"Who the hell are you?" Natasha demanded.
The other woman looked at the syringe in her hand, and then at Nat's arm – the needle had broken, and was still embedded in her flesh. She must have realized she couldn't deny it, but she dropped the syringe and put out her lower lip. "I didn't drug you," she said.
"Then what did you do?" asked Nat. She was trying to take stock of her body and her reactions, but it wasn't much good. She was already so exhausted that it was difficult to tell what might be a drug and what might just be that she already felt like she'd been thrown into a threshing machine.
"It's to take a sample, not to inject," the woman said. "We knew Black Widows would be on this plane. I was to obtain a blood sample, so that we could analyze the steroids they give you."
Natasha's immediate reaction was a derisive snort: steroids had nothing to do with it! A moment later, however, her brain made the connection – she knew who, or at least what, this woman was. The first Hu Xian had started appearing in the late 80s. These were China's attempt to create its own version of the black widow program, and their spies had spent ears trying to wheedle their way into the Red Room and get a hold of the USSR's work on bio-enhancements. Hu Xian themselves weren't super-soldiers, or at least they hadn't been the last time Natasha had news about them, but they were lethal assassins.
Not being drugged was good news, but even so, Nat knew she couldn't handle another fight right now, not against a trained opponent. She wasn't even sure she could handle landing a plane. She'd almost managed to reason with Triinu, maybe she could reason with this woman.
"Can you fly a plane?" she asked.
"No." The Hu Xian looked honestly surprised by the question. "I have rescue waiting."
"Then let me do it," said Nat. "Once we're on the ground, I'll give you the sample you want, and you can go. I won't turn you in, but I need to save these passengers, okay?"
The Hu Xian was not impressed. "They warned me you would try to trick me," she sad.
"I'm too tired to trick anybody right now," Nat said. "Let me land the plane. Once we're on the ground, I'll go with you to Chongqing and you can take all the samples you need, but let me save the passengers. That is the only thing I am asking of you."
The woman glared at her a moment, then grabbed her wrists with both hands. "You under arrest!" she said, in broken English.
The passengers had gathered around, crammed into the narrow aisles or peering over and between the seats, while Natasha and the Hu Xian talked – but few if any of them had understood a word of the conversation. Now, as Nat tried to free her hands from the other woman's grip, the stewardess pushed her way to the front of the crowd and tried to separate the two. "What do you mean, she's under arrest?" she asked.
"I don't know what she's..." Nat began.
The Hu Xian ducked under Nat's arm, twisting it up behind her back, and forced her to her knees. It was a lock Nat knew how to get out of, but the other woman had unfortunately chosen her somewhat battered left arm to work with, and the pain made her vision momentarily blank out white. When she became aware again, five or six people were holding on to her while the Hu Xian spoke calmly to the stewardess.
"I am federal agent in China." The woman pulled out a badge and waved it, then put it away before anybody could take too close a look. "We are looking for plane thief, knocks out the passengers with drugs and sells plane to third-world countries. Passengers mean nothing." She glared at Natasha. "We find her."
"That's not true," said Natasha calmly. There were three people hanging onto her – two large blond men who looked like they might have been brothers, one in a Ghostbusters t-shirt and the other in a Hunger Games one, and a hulking Asian man who looked like a sumo wrestler even if he wasn't actually one by trade. She could have taken any one of them if she'd had any mobility, but at the moment, she did not. If the Hu Xian wouldn't see reason, however, maybe these men would. "Listen to me," she said to them. "I'm..."
"You're who?" the Hu Xian interrupted in Cantonese. "What are you going to tell them? That you're a former Soviet agent who now calls herself a superhero? That will sound twenty times more absurd than my story!"
"Fuck you!" Nat replied in English. The men had her by her arms and shoulders, but her legs were free. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she lashed out to wrap them around the woman's neck. Nat no longer cared who she had to kill in order to get there. She would snap the Hu Xian's neck and then she would damned well land this plane.
