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“They told me I’d find you in a place like this.”
John Porter cracked one eye open. It was difficult, since he was tired and both his eyes were puffy from repeated blows to his face. But the voice was a woman’s, with an American accent, and neither one of those qualities was the norm for the sort of voices he tended to hear in a prison cell in the Middle East.
The owner of the voice was a younger woman – late twenties, he estimated – with shoulder-length red hair, strikingly blue eyes, and a pale, beautiful face. She wore a snug, dark grey jumpsuit, matching gloves, and a pair of odd-looking bracelets, as well as an equipment belt and two thigh holsters. She had a pistol in each holster.
John cleared his throat before he spoke. He hadn’t had cause to speak to anyone in days, since that was how long it had been since one of his captors had come into his cell. He imagined they were quite content to let him die of thirst in here.
“Aren’t you a little short for a terrorist?” he asked hoarsely.
The woman’s mouth quirked in a half-smile for a brief moment. “Here,” she said, retrieving a water bottle from her belt. “Drink up. You must be thirsty.”
John took a careful sip to start – not because he was concerned she was trying to poison him; after all, if she wanted him dead, she could just shoot him. He was afraid that if he drank too quickly he would choke trying to swallow, his throat was so dry.
After he had drained the bottle, he asked, “So who are you?”
“Natasha Romanov,” she replied. “I’m here to get you out.”
“I mean who are you with?” John asked. “Because the last time I dealt with an American, he tried to shoot me and I had to kill him. I imagine your government’s still upset about that.”
“I’m not with any branch of the U.S. armed forces,” Romanov said. “I work for S.H.I.E.L.D.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Then we’re doing our job.” Romanov extended a hand. “Come on, get up. Unless you want to stay here.”
“Not really, no.” John let her help him to his feet, which were still a bit wobbly. “The accommodations are bloody awful. No mint on the pillow or anything. And I’m fairly sure they only change the linens upon request.”
Again, the half-smile appeared on her face before she quickly smothered it with her mask of professionalism. “They also said you had a mouth on you. Seems like my intel’s good so far.” Romanov moved to the door, which hung slightly open, a disposable lockpick protruding from its keyhole. “Stay low and keep quiet.”
“I know how to do my job,” John told her with a certain amount of wounded pride.
“Then how’d you end up in here?” she countered before slipping out.
With a discontented sigh, John dropped into a half-crouch and followed her. He didn’t know who she was – Natasha Romanov was an obvious alias – and he had no idea who S.H.I.E.L.D. were, but given the choice between staying in his cell and leaving, he would go with the option which did not end in a slow and lonely death.
He crept along a dark and dusty hallway just behind Romanov, idly wondering where the hell he was. The only light sources were dim and flickering overhead bulbs every fifteen feet.
They’d caught him less than three hours after he’d driven away from the shootout where Collinson had lost his life. These men weren’t Taliban, and so he consequently had no idea who was holding him or why they hadn’t just put a bullet in his head to begin with.
Unbidden, an image of Alexandra rose into his mind’s eye. He missed her. The need to get back to England, to see her, was almost like a physical thing, trying to chew its way out of his chest. Especially after the news of Diane’s death.
He couldn’t die here.
“Where are we going?” he hissed at Romanov. “Do you have transport out of here?”
“Someplace safe, and yes,” Romanov hissed back. “But we should keep conversation to a minimum. This isn’t some tiny terrorist cell in the middle of nowhere, we’re in one of their major bases of operation.”
“Whose base?” John demanded. “And where is ‘someplace safe?’ Look, Miss Romanov –”
“Tasha.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Look, Tasha, I’m grateful for you breaking me out of that cell. But I have a daughter in England who is now without her mother. If I don’t get back, she will have precisely no one. So unless you tell me where the hell you intend to take me, I’m going to say a cheerful goodbye and find my own way out of here.”
For a moment it looked as though Tasha were going to snap at him, but her expression smoothed back out into that bland mask. “Alright, listen. If you’re going to be difficult about this, then I’ll give you the speech now, as opposed to when we’re out of here and have time for it. We want you to work for us.”
John frowned. “‘We’ being S.H.I.E.L.D.?”
“Yes. Your efforts in counterterrorism have been – well, inspired. The Director heard about how you rescued Katie Dartmouth and was impressed. He’s been keeping an eye on you ever since, and after what just went down with Sharq and Brady, he thinks this is the ideal time for you to disappear so you can work for us.”
