Black Widow: Red Vengeance (A Marvel YA Novel)

by Margaret Stohl

  Better. Only by a margin.

  Natasha looked back up at the screen. The virtual map on the walls of the Brain Trust began to adjust as soon as Carol spoke; as if she were the one moving them. That’s how closely her words were being followed right now; Natasha knew they were echoing through the Situation Room, the Pentagon, as well as a number of secure facilities bearing no name that could ever be repeated. “Monreale, in the hills outside of Palermo,” Carol finally said. “I’ll put in the coordinates now, the map should tighten up.”

  The room roared into activity as soon as she stopped speaking.

  Maria took control. “Send out the call. Do it.” An aide nodded and disappeared.

  She looked at another. “Evacuate the area, they have to evacuate. Local authorities, national, the U.N. Now!”

  A third: “Use every possible channel. State, the DOD, the JCOS, even the Oval. Heck, call CNN and the BBC if that speeds things up. Just get the word out.”

  Finally, her eyes swept the room. “Stay ready. You’ve only got a few minutes, people, let’s make them count. These moments don’t come around twice in a lifetime.”

  “Nine,” Natasha said, her eyes on the screen. “Now we have nine.”

  “You heard the agent. Nine minutes,” Maria said. “I want eyes back on the screen every minute. You’ve only got nine. Stay aware of the time.” The room broke back into the buzz of activity.

  Coulson looked over at Natasha. “What’s in Monreale?”

  Natasha tried to remember. “Nothing. A town. A church. A pasticceria and a gelateria, I don’t know, maybe a pizzeria. It’s Sicily.”

  “You think they’re after a military target, maybe our base at Sigonella? They don’t call it the Hub of the Med for nothing,” Coulson said.

  “Maybe, but that’s all the way over near Catania, on the east side of the island.” She looked back at the radar. “That’s not the right trajectory to hit the Hub.”

  “The Hub?” Dante asked. “That’s this Sigonella thing?”

  Coulson looked at him. “Naval air base for U.S. ops in all of Western and Eastern Europe, and really a hub for all of special forces. There, or Naples.”

  Natasha looked at him. “I was at Sigonella with Hawkeye right after Budapest, and I had a second stay at the Hub Med back in the Yelena Belova days. Took down an old Soviet bomber she’d had her eye on, and even airlifted Stark up out of a mess near there on the way home.”

  “Yelena Belova days?” Ava interjected. “Another Russian? Because that’s a Russian name, right? Was she—like us? Krasnaya Komnata?”

  “That’s a long Russian story,” Natasha said, brushing her off. “We can talk about it in”—she checked her Cuff—“six minutes.”

  She turned back to Coulson. “Monreale is outside of Palermo, and even Palermo isn’t exactly metropolitan New York City. Still.” She shook her head. “Probably a million people in and around the urban center, and all they can do is sound the sirens and get everyone as far away as they can.”

  “But no strategic target?” Coulson asked. “No reason for the target selection?”

  “Can’t think of one,” Natasha answered. “Can you?”

  “Power plant? Weapons plant? Industrial target? Oil? Crops? Water storage? Anything?”

  “No, not at that site,” Natasha said. “There’s no reason to drop a nuclear bomb on Monreale. There’s nothing but a church.” She shrugged. “Well, a famous church.”

  Ava spoke up. “How famous?”

  “I don’t know, people wait in lines to go inside. Byzantine frescoes. Lots of gold. I met an informant there once. In a confessional.”

  “And?” Dante asked.

  “Well, he confessed,” Natasha said, her eyes still on the radar map. He confessed all over the floor and the nuns chased me out with mops.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Sana said. “Who bombs a gold church?”

  “A really big atheist.” Ava frowned.

  “Or a bigger sinner,” Dante said.

  “I’d guess a rival capo from the Casa Nostra.” Coulson shrugged. “Sicilian Mafia aren’t exactly choirboys, except for when they are.”

  “Four minutes. This isn’t helping.” Natasha spoke up. “Can we zoom in?” She pointed. “That’s the cathedral. Those are the cloisters. The thing that looks like the outline of a box, surrounding the garden and the fountain, see?”

