While Jarvis would have been relieved to know that the radio blackout was caused by Thor's arrival, rather than by the destruction of the helicopter, the actual situation on board hadn't improved very much.
"The Kraken?" asked Agent Wheeler. "Isn't that something out of a Disney movie?"
"Nay, Lady," Thor said. "I fear it is real indeed."
Tony could have sworn he heard Steve mutter, "I was in a Disney movie once."
As if to reinforce Thor's point, a gigantic tentacle rose from the water and whipped through the air towards the helicopter. The lower surface was covered with giant suckers, while the upper was studded with scaly armor plates that curled into giant hooks, all shimmering with an unearthly bioluminescence. Thor threw the door open and hurled Mjolnir at the tentacle. It hit in a spray of blue liquid and the appendage snapped back, shaking like a slapped wrist – and astonishingly, that was all that seemed to happen. The Kraken was discouraged, but not harmed.
The hammer flew back into Thor's hand, and he shouted to Tony and Rhodey in the front seat: "do not linger here! Fly!"
Rhodey didn't wait to be told twice. He put the helicopter back into a steep climb and wheeled around to take them back towards land. As they banked in the air, everybody got a glimpse of the Kraken's huge, gelatinous body sinking back into the foaming water.
"Sweet Jesus," said Agent Wheeler softly.
Once he was sure they were out of tentacle range, Tony took another look at the radio, hoping he could re-establish contact with Jarvis and assure him and Pepper that everybody was all right. He was disappointed: Thor's electric arrival had fried the radio completely, along with half the instruments. Rhodey was flying by sight. All Tony could do was sit back and curse the coast guard protocols that had forbidden them from bringing their cell phones.
"Where did that thing come from?" Agent Wheeler demanded of Thor.
The god sat down between her and Steve, forcing them to both move over until they were squashed against the doors. Steve had offered him the last set of soundproof headphones, but he hadn't taken them – it seemed that despite the noise of the helicopter he could hear just fine, though he did need to shout over the din. "The kraken once haunted the deeps of Asgard," he said. "This one was the last, the eldest and most cunning of all. It used to set upon our ships and destroy them as it has yours, until I, along with my most trusted friends, took it upon ourselves to destroy it. Long we hunted it, and after a great and terrible battle we flung the monster from the branches of Yggdrasil to land in the seas of Midgard. There, by great effort, we buried it in the crater of a volcano, in hopes that the heat would destroy it.
"Alas," he went on, "the Kraken was mightier than the mountain. Its thrashing burst the volcano at its seams, and it was again unleashed upon Midgard. In the end we conquered it by guile rather than force. We summoned Baldr, the sweetest singer in all the nine realms, to lull it to sleep with his music. Only then could we seal it away at last. We hoped it would lie undisturbed beneath the stones of the sea bottom until the world's end – only to see you drop a bomb upon its resting place!" He glared at Tony.
"It's not like I did it on purpose!" Tony protested. "We were trying to stop a tidal wave, and insofar as we managed that, I think we did okay!"
"We can figure out who's to blame later!" said Steve. "It's a kraken, fine. How do we kill it before it hurts any more people?"
"It is a creature of Asgard!" Thor declared. "No mortal weapon can pierce its armour! The Lady Sif blinded its eyes in the battle, but it hears the slightest sound, and it guards its vital parts well. I have seen this same beast pluck a bilgesnipe from a cliff and tear it in half!"
So much for Tony's theory that their little explosion had injured the animal. Apparently all humanity had done was interrupt its nap and then annoy it by filling the ocean with noisy boats and oil rigs. "All right," said Tony, "we tried it on our music and it wasn't a fan, so can you get us in touch with this Baldr guy, Thor?"
"I cannot, for he is now many years dead," Thor said regretfully.
"Well, that's inconvenient," Tony grumbled. Putting the Kraken back to sleep would only be a temporary solution, anyway. Somebody else could always come along with another bomb later. They'd have to kill it.