But she'd forgotten about the passengers themselves. Half a dozen more, with the terrified stewardess, ran in to save the Hu Xian and help hold Natasha down. These people were frightened and a lot of them were probably still feeling ill from the effects of oxygen deprivation. They knew they were on a plane with no pilot and were afraid they were going to die. If they overpowered this woman they'd been told was a threat, that was an action they could take to save themselves. When the only known alternative was sitting there impotently waiting for the fuel to run out, being able to do something was a powerful motivation.
"Can anybody else here fly a plane?" Nat shouted as they dogpiled her. She already knew the answer – if anybody could, they would already have been in the cockpit. If there had been any trained pilots among the passengers, the widows had probably killed them along with the crew. "Let me try! Does it matter where I'm going as long as..."
The sumo wrestler put a hand over Nat's mouth. Automatically, she bit it. He reacted, probably just as automatically, by kicking her in the face. Something in Nat's nose went crunch, and she tasted blood.
"Tie her up," the Hu Xian ordered. "I will call Interpol and arrange to have the plane escorted to landing." She unzipped her purse and took out a cell phone.
She had rescue waiting, she'd said. She was going to take Nat and bail out, leaving everybody else to die.
"Stop!" a new voice shrieked.
Nat looked up, blinking through a haze of red, trying to figure out why the shout had sounded so familiar. She couldn't see the speaker, but a figure was shoving its way through the gathered passengers.
"Get out of my way!" the voice ordered, "or I will stab you with my knitting needles, and then I'll be really mad, because blood stains!"
Natasha laughed out loud, startling the people holding on to her and thoroughly confusing the stewardess. "Coca cola!" she called, licking blood from around her mouth. "How many times have I told you? Coca cola within ten minutes destroys the protein before it can bond with the fabric?"
The figure finally made it to the front, and there was Laura Barton, looking like a small, furious guardian angel in a home-made blouse, with her knitting standing in for a flaming sword. "What is wrong with everybody?" she asked. "Don't you read the newspapers?"
"Ma'am, return to your seat," said the Hu Xian. Her accent had evaporated, Natasha noticed.
But Laura wasn't the sort who blindly obeyed orders from anybody – not her husband, not SHIELD agents, and definitely not complete strangers. "Are you blind?" she asked. "This is the Black Widow! She saved all your lives in New York just a week ago and now you're going to throw her in jail? She's here to save us!"
The urge to laugh was stronger than ever. It must have been the exhaustion, but somehow it seemed really funny in that particular moment that what was about to save the day was not fighting or super-heroics, but a much-needed cold splash of Ohio farm wife common sense.
"Well, who's she?" the man in the Ghostbusters shirt asked, in a strong Aussie accent. He pointed to the Hu Xian.
"This is ridiculous..." the Hu Xian began.
"You learned English pretty quick, didn't you?" Natasha broke in. "She's some kind of spy who's here after me. I don't care what happens to her as long as you keep her out of my way. I have to land the plane." She looked around at the people holding her. "Do you guys mind?"
"Let her go," Laura ordered.
"Hold her!" the Hu Xian insisted, her English suddenly broken again.
"Can anybody else here fly a god-damned plane?" asked Nat.
That, finally, got through. One by one, reluctant, the men released Nat and set her back on her feet again. Laura hurried forward to give her a wad of kleenex for her broken nose while everybody else, including the Hu Xian, simply stared.
"Can I get that sandwich?" Nat asked the stewardess.
"Get her a bag of ice, too, if there's any left," Laura added.
The woman nodded and hurried for the nearest kitchen area.
"Sit down and put your head between your knees," Laura ordered, helping Nat to do so. "What are you wearing?"
"A Russian navy flight suit," said Natasha. "It's not the worst choice of clothing I've made today. Never mind that, though." Despite the instructions to keep her head down, Nat looked urgently up at her friend. "Are you okay? What about Cooper and Lila?" Natasha had been there the day Lila was born. The last thing she wanted was to think she'd been elsewhere when the girl died.
"We're fine," Laura promised. "The kids are asleep – I told them Dad would come for us." The fact that Clint had not in fact shown didn't seem to bother her at all. Natasha was just as good, if not better. "I have a screaming headache."
