Phase Two: Marvel's Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Marvel Cinematic Universe), page 1
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A Sneak Peek of Phase Two: Avengers: Age of Ultron
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CHAPTER 1
It was a fine cool morning to be jogging on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Sam Wilson planned to put in his miles and then he had to get to work at the VA rehab facility. He liked running on mornings like these, before the heat settled in and DC turned into a steam bath. He wasn’t thinking about much, just enjoying the groove of the run, the feeling of his body getting loose. He heard a voice from behind him. “On your left.”
Sam nodded. It was standard runner’s courtesy to let someone know when you were going to pass them on a path. But the other guy was moving fast. Really fast. Almost at a sprint. He shot ahead of Sam and made a turn, disappearing behind the Lincoln Memorial. If he kept up that pace, he wasn’t going to get very far. Sam decided he must be doing some kind of interval workout. Sprints, then walks. Something like that.
Sam’s standard loop around the National Mall was almost exactly four miles. The first time he saw the fast guy was about a mile and a half into it. Then, before he reached the three-mile mark, he heard it again. “On your left.”
There he went again. “Uh-huh. On my left. Got it,” Sam said. He considered himself to be in pretty good shape, but this guy was Olympic level. Unless he was catching a ride or something. He watched the other runner go, and picked up his own pace. A little competition was good. He could go faster and he didn’t like having other runners show him up. His lungs started to burn and he could feel the muscles in his legs burn, too. This wasn’t just a regular jog anymore.
When he was a few hundred yards short of the complete loop, he heard footsteps again. “Don’t say it. Don’t you say it,” he said, trying to go faster, but he was pretty worn out.
“On your left.” The other runner went by at the same robotic near-sprint.
“Come on!” Sam said. He started to sprint, too. When he got to the four-mile mark, he staggered off the path and sat down by a tree, panting. It had been a long time since he’d run that hard.
The other guy had stopped, too. He strolled back over to Sam, barely out of breath. Now that Sam saw his face, he started to figure out how the guy had kept up that crazy pace. “Need a medic?” he asked Sam.
“I need a new set of lungs,” Sam said, half-serious. “Dude, you just ran, like, thirteen miles in thirty minutes.”
“I guess I got a late start.”
“Really? You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take another lap. Did you just take it? I assume you just took it.” Sam laughed at himself.
“What unit you with?” Mister Fast asked.
“Fifty-Eighth Pararescue. But now I’m working down at the VA.” Sam got to his feet and extended a hand. “Sam Wilson.”
“Steve Rogers.”
“I kind of put that together.” Sam couldn’t believe he was talking to Captain America. “Must have freaked you out, coming home after the whole defrosting thing.”
“It takes some getting used to. It’s good to meet you, Sam.” Captain America turned to go.
Sam was a little bit starstruck and a little bit curious. He also felt like maybe he’d put his foot in his mouth by bringing up the defrosting thing. “It’s your bed, right?” he called out.
Steve turned back. “What’s that?”
“Your bed, it’s too soft. When I was over there, I’d sleep on the ground, use rocks for pillows like a caveman. Now I’m home, lying in my bed, and it’s like…”
“Lying on a marshmallow,” Steve finished.
“Feel like I’m gonna sink right to the floor,” Sam said.
Steve nodded. “How long?”
“Two tours. You must miss the good old days, huh?”
Steve thought about it. “Well, things aren’t so bad. Food’s a lot better. We used to boil everything. No polio is good. Internet, so helpful. I’ve been reading that a lot, trying to catch up.”
I bet you spend a lot of time trying to catch up, Sam thought. He had an idea. “Marvin Gaye, 1972, Trouble Man soundtrack,” he said. “Everything you missed jammed into one album.”
“I’ll put it on the list.” Sam saw him write it down in a little spiral notebook. Then Steve’s phone chirped. He looked at his screen and said, “All right, Sam, duty calls.”
“Thanks for the run.”
“If that’s what you want to call running,” Steve joked.
Sam laughed. “Oh, that’s how it is?”
“Oh, that’s how it is.”
“Okay.” Sam waved. “Any time you want to stop by the VA, make me look awesome in front of the girl at the front desk, just let me know.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Steve said with a grin.
With a rev of its overpowered engine, a black sports car pulled up to the curb nearby. The driver was a young redheaded woman Sam recognized immediately: Agent Natasha Romanoff of S.H.I.E.L.D. Holy smokes, he thought. This sure is better than bumping into senators while you’re trying to cross Pennsylvania Avenue. “Hey, fellas,” Romanoff said. “Either one of you know where the Smithsonian is? I’m here to pick up a fossil.”
Steve glanced over at Sam as he walked to the car. He figured Sam would be checking Natasha out and he was right. She was hard to ignore. “That’s hilarious.”
As he got in the car, he saw that Natasha was also checking Sam out. “How you doing?” Sam said.
She gave him a little smile. “Hey.”
Steve grinned at him. “Can’t run everywhere,” he said.