Thor seemed to think this was well-nigh impossible, and Tony had to admit, an animal that could survive being buried in a volcano was probably about as close to indestructible as anything could get. But it was still an animal, presumably made of flesh and blood, or at least of flesh and blue stuff. Thor had said it guarded its vital parts well, but that implied that it did have vital parts.
Eyes were an obvious weakness on most living things, but if the Kraken were already blind then that didn't do a whole lot of good. Ears might be a good target on an animal that couldn't see, but they'd have to find them first, and Tony had no idea where a squid's ears were. As far as cephalopod orifices went, actually, the only one he was sure he could locate in a pinch was the mouth – and since that would be a snapping beak in the middle of the ring of tentacles, it really wasn't a promising possibility.
"Wait," Steve said suddenly. "Colonel Rhodes, we're not going back to Los Angeles, are we?"
"That's where I'm headed," said Rhodey. "Did you have something else in mind, Captain?"
"This thing hunts by sound!" said Steve. "It could be following us. We can't risk leading it into a populated area!"
Rhodey clearly hadn't thought of that – neither had Tony. "Well, if anyone's got any other ideas, let's hear 'em," Rhodey said. "Quickly, because we're going to reach PSR soon."
PSR stood for point of safe return – the last moment when they would have enough fuel to reach land from where they were. "It needs to be somewhere we can get in touch with home from," Tony said. "We have to let people know what's going on."
"But somewhere no civilians will die if that thing follows us," Steve insisted.
Agent Wheeler had an idea. "Alcatraz!" she said. "It's a fortress, and we'll be able to call out from the visitors' centre!"
"No," Tony said. "Alcatraz is in the middle of San Francisco Bay." That would put the Kraken within easy reach of not one but three major urban centres.
"Right," Rhodey agreed, "if it got tired of trying to get to us, it would be right on the city's doorstep. How about San Nicolas?" That was one of the Channel Islands, where the Navy had a small training facility and airfield. "It's sixty miles out from Los Angeles, and it'll have some firepower to try to hold the creature off."
"Sounds good," said Steve.
Nobody else objected, so Rhodey altered course. "San Nicolas it is."
The fact that Rhodey was able to find San Nicolas island flying without instruments made Tony wonder if he counted as a superhero. Without the radio they couldn't call ahead to let the Navy know they were coming, so it wasn't surprising to find armed soldiers waiting to greet them as they touched down on the base helipad. Steve took charge of the situation: he climbed out, shield on his arm, and saluted to the welcome wagon. The men promptly straightened up and returned the gesture, relief written plainly on their faces. Within minutes, the group from the helicopter was being introduced to the man in charge, Lieutenant Commander Park.
"Captain Rogers!" he said, saluting. "It's an honour to meet you, though I wish I'd been notified..."
"Thank you," Steve replied, "but I'm afraid this isn't a pleasure visit. We've got an incoming hostile."
"We suspected as much ever since we were told about the Van Buren," Park said with a nod. "What are we looking at?"
"I think we'd better let Thor explain," said Steve.
Steve, Thor, and Rhodey stayed behind to brief Park and the other officers, while Agent Wheeler and Tony were escorted to the nearest building so they could make phone calls. Wheeler earnestly tried to convince her superiors at the FBI that there was indeed a sea monster and she had seen it, while Tony called Pepper.
The phone didn't even ring – it went straight to her voicemail. "Oh, come on," Tony said out loud. "A time like this and you don't have your phone on?" Usually the only time she turned it off was while she was driving, but then he remembered that they'd all been up most of the night; most likely she'd just forgotten to plug it in and now the battery was dead. He left a message, explaining what had happened and asking her to please pass the news on to Jarvis, because Tony didn't know his phone number. Maybe Steve had the right idea after all, he thought, as he hung up: he should have written down the numbers of the new phones he'd bought. As it was he wasn't even entirely sure which area code they used.
"Are you finished, Mr. Stark?" asked the woman who'd brought them to the phones. Her nametag and stripes identified her as Ensign Mazurski.