“Disappear? I don’t fucking think so,” John said, shifting his weight back slightly in anticipation of an attack from Tasha. “I told you, I have a daughter. Alexandra. I’m not disappearing from her life. I did that already and threw out the bloody tee-shirt.”
“We don’t expect you to,” Tasha said, raising her hands in a gesture of placation. “You can be with your daughter again, John, whatever your decision. This is an offer you can refuse. But the Director thought that if we helped you escape –”
“That I’d feel like I owe you.” John scowled at her. “What’s this Director want with me? He really thinks I’m that special? I’m a bit of a fuckup, truth be told.”
“We noticed,” Tasha said wryly. “That’s why you interest him. There are a lot of fuckups in S.H.I.E.L.D., John. It’s what makes our agency work. But –” her eyes narrowed, just a bit – “it was the fact that you spared As’ad that really made him sit up and take notice of you. A black-ops man who knows when to kill and when not to… That’s rare.”
“Speaking from personal experience?” John asked.
He saw the mask flicker for an instant as the question hit close to home. “That’s not important right now. What is important is that you tell me whether you’re coming or not. Because if you want to try to find your way out of here by yourself, be my guest. I guarantee you that you won’t make it.”
John grimaced. She was probably right. He had no idea where he was, who was holding him, or in which direction England was. He also had no money, ID, or weaponry. Right now, Tasha was his best option.
And he didn’t feel like she was lying to him. There was something about her candor, even with the mask in place, which resonated with him.
“Alright,” he muttered. “But you never told me who’s holding me.”
“Oh, right. It’s the Sword of Islam.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I thought I killed their leader when I rescued Katie.”
“Please. That was one isolated cell, and part of their Iraqi operations. This is one of their larger bases in Iran.”
John cast a glance around at their dilapidated and dark surroundings. “Seems like it’s seen better days.”
“Of course this area has,” Tasha said. “They threw you in there to die, John. There’s nothing down this deep but oubliettes and bones.”
“How did you find me?”
“S.H.I.E.L.D. has advanced resources at its disposal.” Tasha frowned, briefly. “Look, John, healthy curiosity is good, but there could be guards down here. I don’t want to take the chance one of them could sound the alarm.”
“Fair enough,” John said. “I’ll come off it for now. What’s our escape route?”
“They keep at least one helicopter on the roof pad at all times. We’re going to liberate one.”
“Right. And how many floors up is that?”
Tasha hesitated. “Three.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a convenient central stairwell we can climb.”
“This is an old warehouse, John. We’re lucky there are still stairs at all.”
“Bugger,” John muttered.
They moved quickly and quietly out of the subbasement and up the stairs to the basement proper without incident. At the top of the stairs, Tasha cracked the door to look out into the hallway. John peered past her shoulder. The basement, he saw, had been converted into more cell blocks, but these appeared to be occupied by people the Sword of Islam actually wanted to keep alive. The corridors here were better-lit, and armed guards patrolled the hallway at frequent intervals, either delivering food to the cells or simply keeping an eye out.
Tasha eased the door to the basement closed. “Looks like a two-man patrol passes here every three to four minutes,” she said. “On my mark, we take one of them out, get you armed, see if they have anything useful on them. Then we take the window we’ve got to see how close to the roof we can get before they’re missed. Can you handle one of them, or do I have to take both?”
John glared at her. “I’m beat and hungry, but not a fucking invalid,” he said.
“Fair enough.”
They waited until they could hear the footfalls of two men, then readied themselves. As soon as the patrol passed the door, Tasha flung it open and sprang at one of the men, fists clenched. John watched with approval even as he charged in himself; Tasha had the good sense to avoid gunfire if possible, knowing that even a silenced shot would instantly alert the entire building to their presence.
He also rushed out at the other man, who was just bringing his AK-47 to bear. John didn’t give him the chance to fire; he hit the man with a vicious right cross, sending him staggering, before getting his finger into the trigger-guard of the assault rifle to prevent it from going off. He gripped the stock with his other hand and put his foot into the man’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. Shifting his grip on the AK-47, knowing he had only a second to finish his opponent, John drove the stock of the weapon into his enemy’s throat, crushing his windpipe and larynx in one blow.
