They’re actually just shy of Knoxville when the encrypted call comes through, which is shit Brock hopes he doesn’t have to explain later. He’s done his damnedest to make up the time they lost during their unscheduled pit stop to switch between him and Rollins (who is currently zonked out drooling against the passenger side window), but the radar alert keeps pinging so many fucking speed traps. Between that, a jack-knifed semi, and the never-ending Tennessee construction, they’re now running almost eighteen minutes behind.
Brock pulls off at the next exit that has a travel plaza and heads for the back section of the parking lot, far enough from the majority of the families running into the attached restaurant, but close enough to other vehicles that they won’t seem like a solitary pedo van. With luck, no one will notice that they’re just sitting here.
The sat phone is one of the almost-modern models, in that it has an attached screen large enough to show a couple headshots side by side. The damn thing still loads incredibly slow, reliant as it is on ancient as fuck satellites. Rumlow picks up the handset for the audio portion, listens for the Mission Commander updates. By the time the full target profiles have downloaded, he’s already swearing inside his head.
“Mariella Costa,” Harper reads, squinting at the tiny font blurred beneath the primary target. “Level Five clearance, Flight Deck access...shit. She was an Insight engineer?”
“Can it and I’ll tell you,” Brock snaps, still straining to listen to the prerecorded message. It pisses him off when they send these ‘tactical updates’ like five seconds before he has to present. He gets the need for security. But would it kill them to give him time to digest? He waits until the message has started to repeat before he hangs up the handset. The profiles stay lit behind him, the literal visages of dead men walking.
Harper, Mitchell, and Rollins shuffle to gather around the screen. The Soldier is the only one missing, curled up in his cage like a big leathery panther.
Christ, he hates his life.
“Here boy,” Brock says through clenched teeth. “Come see this face you gotta tear off.”
The Soldier crawls out of his cage with an odd stiffness, noticeable only because it immediately disappears as soon as he realizes Rumlow is watching. He’s more like a cat in that regard, Brock thinks. Conceal the small stuff, until it hurts so bad you bite the fuck out of people without provocation.
The newly minted rules are taped above his cage, written on the back of a page of MRI results. It’s not a very long list -- mostly, ‘don’t fuck with the cage, don’t feed unauthorized foods, exercise as needed’, and a cheat sheet of all the formalized commands. Brock can see the Wonder Twins have added a couple extras, including “never expose to sunlight” and “never feed after midnight”. Brock bites the cap off a Sharpie and adds ‘don’t fuck with the list, either’. And, because he’s not a completely joyless asshole, he adds “never splash with water”.
He heads back to take his place at the center of the group. The Soldier comes to sit right at his feet, nearly plants his butt directly on top of them. Brock nudges him to the side with the steel toe of his boot. The Soldier scoots where he’s directed, again with that very subtle creakiness. Brock makes a note to exercise him later.
“Primary target is Mariella Costa,” he tells the group. “Former Insight weapons engineer. Called in sick to ‘work from home’ three days ago; supervisor got suspicious when she failed to respond to email.”
He taps the visuals at top half of the screen. Mariella is a muscular, tan woman with a mole on her right cheek and deceptively sweet features. Her profile photo shows her with shoulder-length, wavy dark brown hair, but the inset ‘most recent appearance’ shot from a grainy convenience store camera seems to show that she’s shaved it off.
“Orders are to take this one alive, if possible,” he says, looking directly at the Soldier. “Confirm what she knows before anyone touches her. If we do have to take her out, they want visual proof of execution. Tissue samples, video, the whole nine yards. Basically bring her head on a plate.”
“Damn,” Harper says. “She run out on her boyfriend or something?”
“Or girlfriend,” Rollins mutters. Like he cares. Brock nudges Harper with the edge of his boot, too.
“According to her coworkers, the second target is her boyfriend. Radim Jelinek. Jelinek failed to report to his job at a local hospice over forty-eight hours ago. Intelligence presumes he’s on the run with her.”
He taps the lower half of the screen, highlighting a hefty, bald white man with broad shoulders.
