by Alex Irvine
Facing the furious Black Panther, Black Widow held her ground. “I said that I’d help you find him, not catch him,” she said. “There is a difference.”
Outside, Vision landed next to the battered Scarlet Witch. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too.” They both knew what would come next. Separation. Prison for her.
“It’s as I said,” Vision lamented. “Catastrophe.”
In the air, War Machine and Iron Man were closing in on the Quinjet. Behind them, coming up fast, was Falcon. “Vision, I got a bandit on my six,” War Machine said. When Vision didn’t answer right away, he got more urgent. “Vision, do you copy? Target his thrusters, turn him into a glider.”
Vision looked up from Wanda and sighted Falcon’s jet pack. He unleashed a lancing beam of yellow energy from the gem. Falcon dodged it, and the beam raked the front of War Machine’s armor. It destroyed the arc reactor powering the suit, and all War Machine’s systems went dark. The suit fell from the sky.
“Rhodey?” Iron Man and Falcon both saw what had happened. Their fight was forgotten, and they both dove hard after War Machine.
Inside the tumbling War Machine armor, Rhodey’s voice was tight with fear. “Tony, I’m flying a dead stick.”
“Rhodes!” Tony rocketed down after the plummeting suit, but he didn’t get there in time. War Machine hit the ground hard enough to dig himself a small crater. Dirt and uprooted plants sprayed out over the field around him.
Iron Man braked to a landing next to the suit and dropped to his knees, ripping off the faceplate so he could see his friend. Rhodey’s eyes were closed and there was blood on his face. “Read vitals,” Tony commanded F.R.I.D.A.Y.
“Heartbeat detected,” she answered. At least he was alive. “Emergency medical is on its way.”
Falcon landed a few feet away. He knew it looked bad. He’d never meant for it to happen. All he’d done was get out of the way.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Rhodey was his friend.
Without even looking at him, Tony blasted Falcon into unconsciousness with a repulsor.
The next morning, Zemo stood in a warm office on the edge of the snowy Siberian frontier. Before he embarked on the last stage of his trip to the abandoned base, there was one more thing he had to do. He dialed the number of his hotel back in Berlin and heard the familiar voice of the desk maid. “Good morning, Frau Leber,” he said in German. She greeted him and he ordered his breakfast, just like he had every morning.
This was the last part of his plan. When Frau Leber knocked on the door with his breakfast and Zemo didn’t answer, she would go inside. And when she did, she would find quite a shock waiting for her in the bathtub. After that, it wouldn’t be long before the Avengers knew just how completely he had fooled them. Then they would know that even an ordinary man could bring down the mightiest heroes.
CHAPTER 23
The Quinjet streaked low over the Siberian tundra, closer to the base Bucky remembered. Zemo was going there. Both of them knew it… and both of them knew that no matter what, he could not be allowed to get control over the rest of the Winter Soldiers.
He and Steve hadn’t spoken much on the flight. Eventually, Bucky asked, “What’s gonna happen to your friends?”
“Whatever it is, I’ll deal with it,” Steve said.
“I don’t know if I’m worth all this, Steve.”
“What you did all those years… it wasn’t you. You didn’t have a choice.”
Bucky didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “I know. But I did it.”
Several time zones west, James Rhodes was going into an MRI machine for more detailed scans on his damaged spine. Tony watched through a glass wall from the next room, looking grim. Vision stood near him, perfectly still, never taking his eyes off Rhodey. “Vision, how did this happen?” Tony asked.
“I became distracted.” No excuses, no finger-pointing. Vision knew he had made an error. If he had gone after Sam sooner, Sam wouldn’t have been as close to Rhodey.…
“I didn’t think that was possible,” Tony said.
Without changing his expression, Vision said, “Neither did I.”
Restless, Tony paced the waiting area. He looked up and saw Natasha in the doorway. Clearly, she wanted to talk to him, and he had a few things he needed to say to her, too. They walked to another part of the facility, where they would have some privacy.