"That's the hypoxia," said Natasha. "You'll feel much better after a good night's sleep." The stewardess came with the sandwich and ice. Natasha thanked her and took several big bites, forcing them down her throat with bottled water, while Laura put the ice on the back of her neck to restrict the blood flow to her broken nose. "I need your help, Laura. You can fly that crop dusting plane, right?"
Laura was horrified. "I can't fly this!" she protested. "I shouldn't even fly the duster, because I don't have a license. Believe me, if I trusted myself with the plane I'd have landed it already!"
"Okay, okay!" Nat put a hand on her shoulder. "Deep breaths. Landing is complicated and I'm really tired," she said. "I need a co-pilot I trust. You already have some idea what you're doing, so I'll talk you through the rest."
"Talk me through it?" Laura stared. "Talk me through landing a 747?"
"It's not any harder than delivering a baby cow," Nat promised her.
Laura blinked, then laughed. "Okay."
Natasha finished her sandwich and grabbed another water bottle as Laura helped her to her feet. The passengers didn't try to intervene again as she made her way forward – maybe they were just too confused. The Hu Xian seemed to think her moment had passed, and was hanging back, perhaps plotting her next move. Nat decided she didn't care, as long as she was allowed to land the damn plane. "Yelena told me she put a bomb on the hydraulics so we won't be able to land," Natasha said as they climbed the stairs to the cockpit. "But it looks like the autopilot's kept it on course for the past few hours, so I think she lied to piss me off." The widows' mission had been to bring back Natasha, and destroying the plane would be totally unnecessary to that. The Red Room didn't waste resources. "Why hasn't anybody tried to contact the ground?"
"Have you seen the dashboard on this thing?" Laura asked. "Nobody dares touch it."
At the top of the steps was Business Class. There were passengers there, too, but they didn't seem to be aware of what had just happened in Economy. Some were praying. Others were crying. A black woman was reading stories to three children, two of them white and one Filipino. An elderly man was sobbing over the body of his wife, unconscious in her seat, while a male flight attendant held his hand. Natasha stopped to talk to him.
"What happened?" she asked.
"She realized there was no pilot," the flight attendant explained. He offered Natasha a napkin, on which someone had written I'm sorry, I don't want to die in a plane crash. "Her husband said she's on phenobarbital. Apparently she took the whole bottle while he was in the washroom."
"How long ago?" Natasha asked.
"Maybe an hour and a half?" The flight attendant shrugged.
Laura nodded. "Go to the galley," she said. "Mix mustard and salt with water and force her to drink it – that'll induce vomiting and get rid of any drugs that are still in her stomach."
"Then just keep her breathing," Nat put in. "If there are any un-used oxygen masks give her one of those. If you can continue getting oxygen to her brain until we reach help, she should survive."
The flight attendant nodded. He patted the husband's hand, then got up to go to the galley.
"Any other emergencies up here?" asked Natasha, looking around.
There was no reply. Nobody knew what to make of her.
"Who are you?" one of the children asked. "Are you the pilot?"
"Yes, she is," said Laura. "She's here to land the plane."
They pushed aside a few pieces of the broken door, and Nat sat down in the pilot's seat. The controls were intimidating, but it would be fine when Laura had her attention in the right places. Natasha was going to need the help. Having something in her stomach made her feel much more awake, but she'd still had a hell of a day and would be prone to making bad decisions. She needed somebody to double-check.
"You sit there," she told Laura, pointing to the co-pilot's chair. "The QRH – quick reference handbook – is hanging on a hook there. It has instructions for emergency procedures. Other stuff I'll tell you how to do. It's not as hard as it looks."
"Right," said Laura, clearly terrified.
Natasha did up her seat belt again. Hopefully the Hu Xian had enough sense to stay put, but Nat didn't want to count on that. She knew perfectly well that survival instinct could and sometimes did take second place to a mission. As with her own colleagues, she had to retain control of the airplane at all costs. She put on the headset, and flicked the radio on.
Immediately there was an electrical smell. Nat quickly reached and turned it off again.
"What was that?" asked Laura, eyes wide.
Then there was a bang. It felt like going over a pothole in a car – there was a sudden jerk, and the plane began to list to the right. People screamed in the cabin as half a dozen warning lights came on in the cockpit, including one to tell them that the number three engine was on fire.
