Chapter Text
“Why can’t HYDRA ever operate somewhere warm ?”
Organic hand wedged firmly under his armpit for warmth, James Buchanan Barnes sighed and flipped open the lens cover of his rifle. Kilometres away in the valley below the convoy was moving at a glacial pace, taking the Carpathian mountain pass seemingly inch by inch on their way to rendezvous with this mysterious new buyer. Barnes silently willed them to hurry it along; the thick snow packed around him to break up his outline was starting to freeze, and so was Baarnes: it had been hours since he’d last felt his toes and his legs were beginning to follow. If there was one piece of technology that S.H.I.E.L.D hadn’t quite figured out yet it was cold weather gear. Whatever they’d suited him up in didn’t hold a candle to the Soviet-issue winter gear he’d worn for a long and dark part of his life. He wondered if the HYDRA troops below were cold.
“Sorry, Brooklyn, I’ll ask them to schedule their next arms deal in Aruba,” came the droll response over the comm-bead in Bucky’s ear. Romanov, positioned ahead of him somewhere else in this inhospitable mountain pass. And probably not face-down in the snow . “I just thought, you know, the Winter soldier could handle a little light snowfall…”
“Had enough of that to last ten lifetimes,” Barnes bit back, slightly more aggressively than he meant to.
“They’re close enough to tap our comms, if they’re decent,” warned a third voice; good-natured but slightly reproachful. Steve Rogers, of course. “C’mon Bucky. You know the players. If we’re all in position, call the game.”
“Yeah,” Barnes sighed. He finally, exhaustingly broke cover, relishing in the blood flow to his legs and extremities brought forth by even the small movement. He peered downscope again. “Yeah. Alright. I’m looking at a whole mechanised company; Armatas, two of them; Strykers, nine, no, ten of them; light trucks, two of them; flatbeds, two of them; infantry… fifty and change.”
“And the arms dealer?” Steve pressed.
“No,” Barnes admitted. “Six weeks and we still don’t even have a picture. We still don’t even have a description .” He ducked down behind a clump of stunted pine, taking shelter from the biting mountain winds. “There’s what looks like an old, abandoned mining town coming up about a quarter mile. I think that must be the meet. They’re taking their sweet time down there, though. Like they expect trouble. You think they’re tipped off?”
“More likely they’re finally getting better at this,” Romanov scoffed. “Graf is the last HYDRA splinter-commander left in Eastern Europe. He knows we’d be coming for him sooner or later; we wiped out all his competition. All I can’t figure out is who this dealer is. Or where she’s getting these new weapons from; they make Chitauri tech look like that pop-gun you used back in Germany, Cap.”
“Hey, I liked that 1911!” Steve chuckled. “Wish I knew what happened to it. It’s probably sitting in a museum somewhere.”
“I don’t think it’s gonna help us much here, Steve,” said Barnes. And then, more solemnly, “You heard me when I said a whole mechanised company, right?”
“We have backup coming,” Steve promised. “If it comes to that. Right now we just need to identify the dealer. If we can apprehend her after the deal, even better. If not-”
“If not I blow the shipment to pieces, as well as as much HYDRA materiel as I can,” Romanov interjected. “They can’t get back across the border with this stuff.”
“Maybe next time they’ll send a whole helicarrier division and not just… you know, us three and a single Quinjet,” Barnes grumbled, and then before anyone else could respond, said “Radio silence for repositioning,” and switched off, moving with quiet efficiency along the treeline, carefully avoiding silhouetting himself as he trailed the HYDRA company. He couldn’t quite identify what was putting him off so badly about this operation. It wasn’t just the cold: it was a hollow pang in his gut, an invisible itch behind his left ear that he just couldn’t reach. It reminded him unpleasantly of the last time he’d had such a negative reaction. Italy, the winter of ‘43. The time he’d been flung off a train.
