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I
September 24, 1998, 03:42 Greenwich
Nick Fury pulled himself out of the dark water quietly and sat on a pillar below the dock. The moon was high and bright, and the air was as fresh as any on the planet. It was a fall night in Asia Minor, cool and calm. He slipped the fins from his feet and loosened his wetsuit, drawing a thin handgun and cocking it. Above him, the raucous sounds of a party blasted out across the water, echoing into the trees on the shore of the normally quiet lake.
He carefully took the wetsuit off and allowed it to sink into the cold black water. He pulled a bow tie from his pants pocket and snapped it to his collar, completing the formal tuxedo worn under the wetsuit, and slipping on the highly polished shoes he pulled from the bag at his belt. He looked up to the dock several feet above his head. As he did, he lost his footing on the dock; his dress shoes could not get grip on the wet wood. Desperately, he flipped in the air, catching the pillar below him with his right hand and holding himself in the air upside down, perfectly still.
Above him, a young lady and a nervous young man strode past, gazing at the moon's reflection on the lake and at each other. Both in their late teens, they were flush with the thrill of attending their first formal dance. It could not compare with their delight at finding one another though, and the party could not keep their attention any longer. Their footsteps creaked on the weather worn beams of the old dock. Just below them, Fury eased his weight from one hand to two, trying not to move or make a sound.
After what seemed like an eternity, they moved on. Fury straightened his body, bent his elbows, and hurled himself up, flipping twice before catching the dock and tumbling upward to land on his feet.
The couple, still only a few yards away, turned to the sound behind them, and were surprised to see the tall stranger standing there. Fury towered over the two like a large, wide building. He did his best to smile and nod, and turned toward the manor house.
Built in the days of plantation barons with unlimited wealth, the house had a borrowed opulence which owed much of its style to the English country estates of a hundred years before. The lights shown brightly from all the windows, and Fury could hear the live band from a hundred yards away, across the beautifully manicured lawn.
As he got closer he passed several men and women, dressed expensively, unconscious in a stupor on the lawn. He checked his weapon and put it back in his shoulder holster under his jacket. He could see his breath in the cold night air. The main door of the house was open, and the music, the heat, and the motion of the party were blasting through it. Fury straightened his tie and stepped inside.
Four men in well-fitting tuxedos, each no less than 300 pounds and built like Romanesque statues, sat watching the party, bored. As Fury entered they stood slowly. Three of them were Fury's height - the fourth was half a foot taller and badly scarred. Fury looked past them into the cavernous living room where revelers gyrated wildly on the dance floor in front of a band that Fury remembered hearing in the 1960's.
The ballroom was decorated in an ornate, eclectic fashion with tapestries on the wall and a mix of eighteenth-century and modern furniture. Layered incongruously over that was the laser light show and twenty-foot high-density video screen showing the band playing for the opposite side of the room. Fury could smell four different narcotics that he knew of, and several other scents which were surely some designer versions of the old favorites. For every man and woman dancing to the music, two were passed out on the furniture - or on the floor.
"Late arriving?" The oldest of the four doormen, a squat man in his 30's with the dead eyes of an experienced killer, stepped forward. He held an electronic book out to Fury, who placed his palm on the screen.
"I hope there's some cake left." The four men looked at Fury like he was their next meal.
The older man watched the screen with surprise and looked up at Fury. "He ain't on the guest list."
"Yeah, I heard the music and came over. Which way to the punch bowl?"
"How'd you get past the perimeter?" Two of the guards reached for weapons. Two others went for Fury in a professional, almost casual attack.
"Like this." Fury pulled the small hand weapon from his coat and carefully shot the older man square between the eyes. He slipped the grasp of one of the men charging him, and punched the other in the throat. The man made a "whuff" sound as the breath left his body. He clutched his shattered windpipe and slumped to the floor.
Fury dropped to the floor and spun around, knocking the other two off their feet. An elbow delivered so fast and sharp that it could not be seen by the untrained eye put the third man away.
The fourth, and largest man back flipped to his feet and took the "Aggressive Tiger Waiting" stance. He seemed to tower over Fury, who stood still.