“The doctor said he shattered L4 to S1,” Tony said. That was most of the vertebrae in his lower back. “Extreme laceration in the spinal cord. Probably looking at some form of paralysis.” Rhodey hadn’t moved his legs since the crash. At the very best, he had bad spinal bruising that would eventually go away. At worst…
“Steve’s not going to stop,” Natasha said. “If you don’t, either, Rhodey’s going to be the best-case scenario.”
Tony thought she was forgetting the role she had played in the Leipzig operation going south. “You let them go, Nat.”
“We played this wrong.”
“We?” Tony couldn’t believe he was hearing this. “Boy. It must be hard to shake the whole double-agent thing, huh? Sticks in the DNA.”
He was trying to get a rise out of her, but she cut right to the heart of the situation. “Are you are incapable of letting go of your ego for one second?”
Tony had no answer for this. They locked eyes for a long moment, and then Tony said, “T’Challa told Ross what you did, so they’re coming for you.” He was a little surprised she was still here.
She held his gaze a moment longer. “I’m not the one who needs to watch their back,” she said.
As she walked away, Tony’s smartwatch chirped. A hologram spawned from its screen. Tony looked at it and wasn’t sure what he was seeing. “What am I looking at, F.R.I.D.A.Y.?”
“Priority upload from Berlin police,” she said.
A moment later, he figured it out. “Fire up the chopper,” he ordered.
Twenty minutes later Tony was on his personal helicopter headed out over the North Atlantic. He knew Ross was at a base out there, and he needed to get this information to Ross immediately. While the chopper flew on autopilot, Tony got a briefing from F.R.I.D.A.Y. “The task force called for a psychiatrist as soon as Barnes was captured. They dispatched Dr. Theo Broussard from Geneva within the hour.” She displayed a dossier image of Theo Broussard, who did not resemble the psychiatrist who had interviewed Bucky Barnes. “He was met by this man,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. added, and brought up another picture.
That was the guy. They’d had him in Berlin, and he’d gotten away. “Did you run a facial recognition yet?”
Offended, F.R.I.D.A.Y. said, “What do I look like?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been picturing a redhead.”
“You must be thinking I’m someone else.”
Ouch, Tony thought. “I must be.” He needed to program a little less personality into his AIs.
“The fake doctor is actually Colonel Helmut Zemo. Sokovian intelligence. Zemo ran EKO Skorpion, a Sokovian covert kill squad.” As she spoke, F.R.I.D.A.Y. flashed a picture of a face Tony recognized. It was the doctor who had interviewed Barnes, no doubt about it.
“So what happened to the real Broussard?”
“He was found dead in a Berlin hotel room,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. said. “The police also found a wig and facial prosthesis approximating the appearance of one James Buchanan Barnes.”
The whole thing had been an operation to frame Bucky and flush him out into the open. “Get this to Ross,” Tony said. Finally, they knew who was behind it all. But they also knew that this one Colonel Zemo had fooled them all… and set them at one another’s throats. What would he do next?
When Zemo got to the base, set into a stone ridge deep in arctic Siberia, he had to chisel a foot of ice away from the control panel before he could go in. But the base security system accepted the code from the red book, and twenty minutes after opening the door, Zemo had the mission report he had been seeking for so long: December 16, 199
1.
He also found the rest of the Winter Soldiers.
Now the final phase, he thought. Now all their crimes will be known.
They would come looking for him. He had to prepare.
“This is the Raft prison control,” said a voice over Tony’s helicopter intercom. “You are clear for landing, Mr. Stark.” Tony stood and let the autopilot handle the descent. He wanted to see the Raft without having to pay attention to flying.
It rose from under the water, a squat black cylinder five hundred feet in diameter, with a few lights shining through the stormy night. Ross had commissioned the Raft for the most dangerous inmates he might have to jail. It was hard to escape when you were in armored cells under twenty-four-hour guard… and several hundred feet underwater.