“This one you can kill on sight,” he tells the Soldier.
The Soldier tilts his head and scrutinizes both pictures, drawing his eyes up, down, and around the lines of their individual faces. Brock leaves him to it. He knows from experience the Soldier will memorize until his creepy eyes fall out.
“Inside source says they’ve crossed over to AIM. Requested asylum in exchange for information. Costa was working on long-range targeting, but her other specialty is aerospace engineering. She may have had access to Stark’s turbine schematics. Apparently, she made noise like she wanted to switch to Propulsion. Idiots in charge let her access their server, trying to convince her to join their team.”
“Seriously?” Mitchell groans. “Anybody ever heard of social engineering? Fucking corporate espionage.”
Brock can’t disagree with that.
“Yeah, their asses are grass. Anyway, official story is, she plans to sell those designs to hostile governments.”
He glances down at his StarkPhone to confirm the details. They’d given him the SHIELD-friendly mission package to review before they left. The real reason they’re out here, though - the part that applies to SHIELD’s tentacled underbelly - that they don’t trust in soft copy anywhere. Once the sat phone is switched off, there will be no trace.
“And unofficially?” Rollins asks.
“Unofficially? She’s one of ours. And she left a coded message. She threatened to expose ‘a significant number’ of senior-level members - publicly on the internet - unless her safety is guaranteed. Says if she and her boyfriend both have a place in the new order, she’ll even burn bridges with AIM - give them bullshit and walk tomorrow.”
He pauses a moment to let that sink in.
“...holy shit,” Harper breathes. He’s saying what they’re all feeling. What this chick is trying -- it’s worse than suicide. Suicide, at least you choose the when and how. This engineer, she’ll be lucky if they let her die.
He understands now why this mission earned the Soldier. Whether it requires this much firepower is irrelevant. HYDRA uses its Fist for two reasons, when something needs to be crushed or when it needs to be personal. Costa needs to be crushed, because she’s forgotten: with HYDRA, it’s always personal.
HYDRA is the most jealous bitch there is, and nobody, fucking nobody, leaves her.
Mitchell laughs, reedy and nervous. “Wow. So that’s double jeopardy for how many billion, Alex?”
“Not enough,” Rollins says. “Cause, here we are.”
“Yeah,” Brock agrees. “Piss off HYDRA, piss off AIM - not a great way to stay breathing.”
The Soldier says nothing, still fixated on the glowing images. His nostrils even flare, like he thinks he can pick up their fucking scent from the pixels. God, Brock hates this conditioning, hates it down to his bones. At this point, R&D might even be sacrificing function in the name of their puppy play.
Brock glances at his phone again.
“The targets are holed up in an AIM bunker south of the border. AIM trades with the cartels in Nuevo Laredo, so they’re underground and armed to the teeth.”
“Bunker busters?” Mitchell asks hopefully.
Brock manages not to pull a completely unprofessional face.
“‘Diplomatically complicated’. Preferred that we infiltrate and excise. Job one is setting up a scramble on transmissions,” he says, looking pointedly at Mitchell. “We have to assume as soon as we engage that Costa’s going to try and retaliate.”
Mitchell nods. He raps the side of his jam-box’s generator, the way other people might knock on wood.
“I got sat and mobile covered. Do they have any hard lines? If they got fibre shielded and buried we’ll probably have to cut it.”
“We have a scan of the bunker schematics,” Brock says. “Looks like there’s at least two? And also some nice choke points and blind corners.”
Read: dinner time for the Soldier. He’s a miracle at a distance, but he’ll take you apart just as brutally up close and personal. Worst comes to worst they can find a solid choke point and funnel hostiles through their cyborg grunt grinder.
Rollins strains to peer at Brock’s phone.
“You got clearance to share that with us?”
Brock scowls. “Yeah, I was getting to that. Hang on.”
He taps the series of codes that allows him to broadcast a secure transmission over infrared. For security reasons, his stupid STRIKE app only communicates sensitive data phone-to-phone. He doesn’t have the clearance to transmit over the mobile network.