  “What are cloisters again?” Ava looked at her.

  “The rooms where the monks lived, a long time ago. I don’t know if they do anymore,” Natasha said. “I only remember it as the place where I hid my Harley.”

  “Of course.” Ava nodded.

  “Three minutes,” Oksana said, staring in horror at the numbers.

  Nobody said a word.

  After that, it might have been better if the tracker hadn’t been able to transmit the live feed. But it was able, and the view from the missile was literally dizzying; it was a roller-coaster ride that everyone in the room knew could only end very, very badly.

  The moment the warhead stopped climbing and began to flatten out, the quieter the room became.

  The missile could only sustain a level apex for so long.

  As they watched, the flat arch of the missile began to break, and its nose tipped lower and lower until it began to drop through the atmosphere, heading directly down toward the landmass beneath it.

  On the radar screen, the map zoomed in, one grid at a time, as the missile fell closer to first the boot-shaped Italian peninsula, then the toe of the boot, then the island it almost seemed to be kicking.

  The city of Palermo grew from a tiny glowing dot on the screen to the size of a quarter, then a poker chip, an apple—the face of a baby, then a child, anyone—

  Now most of the screen showed a satellite view of the city, broken into grids, crisscrossed with highways.

  One highway snaked up and out of town, and they could see it connect to a smaller grid, separated only by a bit of hillside.

  “Here we go,” Natasha said, holding her breath.

  “Here we go?” Dante asked. “Are you kidding me? You guys are going to stop this thing, right? You’re not just going to sit there and let it blow some town off the map, are you?” Dante was shouting now.

  Maria didn’t look up from the screen. “Can someone shut the kid up?”

  Ava looked at Dante. His face was white. She took his hand in hers, and then reached for Sana with her other one.

  Natasha looked away.

  All eyes were on the screen. The horror was too vivid to watch—and too vivid not to. They saw the city break into streets, and the streets break into buildings.

  Make it fast. Make it clean. Don’t come down in the middle of a school. Don’t come down in the middle of the church during a service—

  Natasha found she was unconsciously bracing herself against the side of her chair. She waited, her body half-curled with tension.

  The missile kept falling.

  Natasha found herself counting down as she watched; they all were. It was impossible not to.

  Ten.

  Nine.

  Eight.

  Seven.

  Six.

  Five.

  Four.

  Three.

  At the last second, just before it seemed that it was going to strike the cathedral straight on, the missile swerved.

  Two.

  “Look—watch the fin move—”

  One.

  As if by some kind of saintly miracle, the missile didn’t hit the church.

  It hit the cloisters.

  They heard the percussive boom-boom-boom as the detonation began, and then the camera shook and the feed went black as it hit.

  The room sat in silence. Ava let go of the others’ hands. Nobody said a word. Natasha felt the bile rising in her stomach.

  She looked at Maria. “Can we switch over to satellite? Try the Stark Sat first?” Tony’s feeds were always higher quality than the federal government’s.

>   “Bring up the feed,” Maria said.

  The new feed was an aerial shot of the cathedral and the immediate buildings surrounding it.

  It was hard to see over the billowing black smoke.

  It was even harder to believe it had happened.

  Because it’s our job to keep this from happening, Natasha thought. This one was supposed to be mine, and I failed. I lost. I couldn’t keep that missile from hitting.

  That’s on me. This one is personal.

  As they watched, the smoke turned from black and gray to white. Flames were still coming up from the center of the cloisters, but the buildings themselves appeared to be largely intact.

  How many of these have I seen, in my life? Not exactly a mushroom cloud, but not a cloud you’d want to see in person. But Natasha had—especially in person. More times than she could count.

  “Does that blast look right to you?” she asked. She wasn’t sure—and she wondered if there was anything particular about this warhead, something she needed to understand. A visual clue to why Yuri Somodorov and his men had stolen it, and how they were using it. How any of it had anything to do with the Red Angel hacker and Red Room and even the Green Dress Girl.

