The Death Of Captain America Read online

“That will not be required. Does all go as planned?”

  “Sharon Carter has no idea that I have been tampering with her thoughts and memories. Carter is extremely vulnerable at this time, and that makes the implants take root and establish themselves with credibility. When the time comes, Agent 13 will be right where we want her.”

  The Red Skull is already walking away and doesn’t bother to turn his head when he replies to Doctor Faustus.

  “She had better be, or it will be your fat head on the block.”

  TWO

  THE black-clad masked man sprinting across the rooftops in the dead of night still thinks of himself as a boy. That’s because he was so young the first time he died, and he has spent more than two-thirds of his time on Earth in cryogenic stasis. The combat boots on his feet came from a special lot made for elite Russian naval infantry paratroopers during the Soviet era. The pistols in his nylon shoulder holsters are 1911AI government-model .45 automatics from a production run shipped to Russia during WWII that have been retrofitted with high-spec heat-treated recoil springs and tritium night sights. The numerous spare magazines are stainless steel and loaded with jacketed hollow-point ammo. The body armor built into his fire-resistant combat togs is an experimental Swiss design, lightweight and flexible. He has knives, grenades, garroting wire, nerve-toxin injectors, and other lethal devices jammed into belt pouches, pockets, and hidden compartments. But the deadliest weapon he possesses is his left arm.

  The man who thinks of himself as a boy was born in Shelbyville, Indiana, in 1925, and the name on his birth certificate is James Buchanan Barnes. His mother is a mystery to him; he barely remembers his father, who was killed in a training accident at Fort Lehigh in Virginia. After he was unofficially adopted as the camp mascot, he had a whole battalion of substitute fathers and older brothers. One of them was Private Steve Rogers, who went to war as Captain America and took the camp mascot along with him.

  Bucky.

  That’s what the soldiers at Camp Lehigh called him, and that’s how he answered to Captain America. He had forgotten all that for a long time. But now, as he crouches behind a roof ventilator assessing the security cams and defensive sensors of the seemingly derelict building across the alley, the restored memories flicker through his mind like old newsreel footage. Often, during the war, after sustained gunfire, his hearing had been degraded by temporary tinnitus, and his vision had been constricted by the “adrenaline tunnel,” so the memories seem like silent movies shot through a narrow lens. Some of the more ghastly images speed by as if the Grim Reaper were riffling a deck of hellish flash cards: soldiers run over by Tiger tanks, the bloated bodies of a French family in a gutted farmhouse, partisans hanging from lampposts, a head rolling down a cobbled street, wounded men begging to be shot, a weeping babushka pushing a wheelbarrow piled with dead grandchildren, screams reverberating from inside a burning Sherman, a forest with dead paratroops dangling from shroud lines like Christmas ornaments. And those were snapshots of battles won.

  The man who thinks of himself as the boy-soldier Bucky pops his head out from behind the ventilator and instantly notes the sensor units on the target building that are his most immediate threats. He bides his time to ensure his recon wasn’t spotted. This patient wariness is the result of intensive training received during the Cold War.

  “Cautious” was never an adjective one could apply to Captain America during the conflict the Soviets called “The Great War Against Fascism.” Never one to sneak up on a foe, Cap would charge Waffen SS machine-gun nests head-on, deflecting bullets with his Vibranium shield. Bucky would be right behind, trying to suppress flanking fire with his Thompson gun. Having no shield of his own, the boy sidekick had to trust wholly in Cap’s ability to fend off all the incoming lead. His faith was bottomless.

  All that changed for Bucky over the English Channel while he clung to the wing of a stolen top-secret drone-aircraft prototype.

  The grown-up boy-soldier sticks his left arm out from behind cover. It is a cybernetic prosthetic strong enough to bend steel bars and punch through armor plate. One of the weapons it contains is a low-yield EMP generator capable of shutting down close-proximity mechanical devices controlled by solid-state electronics. The man in black has amped up the power setting to reach the spy-cam circuits and motion sensors across the alley. There is no hesitation on his part as he leaps across the gap separating the two buildings. He grabs a window ledge six floors above street level, out of the search fields of all the rooftop sensors.