“Put ‘em up,” he grunts. The team responds by holding up the business ends of their IR readers.
Rollins’ eyes narrow when he opens the brief on his phone.
“Big place,” is all he vocalizes. Brock hears all too well what he doesn’t say. The compound is four levels, huge for an outpost in this region. He wonders if there’s more like them, maybe up over the Canadian border. Now that Tony Stark’s people are obsessed with shutting AIM down in the United States, it looks like they’ve just started setting up shop across the line.
Like fireworks tents, only meaner. According to their roster, this outpost has nearly eighty security personnel on staff; at least a quarter of those decent mercs. Sixteen to one, if the odds were completely stacked against them. Fucking thankfully, they’re not.
“Yeah, it’s a long list,” he acknowledges. “But they’re not all on shift at the same time, and we have an assist. Some of their people are also our people.”
Which is the other reason Costa’s an idiot. Trying to run to AIM, like AIM hasn’t been in HYDRA’s back pocket since it was founded. Lots of governments and think tanks over the years got that special, secret push.
And if they ever get too loud or out of line, they get a harder shove - and fall over.
Brock turns his phone around to highlight the lower right section of the schematic.
“We ingress from the southeast corner,” he says. “Our guys on the inside are working on a door code and cover.”
“We know where they’re holding her?” Mitchell asks.
“Our guys are working on it. For now, assume it’s the lowest level.”
“And the people who work there?” Harper asks.
“What?”
“The security, okay, I see the patrol stations marked.” Harper squints at his own phone and draws two fingers apart to zoom. “But there’s labs here, they gotta have employees. What about Joe Schmoe who works in Evil Physics, or whatever the fuck AIM does? How are we gonna sneak past with Benji here? He isn’t exactly subtle.”
Fuck. Harper’s back on Belize again, and while Brock doesn’t exactly blame him, the last thing he needs is this bullshit stirring up the group. Mitchell could maybe use some healthy fear, but it bothers him that Rollins is uneasy. It is a big place to take on with just five people. Creepy or not, if something goes sideways, the Soldier might just be the trump card that saves them.
“Belize wasn’t typical performance,” Brock says firmly. “He’s been adjusted.”
“And he glitched out like four hours ago!”
“Because you idiots fed him chips!” Rollins says. Rollins is good at masking fear with pissiness, or indifference, but Brock knows from experience eventually the facade cracks. And they can’t be chipping each other apart now.
They got a job to do, and whatever knots Brock might have in his guts about going in like this -- by ground, with a skeleton team, and the Soldier’s freaky cage rattling every mile along the way -- that pales compared to thought of turning it down. Just look how well quitting turned out for Costa.
“Doesn’t matter who fucked up!” Brock snaps, before Mitchell can open his big mouth too. “The Soldier’s gonna listen this time, okay? He’s gonna be good.”
Brock glances toward the Soldier, hoping that was close enough to the right creepy lingo. He feels his blood turning to ice.
The Soldier is still curled patiently off to the side, exactly where Brock left him, only he’s no longer drooling at the targets. His eerie eyes are fixed directly on Brock’s face with the same intensity. Like he’s also measuring Brock for a coffin.
“How many?” he asks in Russian. His voice sounds like he’s been chewing gravel.
Brock’s whole mouth is running dry.
“How many what?”
The Soldier’s eyes flick to Brock’s StarkPhone, then back to his face.
“How many on each level?”
“Guards? Or...”
“How many total?” The Soldier asks insistently.
Harper and Mitchell are both staring like the Soldier’s grown a second head. Brock’s unsure if it’s because they’ve started Russian lessons, or if it’s because this is the longest discourse they’ve ever heard from the Soldier. Rollins’ hand is shifting ever so slowly toward his Glock.
The Soldier picks up on the hostility and shrinks back slightly, dips his upper body down.
“I’ll be good,” he promises in thickly accented English. “I’ll get them for you. I'll get them.”
Somehow, Brock doesn’t think he means just the targets.