  “I don’t know,” Carol said. “I’ve never seen the B-61 adjustable precision fin in action, live. That was a little more than just precision.” The smoke continued to curl upward in a series of great and exploding plumes as she spoke. “Radiation count is high, but the lethal fallout is relatively contained.”

  “Now I see why someone bothered to steal it.” Natasha nodded. “That’s a pretty specific strike.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the latest trend in nuclear strikes. We’ve gone from city killers to neighborhood killers to street killers.”

  Natasha nodded. “I get it. If you can limit the fallout, it’s easier to use. Fewer headlines reporting civilian casualties.”

  Ava spoke up. “That’s what one of my teachers at the Academy said about the Cold War. The only thing that kept the Soviets and the Americans from blowing each other up was the fact that they knew they would take the world down with them.”

  “Take that fear away, and what’s stopping you from pressing the button?” Natasha looked back up at the image of the burning church.

  “Nothing.” Carol’s words echoed across the room. “And they just did. If only to demonstrate that they could.”

  “Will somebody tell me what is really happening here?” Dante asked. “Is this World War Three?”

  It was a good question, which is why nobody answered.

  S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY

  CLEARANCE LEVEL X

  SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES & INDIVIDUALS (SCI) INVESTIGATION

  AGENT IN COMMAND (AIC): PHILLIP COULSON

  RE: AGENT NATASHA ROMANOFF A.K.A. BLACK WIDOW

  A.K.A. NATASHA ROMANOVA

  AAA HEARING TRANSCRIPT

  CC: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, SCI INQUIRY

  COULSON: You left. We were sitting there reeling—and then you were gone.

  ROMANOFF: I had to see for myself. So I went.

  COULSON: Because you felt responsible?

  ROMANOFF: I had touched that missile with my hands, Phil. I’d put my own tracker on it.

  COULSON: I know. I also know it won’t help to tell you how comparatively small the loss of life was. Or how great the humanitarian crisis would have been had the trajectory changed by three degrees.

  ROMANOFF: That doesn’t change anything.

  COULSON: You just see the destruction.

  ROMANOFF: It’s so familiar now. I’ve seen it so many times.

  COULSON: You aren’t the reason bad things happen to the world, Natasha.

  ROMANOFF: After a while it doesn’t matter why they happen. All of those moments, the rubble and blood and fire and smoke—the children crying and the parents screaming and the loved ones losing each other, sometimes forever—they all belong to me.

  COULSON: You can’t let them.

  ROMANOFF: That’s where I live. It’s all I see. We all have a job to do. That’s mine.

  COULSON: It’s not all you have. It’s also not all the world is.

  ROMANOFF: Death and destruction. Loss and pain. That’s what my dreams are made of.

  COULSON: But that’s not everything.

  ROMANOFF: I know. I just can’t remember why not.

  CITTÀ DE MONREALE,

  PROVINCE OF PALERMO

  REGIONE SICILIANA, ITALIA

  Looking down at the coastline, the black plume of smoke reaching into the sky was the sure sign. Monreale was going to be a mess.

  Ava had expected nothing less, not since the Widows had met the Stark Jet at the Triskelion hangar. Tony, to his credit, did not say a word about his long flight from the CERN facility in Geneva. He had immediately turned his plane around and headed back over the Atlantic to Palermo.

  “Remind me next time I get a hundred million dollars to pick up one of these things,” Natasha had said as they passed Greenland in record time. She was copiloting; Tony had left the crew behind.

  “Well, that wouldn’t get you one of these,” Tony had answered, from the pilot’s seat. “I mean, maybe your standard Gulfstream G650 comes with a top-of-the-line Rolls-Royce engine, which is good, but not Stark Jet good. Top speed is what, Mach .995? Ninety-two percent of the speed of sound?” He scoffed. “Come on, guys. I need a fast ride.”

  “And you can do better?” Ava looked at him.

  “I did. I built and rebuilt this engine twenty-four times until I got it right.”

  “Of course you did,” Ava said, from the jump seat. “When you weren’t busy saving the world or whining about it.”