John looked up just in time to see the other guard hit the ground in a tangle of limbs, Tasha clinging to him like some kind of spider. He heard the crunch of bone as Tasha did something to the man that left him lying there, limp and extremely dead.
The man whose throat John had crushed lay there writhing in silence for another moment before Tasha rose effortlessly to her feet and gave him a sharp kick to the temple.
“Not bad,” she said, surveying his handiwork. “Help me move them into the stairwell, and then we go.”
In his mind’s eye, John began to construct a rough picture of the building as they quickly and quietly made their way through the twisting corridors of the basement after hiding the bodies. From everything he’d seen, he imagined it was a boxy, one-story affair, with a multitude of corridors leading to storage spaces underground and the larger, open areas for mass storage on the ground floor.
When they opened the door to the ground floor and he could see the high ceiling stretching for meters over a forest of crates, he knew his picture was accurate.
“They should be missing that patrol any second now,” he whispered to Tasha. He couldn’t see anyone nearby, but he could hear the muted sounds of men talking from not far away, the language definitely Persian. Tasha hadn’t been lying about this being in Iran – not, he reflected, that he’d really doubted her honesty.
“Agreed,” Tasha said. “You as good with a rifle as you are at getting captured?”
John gave her an offended look. “So long as none of the terrorists are actually mothers carrying children, yes.”
“Then we should take the initiative. I’ll draw them out, you take them down. Before they start fanning out to look for us and make our job harder.”
“If you don’t mind playing bait, then I can do that,” John replied. “Where am I setting up?”
Tasha indicated an especially tall stack of crates. “Up there. I doubt anybody will be able to see you unless they look straight up.”
“Right.” John slung the AK-47 behind his back, making sure the strap didn’t catch on any of the nearby crates as he did, and began to climb. It took him only thirty seconds or so to reach the top of the stack, but by the time he got himself situated and the AK back in his hands, Tasha was already gone.
He swore under his breath, wishing he was being rescued by someone with SAS training. Not that he doubted her competence; rather, John wished he could more accurately predict how she would act in any given situation. Given what he’d seen of her moves in the basement, whoever had trained her, whatever regimen she’d been through, it wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen.
There was the sudden sound of angry shouting and a stutter of gunfire. A moment later Tasha came bolting around a stack of crates, arms pumping. John sighted in on her, then tracked his sights up past her to the corner she’d rounded.
Five insurgents came around it a moment later, one after the other, and he dropped each of them with a single shot.
John carefully dropped to the ground, where Tasha was waiting. “They definitely know we’re here now, but the odds are a little better,” she said. “Let’s go. Grab one of their guns if you’re low.” He checked the clip in the AK; seventeen shots left. As they moved, John grabbed the clips out of two of the men’s assault rifles. Either they would hold him until he and Tasha were out of here, or the two of them would probably die.
As though the universe were trying to punctuate that thought, John heard the sound of doors slamming open at the far end of the room, followed by orders being shouted in Persian.
“You know where the stairs are in this room?” he demanded.
“No, I decided to infiltrate an enemy stronghold without memorizing the location of all the entrances and exits,” Tasha shot back at him, not slowing down as she gave him sass. “Just keep up.”
John heard the scrape of a boot behind him. He whirled, tracking with his AK even as he did so, just in time to see a pair of enemies rounding a corner to their rear. He fired twice on instinct, dropping both of them. There were two reports to his six; turning, John saw Tasha had drawn her pistols and shot another pair of insurgents. The SAS officer in him questioned the sanity of wielding a pistol in each hand, while the rest of him had to give her some grudging respect for actually pulling the maneuver off.
A tense twenty seconds followed as they wove their way through the forest of crates without seeing another soul. They turned another corner and found themselves next to one of the walls of the building, at the start of a corridor that led to a door at the far end of the ground floor. Tasha began sprinting for it, and John forced his tired and aching body to keep up, ignoring the throbbing in his left arm from his old wound.
Ahead of him, just as she was about to reach the door, Tasha looked over her shoulder. “DOWN!” she shouted.
John dropped on instinct, twisting around as he did. There were three men at the start of the corridor, weapons blazing, but the rounds roared through the air where his head had been a moment earlier. John shot each of them in turn, not bothering with efficiency at this range and instead firing a two-second burst that emptied the rest of the clip. He swapped out, got to his feet, and began following Tasha up the stairs.