Fury pointed his weapon at him. "I suppose I should want to prove I'm better than you by beating you up and not shooting you."
The man smiled. Fury put his gun away. The man made a precise and almost delicate move and brought his leg down, up and over. By the time the highly advance attack was completed, Fury was behind the man. He knocked him off-balance with a left-handed shove and hit him with a right uppercut when he came around. The man fell to the floor as though he were being pulled down with a rope, and didn't move.
"Nice move, buddy, but the Jeet-Ko is no good in a room this small. I should have a word with your Sensei."
He straightened his tie again and walked into the party. He strode through the dance floor and past the band, stepping over the drug-addled bodies on the floor. There was no sense of general alarm. Nobody could have heard the commotion at the door, but there would be a camera that monitored the area. He had about another thirty seconds. The only question was whether they would interrupt the party to find him, or try to round him up without stopping the orgy.
He made his way to the master staircase, huge and twisted - it must have taken an entire oak forest to build the place. He stood and watched a woman came down the steps. Sleek and raven- haired, she wore a deep purple evening dress which was not made for concealment.
"Good evening," her voice was low and smoky, and had just a hint of a Cambridge accent. She wore an expensive perfume that Fury had never smelled before. "My name is Hecate. You are the gentleman who entered at the door a moment ago?"
"Yeah, I'm the party crasher."
"The host of this soiree would like to meet you. I'm afraid you'll have to check your weapon, though."
Fury took out the gun and handed it to a valet who appeared out of nowhere, and disappeared just as quickly. "That gun is imprinted with my bio-energy signature, you know. It's no good to anyone but me."
"Of course. Will you come this way?" She started back up the stairs. "By the way; those men you killed, they were supposed to be the best in the world. Their credentials were impeccable."
"Well, I didn't kill all of them."
At the top of the stairs they turned toward a large set of double doors. Two guards opened them, looking as though they were barely restraining themselves from attacking. The room inside was enormous. It was an office of sorts, but the size of a basketball court. At the far end was a desk, huge and polished. A tall chair faced away from them, toward a bank of high-density screens showing various parts of the house, and different parts of the world.
The rest of the room was a mix of leather and mahogany, conservative as an ambassador's office. The people lounging on the settees and armchairs weren't so refined. A dozen men and women, dressed in colorful outfits - several wearing masks - were talking and sipping champagne. If they noticed Fury and the woman enter it was difficult to tell.
They stopped and waited a moment in front of the desk. Finally, the chair turned and the man sitting in it faced them. He was lean and hard for his age, somewhere in his middle fifties. His face was gaunt, lined with two deep dueling scars.. His hair was clipped to a sharp-angled flat- top, his eyes sharp and steady.
"Lieutenant Fury." The voice had a deep German accent.
"Baron Reichsmann. It's Colonel Fury now. Are you still a Baron, or have you been promoted to Duke or something?"
"Do not insult me in my own home. It's bad form." He reached for a cigar and offered it to Fury, who declined. "You must want something. I'm surprised an old Company man like yourself couldn't have simply arranged to be on the guest list."
"I didn't have a present to bring. What do you get for the man who steals everything?"
"I will not tolerate that in my home!" Reichsmann stood up. "You are five hundred miles from the nearest telephone. Our host government hates Americans almost as much as it hates spies. You should be more polite." The others in the room stopped talking and stood, watching.
Fury smiled humorlessly. "I want you to pass along a message to your cousin Otto. Tell him I know about Hydra and how he lost control. Tell him I also know who took over Hydra and where they are now." Fury turned to leave.
Reichsmann took a gun out of a desk drawer and pointed it at Fury. "Don't you dare turn your back on me!"
Fury turned back around. "You wanna know why I didn't just arrange to get an invitation? Because I wanted to get your attention. And because a lot of your guests are already SHIELD agents."
"Don't be absurd. I know most of the..."
The door burst in and a SHIELD Infiltration Team, dressed in evening attire, jumped in and covered everyone with assault weapons. They wore formal evening dress and carried the latest in armament - easily concealed and deadly. The costumed guests who had been watching Fury looked at one another, then put their hands up in surrender.