Natasha cursed. Of course – of course Yelena had hooked her bomb into the electrical system, to be activated when somebody tried to call for help, because Yelena Belova was, and had always been, a sadist. Nat didn't know if it were because she'd witnessed the horrors of Chernobyl at the age of two, or if she'd just been born a psychopath... right now it didn't matter. But god, Nat hoped she never saw Yelena again, because if she did, she would not be responsible for what came next.
"Natasha! Nat, what do I do?" asked Laura frantically.
Nat tried to steer the plane out of its roll, but it didn't want to respond. She checked the dashboard, and her stomach dank. There were three separate hydraulic systems on the plane to run the steering. It shouldn't be possible for all three of them to lose pressure at the same time, but the engineers who designed it had been thinking of random accidents and failures, not vengeful black widows with bombs.
First things first. Prioritize. "Get the flight manual," Natasha ordered. "Find instructions for shutting down the number two and three engines." Only number three was on fire, but shutting down number two as well would keep the thrust even, and she had an idea how she might be able to steer.
Laura flipped through the book. "Here it is! I found it!"
"Give it to me." Nat grabbed it and began working through the checklist. "You take this." She grabbed the radio and turned it on again – hopefully all bombs had already gone off, and the radio itself had only been a source of electricity and was not damaged. "If you can, call Mayday and ask for the nearest runway. We don't care what country it's in. Air Traffic Controllers all speak English."
Nat winced a little as she hit the radio switch again, but this time it seemed to work just fine. That was a small mercy. She found the frequency she'd used earlier to talk to Espinoza. "Try now. Mayday, identify us as AA113, and state what's wrong."
Laura licked her lips. "Uh, Mayday. This is AA113. We just had a bomb go off on board and we need to land."
There was no answer. Natasha continued shutting down the bad engines, and nodded at Laura to try again.
"Mayday!" Laura repeated. "Can anybody hear me?"
"AA113," said a voice with a thick Spanish accent. "This is Manila. I can hear you."
"Oh, thank god!" said Laura. "Um, this is AA113, we just had a bomb go off on board and we need to land! It's an emergency!"
There was the sound of machinery winding down. The warning that number three was on fire stopped beeping, but the plane was still listing to the right. The rudder must be stuck. Now that Natasha had the same thrust on both sides, however, she throttled back the remaining left engine so that the right one could compensate for the rudder hardover. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, but then slowly, the plane began to settled back into level flight.
"Okay," she said aloud. So she could steer. Not very well, but it was a start. Next problem – they were gaining altitude, when they ought to be losing it.
"We can get you a runway in Laoag," the control tower said, and called out the numbers for the new heading. "Runway is twenty-four hundred metres. Is that enough?"
Laura looked at Nat.
"It'll have to do," said Natasha.
"Yeah, that's fine," Laura said.
"Tell them we need emergency vehicles." Natasha moved the throttles to try to turn the plane left.
It didn't work. With the rudder stuck, even with the right wing engine at maximum and the left at idle, the airflow would not allow a left turn.
Nat forced herself to keep thinking. If she couldn't turn thirty degrees, then she would have to turn three hundred and thirty. She throttled up the left engine again, and the plane began making a long, lazy loop to the right.
Now they were losing altitude again. Without the hydraulics Nat couldn't control the elevators any more than she could the rudder, and could do nothing about the plane's pitch. It had gained altitude as it gained speed when she adjusted the engines, but now they had less power and it was falling. Left to its own devices, the aircraft would continue to bob up and down in sinusoidal motion as lift and gravity alternately gained the upper hand.
But gravity always won in the end. They needed to get to the ground as soon as possible.
"Ask them for our position," Nat said. "We need to know how far away we are."
Laura nodded. "Uh, control? Where are we?" she asked. "Can you see is?"
"Affirmative, 113," said the controller. "You're not a pilot, are you?"
"I can fly a crop duster," Laura said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. "My friend is flying the plane. She's a pilot. I'm just doing the radio stuff so she can focus." Her voice said that she desperately hoped that was all Nat intended to ask of her.
