by Dan Abnett
The limousine burst through the bridge abutment and cleared the towpath at a height of six meters. Trailing debris and the tatters of its tailpipe system, it plunged headlong toward the broad, calm river far below.
TWO
69˚ 30’ SOUTH, 68˚30’ WEST
07.26 LOCAL, JUNE 12TH
IT WAS a long drop.
He came tumbling and spinning out of the floor hatch into the shocking cold and turbulence.
Below him, dense cloud cover. Below that, uncertainty.
Hawkeye had performed several HALO drops in his career—but always with prep, and never in an emergency.
He hadn’t even had time to strap on the drop-pack properly. It was hooked over one shoulder, the other set of harness straps flying and snapping in the ferocious air.
Get it on, get it fixed, get it secure. Stabilize…
He was spinning, inverting. The air slammed against his face. No mask, no respirator. He couldn’t breathe. He spread his arms and legs, trying to control his free fall. Slipstream was trying to rip the drop-pack off his back. He fumbled, caught the flying straps, and managed to cinch them around his other shoulder.
Burning debris and plumes of whipping black smoke streaked the sky around him. Whatever had hit the Quinjet had taken it out of the sky, bursting through the hull and then shredding it. Surface-to-air. A missile. Rotating, he glimpsed the Quinjet’s nose cone flaming like a comet into the cloud banks, drizzling dirty smoke.
Did she get out, too? Please, God, let her have gotten out, too…
He hit the clouds. Visibility cut. He was dropping through an icy void of soft white, but it felt as though he were suspended, motionless.
Arms out, Barton, legs out. Belly down, chin up.
How long did he have? Twenty seconds? Thirty? He had no altimeter, and he didn’t know how high up the Quinjet had been flying when it was hit. If the cloud cover was low-lying, he might reach the ground at any second. He wouldn’t even see it coming up at him.
The pressure was intense. He couldn’t hear because of the wind-chop in his ears. Droplets of blood from one nostril were flicking up across his cheek and eye. He felt like he might hurl. That wouldn’t be a good look. Not heroic at all…
The drop-pack wasn’t a ’chute, not even a compact HALO version. It was a one-use lifter unit based on repulsor technology developed by Stark Industries. “Oh, a jet pack,” Barton had laughed when Stark first showed the units to the Avengers. He’d gotten a scowl in return. Not a jet-pack. Just a device to “slow and soften a terminal descent.”
If he activated it too early, it would burn out its fuel cell, and then he’d be falling again. If he activated it too late…
Give me a sign, he thought.
Hawkeye fell out of the bottom of the clouds; with a sudden shock, visibility returned. The landscape yawned below him. A vast mat of dense green vegetation. A slanting horizon. A dappled, yellow sunset sky that washed a golden cast over the view. The glitter of threading rivers. The twinkle of the faraway Gorahn Sea. The rough-tooth gray line of the Eternity Mountains, ghostly in the distance.
The jungle below was dense. Really dense. Before the attack, they’d been circling the Quinjet trying to find a viable landing zone. Hitting the tree canopy was going to hurt, drop-pack or no drop-pack.
A meteor streaked past him, dragging flames behind it. One of the ’jet’s engine pods. It shot diagonally through the sky and impacted in the forest below. There was a bright flare, and a boom he could hear despite the wind. He could see fire in the impact-hole the burning junk had made in the tree cover.
He realized how fast the ground was coming up. Where was a flier when a guy needed one? Where was Thor or Iron Man?
Yeah, where the hell were they? Before the missile strike, he’d been flying for over an hour without base contact.
He reached for the center of the harness, found the activator stud, and pressed it. Nothing happened. He began to thump the harness stud frantically, as though he were giving himself CPR. Come on! Come on!
Damn you, Stark! The damn thing isn’t wo—
Then he realized it was. The repulsor lift was so quiet he couldn’t hear its throb over the buffeting wind. He was floating, drifting downward like a seedpod.
He angled himself feet-down. Okay, this was better. This was working. This, he could handle.
He hit the trees anyway.
