The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (23 page)

Go figure. There sure weren't any Chinese named Steve when I was growing up around here, Steve thought.

While he waited for General Fury to get there, Steve wondered how often in the history of military operations a soldier had been ordered to sit in a bar and wait for his superior so they could have a drink. Probably it happened fairly often to spies, but Steve Rogers would sooner have worn a hammer and sickle than considered himself a spy.

Whoa there, he told himself. What have you been doing this past couple of weeks? Keeping secrets, executing plans that directly contravene your orders... if that wasn't spying, it was sure in the same territory.

Steve's father had always drilled into him the importance of being a man when you found out you'd been wrong about something. A real man admitted his errors and would move heaven and earth to make them right. Now Steve found himself in the position of having to do that. General Fury had called him out. The jukebox abruptly switched from some kind of incomprehensible noise to music that Steve recognized, even if he'd never learned to appreciate it: the Delta blues he'd never known anything about until he'd gone into the service and heard it coming from the kitchens and maintenance yards where most of the black soldiers were assigned. The only black person in the bar was wearing a leather cowboy hat and long braids. Not a blues type, that was for sure. And now here came General Fury through the door, more walking evidence that Steve was a man out of his time as surely as Rip Van Winkle. A black general. With a flush of embarrassment, Steve remembered breaking General Fury's nose, and later apologizing about it. When you made a mistake, you made it right, no matter how hard or humbling it was.

"General," Steve said, standing up as General Fury approached his booth.

"Sit down," General Fury said. "We're off duty here. You want that freshened up?"

"Thanks," Steve said. When General Fuiy had come back with another ginger ale for Steve and a beer for himself, Steve said, "Okay. I have three orders, and I've completed one. Gan I get a pass on the second if that makes it easier to fulfill the third?"

"You mean I'm not going to be able to get you drunk?" General Fury said. He did not smile, which put Steve off balance right away.

"I got drunk once in my life, when I was sixteen," Steve said. "That was enough."

"Fair enough. Consider the second order rescinded. Now let's get on with the third. I need you to lay out for me exactly what you've been doing with Esteban Garza. Has he been in touch with you since Ozzie Bright had his little accident?"

"No, sir. I haven't heard from him. I imagine that I won't be hearing from him." How did you say it, Steve wondered? When you were Captain America, how did you admit that you'd been suckered because you were so hungry for action, for the grim self-satisfied thrill of deciding what was right and then doing it, that you decided to ignore the oaths you'd sworn? He couldn't make the words leave his mouth. Pride, he thought.

"Did he ever ask you to report on SHIELD activity?" General Fuiy asked. Steve remembered Admiral Garza saying something along the lines of
I'm not asking you to spy for me,
but I am asking you to listen
. "Not directly," he said. "He did ask me to pay attention to how you were dealing with Washington."

"And did you?"

"I—" Steve caught himself He was only going to get one chance to say this, and he had to both tell the truth and make sure that it sounded right. But he spoke quietly, both because there were civilians around to hear and because he was going to be saying words he never thought he would have to say. "I never told him anything that compromised any mission or SHIELD security, sir."

"Okay. What did you tell him?"

"Mostly that I was angry and dissatisfied with the way SHIELD was approaching the Chitauri threat."

"Was this after Garza used you to leak the screener to SKR?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know that SKR was shut down."

"Yes, sir. Admiral Garza told me."

"He make a big show about how embarrassed he was?"

Steve nodded.

"You realize," General Fury said, "that he flew you like a flag. I sent out a test crew with Chitauri samples, and they walked right through every single SKR screener they tried. You got up on TV to tell everyone about terrorism and how SKR was going to make them safer, and what happened was that they made goddamn placebo screeners, and now the Chitauri know exactly where they can go, unless we're going to fill every airport and federal building in the country with ants. Let me put this as clearly as I can: if you weren't who you are, you'd be in jail. In some situations, you'd be in a grave. I never thought I'd say this, but Hank Pym's been a damn sight more useful to us the past few weeks than you have." Steve could feel his face burning. Still he did not speak, because he could not defend himself. What he could do was sit and take his medicine, and wait for his chance to make it right.