  The man who was once Bucky hangs motionless by his mechanical arm as he mentally clicks on the safety of his EMP weapon. This is not the original arm the Soviets fitted him with in the bad old days. This is a vastly improved model that even includes a holographic disguise suite, making it seem like a flesh-and-blood limb to the casual observer. Sometimes, he has ghost-memories of his own arm. Now, he remembers the mission to Baron Zemo’s castle, during the war—the drone over the channel, and Captain America yelling at him to let go and abort the mission. But there was stupid pride at work there. A desire to prove himself to the mentor he admired so much. He had hung on too long; the drone self-destructed, blowing off his arm and plunging him into icy waters.

  Everybody presumed he was dead. The recovery of his body by a Russian K-Class submarine was never reported to the Allies because of a tactical decision made on the spot. The boy-soldier remembers floating down a dark tunnel toward an ethereal white light, then abruptly being pulled back.

  He now understands he was plucked from the brink of death by a Soviet intelligence officer named Vasily Karpov, who had the foresight to have him put into cryogenic suspension until that time when Russian medical technology had advanced to a state in which revival, reconstitution, and prosthetic improvements were possible.

  The boy returned to the land of the living as an enhanced super-soldier with his memory selectively wiped. Reprogrammed to be loyal to Mother Russia, Karpov, and later to Karpov’s heir and protégé, Aleksander Lukin. This super-soldier was deployed to the West as an assassin and saboteur by a directive of the Executive Action Department X of the KGB (mokrie dela, i.e. “wet-works”) and assigned the code name “Winter Soldier.”

  The man who thinks of himself as a boy and was once called the Winter Soldier processes these memories in mere moments. He knows he has a thirty-second window before the security backup system reroutes feeds to standby sensors. It takes him fifteen seconds to unfasten the grill over the ventilation port with a mini electric screwdriver, and he is well inside the duct system when the backup sensors come online behind him.

  Bucky is now inside a top-secret S.H.I.E.L.D. substation.

  He drops from an interior ventilation duct into a deserted corridor and makes his way through the labyrinthine complex like a fast-moving wraith. The techs and operatives might sense something behind them in the more densely occupied passageways or catch a flitting motion in their peripheral vision, but there is nothing to be seen when they turn.

  When he was the Winter Soldier, he would not have thought twice about breaking the neck or cutting the throat of anybody who impeded his way during a mission. He had killed hundreds and felt no remorse. But that was before Lukin sent him to retrieve the Cosmic Cube and he had his first encounter with Agent 13. Sharon Carter had informed Captain America of the Winter Soldier’s amazing resemblance to Bucky, and Cap had taken it upon himself to track down the boy-soldier-turned-assassin and make amends for leaving him to his fate on the drone over the channel. Captain America prevailed, recaptured the Cube, and turned it on the Winter Soldier, telling him, “Remember who you are.”

  But “who you are” is more than memories of events. It is ethics, morals, loyalties, obligations, faith, and all the lines in the sand you have drawn to protect your integrity and self-esteem. Who can imagine the avalanche of despair, anguish, and guilt that overwhelmed a patriotic kid who had been turned against his own country? Bucky had crushed the Cube and teleported away.

  The tec
hs and operatives have nothing to fear from the seasoned killer darting from doorway to doorway behind them. Not that he wouldn’t defend himself if attacked, but his techniques would be debilitating rather than lethal. There might be pain and scarring, but no new bodies on the morgue slab.

  In one of the lowest levels, a secure door slides open in a mainframe-access room where cooling units are humming constantly and breath turns to frost. A black-gloved finger taps in a twenty-digit access code and scans in a hologram of Nick Fury’s thumbprint. The small square of floor beneath his feet glides silently down into the sub-subbasement and an alternate command center known only to S.H.I.E.L.D. agents at the directorship level.