Fill: Pedigree (9/?)
They’re actually just shy of Knoxville when the encrypted call comes through, which is shit Brock hopes he doesn’t have to explain later. He’s done his damnedest to make up the time they lost during their unscheduled pit stop to switch between him and Rollins (who is currently zonked out drooling against the passenger side window), but the radar alert keeps pinging so many fucking speed traps. Between that, a jack-knifed semi, and the never-ending Tennessee construction, they’re now running almost eighteen minutes behind.
Brock pulls off at the next exit that has a travel plaza and heads for the back section of the parking lot, far enough from the majority of the families running into the attached restaurant, but close enough to other vehicles that they won’t seem like a solitary pedo van. With luck, no one will notice that they’re just sitting here.
The sat phone is one of the almost-modern models, in that it has an attached screen large enough to show a couple headshots side by side. The damn thing still loads incredibly slow, reliant as it is on ancient as fuck satellites. Rumlow picks up the handset for the audio portion, listens for the Mission Commander updates. By the time the full target profiles have downloaded, he’s already swearing inside his head.
“Mariella Costa,” Harper reads, squinting at the tiny font blurred beneath the primary target. “Level Five clearance, Flight Deck access...shit. She was an Insight engineer?”
“Can it and I’ll tell you,” Brock snaps, still straining to listen to the prerecorded message. It pisses him off when they send these ‘tactical updates’ like five seconds before he has to present. He gets the need for security. But would it kill them to give him time to digest? He waits until the message has started to repeat before he hangs up the handset. The profiles stay lit behind him, the literal visages of dead men walking.
Harper, Mitchell, and Rollins shuffle to gather around the screen. The Soldier is the only one missing, curled up in his cage like a big leathery panther.
Christ, he hates his life.
“Here boy,” Brock says through clenched teeth. “Come see this face you gotta tear off.”
The Soldier crawls out of his cage with an odd stiffness, noticeable only because it immediately disappears as soon as he realizes Rumlow is watching. He’s more like a cat in that regard, Brock thinks. Conceal the small stuff, until it hurts so bad you bite the fuck out of people without provocation.
The newly minted rules are taped above his cage, written on the back of a page of MRI results. It’s not a very long list -- mostly, ‘don’t fuck with the cage, don’t feed unauthorized foods, exercise as needed’, and a cheat sheet of all the formalized commands. Brock can see the Wonder Twins have added a couple extras, including “never expose to sunlight” and “never feed after midnight”. Brock bites the cap off a Sharpie and adds ‘don’t fuck with the list, either’. And, because he’s not a completely joyless asshole, he adds “never splash with water”.
He heads back to take his place at the center of the group. The Soldier comes to sit right at his feet, nearly plants his butt directly on top of them. Brock nudges him to the side with the steel toe of his boot. The Soldier scoots where he’s directed, again with that very subtle creakiness. Brock makes a note to exercise him later.
“Primary target is Mariella Costa,” he tells the group. “Former Insight weapons engineer. Called in sick to ‘work from home’ three days ago; supervisor got suspicious when she failed to respond to email.”
He taps the visuals at top half of the screen. Mariella is a muscular, tan woman with a mole on her right cheek and deceptively sweet features. Her profile photo shows her with shoulder-length, wavy dark brown hair, but the inset ‘most recent appearance’ shot from a grainy convenience store camera seems to show that she’s shaved it off.
“Orders are to take this one alive, if possible,” he says, looking directly at the Soldier. “Confirm what she knows before anyone touches her. If we do have to take her out, they want visual proof of execution. Tissue samples, video, the whole nine yards. Basically bring her head on a plate.”
“Damn,” Harper says. “She run out on her boyfriend or something?”
“Or girlfriend,” Rollins mutters. Like he cares. Brock nudges Harper with the edge of his boot, too.
“According to her coworkers, the second target is her boyfriend. Radim Jelinek. Jelinek failed to report to his job at a local hospice over forty-eight hours ago. Intelligence presumes he’s on the run with her.”