  “Ha!” Tony said, winking. “This baby can fly.” He lowered his aviator sunglasses. “Rolls? Please. This is how Stark rolls.” Natasha shook her head.

  The banter—any talking, really—had stopped as soon as the triangular coast of Sicily came into sight. The plume of black-and-gray smoke above Monreale and Palermo, on the northern shore, was visible from the air. It had been carried with the wind down the coast.

  Now, Ava thought. Now it really starts.

  It was impossible to think of anything else after that, although it was equally impossible to imagine what they would find when they arrived. Even after touching down at the tiny Boccadifalco Airport—an old World War II airstrip, nine kilometers from the site of the missile strike—all they could see was a sky full of thick black smoke and ash, as if nearby Mount Etna itself had erupted, instead of a disaster dropping from the sky.

  What would they find at Monreale? After talking their way onto a Palermo police chopper, trudging up the hillside town’s steep main street, and weaving between the sea of hurriedly parked emergency vehicles, Tony and Natasha and Ava found their answer.

  Smoke and rubble and destruction. The crumbling remnants of a rectangular stone structure, just west of the cathedral itself. Crowds held back by police, soldiers crawling atop burning ruins as they searched for survivors. Scientists in radiological CBRN suits, moving like moonwalking spacemen across the very center of the strike.

  And reporters—a fleet of local newspaper journalists and bloggers and television reporters, any crew that could find its way from anywhere in Europe to Sicily. Civilian journalists holding smartphones tweeted and posted and captioned and confirmed what little the professional media could not. The missile had already struck; the remaining chaos was purely civilian.

  This is what it looks like, in our time, Ava thought. The beginning of the end, or at least, the beginning of something that feels that way.

  An act of war.

  The one miracle had been the near miss of the strike. So many variables had fallen on the side of the Sicilians; at the last moment, the missile had veered slightly to the west, missing the cathedral completely. Mass casualties had been avoided. The cities—both Palermo and Monreale—remained, for the most part, safe.

  Given that, only hours ago, a nuclear missile had been streaking down from the
sky toward a million human lives, it was more than a miracle. “Makes you almost wish you believed in them,” Tony said, stepping under the police tape and catching up with Natasha and Ava. All three of them now wore particulate masks over their faces, like everyone else at the site. Until the smoke surrounding them had been tested, nobody could say whether or not it had been weaponized. All anyone could agree on was that however improbable it sounded, there seemed to be virtually no loss of life, and little fallout.

  “That can’t have been a miracle. It had to be the plan,” Natasha said. “Nobody gets that lucky. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that.”

  “So what, then?” Ava asked.

  “Maybe the target was never the cathedral,” Natasha said, shading her eyes with one hand as she pushed through the forensics teams to the middle of the blast site.

  “And not just the cloisters. Look.” Tony pointed. “See that orange flag? Where those spaceman technicians have marked it?” Through the opening in the crumbling remains of the stone structure in front of them, they could see through to the center of what had been the courtyard of the cloisters.

  “You mean in the middle?” Ava said.

  “It’s not just the middle. It looks like the exact midpoint. If you were to get out a massive protractor and measure a radius, I bet you five bucks it would connect precisely to the center, right where the missile struck.” Tony stared at the flag.

  Ava looked at him. “Why? What’s the point?”

  “I don’t know, aside from someone trying to prove they could target a tin can,” Tony said. “What used to be there where it hit? Does anyone know?”

  “I remember a fountain,” Natasha said. “A round one. There was never any water in it.” Ava looked at her curiously. “Some more—confessing.” Natasha shrugged.

  Tony raised an eyebrow. “What, water torture?”

  “Anyways.” Natasha changed the subject. “Aside from that fountain, I’m not sure what could have been there.”

  “Excuse me, padre?” Tony flagged down an ancient Sicilian priest as he passed in front of them, awkwardly adjusting an equally ancient-looking black rubber gas mask over his clipped white hair. The padre looked startled.

  “What are you doing?” Ava hissed, horrified.