  The figure standing at the monitoring station in the command center is wearing a director’s uniform and an eye patch. A facial-recognition scanner would identify him as Nick Fury—former director of S.H.I.E.L.D., veteran of three wars, and black belt in Taekwondo. Although Bucky is careful to approach from an oblique angle so his reflection on the monitor screens doesn’t give him away, his first punch is easily blocked. The fight that ensues is brutal, brief, and silent but for the dull thuds and grunts of the combatants. The man who was once the Winter Soldier punches past a combination inside block and palm block to hit a secret switch on the temple of his opponent. The single eyeball rolls up, and a computer-generated voice announces, “Emergency shutdown activated.” With that, the Nick Fury Life Model Decoy turns itself off and sinks to its knees on the tiled floor.

  Bucky pulls out a S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue encrypted holographic communicator and activates it on channel-hopping security mode. A flickering image of the real Nick Fury appears in front of Bucky, but his voice emanates from the communicator.

  “So Sharon’s intel was on the money? I haven’t been to this substation in years. Wasn’t even aware it was still operational.”

  “Yeah, I got in slick as a whistle, and this automaton version of you was right where she said it would be.”

  “Let’s get on with it, kid. Inject the nano Trojan horse where I showed you.”

  Bucky peels the face off the robotic Fury to reveal the access ports to the organic memory banks and pushes the plunger on the nanobot injector. The lone eyeball in the mechanical head revolves and locks forward when Bucky plugs a cable into a data-input port. “It’s weird,” he mutters. “This thing even moves exactly like you.”

  “It’s the new advanced-model L.M.D., and it probably thinks it is me. The current honchos don’t mind that one bit. All the soldiers and rank and file believe it really is me, and it’s a damn convenient blame-dump if the whole Registration and Cape-Killer thing goes south on ‘em. Plug that cable into the console next to the monitor. The output port with the red triangle next to it.”

  Bucky follows Fury’s instructions, and dense pages of code start scrolling quickly down the monitor.

  “What does this do?” Bucky asks. “Are you in their system now?”

  “I never left the system, kid. I may be hiding out, but I ain’t blind and deaf. But now, whenever this L.M.D. stand-in logs in, I’ll be able to access him, and I’ll have eyes and ears on the Helicarrier.”

  Other screens light up on the console. More data, and sped-up video. Scenes of a major scrum between Captain America’s resistance and Iron Man’s pro-registration supporters flash by. It is a visual documentation of the superhuman Civil War that tore the costumed community in half. Bucky watches it, dumbfounded.

  “What are they doing? I know I’m still in the dark about most of these guys, but it looks like they’ve all lost their minds. How can Cap be letting this happen?”

  “Let it happen? Kid, Cap is trying to stop it. Just like I am. And now, maybe you, too.”

  Bucky stares morosely at a screen on which Captain America is going head-to-head with Iron Man. He can see that neither man has his heart in it—both pulling punches, holding back their full powers. The Civil War holds no logic or reason to him, but neither does any war that he can think of. Personal ambition, nationalism, greed, and humanity’s hardwired fear of the “other” collide in an ethical vacuum, and wholesale slaughter results. He sees no safe path out of the minefield and is reluctant to jump into the thick of it.

  “It’s different for me, Colonel. Because of what I’ve done.”

  “They hijacked your body, kid, and used it for their own purposes. That wasn’t you.”

  The man who killed for the Rodina, the Mother Land, takes a hard look at the holographic image of Nick Fury. When Bucky was Cap’s sidekick, Fury was already a grown man—a sergeant leading a small unit of elite troops called the “Howling Commandos.” There are few left alive who can remember the world seen through Bucky’s eyes—and the eyes of Fury, Captain America, and the Red Skull. The entire world was at war then, with two conflicting ideologies allying to crush the axis of fascism. Millions dead, and nothing much has changed—except for a noticeable loss of innocence and the steady erosion of optimism. Fury appears middle-aged, rather than elderly—a result of the experimental Infinity Formula that saved the then-sergeant’s life during the last year of the war, a snippet of data the former KGB assassin remembers from a briefing at the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters building in Moscow.

  “I came here to do this job for you because I owe it to Cap. I’m not signing up for another hitch here, sir. I heard that speech Senator Wright made when they passed the Registration Act. He made a big deal out of the Philadelphia bombing, the terror strike I conducted as Winter Soldier. So that makes me partially responsible for this mess.”