"All right, tell her you're northeast of Babuyan," said the voice. "About three hundred kilometres from the airport."
The plane was moving very slowly for a transoceanic jet because of the need to stay at low altitude. Three hundred kilometers would take them nearly forty minutes, and without pitch control, they didn't have that kind of time. "Ask him what the weather's like down there," said Natasha.
What had the people in Economy thought of the bomb? Had they decided it was proof that Nat was the bad guy after all? Might they be up here at any moment to remove her from the pilot's seat?
"My friend wants a weather report," Laura said.
"Twenty-seven degrees Celcius at Laoag," said the voice. "Humidity ninety-two percent, winds five kilometers per hour. Clear skies, zero chance of precipitation."
High humidity and low winds would mean calm seas, Natasha thought. That was good. "All right," she said. "We'll try for Laoag. If we can't make it, we'll have to ditch in the ocean." She glanced at Laura, who nodded. Nat didn't really think they had a realistic chance of getting there, but pretending they did would help Laura stay calm.
It wasn't a pretense she could keep up for very long, however. As the plane slid down the next slope of its roller coaster ride, Natasha spotted islands in the sea below them, and tried to arrange them on a mental map. That would be Babuyan right in front of them, and several more specks of land in between themselves and the big island of Luzon, where the airport was. Laoag wasn't on the north coast, through – once over Luzon, they would still have seventy kilometers to go.
That wasn't acceptable. They needed to land now. The longer they were in the air, the less control Nat had over the plane.
"Are we gonna make it?" asked Laura. She sounded like she knew what the answer would be.
Nat shook her head. "We're in the water," she said. "The way we're going up and down, I don't trust us not to crash on our way in to Laoag. Let them know."
Laura nodded. "My friend says she's going to land the plane on the ocean. We won't make it to the airport."
"Understood," said the tower. "We'll get everybody out of your way."
The man sounded calm, because like any pilot or air traffic controller, he had been trained to stay calm. Panic helped nobody. But he would understand the same thing Natasha did – that water landings in large aircraft were all but impossible. It was the angle of approach that was the problem. If she came in too steep, the engines would be the first thing to hit the water, and the drag they produced would bring the whole plane to a stop so suddenly it might break apart. Too shallow, and the tail would skim the water and tear off, letting water in and drowning everyone on board. The angle, she knew, was eleven degrees.
"Natasha," said Laura. "Something's happening."
Nat looked out the window, in the direction her friend was pointing. Something was happening, but it was hard to say what. The water ahead of them looked strange, as if something were emerging from it. It took a moment, but Nat recognized the effect. She was watching adaptive optics shut down. A hellicarrier was decloaking.
Quickly, she switched the radio to a SHIELD channel and grabbed the handset from Laura. "Helicarrier, this is Agent Romanov!"
"Good to hear from you, Natasha," said the voice of Nick.
She grinned in relief. "Pleasantries later. Right now, I need a favour. I need you to get right in front of us..."
"Right in front of you?" Fury interrupted. "Natasha, you can't land an airliner on a carrier."
"I know. Let me finish," she said. "I need the... the thing." The word escaped her. "The thing with the lights that gives planes the angle of approach."
There was a pause. "You mean the glide slope indicator?" asked Fury.
"I've had a long day," said Natasha. But yeah. I need you to set it up to indicate eleven degrees."
"It does three degrees," said Fury. "That's the angle to land on a carrier."
"I need eleven for a water landing," Natasha replied calmly.
"The gyros are designed to stay at three no matter what," Fury pointed out.
"I. Need. Eleven," Natasha repeated. "Why are we talking about this? I don't have time to talk."
She could hear muffled voices in the background, but not what they were saying. As they got closer to the island, Nat felt her stomach sinking... after all this work, could it really end in disaster after all? But then Fury returned.
"Chiba says he can do that," he said.
"Then get him out there!" Nat ordered.
The carrier moved slowly, directly into their path, and then rotated so they could pass over the deck as if to land. The sun was starting to set, but that wasn't a bad thing – the low light made the glide slope indicator easy to see.
