Chapter 171: Raiding HYDRA
Howard Stark took a pull from the flask he kept in his breast pocket — a habit so ingrained it probably qualified as a personality trait at this point — and raised it in Steve's direction.
"Captain America." He gestured with the flask. "Last chance before we do something inadvisable. Sure you don't want a drink?"
"I'm sure," Steve said, adjusting the strap on his shield without looking up.
He didn't particularly enjoy Howard Stark's company, which wasn't a character flaw on either side so much as an inevitable friction between two very different definitions of what taking things seriously looked like. But Peggy had been direct about it:
Howard was the pilot, Howard had the plane, and Steve couldn't fly. He'd briefly calculated whether he could learn in the available time window. The answer was probably yes, eventually — but eventually was two hours he didn't have, and Bucky's unit had already been in HYDRA captivity long enough that every additional hour made the math worse.
So: Howard Stark, flask and all.
"Your backup," Howard said, with the casual curiosity of a man who asked questions primarily to have something to do with his mouth. "This mystery friend of yours. Is he actually useful, or are we running a charity operation here?"
Steve opened his mouth.
"Depending on who's doing the assessment," a voice said from the hangar entrance, "the answer is probably yes."
Jake walked in, coat collar up against the night air, moving with the unhurried certainty of someone who had made better time than expected and wasn't going to make a performance of it.
Howard closed his mouth. Opened it again. Looked Jake up and down with the frank appraisal of an engineer encountering an unexpected variable. Then he looked at Steve with an expression that communicated, without words, a fairly complete opinion.
"Sorry I'm late," Jake said to Steve. "Ready?"
"Ready. It's just the two of us going in."
"Understood."
They boarded.
The plane was fast and well-maintained — whatever else Howard Stark was, he took his aircraft seriously. The cabin was cramped in the way that military transport was always cramped, designed for function rather than comfort, with Peggy Carter occupying the forward seat with the posture of someone who had decided to be professionally composed about a situation she had significant reservations about.
Howard, for his part, directed most of his in-flight conversation toward her.
"Agent Carter — if we happen to come through Luxembourg on the return leg, there's a restaurant I know. Cheese fondue. Late night. The view alone is worth—"
"Thank you, Howard."
The tone was the conversational equivalent of a door closing.
Peggy's attention was elsewhere. Jake had noticed it from the moment he'd stepped aboard — a steady, analytical regard that moved across him methodically. Face. Build. The way he held himself. The coat. Back to the face. It was the look of a trained intelligence officer encountering something that didn't match her file, running a real-time comparison between observed data and recorded data and finding the delta significant.
Jake kept his focus on the window and the conversation with Steve, which was more productive anyway. Steve had done proper reconnaissance — aerial photographs, intercepted communications, a structural layout of the HYDRA facility at Azzano built from three separate intelligence sources. His plan was straightforward and good. Jake offered two adjustments, which Steve considered seriously and incorporated without ego, which was one of the things that made working with him unusually efficient.
"Lancelot." Peggy's voice, when she finally spoke directly to him, had the careful precision of someone choosing their words in advance.
Jake looked over.
"You've changed considerably since the last time I saw you."
"People change."
"Not usually this much. Not in this direction." Her gaze was steady and professionally unapologetic. "The Dark Council — what exactly is it? What do you want?"
"The Dark Council isn't a religious organization," Jake said. "It doesn't have a theology or a prophet. It helps people who are trapped find a way out. That's the whole thing." He paused. "Rescuing Bucky and the 107th tonight — that's a version of the same principle."
Steve gave a small nod without looking up from the map.
Peggy studied Jake for a moment longer. Then, apparently deciding to approach from a different angle: "You're outside American jurisdiction."
"Yes."
"The SSR has an open file on your organization."
"I'm aware."
"That doesn't concern you."
"Not especially," Jake said, in a tone that wasn't dismissive so much as genuinely honest about the hierarchy of things he was concerned about at this particular moment, and where SSR administrative files ranked on that list.
Peggy's expression tightened fractionally. She was sharp enough to recognize that she wasn't going to get anything useful through direct interrogation, and disciplined enough not to keep trying once she'd made that determination. She turned back to the front of the cabin, and if the angle of her shoulders communicated a residual frustration, she kept it entirely professional.
Howard, who had been watching this exchange with the alert interest of someone taking notes, caught Jake's eye and pointed between him and Peggy with a slightly accusatory expression.
Jake looked at the window.
Howard looked at Peggy.
The plane flew on.
BOOM.
The explosion was close — twenty centimeters off the left wing, near enough that the shockwave hit the aircraft like a shove from a very large hand. The cabin lurched. Loose equipment shifted. Howard's hands moved on the controls with the automatic competence of a genuinely excellent pilot keeping a plane in the air through an inconvenient situation.
"That's our exit," Jake said.
Steve was already standing, reaching for his parachute. "Agreed."
"The altitude is at least five hundred feet—" Peggy started.