He taps the lower half of the screen, highlighting a hefty, bald white man with broad shoulders.
“This one you can kill on sight,” he tells the Soldier.
The Soldier tilts his head and scrutinizes both pictures, drawing his eyes up, down, and around the lines of their individual faces. Brock leaves him to it. He knows from experience the Soldier will memorize until his creepy eyes fall out.
“Inside source says they’ve crossed over to AIM. Requested asylum in exchange for information. Costa was working on long-range targeting, but her other specialty is aerospace engineering. She may have had access to Stark’s turbine schematics. Apparently, she made noise like she wanted to switch to Propulsion. Idiots in charge let her access their server, trying to convince her to join their team.”
“Seriously?” Mitchell groans. “Anybody ever heard of social engineering? Fucking corporate espionage.”
Brock can’t disagree with that.
“Yeah, their asses are grass. Anyway, official story is, she plans to sell those designs to hostile governments.”
He glances down at his StarkPhone to confirm the details. They’d given him the SHIELD-friendly mission package to review before they left. The real reason they’re out here, though - the part that applies to SHIELD’s tentacled underbelly - that they don’t trust in soft copy anywhere. Once the sat phone is switched off, there will be no trace.
“And unofficially?” Rollins asks.
“Unofficially? She’s one of ours. And she left a coded message. She threatened to expose ‘a significant number’ of senior-level members - publicly on the internet - unless her safety is guaranteed. Says if she and her boyfriend both have a place in the new order, she’ll even burn bridges with AIM - give them bullshit and walk tomorrow.”
He pauses a moment to let that sink in.
“...holy shit,” Harper breathes. He’s saying what they’re all feeling. What this chick is trying -- it’s worse than suicide. Suicide, at least you choose the when and how. This engineer, she’ll be lucky if they let her die.
He understands now why this mission earned the Soldier. Whether it requires this much firepower is irrelevant. HYDRA uses its Fist for two reasons, when something needs to be crushed or when it needs to be personal. Costa needs to be crushed, because she’s forgotten: with HYDRA, it’s always personal.
HYDRA is the most jealous bitch there is, and nobody, fucking nobody, leaves her.
Mitchell laughs, reedy and nervous. “Wow. So that’s double jeopardy for how many billion, Alex?”
“Not enough,” Rollins says. “Cause, here we are.”
“Yeah,” Brock agrees. “Piss off HYDRA, piss off AIM - not a great way to stay breathing.”
The Soldier says nothing, still fixated on the glowing images. His nostrils even flare, like he thinks he can pick up their fucking scent from the pixels. God, Brock hates this conditioning, hates it down to his bones. At this point, R&D might even be sacrificing function in the name of their puppy play.
Brock glances at his phone again.
“The targets are holed up in an AIM bunker south of the border. AIM trades with the cartels in Nuevo Laredo, so they’re underground and armed to the teeth.”
“Bunker busters?” Mitchell asks hopefully.
Brock manages not to pull a completely unprofessional face.
“‘Diplomatically complicated’. Preferred that we infiltrate and excise. Job one is setting up a scramble on transmissions,” he says, looking pointedly at Mitchell. “We have to assume as soon as we engage that Costa’s going to try and retaliate.”
Mitchell nods. He raps the side of his jam-box’s generator, the way other people might knock on wood.
“I got sat and mobile covered. Do they have any hard lines? If they got fibre shielded and buried we’ll probably have to cut it.”
“We have a scan of the bunker schematics,” Brock says. “Looks like there’s at least two? And also some nice choke points and blind corners.”
Read: dinner time for the Soldier. He’s a miracle at a distance, but he’ll take you apart just as brutally up close and personal. Worst comes to worst they can find a solid choke point and funnel hostiles through their cyborg grunt grinder.
Rollins strains to peer at Brock’s phone.
“You got clearance to share that with us?”
Brock scowls. “Yeah, I was getting to that. Hang on.”
He taps the series of codes that allows him to broadcast a secure transmission over infrared. For security reasons, his stupid STRIKE app only communicates sensitive data phone-to-phone. He doesn’t have the clearance to transmit over the mobile network.