"Yeah," said Tony. "Thank you."
She nodded. "Then I've been asked to take you and Agent Wheeler to a safe place. Our seismograph is recording increasingly intense tremors, and if the Kraken finds the island we don't want civilians getting hurt.
"I'm not a civilian," Tony protested. "I mean, I'm not a soldier, either, but come on. I'm Iron Man! There's gotta be something I can do." But as he spoke, he remembered Jarvis' helpless protest: you are not Iron Man without the suit.
"Do you have your suit with you?" asked Mazurski. For a moment Tony thought she was being sarcastic, but then he realized it was an earnest question. She was looking at him as if she expected him to pull it out of his wallet.
"Unfortunately, no," he admitted. "It's at home, and... well, my computer is down."
Mazurski was visibly disappointed. "Then you'd better come with me. There's a bunker beneath this building where you two can wait out any fighting."
"Thanks," sighed Tony.
The Ensign showed them down a flight of stairs and into what turned out to be an underground shelter capable of holding hundreds, designed as a place for VIPs to hole up in case of a nuclear attack on Los Angeles. Tony and Wheeler were escorted into a quite nice furnished room, part of the officers' apartments. Wheeler crossed to the nearest chair and sank into it, exhausted.
"Is your life always like this, Stark?" she asked.
"Mostly," Tony replied. "How about you. You work for the FBI – you must see some pretty weird stuff, yourself."
"Nothing nearly as weird as the whole sea monster bit," said Wheeler.
Tony chuckled. "That's cute."
"What's cute?" she asked.
"That you think the sea monster is the weirdest thing that's happened to me this week."
Wheeler thought about it a moment, then shook her head. "I don't want to know."
They waited in the bunker for some time. The room was large and well-lit, and the decorator had gone to some trouble to make the furnishings match those in the administrative building above – but to Tony's discomfort, there were no windows. The only windowless place where Tony was really comfortable was his workshop: that was a thoroughly familiar environment, one that was entirely his own and in which he felt completely safe. But other enclosed rooms, especially ones where the lighting was dim, or where he knew he was underground, dredged up unpleasant memories. It wasn't exactly claustrophobia – nobody with real claustrophobia could have worn the Iron Man suit – but it made his chest feel tight, and he became nervous and fidgety.
Now, locked in with Agent Wheeler and perhaps two dozen civilian staff members and visitors who had to be kept out of harm's way, Tony could feel the effects of the confinement setting in immediately. He found himself breathing shallowly, as if afraid there wouldn't be enough air, and fighting the urge to pace like a caged lion. It had always annoyed him when Dido paced. He wasn't going to start doing it himself.
Instead, while other people read magazines, played cards, or held quiet conversations, Tony sat next to the radio so he could talk to Steve, Thor, and Rhodey upstairs. He began obsessively checking his watch every couple of minutes, which didn't help much – time was moving at a crawl, and every time he looked at the numbers he thought about the transponders he'd installed in his watches to help quell Pepper's constant worries. If Jarvis had still been in the computer, he would have been able to locate the signal at once and reassure Pepper and himself that Tony had made it to a safe place.
"How are we doing, guys?" Tony asked, for at least the fifth time.
The voice that answered was Rhodey's. "We're still watching the seismograph." The naval base didn't have the mapping technology on had that would allow them to pinpoint the Kraken in real time, as Jarvis had been able to do. Instead, they had to estimate the animal's distance from the island based on how strong the tremors were.
"Is it still coming this way?" Tony was sure somebody would have told him if it weren't, but asking killed time.
"Affirmative," said Rhodey.
"Roger that." Tony sat back and tapped his fingers on the table. This was the thing he hated most: a situation he could do nothing about. Tony had spent the last few years of his life refusing to be a victim: not of the Ten Rings, not of the government, not of Vanko, not of Loki. But now, all he could do was sit here waiting for this ridiculous sea monster to pay a visit, and it made him want to punch something.