There was another gunshot, and pain exploded all through his right leg. He’d taken a bullet in his thigh. Desperately trying to keep his balance, as well as clenching his teeth to swallow a scream, John staggered around to see there was one more man, who had taken cover at the corner leading into the corridor rather than charging out like his friends. As soon as John turned, the man ducked back around the corner.
“Fucking hell,” he swore. “Of course it had to be my fucking leg.”
“Can you still take stairs?” Tasha demanded, laying down some covering fire as John limped agonizingly into the stairwell.
“It’s that or stay here and die, and I don’t plan to fucking die.” John slung the AK-47 on his back again and began hopping up the stairs on his good leg, bracing himself on the rickety guard rail. “It would have been nice if we’d had more men with us. Why the hell did S.H.I.E.L.D. send just you?”
“I was the only agent in the area,” Tasha said. “We could have taken longer to get a full team together, but we thought you’d prefer evac sooner rather than later, given that later you might have been dead.” She got to the top of the stairs well before John and fired a few rounds down back toward the door to discourage pursuit.
“Yes,” John observed as he limped to the top of the stairs. “Now I can die much sooner and more painfully. Bully for me.”
“You’re not going to die,” Tasha said, sounding exasperated. “We’ll get the chopper going, patch your leg up, and you’ll be back with your daughter inside of twelve hours.”
“Excuse me for not being at my most optimistic right now,” John growled. “I’m just a bit cranky on account of this bullet in my fucking leg.”
The door to the roof slammed open of its own accord. Three men boiled through it, baggy cloaks and head scarves billowing as a harsh wind from the dusk outside blasted inward. John managed to shoot one of them in the gut before the other was on top of him, knocking the AK out of his grip. Then he started trying his level best to slit John’s throat with a large, wicked-looking knife.
John managed to catch the man’s wrists and hold off the attack, but the insurgent noticed his thigh wound and kneed him in it. White-hot light exploded behind John’s eyes as he fell to one knee, his right leg completely giving out on him, but he managed to use his sudden momentum to push the attacker’s knife aside. The man staggered, which gave John plenty of opportunity to tackle him, wrenching the man’s knife hand behind his back into a submission hold. After a long, tense moment as his opponent bucked beneath him, John felt the man’s fingers go limp around the knife, dropping the weapon. He scooped it up and rolled away, still favoring his leg.
He came up just in time to see the man, also back on his feet, going for a sidearm. Without thinking, John hurled the knife.
It hit his adversary in the chest, handle-first. The man looked down as it clattered to the floor and laughed.
That was all the opening Tasha needed to come in with a vicious elbow strike to his nose. As he staggered back from that attack, John scooped the AK-47 back up and shot him in the face.
He looked at the third man who had come through the door. That one was lying on the floor, his neck at a horribly unnatural angle.
“Took you long enough,” John said. “You having trouble or what?”
She shot him a dirty look. “Asks the man who flubbed an easy knife throw.”
“It was not easy,” John protested. “It wasn’t a throwing knife to begin with, and –” He abruptly stopped talking as the door at the bottom of the stairs banged open. Without thinking, John leaned over the guard railing and sprayed a short burst, catching two men before he had to duck away from a withering hail of return fire.
“You want me to go get the chopper, or do you want to keep bantering?” Tasha asked.
“If it’s not too much trouble, love,” John simpered at her before blind-firing the rest of his second clip down the stairs. He heard a scream, which meant that he at least hit someone.
As he half-staggered, half-hopped out onto the roof, reloading his AK, he saw Tasha sprint toward a rusty-looking army surplus helicopter that had probably been bought from the U.S. in the late seventies. But a ride was a ride, he thought, and in the current situation he really couldn’t afford to be too choosy.
“Fuck me,” he growled as his right leg nearly gave out. “Zimbabwe all over again.”
“Keep them off the copter!” Tasha called from inside the craft. “I need a minute to get this thing started!”
“Of course you do,” John grumbled as he painfully lifted himself into the copter and took what cover he could in the passenger section. “Wouldn’t be a proper escape if we could just fucking fly away.”
He opened up on the roof entrance as he saw shapes moving just beyond the door. This time he was sure he didn’t hit anything, but the men chasing them obviously reconsidered the tactic of simply rushing out the door. Instead, one man blind-fired around the door, just accurately enough to get John to duck behind the cover of the copter’s chassis, so two of his friends could rush out and take up positions behind ancient, enormous air-conditioning equipment on the roof.