Jake had the cabin door open before she finished the sentence. Cold air flooded in at volume, immediate and total, pulling at everything not secured. He clipped the parachute, confirmed the release, looked at Steve once — Steve nodded — and stepped out.
The wind took him.
Behind him, through the rushing air and the receding engine noise, he heard Peggy Carter say something emphatic that the altitude rendered unintelligible.
The parachute deployed. Below, the dark geometry of occupied Austria resolved into roads and tree lines and, several kilometers distant, the particular cluster of lights and structures that matched the aerial photography Steve had been working from.
Jake steered toward it and watched the ground come up.
They came down in a tree line a kilometer from the perimeter.
Chutes buried, gear confirmed, they moved along the road's edge in the dark without speaking — the silence of two people who had already agreed on the plan and didn't need to revisit it.
A HYDRA patrol vehicle came around the bend.
They stopped.
The truck rolled past at five kilometers per hour, the driver's window cracked, the passenger half-asleep against the door.
Jake and Steve exchanged a look.
The truck stopped.
The driver heard something on the roof. He reached for his pistol and started to lean out the window.
Jake's hand closed around the back of his collar before he'd cleared the frame. One smooth pull and the driver was out of the seat and moving through the air in a direction he hadn't planned on going.
The passenger was faster than expected — already turning, gun coming up — but Steve was already there. A precise strike to the back of the neck, the kind that switches the lights off cleanly without permanent damage, and the man slumped against the door.
Sixty seconds later the truck was back in motion, Jake driving, Steve in the passenger seat, both of them in appropriated HYDRA overcoats that fit well enough to pass a casual checkpoint glance.
The facility gates opened without incident.
The base was large and well-organized — the infrastructure of a program that had been running for years rather than months, with the particular confidence of people who believed strongly in what they were doing. HYDRA architecture had a specific aesthetic: functional at its core, but with a grandiosity that suggested the people designing it were making a statement about their own importance. High ceilings. Wide corridors. Equipment that was decades ahead of anything the Allies had in the field.
The Tesseract-derived weapons were everywhere.
Jake had factored this in, but seeing them in person calibrated his caution appropriately. The energy weapons weren't kinetic — they didn't bruise or break. They dissolved. A direct hit converted organic matter into light and vapor with a thoroughness that made the distinction between enhanced and non-enhanced completely irrelevant. Even with the super soldier serum, taking one of those shots would end the conversation permanently.
The plan split at the third junction: Steve toward the prisoner compounds in the eastern section, Jake toward the manufacturing floor.
They separated without ceremony.
The weapons manufacturing floor was vast.
Jake moved through it along the maintenance walkway, staying high, reading the layout from above before committing to ground level. Below him, rows of HYDRA technicians worked at stations processing something that glowed — a deep, saturated blue, the color of deep ocean or clear sky at the horizon, contained in small cube-shaped canisters that were being assembled into larger delivery systems along a production line that ran the length of the room.
Tesseract energy. Extracted, refined, packaged for deployment.
The blue light of it cast everything in the room in the same cold hue, making the technicians look like figures in a photograph taken at the bottom of a lake.
Jake descended to the floor level through a maintenance stair and moved along the wall toward the storage section, counting canisters, assessing quantities.
"Hey."
He stopped.
A HYDRA guard, young, alert in the way that meant recent posting rather than experienced complacency, stood ten feet away with a rifle raised. Nobody else in the immediate vicinity.
Jake raised both hands, slowly, keeping his back to the man.
"Don't move. Turn around. Who are you — what are you doing in this section—"
The guard's boots on the concrete floor — heavy, deliberate — came closer. The barrel of the rifle would be about three feet from Jake's spine by now. The man was following protocol, which meant he was going to call for backup within the next fifteen seconds if Jake didn't give him a satisfactory answer.
Jake crouched.
The movement was fast enough that the guard's trigger pull was a reflex response to something that was no longer where it had been. The shot went over Jake's head and sparked off the far wall. Then Jake's fist connected with the guard's jaw in a single short arc — not a full swing, just a rotation of the hip with the new body weight behind it — and the man left the ground by approximately two feet before landing three meters away and staying there.
Jake looked at his own fist for a moment.
Still getting used to that.
He turned back to the storage canisters. The blue light pulsed steadily in each one, patient and self-contained, utterly indifferent to what was happening around it.
There was a significant quantity here. More than the manufacturing process required for current output. This was stockpiling — building toward something larger than the facility's day-to-day operations suggested.
Jake began moving canisters.
He wasn't sure yet exactly what he was going to do with them. The practical voice in the back of his mind was already running through options — extraction, concealment, destruction, leverage. The less practical part of him, the part that had been watching a room full of the most dangerous energy source on the planet pulse quietly in the dark, had bypassed that calculation entirely and arrived directly at take as many as you can carry.
He was halfway through that process when the distant sound of alarms began.
Steve had apparently been found.
Jake worked faster.
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