He’d made it perhaps a hundred yards before he spotted the first muzzle-flash from the armoured column. Then he was flinging himself to cover, flattening himself as much as possible to brace the inevitable explosion, waiting long seconds that stretched into forever for the whistling of shells coming in his direction. None followed; what did follow, though, was a string of sharp retorts like the world’s biggest strip of Chinese fireworks all going off at once. Screams and shouts mingled in the wind, intertwining with the staccato rattle of small arms fire. Barnes fumbled for his comm-bead. “What the hell is going on down there?”
“-ambush,” Romanov’s voice was coming in heavily distorted. Graf’s gotta have some kind of jammer, Barnes cursed to himself.
“It ju-… -ent off!” That was Steve now, and he sounded out of breath. “-sudden. Outskirts of th-... -ing camp. A rival faction?”
“Well it isn’t us,” Romanov said bitterly. “Brooklyn, can you see who’s doing the shooting?”
He could. He’d hastily re-adjusted his scope while wriggling his way to the edge of the high pass he’d occupied; peering down, now with the benefit of not worrying about giving away his position he had a clear line of sight to the column. They’d been hit right as they were entering the mining town - from the rear, it looked like, judging by the path of destruction through the rearguard. A destroyed flatbed had collided with one of the Strykers - damndest thing, from this angle it looks like it was thrown at it - and one of the Armatas heavy tanks was a burning pile of wreckage. The head of the column and most of the infantry were fleeing into the town as fast as they could, while a token rearguard was trying ineffectually to stop or at least slow down their opponent.
Their opponent, who appeared to be a single woman.
Barnes was a decorated war veteran, a trained special forces operator who had led dozens of covert missions behind enemy lines during the Second World War, and that was before he’d been abducted, brainwashed and ‘augmented’ by HYDRA, turned into the living weapon called the Winter Soldier and forced to perform high-profile assassinations for decades. He might have lost his appetite for indiscriminate violence, but his mind was as much a finely honed tactical tool as the high-powered HYDRA prosthetic he wore. So it was with a certain clinical detachment he observed the lone gunwoman stalking from the cover of a burnt-out tank to hop over a low wall at an easy, almost leisurely pace, incapacitating or killing entire fire teams of HYDRA as she went with rifle and grenades. She was head to toe in armour, like something Stark might manufacture and wear but with a much more utilitarian and brutalist design. The rifle she clutched in one hand was of an unfamiliar make; not quite but similar to the strange new micro-flechette rail-weapons HYDRA had so recently outfitted themselves with. She was a predator expertly stalking her prey; first sowing disarray into the already-disorganised HYDRA column, then isolating and gunning down individual elements. To Barnes, it was like watching a recording of his Winter Soldier kills on a mass scale. She’s faster than me, he realised, and when he shivered this time it wasn’t from the cold.
“Lone operator,” Barnes hissed, fidgeting with the networked high-definition camera on his scope to give his own squadmates a look at her. She moved like a ghost; here one moment, there another; each arrival punctuated by clinical, efficient brutality. He could almost predict her approach. Flashbang through the window , he thought even as he observed it in real time. Through the wall; six, no, seven shots. Out the back. This time around the flank to the north; cut off the front and rear columns . “I don’t recognize the colours or the make of her armour. And-” He cursed as he watched the mystery woman flank one of the eight-wheeled Stryker fighting vehicles by skirting around an industrial building. Sticky bomb to the treads , Barnes thought, but then a vivid white-blue glow, brighter than the winter sky, suddenly surrounded the assailant; the tank was wrenched off its treads as if by antigravity, but then he watched in shock as the women hefted the armoured vehicle as if it were a toy before heaving it directly into a building full of troops. A column of fire scorched the sky. “Enhanced,” Barnes hissed. “We have an Enhanced in play.”
The channel was silent for a moment. Then:
“Natasha?” Steve said quietly.
“Steve?”
“Are you sure it isn’t us?”
“It isn’t us,” Romanov hissed coldly. “I’d tell you if it was this time.”
This time. Barnes growled inwardly, cursing S.H.I.E.L.D, cursing Nick Fury, cursing HYDRA and this secret war. “Well if it isn’t us, and it isn’t HYDRA- who the hell is it?”