As the car squealed away into traffic, Sam Wilson said to himself, “No, you can’t.”
Man, he thought. I just met two of the Avengers.
But he still had to go home, get a shower, and get to work. Life went on.
CHAPTER 2
S.T.R.I.K.E. team leader Brock Rumlow briefed Cap and Natasha as they flew in a Quinjet over the Indian Ocean. “Target is a mobile satellite launch platform, the Lemurian Star. They were sending up their last payload when pirates took them, ninety-three minutes ago.” Rumlow was working on a touch screen in the Quinjet’s passenger compartment. He showed the ship and then its location on the map, close to the Indian coast.
“Any demands?” Steve asked.
“Billion and a half.”
“Why so steep?”
“Because it’s S.H.I.E.L.D.’s,” Rumlow said.
That changed things. This wasn’t an ordinary hijacking. “So it’s not off course,” Steve said. “It’s trespassing.”
“I’m sure they have a good reason,” Natasha said.
“You know, I’m getting a little tired of being Fury’s janitor.”
“Relax. It’s not that complicated.”
“How many pirates?” Steve asked Rumlow.
“Twenty-five. Top mercs led by this guy.” Rumlow pulled up a dossier on the screen. “Georges Batroc. Ex-DGSE, Action Division. He’s at the top of Interpol’s Red Notice. Before the French demobilized him, he had thirty-six kill missions. This guy’s got a rep for maximum casualties.”
“Hostages?”
“Oh, mostly techs. One officer. Jasper Sitwell.” A photo of Sitwell appeared on the screen. “They’re in the galley.”
Steve knew Jasper Sitwell. He wasn’t usually in the field. “What’s Sitwell doing on a launch ship?” he wondered aloud.
Steve considered the layout of the ship and the location of the galley where the hostages were. Everything seemed pretty straightforward. “All right, I’m gonna sweep the deck and find Batroc. Nat, you kill the engines and wait for instructions.” He looked at Rumlow. “Rumlow, you sweep aft, find the hostages, get them to the life-pods, get them out. Let’s move.”
“S.T.R.I.K.E., you heard the cap,” Rumlow said. “Gear up.”
“Secure channel seven,” Steve said into his wrist mic, testing the frequency he would use on the operation.
“Seven secure,” Natasha echoed. “Did you do anything fun Saturday night?”
“Well, all the guys from my barbershop quartet are dead, so, no, not really.”
“Coming up on the drop zone, Cap,” Rumlow said from up front.
“You know, if you ask Kristen from Statistics out, she’d probably say yes,” Natasha said. Lately she’d started a campaign to get him to date more. Or at all.
Steve knew she was right about Kristen from Statistics. “That’s why I don’t ask,” he said. The Quinjet’s rear ramp opened up, exposing a stormy night sky.
“Too shy, or too scared?”
“Too busy!” Cap jumped out the back of the plane.
Rumlow and his second-in-command, Jack Rollins, saw Cap jump. “Was he wearing a parachute?” Rollins asked.
“No,” Rumlow said with an admiring smile. “No, he wasn’t.”
CHAPTER 3
Steve fell through the stormy nigh
Steve grabbed him from behind and covered his mouth, putting him in a chokehold until he was unconscious. Then he lowered the mercenary to the deck. He needed to keep up the element of surprise as long as he could.
He went counterclockwise around the deck of the ship, taking out the mercenaries as he found them. He used exactly as much force as was necessary to stop them from sounding the alarm.
Everything went fine right up until he had made an almost complete circuit of the ship. Then, just as he began to turn into the middle of the deck to get inside and head for the galley, he skidded to a halt. One of the mercenaries had him covered with an automatic rifle. “Don’t move!” he shouted.
Steve froze. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another armed mercenary. They had overlapping fields of fire and he had no place to run. He could probably take them down, but he was going to lose some blood doing it.
Then there was a soft pop and the nearest mercenary collapsed. Before he even hit the deck, the second man also fell. A moment later Brock Rumlow dropped out of the sky, parachute trailing behind him over the deck. He held the rifle he’d used to drop the two mercenaries. Good shooting, Steve thought. It wasn’t easy to be accurate when you were hanging from a parachute on a windy night and shooting at a moving target on the deck of a ship, which was also moving. Rumlow was among S.H.I.E.L.D.’s best.
“Thanks,” Cap said.
“Yeah,” Rumlow said with a grin. “You seemed pretty helpless without me.”
Natasha and the rest of the team dropped around them and together they all started off to the next mission objective: Find Sitwell and also find Georges Batroc. “What about the nurse who lives across the hall from you?” Natasha asked Steve as they walked. “She seems kind of nice.”
Her name was Kate, and Natasha was right. She was nice. Steve appreciated what Natasha was trying to do, but his mind wasn’t on romance right then. “Secure the engine room, then find me a date.”
“I’m multitasking,” she said, and vaulted a railing before dropping down to the lower deck, where the engine room was.