The worst part of all was knowing that this was, at least partially, his own damn fault. Jarvis had seemed to be blaming himself, but Tony was the one who'd turned his offhand remark about an opposing wave form into an actual plan. If anybody could be said to be personally responsible for waking the Kraken, it was Tony – and when Tony made mistakes on that sort of scale, he liked to be able to go out and fix them, or at the very least punch them in the face a few times.
Guilt is a terrible emotion, Jarvis had said, understanding it for the first time. He was right. It was.
Tony let a few more minutes go by. "Guys?"
"Nothing new up here," was the immediate response. Steve this time.
"Right."
Nobody was sure how fast the Kraken could move. Thor had gone on about it being 'fleet as the leaping dolphin' or some similar nonsense, but while that made great poetry, it didn't give them an ETA. It had seemed to respond very quickly indeed to the music, but maybe it just really, really hated rock n roll. Maybe it didn't see a reason for hurrying now that nobody was blaring Black Sabbath in its sensitive ears. Or maybe it had lost interest in them when the helicopter landed and shut its engines off.
That was a worrying possibility. Assuming the Kraken had ever tried to follow the helicopter at all, now that they were on the ground it could only have a very general idea of where it was going. Maybe it had gotten lost. Some of the other Channel Islands had resorts and research stations on them. Those would have been evacuated in preparation for the tsunami, but after the warning was cancelled, people had probably already started coming back. Without a sound to guide it, the Kraken could end up on any one of those islands – or it could easily pass right by them and move on to the biggest source of noise for hundreds of miles: the city of Los Angeles.
"Guys," Tony said again.
"Tony, it's been thirty seconds," said Rhodey. "We'll let you know if..."
"No, Rhodey," said Tony, "listen to me: we want to draw this thing away from the mainland and towards the naval outpost, remember? Well, we're all hunkered down here quiet as mice, while the city's full of machines and traffic. If we want to keep its attention, we're going to need to make some noise."
There was a brief silence. "Shit," Rhodey said quietly. "You're right. Give me a sec, I'm gonna go talk to Park."
After that, all Tony could hear for a few minutes were muffled voices – one was definitely Rhodey's, and there were a few loud declarations that could only be Thor. Steve might have put a few words in, but the conversation was far enough from the microphone that it was difficult to tell. All Tony could say for sure was that a hurried discussion was happening.
Finally, Rhodey's voice returned. "Okay," he said, "there's a weapons testing range at the northwest end of the island. We're gonna set off some explosives and see what happens. You guys might hear some bangs."
"Thanks for the warning," said Tony. He sat up straight and tried to stretch a kink out of his back, wincing when his shoulder protested at being rolled all the way up. He felt a bit better now – at least he'd managed to make some kind of a contribution.
It took about ten minutes, according to Tony's repeated watch-checkings, for the Navy to put together a few small bombs. Despite what Rhodey had said, the people in the bunker didn't so much hear the explosions as feel them. With each distant blast, the ground trembled slightly, and Tony could feel his bones vibrating in time with a sound too low for his ears to pick up. That was good, he thought. Low frequencies propagated further, particularly in water. The Kraken wouldn't be able to miss them.
After a sequence of five deep, shuddering booms, a voice came on the radio again. This time it was Steve.
"How's it going?" Tony asked eagerly.
"I think we're getting results," Steve replied. "At least, their seismologist says the tremors are getting closer. It all looks like wiggly lines to me. I wish we had Jarvis' map."
When this was over, Tony thought, he would have to look at the software Jarvis had put together and think about possible applications for it. How would you pay royalties to an artificial intelligence, he wondered. "What's the estimated distance?"
"Not sure," said Steve. Tony heard him pass the question on to somebody else, who started to reply – only to be cut off by another low, throbbing impact. It could have been another explosion – but the tremor seemed just a fraction of a second too long, and vibrated at a lower pitch that made Tony's insides feel rather uncomfortable. His heart jumped behind the arc reactor.