"Now," General Fury said. "Am I wrong?"

"No, sir," Steve said. "You're not wrong."

"I'm glad we agree. Now would you like to get started on fixing this mess?"

"I very much would, sir."

General Fury killed off his beer. "I thought you might. Find Garza. When you find him, call me so we can bring him in. Under no circumstances are you to take him down yourself. Are all parts of those orders understood?"

"Yes, sir," Steve said. "May I ask a question?"

"You sure may."

"Will I have SHIELD resources available to me while I'm looking?" For the first time since he'd walked into the bar, General Fury cracked a smile. "Oh,
now
he wants to work with the team. Yes, Captain. They're waiting for you at the satellite tracking lab right now." It took less than six hours. Garza had been smart enough to ditch his cell phone—which pinged from a Dumpster on Great Jones Street—and nobody at the Pentagon would allow SHIELD to piggyback on the homing beacon they had in all high-level staff cars. Initially that was a problem. Then Steve realized that the Chitauri might not know that SHIELD had pegged exactly the way in which SKR had faked the screeners, and he commandeered security footage from Washington and New York airports. Presto. Either Garza hadn't had time to consume and assimilate a new identity, or he hadn't thought he needed to. Whichever was the case, a lab tech caught him via facial-recognition software coming out of long-term parking at JFK. With that hit, they tracked him into his terminal, through a gate with a brand-new SKR

screener, and to the gate where he boarded a flight... for Buenos Aires.

Back to the Pentagon, where after some wrangling Steve was able to get a look at tapes from Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires. Again the techs went to work, and they pegged Garza getting on a chartered flight. Using the gate number, they cracked Ezeiza's records... and found that there was no record of any flights taking off from or landing at that gate on the day in question.

"Hmm," Steve said. "Looks like our lizard friends have gotten into the airport before us."

"You want my guess?" said one of the techs. "Heading through Argentina, plus no ants, equals Antarctica."

Steve watched the map, wondering how he might test that hypothesis. "Could be you're right," he said.

"Let's nail that down."

Ninety minutes later, armed with satellite tracks of a private jet leaving Buenos Aires at the right time and then landing in the Antarctic interior, Steve was on his way by helicopter to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. An hour after that, he was thundering south in an F-16. He left a message for General Fury: GONE ICE FISHING.

35

It all comes to a head, Nick thought. One last meeting, one last set of orders, and one more time we set out to take care of business. Normally he was starting to get jazzed up about a mission by the time it came to this point—knowing combat was on the way was the second-most powerful buzz in the world, combat itself being the first—but for some reason he was coming into this final briefing annoyed and out of sorts because they should have put the goddamn Chitauri away the last time. Which is what he told the team right off the bat. "What we're doing here," he said, "is cleaning up a mess that we never should have made. We had the Chitauri on the ropes in Arizona, and we got distracted by other things, and look where that got us. Today or tomorrow, we finish the job once and for all." He looked around the room, from Janet to Clint to Thor to Tony. Banner hadn't been invited today. They would also be using several squads of next-gens, but Nick planned to brief them separately later.

"Okay," Nick said. "Steve is en route to Antarctica right now. It looks like the Chitauri have decided that the ants are their biggest problem, so they've cleared out to where ants don't live. Unless Hank comes up with a way to control penguins, we're working with a whole new set of circumstances on the ground."

"Sounds a little like Micronesia all over again," Tony said. "I'd sure hate to have to do that again. It was hell on my batteries."

"Keep on joking, Tony. Twenty thousand people died that day. It's not a mistake we're likely to repeat." Tony stood. "Nick, can the sanctimony. Yeah, I was joking, but I'm also right. The last time we decided to go in and take on the Chitauri face-to-face without Bruce, we ended up with a wrecked fleet and a hundred square miles where the fish are going to grow three heads for the next thousand years. What I'm saying, in my own inimitable fashion, is let's make sure we don't fall for the same trap again."