Branches ripped and snapped at his face. Creepers tore. Leaves whipped against him. He glanced sideways off a tree bole with winding force and felt the bark rake his skin. The suddenly gloomy air was full of dust, leaves, insects, debris. Tumbling like a rag doll, he felt like an idiot. Where was his famed acrobatic skill and grace now?
He hit another branch. Then another. He cursed in anger and pain and inadvertently swallowed a leaf. Choking, he fell farther, glancing off large trees, smaller trees, cross-branches, and creepers as thick as anchor chains. Limbs flailing, he shredded through veils of hanging moss. The drop-pack, choked with leaf fiber, shut down.
He landed on a bed of ferns, bounced, ricocheted off a mossy boulder, and landed face-down on swampy ground. Then, and only then, the drop-pack restarted, raising him a foot off the forest floor as if he were levitating on his belly.
It died again. He fell on his face.
Silence. He exhaled, and then sat up coughing, spitting out bits of leaf.
He was alive. He’d left his dignity somewhere up in the tree canopy, but he was alive.
Hawkeye got up. He took off the dead drop-pack, told it what he thought of it, and tossed it.
The glade was still. Cycads and ferns grew thick and alien all around him. Massive, gnarled trees festooned with trailing vines and creepers lofted up into the green darkness overhead. There were sounds: the babble of a nearby stream, the buzz of insects, the croak and warble of amphibians, the continuing crack and flutter from the damage his plunging form had done to the trees.
It was humid. He was sweating. He was dirty. He tried his comms, but the link was dead air. He activated his locator bracelet, and the green LED began to wink. He pulled the scanner from his belt pouch and panned it around, three-sixty. No traces. Nothing.
No sign of her. Please god she made it out and down alive.
He started to walk, but the terrain was not walking-friendly. Boulders, rocks, mire, roots, dense foliage. He drew his game knife and used the serrated edge to carve a path. His hands became sticky with sap. He saw bugs: bright beetles like enameled mechanisms, coiling mud worms, a centipede as long as his forearm that made him grimace in disgust. Microscopic flies billowed around his head, searching for his mouth, his nostrils, his tear ducts.
“Hating this,” he said out loud. He looked up and realized he was standing underneath a web. The silk was so fine that it looked like smoke. The web was strung between tree trunks and spread as large as a tennis net. Up in the shadows of some leaves, he saw the thing that had made it. Black, eight legs, hairy, the size of a German Shepherd.
He got out from under the web. In this neighborhood, definitely not friendly.
Hawkeye felt like he was being watched. The hunter’s internal sense. He kept a firm grip on the knife. Where are you...?
Nothing. He clambered on. Sunlight fell in bright beams through the tree cover, piercing the emerald twilight.
Something moved ahead of him. He saw leaves tremble. He ducked into shadows, his back against the thick bole of an ancient tree. He waited, barely daring to breathe. Whatever it was, it was coming closer. He waited, the knife clenched in his hand. It was time for the bow. He needed the range. But he didn’t want to move to pull it out of his quiver.
He waited. Something tickled his cheek. He angled his eyes down. A scorpion, green as guacamole and the size of his hand, was crawling down his face and onto his throat.
Not now, not now…
Leaves parted. Something came into view. It was big.
It was a duckbill: a bipedal dinosaur the size of two cars. He didn’t know the f
ancy scientific name. Hadro-something. He did know it was a herbivore. It was huge and solid, with a domed back, hunched over on its massive hind legs while its smaller forelimbs delicately searched the ground cover for delicious treats. Its head was low, and sniffling, burbling, wet breath grunted snottily from its nostrils. Its heavy tail arced out horizontally as a counterweight to its frame. Its eyes were big and placid, like a cow’s eyes. It smelled like a damn cow, too—like a barnyard. Something sweet and rotten, fleshy, gassy. He could hear the contents of its vat-like stomachs gurgling as they fermented and digested.
Slowly, he reached up with the knife and flicked the scorpion off his collar. He breathed out.
The duckbill raised its head slightly, as if noticing him. It stared for a moment, and then went back to its grazing. It broke wind, sounding off like a trumpet.