"Was that another bomb?" he asked.
"I don't think so," said Steve. "I'll just..."
It happened again – once, twice, and then three times in quick succession. Over the radio Tony heard the sound of distant shouting, followed by a thunderclap that could only be the firing of some large-calibre weapon. It seemed the Kraken had only needed a nudge in the right direction. Now that it had found them, the fight was on.
"I'll keep you updated when I have the chance!" Steve promised, and then was gone.
The waiting had left Tony antsy and frustrated. Knowing that there was a battle outside, being able to hear it over the radio and occasionally feel it in the ground and yet not being able to join it – that was infinitely worse. People on this island were going to die. It was true that they were soldiers who were willing and able to defend themselves, though a sea monster probably hadn't been the type of enemy they'd had in mind when they enlisted, but Tony was still angered by his own inability to protect them. He should have been out there. If he'd only had one of the suits he could have engaged the Kraken himself, led it back out to sea, maybe spotted one of those vital parts it supposedly guarded so well. He could have done something.
Fuck Dr. Strange! Tony was supposed to be Iron Man. He'd taken it upon himself to protect people from a dangerous world he'd helped create, but now, in exactly the sort of situation he should have been in the thick of, he was cowering underground with the civilians like a mouse under a cupboard. The Iron Man suit was what allowed Tony to live up to his responsibilities, to fix his mistakes, and the sorcerer had snatched it out from under him – for the sake of what? Tony was starting to appreciate what Strange might have been getting at about Jarvis, but right now he didn't need life lessons about friendship and respect for all sentient beings. Right now Tony needed his damn suit.
Big man in a suit of armour, Steve had once sneered at him. Take that away, what are you? The real answer, it seemed, was 'nothing much'.
The noise and tremors of the battle were getting fiercer now, and the other people in the bunker were getting nervous. Agent Wheeler seemed to have pulled herself together and was trying to keep everybody calm, promising them that the US Navy and two superheroes – it should have been three – were up there looking out for them. Tony stayed sitting by the radio, drumming his fingers and tapping his feet in frustrated impatience. Why couldn't there have been a video uplink? What the hell was the government spending all those billions in defense dollars on? If Tony had to be stuck down here during the action, he would have liked to at least be able to watch.
Suddenly, the entire bunker shook as something impacted directly above them. People shouted and grabbed the furniture for support as the lights swung and two ceiling panels dropped to the floor. Had that been the Kraken, or were they under friendly fire? There was a second, even bigger impact, and then a third so violent that it threw Tony out of his chair. The lights flickered and went out, plunging the room into pitch darkness. People pulled out cell phones and flashlights, and the arc reactor suddenly seemed very bright. Somebody was crying. More ceiling panels came down.
"Everybody take cover!" Agent Wheeler ordered. "On the floor, close to the walls, cover your heads!" There were shuffling sounds as people obeyed. Tony crawled under the radio desk and curled up with his arms over his head. At least the administrative building above them was only two storeys – it wouldn't be like getting trapped under tonnes of debris from a skyscraper. As long as rescue workers could get to the island, survivors would stand a good chance of being found quickly.
There was another impact. Material rained own from above and then, with a terrific slow-motion crash, the entire ceiling collapsed. Tony pulled his shirt up over his face just in time as the room filled with a choking cloud of dust. The sounds of splintering, groaning, cracking, and smashing went on and on and on, before finally fading out into an ear-ringing silence, punctuated by the sounds of coughing and sobs.
The first time Tony tried to open his eyes, there was still too much dust in the air, thick and stinging and lit up ghostly blue by the arc reactor glowing through his shirt. He quickly covered his face again, his eyes streaming, and waited a few more seconds. This time, when he peeked out from under the radio desk, he found a shaft of dingy grey sunlight seeping down from above, just visible around the edges of a twisted mass of concrete, rebar, and destroyed office furniture that had fallen on top of his hiding place. He was trapped.