The chopper landed on a helipad, and the helipad lowered inside. The Raft. Heavy pressure doors sealed over it. Tony got out of the chopper and saw Secretary Ross walking across the landing deck to meet him. Perfect, Tony thought. Now they could sort out the truth behind the Vienna bombing. “So, did you get the files? Let’s reroute the satellites and start facial scanning for this Zemo guy.”
“You seriously think I’m going to listen to you even after that fiasco in Leipzig?” Ross looked incredulous. “You’re lucky you’re not in one of these cells.”
Ross walked away into the base command center. Tony followed, already figuring out ways he could work around Ross. Right now he had to mend fences with the team.
He entered the cell block to sarcastic applause from Clint Barton. “The futurist, gentlemen! The futurist is here! He sees all! He knows what’s best for you, whether you like it or not.”
“Give me a break, Barton. I had no idea they’d put you in here. Come on.”
“Yeah, well, you knew they’d put us somewhere, Tony.”
“Yeah. But not some supermax floating ocean pokey. You know, this place is for maniacs. This is a place for…”
“Criminals?” Clint said, saying the word Tony stumbled on. “Criminals, Tony. I think that’s the word you’re looking for. Right?” He came right up to the bars and pinned Tony with an angry look. “It didn’t used to mean me or Sam or Wanda.” Clint shrugged. “But here we are.”
“’Cause you broke the law,” Tony said. “I didn’t make you.”
“The law. The law.” Clint kept repeating that as Tony went on.
“You read it, you broke it.”
“The law. The law. The law.”
“All right,” Tony said. “You’re all grown up. You got a wife and kids. I don’t understand. Why didn’t you think about them before you chose the wrong side?”
“You better watch your back on this guy,” Clint called out to Sam and Wanda. “There’s a chance he’s going to break it.”
That was a low blow, Tony thought. But maybe he deserved it. Then Scott Lang joined in. “Hank Pym always said you never can trust a Stark.”
Tony looked at him in passing. “Who are you?”
“Come on, man,” Scott said. Tony moved on to Sam Wilson. At first Sam wouldn’t talk to him. Then he asked, “How’s Rhodes?”
“We’re flying him to Columbia Medical tomorrow. So… fingers crossed.” Tony looked around the cell. “What do you need? They feed you yet?”
Sam looked skeptical. “You’re the good cop now?”
“I’m just a guy who needs to know where Steve went.”
Sam gave him nothing. “Well, you better go get a badder cop.” Tony paused.
“I just knocked the A out of their AV,” he said. Without audio, Ross wouldn’t know what Tony and the prisoners were talking about. “We’ve got about thirty seconds before they realize it’s not their equipment.”
He showed Sam a police picture of the murdered Dr. Broussard. “Just look. Because that is the fellow who was supposed to interrogate Barnes.” He saw them understanding what he meant. They had been right all along.
“Clearly, I made a mistake,” Tony said, just to be upfront about it. “Sam, I was wrong.”
“That’s a first.”
Okay, Tony thought. I had that one coming. “Cap is definitely off the reservation and he’s about to need all the help he can get,” he said. “We don’t know each other very well. You don’t have to…”
“Hey. It’s all right.” Sam thought hard. “Look, I will tell you. But you have to go alone—and as a friend.”
“Easy,” Tony said. He could do that.
Back in the Raft’s command center, Ross was waiting. Tony walked right past him, powering his helicopter up by remote. Ross followed him. “Stark, did he give you anything on Rogers?”
“No.” Tony climbed into the helicopter. “I’m going back to the compound instead. But you can call me anytime! I’ll put you on hold. I like to watch the line blink.”
With that, Tony closed the door and flew up into the cloud cover, far enough away that Ross would be dropping surveillance on him. Then he put the helicopter on a course back to Avengers Tower and jumped out of it as he triggered a new Iron Man armor that he had built specifically for stealth operations. By the time the armor was complete, he was in a full swan dive down into the clouds. The boot thrusters kicked in and Tony turned east, not going back to North America at all.
He was going to Russia.
And he was right about the Raft having dropped surveillance. But what he didn’t think of was the idea that someone other than Ross might be watching.