"The difference is, they're on the run this time," Nick said.

"And armies on the run lay traps behind them, do they not?" Thor said. "I'm afraid Tony might be right here. How do we know what we're in for? Have we even seen this place where they're going? Do we know it exists?"

Nick pulled up a large image of Antarctica, and rescaled it to infrared. "Right there," he said, zooming in on a mountain tagged Vinson Massif, near an inlet of the Weddell Sea, "is what looks a lot like a volcanic vent. Thing is, the geologists say there's no volcanic activity anywhere near there. After Steve and the lab tracked down these invisible flights from Buenos Aires, we found others as well, from Johannesburg, Christ-church, and Melbourne. We've backtracked the manifests of those flights, and an awful lot of them had a passenger or passengers who originated in the United States but has no return flight booked. So, lady and gentlemen, I believe we have found our Chitauri stronghold. It's cold, it's isolated, and there's no telling how long they've had to prepare it or how many of them are there to hold it. We leave in twelve hours. Any questions?"

Tony, who had taken his seat, now stood again. "Just one, Nick, and I'm serious. How do we know this isn't another Micronesia?"

"Because, like I said, they're on the run," Nick said. "From what we know about their fertility rates and so forth, there can't be that many of them unless they've been cloning like crazy or they've been reinforced from off-planet." He turned his attention from Tony specifically to the group as a whole.

"Neither one of those is likely, because their tactics to this point haven't squared with the idea that they're operating from what they feel is a position of strength right now. Suicide attacks, infiltrations, attempted assassinations... these are the tools of the outmanned force. I'm guessing they're low on manpower, but maybe not low on weapons, and they were going to be content with laying low until they found out about Hank's breakthrough with the ants. So they tried to take that out... ah. Maybe now is a good time for Tony to explain to us exactly what the story is with the amplifier."

"What's to explain?" Clint asked. "We got it all before."

"All except for the part about the amplifier being fake," Thor said. Clint looked from Thor to Tony to Nick, and then back to Thor. "What?"

"Sure. Ask him. There is no amplifier. He showed it to us, then put out a distress call to get us to come save it. Only it was... what's the best way to put it, Tony? Would you call it instilling brand loyalty?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Tony said. "You and your hippie canards. It worked, didn't it? And aren't you the one who called down
lightning
in the middle of my headquarters, with my employees all over the place?

You can shove your sanctimony, too."

"Let me get this straight," Clint said. "You showed off a fake amplifier in the lab, and then built your whole presentation at the Triskelion around the same fake amplifier? And then got the whole team to show up because the Chitauri were blowing up your building to get an amplifier that didn't exist?"

"More or less," Tony said. "Except you haven't talked about the reasons."

"Screw the reasons," Clint said. "You put our lives on the line for a joke."

"Clint, aren't you about the last one in the room who should be moralizing about the value of a life?" Tony asked.

"Stay on track here, people," Nick warned.

"We are on track, Nick," Tony said. "The track is to figure out what's at stake, where the enemy is, and how to fight it. That's what I did. We've got Chitauri in the Cabinet of the United States. How do I know there aren't any in SHIELD? You can be pissed about it if you want to, but from my point of view it looks like I just sacrificed my company headquarters as a decoy to round up a whole lot of Chitauri. They put all their eggs in this basket, Nick. Now it's either go back underground or rally for some big doomsday like the bomb they had before. The one that Thor teleported off to wherever."

"Niflheim," Thor said.

Tony tipped an imaginary cap. "Thanks, big man. Niflheim. And the dragon's name was, what, Bimblog or something?"

"Nidhogg."

"Okay. So Thor teleported their last bomb to Niflheim, as a result of which Nidhogg bears a serious grudge against all of us. Unintended consequences. That's fine. But we need to consider whether they might not have something similar planned right now. They know we're coming."

"If they'd had another doomsday kind of bomb, wouldn't they have set it off after Arizona?" Janet said.

"If they were thinking like human beings, maybe, sure," Nick said. "That doesn't appear to be the case, however. Now can we get back to the briefing?"