Chapter 44
[Classified Location], Russia
June 2011
The bunker was quiet, but not abandoned.
Natasha’s hands shook. She clenched them into fists and reveled in the sticky half-dried blood coating her palms.
Four more lives to add to her tally, and she had been inside less than an hour. But these she would not regret. These were KGB. Her old masters. The people who, according to her source, had her Soldier locked away somewhere in here.
She crept through darkened hallways lined with ancient steel and iron. Rust grew in the corners and the ugly fluorescent lights above her head flickered irregularly. The corridor curved ahead of her, essentially a large metal pipe with a metal catwalk leveling the floor about a quarter of the way up from its bottom.
Footsteps.
Natasha stepped aside and folded herself down into the gap between the raised walkway and the floor. Grime and moisture instantly coated her palms. She ignored it. She’d had worse.
Through the small gaps in the porous metal of the walkway, she noted that the person approaching was wearing an open white lab coat, and he was alone.
Excellent.
He passed overhead, absorbed in a tablet of some kind.
Natasha slipped silently from her hiding place and came up behind him, knife in hand.
The scientist froze when he felt the cold metal.
“Scream and you die,” Natasha said in Russian. The familiar syllables of her native language felt like coming home.
He nodded stiffly.
“Where is the Winter Soldier?”
“I do not know who you mean,” the scientist gasped.
She jabbed him with the knife.
“Okay, okay,” he said, flinching. She felt moisture on her fingers and realized she’d cut him a little.
The scientist fumbled with his tablet. “Look—here, I’ll find the blueprints—”
“Don’t bother,” Natasha said. “You’re going to lead me there. You’re going to answer some questions along the way. If you warn anyone, you die. If you try to run, you die. If you attempt to trick me or lead me astray, I will notice, and you will die.” She shoved the scientist away and he whipped around to face her. Natasha fixed him with her coldest glare. “And believe me,” she continued, “if there is a life after this one, your family and anyone else you care about will join you there soon.”
The scientist nodded shakily.
Natasha smiled kindly at him. “Lead the way, doctor.”
Shakily, the doctor turned off his tablet and tucked it in by his side. They set off back the way he’d come.
“Why is the Soldier here?” Natasha asked.
“He—ah—they were having some performance issues,” the doctor stuttered. “The—neural programming, it—was faulty. This was… a temporary solution, until it could be determined what… what was causing the lapses.”
“And before that? What have you been doing with him for the last twenty-one years?” Natasha demanded.
The scientist squirmed. Natasha jabbed him lightly in the spine with her blade. “Answer me.”
“Ah—missions,” the man said.
“KGB?”
There was a pause.
Natasha narrowed her eyes. “ KGB? ”
“No,” he admitted. “Not entirely.”
Gunfire shredded the corridor.
Natasha dove aside. The scientist took the brunt of the bullets. She rolled beneath the catwalk again and bolted in a low crouch in the direction of the shots.
Three guards.
Bullet traceries tore through the metal. They knew or suspected she was coming. A line of pain traced Natasha’s ribs. She ignored it, pulled out a flash grenade, threw it underhanded up the wall. It rolled around the curve of the tunnel and clanged on the metal above.
She shut her eyes. Pinned her hands over her ears.
Bang
Natasha climbed up from beneath the catwalk and found the three guards moaning on the ground. She grabbed an assault rifle from one of them and noted that none of them was wearing a keycard or ID of any kind. No KGB logo, no indication of who they worked for.
Interesting.
But unimportant.
She put a bullet in each of their heads, rolled their bodies beneath the catwalk, and went back for the scientist.
He was dead. Rifle fire had shredded his chest and head. Natasha nudged the body with her toe in irritation, grabbed his tablet, and rolled the scientist under the catwalk as well. She examined her prize. The screen was cracked and there was a bullet hole in one corner, but it still functioned.
She turned it on and examined the blueprints that were still up from the scientist’s frantic attempts to save his own life.
Natasha examined the plans carefully, figured out where she was, and extrapolated based on the route she and the scientist had been on.
She set off in a soundless jog.
For fifteen minutes, Natasha traced her way through the bunker that apparently was being used by someone not the KGB. She could sort that out later. Or maybe she would kill everyone involved and then it wouldn’t matter.
There.
A door plastered with warning signs in eleven languages, all of which Natasha knew, loomed ahead.
All of them mentioned “cryo storage”.
Long-slumbering rage burst into full flame.
Natasha strode forward, fists clenched, and threw secrecy to the four winds. She lifted the assault rifle and held the trigger back until the lock on the door was gone.
Inside was an antechamber. Natasha plowed through it and through the much-flimsier door on the other side.
Her feet froze to the floor.
Almost literally.
A layer of ice crusted the ceiling and the corners of the room. Clearly, the technology they were using was old and leaky. The air smelled chemical-blue. Four vertical cryo tubes stood along the back wall. Only three of them were empty.
Natasha stepped in a dream across the room until she was looking up at the face she had seen behind her closed eyes for two decades. Distorted by ice, marked with two new scars, sleeping, but still him. Still recognizable.
“They froze you,” she whispered, still in Russian. “They locked the Winter Soldier in ice. My Zima.”
Still as if in a dream, she walked over to the corner of the control panel and started tapping away. The machine was old, its firewalls easily cracked.
Begin thawing? Y/N flashed on the screen.
“Yes,” Natasha hissed, and stabbed at the Yes option.
There was a hiss. Seconds later, warm air flooded the room.
Accompanied by the drip of melting ice, Natasha left that pane and began to slog her way through the old bunker’s network. There was very little usable information. Clearly, the whole thing was mainly a refrigerator for her Zima.
Here was something.
Natasha narrowed her eyes and leaned in closer, trying to decipher the Russian characters on the screen. It was a scanned copy of a handwritten document. The handwriting was a mess and the quality was poor, but she got a date, a time, and a location. There was a meeting of the people who were going to use her Soldier, to wake him up and—her blood ran cold at the description of what they would do to his mind. What they had already done, numerous times, to keep him docile and complacent. To erase him.
The rage found fuel in her fear and burned hotter.
But even in the heights of fury, Natasha maintained her control. She took a steadying breath and forced herself to stay still. Focus. She had to leave a message for her Soldier somehow.
She found a marker in the antechamber and scrawled on the wall: Zima. Winter Soldier. and drew an arrow pointing down towards the floor. She would record herself on the tablet and leave it there for him.
“Zima,” she whispered into the camera, caressing the Russian syllables, relishing the taste of his name on her lips after so long. “My Soldier. I do not know if you remember me,” she began. “My name is Natalia Romanova. The Black Widow. For years, I was your partner. And more. We met in 1953. In 1990, it was discovered that you were… compromised. We were separated. I was led to believe the separation would not be permanent. I was lied to.”
Natasha took a deep breath. “I have sworn vengeance on those who did this to you, to us. In the control panel is all the information about what they’ve been doing to you to try and keep you docile, keep you from remembering. You are free now. I am going after my revenge. When you wake, if I am not here, know that I will come for you, Zima. I will always find you. There is no force in this world can keep us apart.”
She realized hot tears were rolling down her face, and did not care. He was her Soldier. He was the only person in the world she trusted to see her vulnerable, broken.
“I loved you for fifty-three years,” she murmured. “And I love you still. Try to remember who you are.”
Natasha rose and centered herself. In order to ensure that her Zima would not be discovered, there was only one thing she could do before she left.
Paint this bunker red.
She lifted her half-spent assault rifle from the floor and settled its weight against her right shoulder like an old friend.