Betrayal
Siberia
October 1995
The bunker was gone.
Natasha stood next to her stolen helicopter and stared in disbelief. The bunker had vanished as if it had never been there. The tundra was smooth, white, and unmarked.
Her memory had never failed her but she scrabbled through her pockets until her gloved hands found her GPS, one of the newest models and one that wasn’t even available on the public market, hoping desperately this was the first time in the seventy-two years since the Red Room took her, changed her, that she was remembering wrong.
Natasha’s heart sank. The coordinates were correct.
She bolted back into the helicopter and, with shaking hands, activated the rotors. It snarled to life and lifted off the ground, engine whining without its warm-up, but she didn’t care.
The spy’s hands flew over the weapons console, aiming two bunker-busters she’d loaded up as a last resort at the ground where she knew the bunker door had been five and a half months ago. Five months in deep cover, and this happened.
Natasha was no stranger to explosions. She pulled ear protection over her head and pressed the button. The missiles screamed from the helicopter to the ground two hundred feet below. She closed her eyes against the resulting fireball.
When she touched down next to the crater and flew out of the helicopter, diving down into its bottom with the grace that wouldn’t leave her limbs even when she was desperate and grieving and furious, she found nothing but scorched earth and flakes of stone. What she did not find was the upper level of the bunker, which should have been there but wasn’t.
Wait.
Natasha scrabbled with her hands until she uncovered the sheet metal. Her heart sank when she realized it was a lone piece of scrap, not a clue that might lead toward a way into the bunker if they’d only removed the top levels, but at least she could see the logo on it.
The KGB, or what was left of it.
Natasha’s eyes narrowed. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a feral snarl.
She carried the piece of scrap with her back up to the helicopter and made sure it was secure in the back before she lifted off and aimed it back toward Naiba. She’d catch a flight from the Russian port city to Moscow for her next check-in. Malyen would be there, as her handler, and she would make the rotten fossil of a man regret having taken her Soldier, and then she would paint Russia in the blood of the entire rotten organization.
But that would take funds. Momentum. Assistance, possibly, and information: all things she didn’t have, and that would take years to obtain. She’d play it smart. Play the long game.
The only thing Natasha Romanova was sure of was that she would never do another thing for the KGB again.
Except destroy it.
Am I not merciful?