Fury picked a cigar from Reichmann's humidor, bit the end off, and lit it.
II
September 24, 1998. 03:42 Greenwich
The barber shop was quiet that afternoon, as usual. There was a smell of cut hair, and of toilet water, and an incessant pleasant chatter among the barber, Ed MacGillivray, his young assistant Johnny Parker, and the men that breezed in and out the door, past the weathered barber pole on the wall outside.
The sun shone on the other side of the street come mid-afternoon, so the place was cool. That was welcome after the many scorching days of summer so recently passed. People walking past the shop nodded to Ed and to Johnny as often as not. There wasn't a man in town who didn't get his hair cut by Ed.
Two strangers walked in just as the MacAffrey brothers were leaving with their father, John, an eighty-year-old who could probably still bale hay if they let him. The two slipped into the barber chairs and straightened their clothes. They were in their early 30's and had close-cropped brown hair. One was taller than the other, but both were over six feet. The suits they wore were obviously made just for them, and fit their muscular physiques perfectly.
"Well, sir," Ed said to one of the men, "what can I do for you now?"
"Just a little off the top." The man didn't look at Ed as he answered. He glanced around the shop - at the blue jar of combs in disinfectant fluid, the clumps of hair on the floor, the electric razors, the cracked ceiling. Finally, he caught Ed's eye in the large mirror. "And shave the sideburns."
Ed and Johnny stopped. Johnny moved quickly to the door and closed it. He drew the blinds and flipped the dangling sign so that it said "closed."
Johnny turned. "You guys could look a little less conspicuous. We'll be answering locals' questions for weeks," he looked at the man in the barber chair next to him, and felt the material of his jacket. "Jean Maillet - Paris? Bulletproof couture - I have three myself."
The man turned to Johnny and pulled a long serrated blade from his sleeve. He stabbed with quick bloody jabs into Johnny's stomach. Johnny made an awful nauseous wretch and bucked violently to the floor. He died in a quick spasm.
Ed reacted instinctually for the alarm button, but couldn't make a step before the other man buried a knife deep in his chest. Ed screamed silently as the breath blew out of his punctured lung. The man took a handful of his hair, turned him around, and pulled him on top of himself, so they were both lying on the barber chair.
He hit a hidden button on the arm of the barber chair and a small high-definition screen circled elegantly in front of their faces from the headrest.
"Retina scan," a calm voice, smooth but simulated, spoke from the screen.
Kicking Johnny's body from the doorway, the first man opened the outside door. From all over town, well-dressed men and women found their way into the barbershop. There were more than two dozen inside within twenty-five seconds. None had made a sound.
When the last person was in the shop they locked the door with their own small computerized seal. An array of weapons appeared seemingly out of nowhere, unfolded from the briefcases and suits of the well-dressed but tight-packed crowd.
The man jammed Ed's dying face into the screen.
"Retina scan complete. Welcome, Agent MacGillivray."
The chair began to sink into the floor, a circular stairway forming in its wake. The crowd of suits followed single file. At the bottom, The man slashed Ed's throat and his lifeless body was dumped to the ground. The man took the lead silently and started down a circular hallway with metallic walls. There was a smell of must in the air. It was cool and quite dry.
A vault door stood at the end. The leader pointed to it and three of the sharp young men behind him jumped athletically forward and attached small devices to the hinges with great precision. In a moment, the hinges were gone. Not melted, not exploded, just gone as though they had never existed. The great door creaked, and fell forward with a rush of stale air.
Shots rang out in the hallway. In a blink, five of the intruders were dead. The rest found some cover by going prone behind the fallen vault door. Two men in overalls leapt into the corridor. The intruders raised their guns to fire on them when a volly of covering fire came from the darkness behind the open vault. In a brief, blood-curdling scream, two of the intruders were cut in half. The two in overalls did a back-flip and landed with guns blazing, cutting down three more of the intruders.
The leader rose, screaming, and unerringly put seven bullets into the two men in overalls. He turned, firing and running into the opening. The 14 remaining intruders grabbed weapons and ran behind him, screaming and firing.