“Put ‘em up,” he grunts. The team responds by holding up the business ends of their IR readers.
Rollins’ eyes narrow when he opens the brief on his phone.
“Big place,” is all he vocalizes. Brock hears all too well what he doesn’t say. The compound is four levels, huge for an outpost in this region. He wonders if there’s more like them, maybe up over the Canadian border. Now that Tony Stark’s people are obsessed with shutting AIM down in the United States, it looks like they’ve just started setting up shop across the line.
Like fireworks tents, only meaner. According to their roster, this outpost has nearly eighty security personnel on staff; at least a quarter of those decent mercs. Sixteen to one, if the odds were completely stacked against them. Fucking thankfully, they’re not.
“Yeah, it’s a long list,” he acknowledges. “But they’re not all on shift at the same time, and we have an assist. Some of their people are also our people.”
Which is the other reason Costa’s an idiot. Trying to run to AIM, like AIM hasn’t been in HYDRA’s back pocket since it was founded. Lots of governments and think tanks over the years got that special, secret push.
And if they ever get too loud or out of line, they get a harder shove - and fall over.
Brock turns his phone around to highlight the lower right section of the schematic.
“We ingress from the southeast corner,” he says. “Our guys on the inside are working on a door code and cover.”
“We know where they’re holding her?” Mitchell asks.
“Our guys are working on it. For now, assume it’s the lowest level.”
“And the people who work there?” Harper asks.
“What?”
“The security, okay, I see the patrol stations marked.” Harper squints at his own phone and draws two fingers apart to zoom. “But there’s labs here, they gotta have employees. What about Joe Schmoe who works in Evil Physics, or whatever the fuck AIM does? How are we gonna sneak past with Benji here? He isn’t exactly subtle.”
Fuck. Harper’s back on Belize again, and while Brock doesn’t exactly blame him, the last thing he needs is this bullshit stirring up the group. Mitchell could maybe use some healthy fear, but it bothers him that Rollins is uneasy. It is a big place to take on with just five people. Creepy or not, if something goes sideways, the Soldier might just be the trump card that saves them.
“Belize wasn’t typical performance,” Brock says firmly. “He’s been adjusted.”
“And he glitched out like four hours ago!”
“Because you idiots fed him chips!” Rollins says. Rollins is good at masking fear with pissiness, or indifference, but Brock knows from experience eventually the facade cracks. And they can’t be chipping each other apart now.
They got a job to do, and whatever knots Brock might have in his guts about going in like this -- by ground, with a skeleton team, and the Soldier’s freaky cage rattling every mile along the way -- that pales compared to thought of turning it down. Just look how well quitting turned out for Costa.
“Doesn’t matter who fucked up!” Brock snaps, before Mitchell can open his big mouth too. “The Soldier’s gonna listen this time, okay? He’s gonna be good.”
Brock glances toward the Soldier, hoping that was close enough to the right creepy lingo. He feels his blood turning to ice.
The Soldier is still curled patiently off to the side, exactly where Brock left him, only he’s no longer drooling at the targets. His eerie eyes are fixed directly on Brock’s face with the same intensity. Like he’s also measuring Brock for a coffin.
“How many?” he asks in Russian. His voice sounds like he’s been chewing gravel.
Brock’s whole mouth is running dry.
“How many what?”
The Soldier’s eyes flick to Brock’s StarkPhone, then back to his face.
“How many on each level?”
“Guards? Or...”
“How many total?” The Soldier asks insistently.
Harper and Mitchell are both staring like the Soldier’s grown a second head. Brock’s unsure if it’s because they’ve started Russian lessons, or if it’s because this is the longest discourse they’ve ever heard from the Soldier. Rollins’ hand is shifting ever so slowly toward his Glock.
The Soldier picks up on the hostility and shrinks back slightly, dips his upper body down.
“I’ll be good,” he promises in thickly accented English. “I’ll get them for you. I'll get them.”
Somehow, Brock doesn’t think he means just the targets.