CHAPTER 4
In the galley, the mercenaries were getting impatient. “I told Batroc,” one of them said in French, “if we want to make S.H.I.E.L.D. pay us, start sending them bodies now!” He walked up and down the row of hostages. They were all sitting on the floor, hands and feet tied. “I have a bullet for someone.… You want a bullet in your head?” He kicked Jasper Sitwell’s foot. “Move that foot—you want a bullet in the head?”
Sitwell just looked at him. He knew S.H.I.E.L.D. would have launched a rescue mission. It was only a matter of time.
Steve got to the lower level of the ship’s bridge tower and shot a small, sticky disk up to the bridge window. The disk contained a microphone that let him in on what the mercenaries were saying. “I don’t like waiting,” one of them was complaining in French.
“Call Durand,” another said. “I want this ship ready to move when the ransom comes.”
There was a pause, and Steve heard the first mercenary say, “Start the engines.” Then he hung up the phone.
Down in the engine room, the mercenary who had taken the call turned to get the engines started. He froze when he saw Natasha Romanoff, smiling at him. “Hey, sailor,” she said.
In the galley, the restless mercenary got sick of shouting at the hostages. “All right, I’ve waited long enough,” he announced, and pounded on the door. “Hey! Find Batroc. If I don’t hear anything in two minutes, I start killing them!”
“I’ll find him,” the mercenary outside called back.
But when he turned around, he walked right into Brock Rumlow’s Taser. He went down without a sound. The rest of the S.T.R.I.K.E. team waited with Rumlow for the order to go in.
Outside, Cap was watching the bridge and still listening in. He knew Batroc was up there when one of the mercenaries said, “Radio silence from S.H.I.E.L.D., Batroc.”
“S.T.R.I.K.E. in position,” Rumlow reported.
It was time to go in. “Natasha, what’s your status?” She didn’t answer. “Status, Natasha.”
“Hang on!” Natasha snapped. She was a little busy with the last three mercenaries in the engine room area. She took them out with a combination of unarmed strikes and electrical jolts from the stingers built into the wrists of her uniform. Then she got back to Steve. “Engine room secure.”
Inside the galley, the mercenaries got ready as the two minutes ran out. “Time is up,” the leader said. “Who dies first?” He pointed at a random agent. “You!”
Then there was a series of sharp cracks as the galley’s windows shattered by S.T.R.I.K.E. snipers hanging outside. The mercenaries all dropped. A split second later, the galley door blew off its hinges, and with a single shot, Brock Rumlow took out the leader who had started the two-minute countdown.
He fell right in front of Jasper Sitwell, who looked at him and said, “I told you. S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t negotiate.”
CHAPTER 5
On the bridge, the mercenary with Batroc looked at his phone. “The line just went dead. I’ve lost contact with them.…”
Captain America’s shield shattered through the window. Batroc dodged the shield with extraordinary reflexes and it knocked out the other mercenary instead and got lodged in the wall. Steve vaulted through the broken window into the bridge compartment.
While Cap was regaining his balance, Batroc kicked out from his hiding place behind a row of navigation terminals and ran. Cap pulled his shield out of the wall and followed, hurtling down a stairwell and coming out onto the main deck.
“Hostages en route to extraction. Romanoff missed the rendezvous point, Captain,” Rumlow said in his ear. “Hostiles are still in play.”
“Natasha, Batroc’s on the move,” Steve said into the wrist comm. “Circle back to Rumlow and protect the hostages.” She didn’t answer. “Natasha,” he said again.
Still no answer.
Batroc took advantage of Cap’s distraction, jumping out of the shadows and nailing him with a series of leaping and spinning kicks. Cap absorbed most of them with his shield, but Batroc seemed quicker than any normal man. He kept coming, and he dodged Cap’s counterattacks. After their first round, Batroc did a back handspring away, and in French said, “I thought you were more than just a shield.”
Okay, Steve thought. Fair enough.
He attached the shield to its magnetic clamp on his back. Then he took off his mask. “Let’s see,” he said, also in French.
The second round was close and short. Steve went after Batroc, knowing he’d have to take a punch to get in close without his shield. That was all right. He got into grappling distance with Batroc and pounded him to the ground. Batroc kicked loose and got up. Steve charged him. They crashed through a door and slammed to the floor inside a room full of computers. With one last punch, Steve knocked Batroc out cold.
“Well, this is awkward,” Natasha said.
Steve looked up. She was at one of the terminals. Had she been here the whole time, not answering his calls and missing the S.T.R.I.K.E. rendezvous? “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Backing up the hard drive. It’s a good habit to get into.”
“Rumlow needed your help. What are you doing here?” He looked at the computer screen and saw the names of the files she was downloading. “You’re saving S.H.I.E.L.D. intel.”
“Whatever I can get my hands on.”
She had gone completely off mission and Steve didn’t like it. “Our mission is to rescue hostages.”
“No, that’s your mission, and you’ve done it beautifully,” she said. She finished the download and popped a USB drive out of its socket.
