on the table Madame was concerned about: a scale diagram of the flight deck and hangars, with plastic poker chips representing each plane and helicopter. The chips were marked with different colours to represent which planes had fuel, which had missiles, and which were in need of maintenance. The four Nat had seen waiting on deck were all in good repair, but only three had fuel and only one was armed.

Airworthiness and fuel could not be dispensed with. Missiles, on the other had, would be nice but weren't absolutely necessary, and the only plane that had them was right up by the island, boxed in so that she would have had to destroy one of the other Yaks to get it out. That stood a high chance of killing somebody who didn't need to die, so she decided to take the plane on the end. It would be the easiest to access and was already close to the beginning of the runway, giving her more time to get it fastened to the catapult.

Once in the air, she would have to immediately turn around and head astern to get away from the Zmeyevich and its escort. After outrunning their missiles, she could figure out exactly where she was and how to go where she needed to be.

As she climbed back down the island to deck level, Natasha was doing math in her head. The ship wasn't planning to launch any planes right now – it was facing the wrong direction relative to the wind, so a launch would require more thrust. At the same time, choosing an un-armed plane would reduce the weight. Both factors would affect the catapult settings.

Nat was on her way down to the below decks when she heard Madame's voice behind her. Evidently the woman had finished arguing with the people in the control centre and was now on her way to her own next errand. Natasha stiffened her spine and kept walking the upright, personality-less walk of a soldier. If Madame saw her, it was all over. Nat had fooled Madame once today, she knew better than to think she could do it again.

All she had to do was get to the bottom of the steps. She had to reach the first deck below, and turn aft – that was where access to the catapult mechanisms was. She still had the peroxide she'd gotten from the first aid kit, and a watch she'd stolen from the foot locker. Now she just needed an acetylene torch, a fire extinguisher, and a few other bits and pieces.

She made it to the bottom, but the sound of Madame's footsteps was still behind her, falling in and out of time with Nat's own pounding heart. Had Madame noticed Natasha? Was she following her? No, it couldn't be. Madame wouldn't just follow Nat, she would say something, or grab her, or just shoot her. But surely she would spot her at any moment. Madame had always told the girls that she knew them all by sight, by voice, by the way they smelled – and Natasha didn't dare to glance over her shoulder and check because she knew that if she met Madame's eyes, even in her nausea-inducing sunglasses, it was all over.

"Madame!"

Nat had been staring straight ahead as she walked – now her eyes focused. The voice was Eglė's. She was running up the hall towards Natasha, dressed now in a track suit of the sort of the sailors wore when working out on board. She couldn't help but see Natasha – and she did. The two looked right at each other, but then Eglė went right past to speak to Madame face-to-face.

"Madame," she said. "Petty Officer Yerokhin... Kamila's going to kill him! She thinks it was his fault Natalia escaped."

"Then let her kill him!" Madame spat. "I don't have time for this!"

Natasha kept walking. Eglė had seen her, but she'd deliberately passed her by to stop Madame from noticing her too. Why had she done it? Perhaps because Natasha had gotten an opportunity to kill her and had not – but Eglė had done more than merely refuse to turn Natasha in. She'd actively made it possible for her to escape. Had she just wanted to be able to say she'd saved Natasha's life and mean it? Nat hoped she'd get a chance to ask someday, but right now she could not.

She stopped in a maintenance storage area for some more materials, and then made her way aft. The catapult that flung the planes into the air from the deck of the carrier was controlled by sailors sitting in a room in the island, but the actual machinery was just below the ship's armored deck. Only the maintenance staff were supposed to be able to open the door, but Nat picked the lock easily, then closed it behind her and laid out her materials on the ground.

It took about twenty minutes to build and set the charge on a small bomb. Now Nat had another twenty to get up to the flight deck and into the plane, and get the plane onto the catapult. She synchronized the watch she was wearing with the one on her bomb – a kitchen timer shed found in the maintenance closet. By anybody's standards, twenty minutes was a ridiculously short time to do such a thing. Natasha could do it.

Attention, said the announcing voice. All crew are advised that Natalia Romanova is still at large. She is now believed to be dressed in a flight suit, knitted cap, and sunglasses.

"Shit,"Nat whispered. Eglė must have told on her after all, or else Madame had beaten it out of her. Or maybe she'd been spotted elsewhere. It didn't matter. What mattered was that she needed to rethink her disguise and get up on deck without using a normal traffic route.

The hat and sunglasses had to go. Nat left them in the maintenance room. A piece of cloth had been tied around a pipe at one point to mark something or other – she pulled that off and wound it around her hair like a kerchief. It didn't cover the red completely, but it would help. Then she smeared grease from some of the joints on her face and hands, and tore the name patch off her flight suit. Now she would hopefully look like a mechanic, which would also give her an excuse to be near the stowed planes.

Her head was still pounding. She told herself she was almost there.