“Nice,” he said.
It wasn’t alone. Two more adults followed it, and then a pair of juveniles. They were all feeding.
He moved. They all looked up at him.
“Don’t mind me, folks,” he said. They lowered their heads.
He checked his comms again. Still nothing. Had he busted the unit on landing? He started to undo the pouch to take a look.
The duckbills suddenly froze.
The adults sat up and raised their heads, listening or scenting. Their murmuring and snuffling had ceased.
What the hell had they heard?
They started and broke, moving amazingly fast back the way they had come. They crashed through the undergrowth with unmistakable fear, scooting the juveniles along with them. One of the adults made a strange warning sob in its throat.
The hell?
Hawkeye sheathed his knife and unslung his bow. It was a carbon composite, custom-made, with a 250-pound draw weight. It was a perfect piece. He quickly checked the tension, then activated the toggle on the handgrip that allowed him to remotely select arrowhead loads from the automated quiver on his hip. He spun up three: two standards and a blunt. Friend or foe, bases covered.
A scream ripped through the glade. It was an awful sound, like the noise a pig might make getting stuck—an almost-human expression of pain. It came from the direction the duckbills had been heading.
Hawkeye tensed. He nocked a standard arrow, the other two laced and ready between the fingers of his draw hand.
A raptor burst from cover on the far side of the glade and charged him, whip-tail up, head down, jaws open. Its long, powerful hind legs drove it forward faster than a cheetah at full stretch.
It had been stalking him, ready to pounce. It was about his height, but twice as heavy and a hundred times as fast. A total killer. Its jaws would easily sever his neck while its forelimbs gutted him.
Hawkeye drew and loosed. The leaf-tipped arrow struck the charging raptor in the sternum, but didn’t stop it. Hawkeye nocked and loosed again, burying a second arrow beside the first. The blunt was the only shaft left in his hand. He fired that, too, smacking the dead-weight arrow into its throat.
Then he sidestepped. The raptor churned past him, rammed into the tree, and fell dead on its side. Leaves shimmied down like confetti.
Hawkeye said something colorful. He spun up more arrows fast. There were two things he knew about raptors:
They were total killers.
And they hunted in packs.
His bow was raised before the second one charged. This time he aimed for the hind legs. Damn thing couldn’t run if its legs didn’t work. He put two leaf-tip shafts into the muscle of its right thigh, and the raptor went down snapping its jaws and thrashing its long tail. Hawkeye moved aside to avoid its sickle-like hind claws.
A third one broke cover, then a fourth.
“Damn it,” Hawkeye snarled. He put a leaf-tip through the right knee of the first one and then another into its brow as it went over. The fourth raptor was almost on him.
The blast arrow hit the raptor in the chest and turned everything from its belly up into a red mist of bloody scraps.
Frantically, he spun up more shafts. Blast arrows. Blast arrows were good. The fifth member of the pack appeared, sprinting for him. So damn fast!
Hawkeye’s legs were smashed out from under him, and he landed on his back. The raptor he had felled with the arrows to the thigh was still thrashing around in a frenzy, and its tail had swept under him. He lay prone and helpless as the raptor snapped at him viciously. Saliva flew from its chopping jaws.
Rolling away, he fired on his side. Not an ideal shot, but needs must. The blast arrow went down its gullet, and the explosion showered Hawkeye with meat.
But the fifth raptor was on him. It leapt the last few meters like an Olympic long-jumper, the sickles of its hind feet raised to eviscerate him as it landed.
There was a rapid, deafening volley of nine-millimeter gunfire. The shots knocked the leaping raptor sideways out of the air. It crashed into the undergrowth, shredding the thicket with its death spasms.
“Just going to lie there all day?” asked the Black Widow.
She stepped into view, a smoking automatic in each hand. Her red hair looked as dark as blood in the green gloom.
He got up.
“Just thought I’d take it easy for a while, Natasha,” he replied. He didn’t want let on how relieved he was to see her alive.
She paused, and shrugged.