"Okay, Laura," said Nat. "We're gonna have to control our angle with the throttles. You take the right, I'll take the left. Now, look down there." She pointed to the carrier in the sea ahead. "See that line of lights on the left side of the deck?"
"Yes," said Laura.
"Those tell us if we're coming in at the right angle," Natasha explained. "If they're all in a row, we're fine. If the middle one is below the level of the ones on either side, we need to speed up, so push your throttle forward. If it's above, we need to slow down, so pull it back. Make gentle adjustments, and try to match mine as closely as possible."
"Got it," said Laura. "I need to send a text message." She pulled her phone out of her pocket and quickly sent a text... to Clint, probably, Natasha thought. She wondered what it said. One of those plane going down, I love you texts, most likely. Laura didn't think they were going to make it.
"We'll be fine," said Natasha. "I promised you I'd get Clint back for you, remember? You haven't seen him yet, so I'm not done. I always finish what I start."
Laura put her phone away. "You've been working on that Orenburg shawl for four years," she said. "You keep starting over!"
"I'm not on a deadline for that," Natasha reminded her. "Fury," she said into the radio. "Have you got the glide slope for me?"
"The whatchamacallit is doing the thing," he replied.
"You're really funny, Grandpa," said Nat. "Here we come."
The plane wobbled like a top as the two women did their best to adjust the throttles in unison. Once or twice one of them went too far, or not far enough, and a wing dipped. No warnings went off when this happened, but people in the cabin would cry out, and Laura kept frantically apologizing. The helicarrier grew larger in the windows, at once terrifyingly fast and agonizingly slow. The altitude alarm began to blare again: terrain ahead! Pull up! Terrain ahead! Pull up!
As they passed over, Natasha could see Jim Chiba on the deck of the helicarrier, yelling at a group of men who were manually holding the glide slope indicator in place. Wasn't he scared? If something went wrong, the jet would come down right on top of him! It made Nat feel rather bad about calling him a coward earlier.
Laura turned on the PA system. "Okay everybody!" she shouted. "Get your seat belts on, put your heads down, and make sure you know where the emergency exits are!"
Nat smiled – Laura Barton was the type who actually listened to the safety briefing before the flight. She was probably quoting it directly.
"Brace for impact!" somebody screamed in the Business Class cabin.
"Oh, god, we're gonna hit the carrier," said Laura.
"No, we're not," Natasha told her.
"Yes, we are!"
"No, we're not! The carrier's superstructure is no more than a hundred and fifty feet above the water line. We're at five hundred feet!" Natasha insisted.
"What if a wing dips?"
"Don't let it happen!"
They passed over the carrier. There was no more help now – this was actually the most dangerous part of the landing, but Natasha smiled at Laura.
"Told you we'd make it," she said. "Now, here we go."
The ocean loomed closer and closer. It was very hard to judge scale from the waves... was that white bit a speck of rubbish, a floating gull, or a distant whale? The altimeter said one hundred feet.
Fifty feet.
Twenty. Natasha shut the engines off. They could do nothing more with them, and having them on would just mean damaging the plane worse, with risk of a fire, when they landed.
Five.
The tail entered the water first, and the drag forced the nose down. Water rushed up over the windshield. Laura screamed and ducked her head. The seat belt cut into Natasha's shoulders. For a moment it seemed as if they would go straight down. Were they doomed to end up lying on the bottom of the ocean waiting for their air to run out? Then they broke the surface again with a splash, and bobbed gently. They were floating.
Natasha breathed out. "I told you we'd make it," she said to Laura. "Aren't I always right?"
"Clint says so," said Laura. "But he also says I'm always right."
"That's because he's smart enough to listen us the women," said Natasha. "Let's get the passengers off."
Laura nodded and pushed her hair back from her face. "Ladies and gentlemen," she said on the PA. "Please make your way to the nearest emergency exits. Instructions are on the cards in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of you! If you have any questions, please ask your flight attendant." She took the headset off. "When I was little I wanted to be a Stewardess," she said. "It seemed like the most glamorous job in the world... flying all over the place and serving champagne!"
"Why didn't you?" asked Natasha.
"Because I wouldn't have had any time to work on my garden," said Laura wih a smile.
Natasha nodded. "Priorities."