They ran into a heavy automatic plasma-slug gun. It sat quiet. The leader stood on it and held two men by crushed throats. The two wore thick blue uniforms with an array of weapons and equipment built in. The men were heavily muscled, but were no match for the intruders' leader, whose fine suit was tattered and a green body-suit was revealed beneath.
The 14 ran in and checked the rooms beyond, finding no one left to guard the underground facility. They formed around their leader, who dumped the two bodies on the hard cold floor.
They raised their right arms in unison: "Hail Hydra!"
The leader jumped to the floor and found the console with the large communications screen. He punched in a code and image appeared. The face was large and disguised with a half-mask of green, with glaring metallic serpentine eyes.
"Hail Hydra! Main Street Base is ours. They never saw us coming."
"Good work, Major. The Head Hydra will be pleased. I'm downloading the access codes to the vaults there. Transmissions from the Helicarrier indicate that you have under three minutes before a SHIELD Mobile Assault Team arrives."
"We'll be gone in two. Hail Hydra!" The screen went blank. Three vault doors at the sides of the room popped open. The ten men and four women ran to them and jumped inside. Metallic boxes were taken out, rolled on their own wheels, cracking with cold. The Hydra Agents handled them with special gloves and brought them to the base of the stairwell, past the cracked and broken bodies and the heavy fallen door.
The boxes were lifted with some trouble and hauled up the stairs. Blood tracked on the steps and twice the men slipped on it, but did not fall. They carried the train of boxes, six in all, out the door to the street. A dirty, battered Greyhound bus was at the curb. Its door hissed open and cold air steamed out as the boxes and Hydra Agents moved inside.
The bus pulled away from the curb eleven seconds before four airships landed in the street, decelerating from mach 2.7 to a full stop within 200 feet. The hard wind blew over several cars and shattered windows around the block. Blue uniformed men poured out of the building-sized vehicles and formed a secure perimeter, while others poured into the barber shop.
Timothy "Dum Dum" Dugan straightened his tie for the fifth time without getting it right. The Helicarrier pitched slightly in the high atmosphere, and the cup of coffee in front of him dipped to the left. He waited by the viewscreen for a report to come in from the Main Street, Taloma Ohio station. The emergency alarm had been tripped, and the Mobile Assault Team had gone immediately to low earth orbit to cover the distance, and had landed hot at the station.
The situation room was quiet and tense. Finally, the screen came back on, though the image was garbled and lined. From the automatic camera mounted on the lead aircraft, Dugan could see the bodies.
The barber shop was gone. Where it stood was now a smoking crater. SHIELD Agents - parts of them - lay scattered around the ground. Two of the transports were smoking and crippled where they lay. Around them, bodies of civilians including several small children lay shattered and motionless. He could see the small arms fire, but he could not hear it; the audio signal was gone.
Dugan breathed in sharply once. He swung his huge arm forward and smashed the alarm butted, disabling the console. At once, the room went to red light and claxons blared. The Helicarrier, a city moving in the sky, doubled its speed and went into the high atmosphere just short of space. The thin gasses could barely hold the huge ship in place, and the turbulence in its wake was visible from the entire eastern seaboard of China.
In Taloma, the four surviving SHIELD Agents were in the fight of their lives. They held their ground on the rim of the crater that used to be Main Street Station. Their communication system was down, but Agents Tom Johnson, Bill Baxter, Craig Cohen, and Kevin Pinto left their low-frequency radios on `broadcast distress.'
An unmarked bus had pulled up moments before, disgorging a Hydra striketeam and revealing a turret on the top. Hydra opened up on the SHIELD Agents and transports with plasma-slugs, the newest and deadliest generation of weapons, combining the power of high-speed high-density ballistic force with the raw power of light-based particle-beams. Even with special armour on the men and vehicles, the plasma-slugs wiped out the surprised SHIELD force in seconds.
At the same moment, Main Street Station exploded from within. The Agents inside were wiped out. The four transport ships were wrecked, and their crews were forced to abandon them when the fires grew out of control. Of the 112 men and women on four ships, only the four remained.