At the end of the hallway on the starboard side was a hatch that led out onto a gun platform at the stern of the ship, just behind and below where the planes were sitting. If she'd done a bit more planning ahead, she thought, she could have sabotaged the guns so they'd have more trouble shooting her down, but there was no time for that now. Nat climbed over the railing up to the second tier, then the third, and then onto the deck itself. The plane she'd chosen was right in front of her. Two technicians were loading missiles into the tubes.

That meant she could take off with some weapons, but she'd have to get rid of these two men first.

They hadn't seen her yet, and the plane itself would hide whatever happened from most people further forward. Nat considered her options, then pulled the rag off her hair, grabbed the nearest man from behind, and stuffed the cloth into his mouth so he couldn't cry out. Then she hooked her feet into the railing that surrounded the deck and swung him down, tossing him into one of the lifeboats stowed there. She then clung to the railing, ignoring her aching ribs and waiting.

"Hey, Dvornikov," said the other mechanic, "can you pass me the quarter-inch socket?"

Naturally, there was no reply.

"Dvornikov?" The second mechanic looked up, but all he saw was the toolbox, sitting alone on the deck. Startled, he ran to the edge and squinted down into the water, as Natasha pressed herself against the side of the ship to stay out of his line of sight. "Dvornikov!" he shouted, then turned to run back towards the superstructure. "Help! Help! Man overboard!"

As soon as he was twenty feet away, Nat slithered up onto the deck and scooped up the socket wrench he'd dropped. It looked like about the right diameter for what she'd need, and would save her the trouble of searching for the correct part. Then she grabbed the wing of the plane to climb into the cockpit. She could feel a stitch pop in her elbow and blood trickle down her arm, but she settled herself into the pilot's seat.

Now for the hard part. She had to get the plane into just the right place, and she would not get a second chance – the moment the engines started she would have enemies all over her.

As she messed with the plane's wiring to start the engines, she felt a change in the vibration within the aircraft carrier itself. Somebody must have listened to the second mechanic's cries for help, and they were changing course so they could stop and look for the missing Dvornikov. Somebody was probably going to be really angry when they discovered him safe in the hanging lifeboat.

That might be an opportunity. Nat waited a few more seconds, and sure enough, she heard a helicopter engine start somewhere on the far side of the island – they were launching one of the Kamovs to search for the fallen crewman. That was exactly the distraction Natasha needed, and now she had less than five minutes left. She fired up the engines, and the Yak's old wings creaked as they moved from their upright storage position into the horizontal flight configuration. There was room on the left, where the deck ended, but on the right it hit the plane next to it, knocking it nose-first onto the deck.

"Oops," Natasha said to herself.

That would have drawn attention with or without the helicopter launch. Nat had to move immediately. She taxied forward, getting the plane into position above the catapult – a tiny leak of steam hissing out of the track in the deck showed her just where she needed to be. But the alarm had been sounded now, and soldiers were running to surround her. Somehow she would have to get out and attach the plane to the shuttle, but how?

She only had one missile and she wasn't going to fire it now. Was there ammo in the plane's guns? There was only one way to find out. Nat activated the gun pod, took careful aim between the soldiers, and fired at the base of the superstructure. Bullets peppered the steel, their armor-piercing points going through it like butter. Had anybody been in there? Were they now hurt, or dying? Natasha hadn't had a choice, she told herself... she had to get out of here.

It worked. The soldiers ducked and ran for cover. Natasha grabbed a piece of twin and a bible that were sitting around in the cockpit and rigged those to keep the firing button down while she swung out to attach the plane to the catapult. Only a minute left.

To her relief, Nat found she'd managed to hit almost exactly the spot she needed. She slid the shuttle back a bit and went to push the socket wrench through the holes, but before she could get it in, somebody jumped on her from behind.

Natasha automatically rolled onto her back to crush her attacker, but whoever it was held fast, trying to pry the wrench from her hands. Nat tried to flip backwards, but the person wouldn't let her move. The arms holding onto her were in a white blazer, and she could see an orange and blue scarf flapping in the wind. This was one of the widows who'd been on the airplane. The hands were too pale to be Kamila, so it had to be Yelena. When Nat turned her head a bit, still fighting to keep her crip on the tool, she saw Kamila running to join them.

Her watch was counting down. There was no more time. In a moment the plane would take off without her.

She pulled as hard as she could on the wrench, forcing Yelena to pull back in order to hang on to it. Then Nat let go, and Yelena's arm snapped back. Natasha rolled off her, grabbed her short brown hair, and forced her head into the steam hissing out of the gap in the deck.

Yelena screamed and clutched at her face as it was scalded. Nat snatched up her wrench again and stood, just in time to face Kamila. She hit her across the face with a backhand stroke, sending her staggering away to the right, where she fell and rolled off the deck into the ocean. With her last few seconds, Nat forced the wrench into the shuttle, grabbed the edge of the wing, and swung herself back into the cockpit in a smooth gymnastic motion that popped several more stitches in her elbow. The sleeve of her flight suit was stained dark red. Nat reached to close the cockpit bubble.