“Anytime now,” John said, throwing another burst at the stairs to keep the men there honest. He pulled sharply back as return fire issued from the men behind the air-conditioning equipment. “Another thirty seconds and they’ll be flanking us. Or they’ll just hit the fucking fuel line.”
“Almost there,” Tasha growled as the rotors began to wind up.
John managed to peg one of the men who’d taken cover behind the AC equipment, landing a clean headshot. The other responded with first a curse and then a warbling war cry as he charged the copter, gun blazing; John shot him neatly in the chest before emptying his last clip at the door as three more men began to charge through. All of them went down.
And then they were in the air.
Gulping in a giant sigh of relief, John let the AK drop to the floor as he half-settled, half-collapsed into his seat. His thigh felt like it was on fire and his heart was going at a frankly ridiculous rate, but he was alive.
Carefully, he hobbled his way up to the cockpit. “Are we clear, then?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the rotors.
“We are,” Tasha affirmed. “The nearest S.H.I.E.L.D. outpost is about four hours away in this bucket. I recommend you treat that thigh wound and then see if you can get some rest. I’ll handle the flying.” She handed him a first-aid kit she’d pulled out from beneath the copilot seat.
Disinfecting and bandaging the wound hurt like hell, but at least he wasn’t bleeding all over the helicopter any longer. John tucked the first-aid kit under his seat, leaned back, and closed his eyes, thinking that this way he might get at least a little rest.
He surprised himself by almost immediately passing out.
"Good to meet you, Mr. Porter."
John cracked one eye open. It wasn’t as difficult as it had been the last time.
He realized he was no longer in the helicopter, but instead in a hospital bed, and the person speaking to him was not Tasha, but instead an intimidating-looking man – bald, dark-skinned, and quite prominently missing an eye, a patch not quite hiding the snaking web of scars surrounding the socket.
“You must be the Director,” he said, mustering the best smirk he could.
“Nick Fury, at your service,” the man said with a slight, not-quite-mocking bow. “That was quite an escape you managed there.”
“Your girl Tasha did a lot of the work,” John replied.
“She’s good at that. And she says she told you why you’re here, and not still rotting in a Sword of Islam prison cell.”
John licked his lips. “She did. I gather you want to give me a job.”
“That’s about the long and the short of it.” Fury seated himself in a chair next to John’s bed. “Frankly, John, I want you training the next batch of S.H.I.E.L.D. ops teams. You wouldn’t be going into the field yourself unless there were exceptional circumstances. We need men like you to prep the next generation for whatever they might find out there.”
“A training job,” John repeated, mulling it over. “I’m not opposed to an easy retirement. But first – Tasha said I would be with my daughter inside of twelve hours.”
Fury grinned at him, getting back to his feet. He crossed to a window John hadn’t noticed before and pulled up the blinds. Outside was London.
“Welcome home, John,” Fury said. “Now, we’re not in a public hospital, so it’ll be a little trickier than usual to arrange visits. But I can have her here in twenty minutes if you’ll give her a call and say that the man picking her up is trustworthy. His name’s Coulson.”
“I can do that,” John replied. “I have a question first, though. What about Section Twenty? My old mates will be wondering where the hell I am.”
Fury chuckled as he sat back down. “We can take care of that. Right now, there’s a terrorist, name of Latif, that they’re interested in tracking. You’re one of two people in the world who could identify him for your friends in Section Twenty. So we’ll use a little movie magic to stage a ransom video for you by his men. Then, when your friends screw up and don’t fulfill the demands, you’ll get ‘executed’ after you give them the location of someone Latif needs for his plan. Nobody comes looking for a man they saw get killed.”
John felt his lip twist. He didn’t much like the idea of deceiving his friends in Section Twenty like that, but –
He looked at Fury. “Set it up,” he said. “And give me your phone. I’ll call Alexandra and let her know I’m back.”
Fury handed him what looked like a smartphone, if it had been designed by someone from Star Trek. “It’s yours. Consider it a you’re-hired gift.” He rose, strode to the door. “Oh. And John?
“Welcome to the side of angels.”
John watched Fury shut the door before dialing Alexandra’s number.
“Hello?”
“Lexi, it’s me,” he said. “It’s Dad. I’m back. And I won’t be going away again. I promise.”
And, for the first time in his life, John Porter meant it.