The four men continued to return fire with their SHIELD Impact Rifles, but the Hydra strikeforce was effectively dug in. Fire came from several directions at once.
"They're circling!" Pinto yelled over the din.
"We can't stay here! We gotta move!" Cohen hollered. "Formation Delta!" Baxter got up and fired, then ran twenty feet to his right and dropped to the ground. Shots outlined him, but he wasn't hit.
Johnson, Pinto, and Baxter flipped their weapons to `automatic' and let loose. The immediately cut down six Hydra Agents, but Johnson and Baxter both took huge, grisly chest wounds and fell back into the smoking crater, lifeless.
Pinto looked over at Cohen, who caught his eye. They both took out their Impact Grenades - the Agents called them `urban renewals.' When they set them off, they'd take the Hydra agents with them.
G.W. Bridge ran into the Situation Room. He found Dugan at the command console, taking reports from four US stations and one in Moldavia.
"Good to see you, Bridge. We're taking hits all over the place, but the Emergency Response Teams are taking control."
"Good work, Dugan. Must have been tough to arrange without committing the reserve."
"The reserve went in ten minutes ago. They're on their way to Moldavia - our key base in that part of the world in under direct fire assault."
Bridge shoved aside a communications agent to get to the console. "Call them back! The other units can go there when they're done in the U.S."
"And leave them to die in Moldavia? That's not how we work, Bridge." Dugan glared at him.
"We have to reserve our manpower, Dum Dum. We're down to 45% of our optimum strength. Jasper Sitwell's been around the world recruiting, but we just don't have the people. Without a reserve in place..."
"We got no choice, Bridge. I read the memos, but this is my call - I'm not leaving those men to die. And I ain't calling the local police - that would just be more blood on my hands."
A siren's wail cut off their conversation. The thirty-foot screen in front of them cleared and an image of the earth appeared. It was a real-time picture, with the black starfield highlighting the bright planet.
In front of the earth, tracking lines appeared in green, showing the paths of thousands of satellites, one at a time. As quickly as they appeared, the lines would be intersected by a red line which would erase the green line. The red line seemed to come from out of nowhere, and disappear as soon as the green line was gone.
The two dozen communication specialists in the cutting-edge SHIELD situation room, under the blinking lights and glowing consoles, stopped and stared. The red and green light reflected on their faces. Bridge turned to them.
"Stop your gawking! Jones: cut the alert siren - we heard it. Grant: assemble a team to secure SHIELD and defense satellites. Smith: get your team working on that anti-satellite weapon. Now!"
The image of the globe was suddenly blurred with interference. When the image cleared a half- hooded face with a serpentine sneer appeared on the console.
"Greetings to the defense agencies of the world. As you can see, your own technology has been turned against you. Hydra has done this. Our technology is as superior to your own as our ideology is superior to your concepts of authority. The new millennium will belong to Hydra."
The face disappeared from the screen. Bridge turned to his research team: "Track that message!"
"Here we go again. I'm gonna get Nick on the horn."
"Mr. Dugan!" Agent Winters turned from his console. "I'm showing air traffic in Director Fury's mission radius! He's going to have company - soon."
"Get the Extraction Team mobile!"
"There is no extraction team, Dugan," Bridge looked deflated, "You sent them to Moldavia. There's nobody left to pick up the Infiltration Team."
The blue/black communication monitor flared to life next to them. Fury's image came up. "Fury here. Request immediate support - green units approaching, ETA 5 minutes."
Dugan looked at the screen as though he was seeing Fury for the last time. "I can't get you now, Nick. You'll have to hold there."
"No can do, you old Warhorse. I'm taking my team into the bush - call me Galahad. I'll contact you in 24 hours if there's any of us left." The screen went blank.
"24 hours in the jungles of northern Myanmar. We wuz there in the war. Not a lotta guys walked out of there in one piece." Dugan say down heavily, like an old man.
"Bad news, Dugan," Dum Dum turned as Bridge handed him a sheet of paper, "Hydra's demands."
