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CHAPTER THREE
Thor & Spider-Man
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Isla Perdida was a large flat rock in the Caribbean Sea, east of Belize and north of Honduras, twelve miles northwest of troubled island nation San Felipe. In the 17th Century the British Navy turned it into a fortress. In the 19th Century it was converted into a prison, shut down and abandoned in the 1930s. In 2014 a multinational consortium renovated the original stonework structure with concrete and steel to build an industrial complex, adding four covered dry docks for shipbuilding.
In the year and a half since, nothing came out. Despite a constant influx of steel, plastics, machinery, electronics, and hundreds of tons of other materiel. Not so much as a widget.
Two months ago Nick Fury found out why. It was building helicarriers. Four of them.
Images and plans smuggled out of the island facility showed their design was a couple of model generations old, probably pieced together from encrypted fragments of technical schematics exposed when Black Widow uploaded Hydra's (and SHIELD's) secrets to the internet. Conventional weaponry, turbine hover engines, nothing to compare with Project Insight, and still a couple of years to completion. But more than enough technological and tactical advantage (not to mention firepower) to destabilize an entire geopolitical region if they were delivered to a rogue nation. Or worse, an ambitious non-government entity.
The government of San Felipe didn't have the political will or the military strength to shut down the facility or evict the multinational consortium. The Honduran Navy's task force of coastal patrol craft — and the Cuban Revolutionary Air and Air Defense Force squadrons that followed — were no match for the combined firepower of four helicarriers, temporarily installed around Isla Perdida before the keels were laid down. Mexico, Venezuela, and Panama policed shipping in the area while the United Nations Security Council debated which countries would take what actions to counter the nascent threat.
Fortunately, the Sokovia Accords (heavily revised since adoption) allowed the Avengers to deploy at the invitation of a sovereign nation's recognized government, with the additional approval of all bordering nations. It took less than a week to get all the papers signed and filed.
But none of the countries involved would allow Hulk within a hundred miles of their airspace. So Doctor Bruce Banner was in San Francisco consulting with Doctor Henry Pym about the possibility of using shrinking technology to separate the gamma-irradiated factors from his tissues and cure his condition. Hank was uncharacteristically gentle when he explained why it wouldn't work. Bruce was characteristically generous when he made a couple of suggestions that might reduce the cellular stresses of size transition.
On Isla Perdida, Thor and Vision took out the weapons emplacements while Iron Man and War Machine engaged the aerial combat craft. When the shooting was done, War Machine, Winter Soldier, and Wanda Maximoff (they really needed to come up with a call sign for her) kept surrendered workers and captured guards on the north dry dock; Falcon provided first aid to the injured. The rest entered the maze of the industrial complex by pairs to root out remaining guards, workers, and bosses: Iron Man with Hawkeye, Thor with Spider-Man, Vision with Captain America, War Machine with Black Widow.
Thor and Spider-Man fought sixteen guards, all wearing heavily padded riot gear, all wielding ion pulse guns and shock rods, to get to a freight elevator. They watched the numbers above the button panel count down, agonizingly slow to both heroes after the adrenaline pumping action a moment before.
Thor addressed his partner in arms. "You did well, young Spider-Man."
"Thanks!" He was genuinely pleased. Most of the other Avengers prefaced their compliments with instruction or critique, but Thor was generally content with success. His counsel generally came after praise (or during training). When it seemed Thor had no notes for him, he continued, "And you were great, too!" Thor suppressed his amusement. "The way your hammer knocked those six dudes in the air, then it came back and smacked them all again before they even hit the ground... Half those guys didn't know what hit them..."
"Ha! 'Twas Mjolnir." He held the hammer up, spun it in his grip.
"We should wait for them to wake up and be like, 'Hey, how's your head? This is Mjolnir, and he knocked you out!'"
Thor chuckled politely. "A fine jest." He considered his young teammate. He opened his mouth to speak, but stopped. A moment later he did speak. "Let's do 'Get Help'."
"Okay!" Spider-Man paused for a beat. "What's 'Get Help'?"
A wry smile spread slowly across Thor's face, from right to left.
"It's great. It works every time. You'll love it."
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The elevator descended to the deepest level of the complex, where four guards retreated and regrouped, now hoping to sneak or fight their way to a boat or an aircraft. The doors opened to reveal not the empty car they hoped for, but Thor holding Spider-Man's sagging form to his side. Mjolnir sat on the floor behind them, apparently discarded for the moment. The god of thunder pleaded with the heavily armed and fully armored guards, two in the lead and two in the rear.
"Get help, please! My friend is dying! Help him! Get—" he bodily threw Spider-Man's body through the door at the guards, "—HELP!"
Spider-Man jumped as he felt Thor begin his throw and shifted his weight so he went at the surprised guards head first, his arms stretched out in front of him, rather than spinning haphazardly. He gripped each of the two armored figures in front by a pauldron, used his power to cling rather than his strength to grab, pulled as hard as he could.
Thor casually extended a hand behind him, keeping his eyes on his improvised projectile, as Mjolnir leapt into his grasp.
The two lead guards lunged forward to keep their footing. They were stable enough anchors for Spider-Man to add some momentum even as he swung his legs to the front, curling them to his chest, but not so sturdy they weren't propelled in the other direction.
Thor transferred Mjolnir from one hand to the other, held it still as one of the lead guards ran into the hammer helmet first, spun a two hundred seventy degree arc in the air to land flat on his face, then lay still and concussed on the floor. The other lead guard he caught by the breastplate, fingers crushing the metal-infused polyethylene to create a handhold.
Spider-Man kicked both legs forward and out, struck both of the rear guards squarely on their chest plates, sent both flying backwards. He flipped, landed in a crouch, caught one of them with a web-line. He yanked him back into a body check, sent him tumbling up and back down hard enough that when he hit the ground he stayed there.
Thor put some of his body weight into throwing the second lead guard at the second rear guard, just scrambling back to his feet, trying to bring his ion pulse gun to bear. The armored figures wrapped around each other on impact, then fell apart as they slid a few yards across the floor. They were either unconscious, or they both simply decided they were done for the day.
Spider-Man sprang up, bouncing with excitement. "Works! Every! TIME!"
Thor beamed, pleased by the ease of their teamwork and the enthusiasm of his young comrade. Now that is how you do 'Get Help'!
"Classic!"