“Welcome to the Savage Land,” she said.
“Gee, thanks.”
“Your locator’s working?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Mine’s not,” she said. “Knocked out in the jump. Did you think I was dead?”
“No.”
“You did. I can see it in the look on your face. You were worried.”
“No.”
She grinned. He started to recover the retrievable arrows.
“You know what brought us down?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Missile,” she said.
“I got that much. Your comms work?”
“No. I think we’re in a dead spot.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Kinda worried we didn’t hear anything before we were taken down, though.”
“It is a concern,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
They moved through the forest. “I saw it as I circled ’round to find you,” she added.
“Saw what?”
“You’ll see. The missile means someone knows we’re here, and that someone doesn’t want us here.”
“Kinda why we came in the first place.”
“With any luck, someone’ll think the missile did its job and we’re dead,” she replied.
“With any luck.”
“This way,” she said.
They clambered up the huge, slumped trunk of an ancient tree. A stream of ants the size of crayons was moving in a marshaled convoy along the dead bark, carrying neatly snipped leaves. From the tree, Hawkeye and the Widow jumped onto a ridge of boulders, climbed their lichen-covered surfaces higher still, and eventually halted on the summit of the ridge, looking out across a deep valley in the forest.
There were bright-yellow buildings below them, a clump of large, modular structures that looked like linked cells. A hangar and landing pad were attached at one end of the modular row, and a razor-wire fence that seemed to be supported by force-field poles surrounded the site. The central structure was a large, drum-shaped building three times the size of the others, topped with telecommunications masts and satellite uplinks.
“Our lead was right,” said Hawkeye.
“It was.”
“And you gotta love an enemy who’s so proud of himself he advertises,” Hawkeye added.
She nodded.
There was a logo embossed on each of the modular structures. The one on the central drum was twice the size of the others.
A.I.M.
Advanced Idea Mechanics.
“Looks like we’ve got a busy day ahead,” Hawkeye said.
“We don’t even know what they�
��re doing,” she replied.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s A.I.M. Whatever they’re doing, it’s going to be bad. A.I.M. bad. Which means we have to stop it. Right now.”
THREE
WASHINGTON DC
07.45 LOCAL, JUNE 12TH
IN THE bottom left-hand corner of his helmet’s HUD, a small digital readout displayed green numerals: a ticking clock, counting down.
As he came over the Potomac, the display read 00:33:22.
Just over thirty-three minutes before count zero, the point that Tony Stark called “Zero Six.” Six zeroes in a row. He’d never given it a grander, more important name—partly because the count had never reached Zero Six before and partly because if it did, he didn’t think he’d be in a position to call it anything.
He was flying nap-of-the-earth, almost supersonic, passing between the parkland trees rather than over them. Reckless—that’s what they’d call it in the report, if anyone was around afterward to make a report. Reckless. He preferred to think of it as expedient. He preferred to think of it as urgent.
He preferred to think of it as saving the world.
00:32:44.
He was a human missile. He was moving so fast that all anyone on the ground could see was a golden streak in the early morning air, not the globally recognized armored form that had graced so many magazine covers and newspaper front pages. As he passed, windows rattled in their frames, car alarms went off, and trees swayed in the slipstream. Crossing the river, his jet-wake scored a surge line across the water.
00:31:33.
Stealth modes shaved speed considerably, so he’d gone what-the-hell full-reactive on the boot jets and attitude thrusters. No time for subtlety. Hugging the landscape reduced his profile some and gave him a dash of environmental approach cover, but he was still a fast, loud, metal contact.
“Avengers priority, this is Iron Man. Request response, NSOC Washington.”
White noise crackled in his earpieces.
“This is Iron Man. How about I order a response, NSOC? National Security Operations Center, this is Iron Man.”
Nothing.
00:30:59.
“Select comm list,” he told his suit. A menu flashed up across his visor view. “Select and link NSOC, NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center, NSA Watchstation Fort Meade, NSA/CIA Joint Ops, CHCSS, and USCYBERCOM. Oh, and the State Department and Homeland.”