  “All the more reason to pitch in on making it right, Bucky.”

  “I’ll think about it, Colonel Fury.”

  The monitors on the console freeze on images of Aleksander Lukin passing through the gates of the Latverian embassy. Bucky taps the screen.

  “That’s the evil S.O.B. who unfroze me every time he needed something blown up or a chop-job done. What’s he doing hooking up with Doctor Doom?”

  The Fury hologram is evasive.

  “You leave Lukin to me, kiddo. The screen freeze means the download is done, so it’s time for you to get out of Dodge.”

  “Consider me gone. Are we still a go on that other thing?”

  “Affirmative. I am blacking out the pertinent S.H.I.E.L.D. satellites and surveillance cams in five minutes, so time it to be in place by then. Blackout will max at two minutes before security backups kick in, so do the dirty and lam out on the double.”

  IT takes four minutes and thirty-seven seconds for Bucky to exfiltrate from the S.H.I.E.L.D. substation and make his way to the location designated by Fury. A small recon squad of Cape-Killers arrives ten seconds later, dispatched to investigate the surveillance-cam sighting of a rogue superhuman. It takes less than ten seconds for the squad leader to ascertain that the suspect they have surrounded on the dark and lonely street corner is a holographic decoy. Before they can report the ruse to headquarters, a cross-channel communication disruptor is tossed into their midst, followed by a smoke-generator grenade and an optical-nullification strobe. This is a situation for which they have no protocols; when they realize there is an armed hostile attacking them, they make the mistake of blindly opening fire. The ordnance they are expending is designed to combat superhumans and is equally effective against armored power-suits. With communications down, there is no way to order a cease-fire.

  The last man standing attempts to reload his weapon, but it is already too late. The attacker appropriates one of the squad’s assault weapons and shreds the last Cape-Killer’s armored suit, destroying the power pack. With the servos and motors shut down, the suit is nothing but a very heavy containment device. With the oxygen regulator no longer functioning, the Cape-Killer begins to lose consciousness and falls to the pavement. Seconds pass, he can breathe again, and he hears a voice.

  “I’m unlocking his helmet and removing it. I guess you can reverse-engineer it and figure out a way to fight a whole army of ’em, huh, Colonel? I’d love to see Tony Stark’s face wh
en that happens.”

  The Cape-Killer tries to blink his eyes back into focus as the helmet is lifted away. The face looming over him starts to resolve into something vaguely human when a black-gloved fist smashes down, and everything goes black.

  INTERLUDE #2

  ACROSS the Atlantic, in his baronial castle in Latveria, Victor von Doom gazes with mild disdain upon the Red Skull—who is, after all, nothing but an elevated thug who rose to power on the coattails of jackbooted fascists. Acknowledging the Red Skull’s Machiavellian skills and technological prowess is one thing, but accepting him as an equal is out of the question. One must have standards, mustn’t one? Toleration is a step below acceptance, and Doctor Doom grudgingly grants that accommodation only because it is to his advantage to do so.

  The Red Skull is not impressed with the ruler of Latveria. He sees Doom as the offspring of Gypsies, lording it over a debased population; a megalomaniac with a taste for grand opera and a fascination with mysticism that belies his scientific training.

  They both desire something the other has, and this is the root of their present accord. They are standing in Doctor Doom’s laboratory, which is equipped with a bewildering mixture of modern technology and the paraphernalia of a medieval alchemist. If the space it occupies looks like a dungeon, it is because that is exactly what it used to be. There are centrifuges and computer terminals where torture racks and iron maidens once stood.

  They exchange whatever pleasantries can be exchanged between two icons of evil and get down to business. The Red Skull speaks first.

  “Have your people found what I told them they would find in that dig in Germany? Are you satisfied with the result?”

  “Yes, Skull. We are quite pleased. And you shall have what you requested. Doom is true to his word.”

  “Do you believe it now? That you had a previous existence in Eisendorf five hundred years ago? That you were the legendary Baron of Iron?”