It was too late. The ship shuddered underneath her as the bomb she'd left on the catapult mechanism exploded, and Natasha was pushed back into her seat as escaping steam hurled the plane into the air. The wind drew tears from her eyes, but she managed to grab the control stick and bring the nose up as she went off the ski-jump shaped end of the runway into the air. While gaining as much altitude as she could, she turned around to head aft. Her plane was to make a wide circle around the carrier and its escort.

But she'd forgotten the Kamov that was already in the air. It was gaining altitude to follow her, and might well have missiles on board. Nat had to speed up, but she couldn't do that until she had the canopy closed. In order to close it, she had to put the jet on autopilot and stand in her seat to pull the acrylic bubble down against the howling, two hundred mile per hour wind.

The first time she tried, she missed. The second time she managed to grab it, but when she tried to pull it shut the wind ripped it out of her hand again. On the third try, she put all her weight on it and braced her knees against the underside of the dashboard controls. It took every muscle in her body, but she dragged it shut and locked it.

Not a moment too soon. Nat pushed the stick forward to gain speed at the same time as a warning blared in her ears. The helicopter had fired a missile.

Natasha veered sharply left and dove, almost skimming the surface of the water. The missile tried to follow the heat of her engines, impacted the water, and exploded. She turned and headed back up again to get a look a the damage she'd done.

The aft deck of the Tugarin Zmeyevich was billowing steam and the plane that had fallen when the wing hit it was now on fire. Figures were spraying it with firefighting foam. The forecastle was crawling with activity as sailors and soldiers prepped the ship's armament to fire. Natasha would have to outrun them.

She checked her controls. GPS data was coming in: she was not far from the island of Tonga. The carrier, which must have been ordered out to these waters specifically as part of the plan to capture her, had been heading Northwest. To get to Vladivostok would have taken it about four days. Nat's stolen plane was heading southeast, and if she kept that heading she would reach Chile in a few hours.

But Natasha wasn't going to Chile. Natasha had to catch up would Aurora Air flight 113. If she'd wanted, she could have just left Laura and the children to die. Clint would never know – but Natasha would, and it wasn't a knowledge she could have lived with.

She turned south, and pulled a map out of the plane's glove box to chart the course she'd need. If she passed over New Caledonia, she could use the island's long axis to orient herself in the direction the 747 had been going last time she'd seen it. The jet had a two or three hour head start on her, but her Yak was twice as fast. Hopefully she could catch up somewhere over Indonesia or the Philippines, but she would have to find the damned plane.

She grabbed the radio. "This is Natalie Rushman calling Pacific Control in Guadalcanal," she said. "Natalie Rushman calling Pacific Control in Guadalcanal, can you hear me? Espinoza?

"Rushman?" his voice came through immediately. "Is that you? Where are you? We expected you over an hour ago. What are you doing?"

"It's a long story," said Nat. A cliché, but a useful one. "I'm now in an old Soviet Yak-38 trying to catch up."

"What?"

"I'll explain later," she said. "Right now I have to find AA113. Where is the plane? Can you give me its probable current position and heading so I can plot an intercept?"

"Uh, I can try," said Espinoza. Natasha heard the sound of shuffling papers. "Gimme a minute." He must have taken his headset off then, because there were only distant, muffled sounds as he spoke to somebody else in the room. A few seconds passed.

Then a warning light came on. The Tugarin Zmeyevich had launched a missile, an M11 Storm with a much longer range – and much greater power – than the rockets fired from the Kamov. Its internal radar had her in its sights.

"Just a sec!" Natasha shouted into the radio, in case Espinoza came back at that moment. She tried the same maneuver that had thwarted the shot from the Kamov, performing an aileron roll and almost crashing into the water, but the Storm was maneuverable and designed to catch aircraft that were trying to evade it. She tried to think fast – there was no ammo left in her guns, but she did still have her own rocket on board. She hoped the technicians had finished the process of arming it. She turned around and got the Storm in her sights.

As soon as the computer showed it locked, she fired.

The two missiles collided in midair with an enormous fireball, close enough to shake the Yak so that Nat had to fight to control it – but then the smoke cleared, and it was over. She quickly resumed her heading away from the carrier. If they fired another shot, she was now out of ammo.

"Hello? Rushman?" asked Espinoza.

"Hi!" said Natasha.

"What are you doing?" he repeated. "Look, your American friend's guys here say I should do as you ask, but what the hell is going on?"

"I'll explain when I'm not running for my life from forty-year-old missiles!" said Natasha. "Where is AA113?"

Espinoza rustled some more paper. "We had a radar target that we thought was the plane. It passed North of us over an hour ago. I can give you its position and heading, but we've already lost it."

"That'll do," said Natasha. Yelena had said she'd set the autopilot to fly out over the Indian ocean, where the plane would crash when it ran out of fuel – Natasha checked her watch and realized it had been in the air nearly ten hours. From starting with fuel for probably around fourteen, the margins were getting a little thin. If they were too far from land when she caught up, she would have to ditch the plane in the water. "Lay it on me."

"Look, even if you catch up," Espinoza said, "you can't board a plane in midair."

Natasha laughed out loud – if he'd only known. "Don't tell me what I can and can't do," she said. "Just give me the coordinates."