T’Challa lowered his Wakandan aircraft, silent and deadly as an owl, out of the clouds and followed Stark’s heat signature. He would follow it to the ends of the earth if needed.
CHAPTER 24
Bucky and Captain America saw the Sno-Cat parked outside the base and knew their quarry was already there. It couldn’t be anybody else. So this was going to be the final showdown. Steve landed the Quinjet and got his shield. Bucky pulled an assault rifle from the Quinjet’s weapons locker.
They stood at the top of the ramp, snow blowing around their feet. Time to go. Bucky had a thought, the kind of random thought people got sometimes when they were about to face great danger. “You remember that time we had to ride back from Rockaway Beach in the back of that freezer truck?”
Cap nodded. “Was that the time we used our train money to buy hot dogs? You blew three bucks trying to win that stuffed bear for a redhead.”
“What was her name again?”
“Dolores,” Cap said. “You called her Da.”
“She’s got to be a hundred years old by now,” Bucky mused.
Cap clapped Bucky on the shoulder. “So are we, pal.”
Together, they went down the ramp and approached the open base door. “He can’t have been here more than a few hours,” Captain America said.
Bucky nodded. “Long enough to wake them up.”
That was the problem. They moved in shoulder-to-shoulder. Just like old times. They walked as quietly as possible down an elevator and followed narrow steel corridors farther into the base. After a few minutes, they heard something behind them. They turned and the noises got louder. A large steel blast door was opening.
“You ready?” Cap said. Five Winter Soldiers, he thought. It wouldn’t be easy.
Bucky was thinking the same thing. “Yeah.”
The doors groaned open—revealing Iron Man. He walked toward them down the narrow hall. Cap stayed on his toes. Bucky kept his gun aimed right at Iron Man’s arc reactor, center of mass.
Iron Man opened his faceplate and kept approaching. “You seem a little defensive,” he said.
“It’s been a long day,” Cap said.
“At ease, soldier. I’m not currently after you.”
Hard to believe, Steve thought. “Then why are you here?”
“Maybe your story isn’t so crazy,” Iron Man said. Cap couldn’t hide his relief. “Maybe. Ross has no idea I’m here. I’d like to keep it that way. Otherwise, I have to arrest myself.”
“Well, that sounds like a lot of paperwork.” Cap loosened up a little
. “It’s good to see you, Tony.”
“Me too, Cap.” He saw Barnes pointing an assault rifle at him. “Manchurian Candidate, you’re killing me. There’s a truce here. You can drop it.”
Bucky lowered his gun, but he still looked uneasy. Even so, the three of them advanced together.
“I got heat signatures,” Iron Man said, his mask back in place as they got close to a larger darkened chamber.
“How many?” Cap asked.
“Uh, one.”
Lights came on around them as they entered, and an eerie quiet filled the musky room.
Something was wrong.
CHAPTER 25
The room was filled with stasis chambers, spaced between banks of equipment and instruments. Inside the chambers lay the bodies of the five other Winter Soldiers. “If it’s any comfort, they died in their sleep,” Zemo said. They could not see him. His voice was coming over a speaker. “Did you really think I wanted more of you? I’m grateful to them, though. They brought you here.”
The door slid shut. Captain America flung his shield. It ricocheted away without any effect.
“Please, Captain,” Zemo said. “The Soviets built this chamber to withstand the launch blast of UR-100 rockets.”
Tony looked at the door, working out his options. “I’m betting I can beat that.”
“Oh, I’m sure you could, Mr. Stark. Given time. But then you’ll never know why you came.” Zemo stepped into view.
“You killed innocent people in Vienna just to bring us here?” That’s what this was all about? Cap couldn’t believe what he was hearing. But Zemo had that look he’d learned to recognize in the war. Something strange about his eyes, an intensity normal people didn’t have.
“I thought about nothing else for over a year,” Zemo said. “I studied you; I followed you. But now that you are standing here, I just realized…” He was looking closely at Cap’s face. “There’s a bit of green in the blue of your eyes. How nice to find a flaw.”