Black Widow: Red Vengeance
BLACK WIDOW: RED VENGEANCE
BY MARGARET STOHL
PROLOGUE:
NATASHA
HIGH-DENSITY
TARGET AREA, MIDTOWN MANHATTAN
RADIATION
ZONE ZERO, ZERO HOUR
Nothing like the Christmas tree at
Rockefeller Center, thought Natasha Romanoff— for
terrorists, crackpots, and basic criminal scumbags. As always, there were no
visions of sugarplums dancing in the Black Widow’s cold red head. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agent glanced up at the
green-needled monolith—dusted with snowflakes and twinkling with lights and
Swarovski crystals, the centerpiece of Manhattan’s annual holiday party—and thought two words.
Merry Christmas? Try: target package.
Natasha
knew that the famed Rockefeller Center tree was larger-than-life in a score of
dangerously useful ways. Symbolic significance? Check. Media coverage? Check,
check. Mass casualties? Check, check,
check. She sighed and touched her earpiece. “Black to base. No sign of
their Alpha.”
“Copy
that, but don’t park your sleigh just yet, Black.” Coulson’s voice crackled
into her ear as she moved through the crowd. “And check in with Red. We’ve lost
her signal.”
“Copy
that, base. Black out.” She kept moving.
A
sea of raised arms, all holding cell-phone cameras, now saluted the
hundred-foot Norway spruce from every side, as if the yuletide monstrosity had
crash-landed on some worshipful alien planet and assumed the role of supreme
leader. Yeah, a planet of sardines, more
than a million a day, all packed squirming into one snowy city block, Natasha
thought.
And for what? To see a freaking
plant.
It
was a stormy Saturday afternoon in December, a bad time both for crowds and
weather, which meant these were die-hard tree people—Natasha just hoped not
literally.
Tourists plus terrorists? That always
ends well.
The
potential for disaster was staggering. Eyes up, defenses down—not one dazed
worshiper was looking anywhere but the supersized tree—even though there was an
entire holiday parade moving down Fifth Avenue at the far edge of the block.
Ever
since the yuletide crowd had begun to surge and climb over the sludge-banked
metal barricades at the edges of Rockefeller Center plaza—the corner of
Fifty-Ninth and Fifth—the NYPD had given up. Now they just cursed the cold
afternoon, waiting out the end of their shifts on the safe side of the
roadblocks, their breath curling upward in raggedy white puffs. And they’re strictly donut patrol, not top
command. That had probably been a factor in the strategic acquisition of
this target, she thought. Human gridlock
with only Paul Blart on your tail—
Natasha
touched her ear again. “Red, what’s going on? Ava? You lost?”
All
she got back was static.
That’s not a good sound—
“Hey,
happy holidays,” said a harried-looking mom in a cheery red fleece, pushing a
stroller zippered in plastic up the curb next to Natasha. “Great snowsuit--“
Natasha
nodded, eyeing the kid as the patch of red disappeared into the snowflaked
crowd. Don’t get distracted, Romanoff. Do
your job and maybe this time nobody gets hurt. She hitched her pack higher,
pushing on toward Fifth Avenue.
Yeah, right.
The
odds were good that this op was going to end in casualties—and that, soon
enough, the red in the snow wasn’t going to be fleece. Natasha’s hooded
“snowsuit” was a CBRN (Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear)
state-of-the-art mop suit that only resembled snow gear; really, it was lined
with filtering charcoal and striped with M-9 detection paper so she could gauge
what was being thrown at her in any given hot zone. And the goggles around her
neck weren’t for skiing but surviving—a mouth guard flipped down from inside,
like a collapsible gas mask. (Dire biological functions aside, the whole getup
also lowered the odds that one of the Black Widow’s many superfans would
recognize her infamous red hair. Oh, the
price of super hero superstardom..)
But
it was the contents of her rucksack that really set her apart. Her requisition
S.H.I.E.L.D. ruck held an M183 demolition charge assembly with enough C-4
(sixteen charges in all) to flatten a city block, if that’s what it came to.
Unlike
the rest of Manhattan, Natasha Romanoff hadn’t come for the tree. She was there
to take out the unknown number of hostiles who were plotting to use Rockefeller
Center as holiday bait for civilian casualties. Her alpha priority was their
leader, who had threatened to launch the largest and most sophisticated
chemical-weapons attack in the nation’s history.
When
it hit, the Northeast Megalopolis, the Boston-Washington corridor that was home
to more than fifty million people, would be flooded with aerosolized chemical
particulates. The invisible, odorless microbes would seize control of human
neurons and eventually destroy them—unless Natasha could destroy the
as-yet-unidentified dispersal devise before the Alpha triggered it, somewhere
on this street, sometime on this day, at some point during this parade.
But no pressure.
This
wasn’t the first time she had carried a satchel charge through the streets of a
populated area; off the top of her head, there had been Pristina and Grozny and
Sana’s and Djibouti and Bogotá before now. She had infiltrated Serbian
revolutionaries and Chechen guerillas and Yemeni pirates and Somali armed
forces and Columbian mercenaries—but then, they had already known they were at
war. It didn’t make the ops any less devastating, only less of a surprise;
those buildings had long been riddled by bullets, roads ravaged from IEDs,
walls chiseled with rat holes for hostiles at every turn. Those cities had
become operational theaters way before she’d gotten the call; everyone who
could leave had already left.
At
least, that was how Natasha had rationalized it to herself.
This,
on the other hand, was midtown Manhattan. This was a holiday attack perpetuated
on American soil in the clear light of day during prime traffic for the
highest-density urban population in the country. It was the sort of bad
business only attempted by the depraved coalition of psychopaths grasping for
global attention—because it worked. Every lethal move the opposition made
brought them closer to achieving the desired result, to producing the
headlines—the worst! the deadliest! the bloodiest!—that could shape or rule an
era and force a country to its knees.
Not if someone stops them first.
She
checked her watch.
Come on, Ava. Where are you?
They
didn’t have this kind of time to waste. For the next two hours, the parade
would still be going, and Rockefeller Center would still be jammed with
civilians. The timing wasn’t an accident. Pearl
Harbor was hit at 7:53 a.m.; the first of the Twin Towers was 8:45 a.m. If
the attack succeeded, today would be worse by an order of magnitude.
From
where Natasha stood, she knew she could shake up a Coke and spray fifty people
without so much as tossing it. If she had to use it, the effect of a single stick
of C-4 in a place like this, on a day like this, at a time like this, would be
unimaginable. If she didn’t use it, the number of people affected by the
chemical attack would probably be worse. There was no easy answer, and there
never had been.
Twenty-eight years of peace. She’d
read it in one of Ava’s S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy assignments, citing a journalist
named Chris Hedges.
That’s all the quiet this planet has
ever known, since the beginning of recorded history. How can one person change
that?
Even
if that one person happened to be the Black Widow.
But it’s not just you; there are two
of you now, she scolded herself. I don’t know why you keep forgetting that. Red and Black, remember? You
don’t always have to be so alone, Natashkava—
“Natashkava!”
She heard Ava’s voice while her back was still turned. “I found the Alpha.
Right around the corner. There’s just one thing—“
Natasha
heard it in Ava’s voice before she saw it. The flinty hardness, the push of
adrenaline that inflected every syllable.
The betrayal.
Her
hand went immediately to the back of her waistband.
It’s not there—
Now
the voice was louder, harsher. “Touch one hair on that Alpha’s head and I’ll
shoot,” Ava said. “And I mean it.”
“I
know,” Natasha said, raising her hands in surrender. And as she slowly turned
to face all that remained of her family, she also found herself staring down
the barrel of her own Glock revolver.
