Chapter 416: Baron Zemo / Grim Reaper / Madame Hydra / Sandman
"Give me a situation report," Batman said. His voice was level. No urgency, no alarm.
"There's no time for a report. Get here in two minutes or start planning my funeral." Iron Man's words came out fast and hard. He wasn't interested in Batman's calm.
Whether Tony was paying him back for the two-minute deadline Batman had once put on him was a question Batman didn't bother with. He was already moving. He hit the Batwing's cockpit at a dead sprint, launched into the night sky trailing a churning wave of displaced air, and drove the nose toward the Adirondack Mountains.
He found the coordinates fast. Without reducing speed, he shoved the stick forward and put the Batwing into a vertical dive.
The scene below resolved in an instant. A HYDRA Quinjet -- iron-gray, both wings angled sharply downward, the bald eagle insignia on its fuselage -- lay broken on a hillside slope. The cockpit section had been punched through by an impact large enough to nearly fold the aircraft in half. Black smoke poured from the rupture. Electrical sparks crackled in continuous bursts. The main fuel tank had been torn open and was bleeding aviation fuel across the ground, and the sparks were close enough that every second was a coin flip.
Standing back-to-back beside the wreck were three people. Iron Man, Tony Stark -- armor up, mark VII. Hawkeye, Clint Barton -- in a purple sleeveless combat suit, long bow in hand. And Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff -- red hair, close-range weapons. None of the three had moved away from the aircraft. Tony could survive the explosion. The other two could not. They stayed anyway.
Because they were surrounded. Several hundred HYDRA soldiers had poured out of the Adirondack Mountains base and closed in from every direction, all of them carrying silver weapons of a design Batman didn't recognize. The ring had one gap, and in that gap stood four people -- different heights, different builds, different apparent ages. Batman caught a glimpse before the angle closed.
He had no more time to study them. The Batwing hit the threshold and the ground rushed up.
He cut the stealth systems. The Batwing roared in at full speed and the aircraft became visible all at once to every person on the ground -- HYDRA soldiers and their four leaders both.
At a hundred meters of altitude, one of the four simply raised a hand.
The earth responded. A column of dirt, gravel, and rock coiled upward in a spiral and drove itself toward the Batwing like a spike launched from a cannon.
Batman broke sideways. The spike missed. Then the column fragmented, and the fragments didn't scatter -- they converged, compressing into dozens of narrow stone lances that spread wide and came at the aircraft from every angle simultaneously.
This was what had brought the Quinjet down. He understood it now.
Batman was already reacting, breaking into evasive angles, when the HYDRA perimeter line raised their weapons in unison. Thousands of purple beams pulsed upward in a grid, silent and precise, threading toward the Batwing's hull.
"Brace," Batman said over the encrypted channel.
"Shouldn't that be directed at you?" Tony said. He was already moving -- both arms out, pulling Hawkeye and Black Widow flat against the ground.
The Batwing came in at under ten meters. At that altitude, the aircraft's airwash hit the mountainside and carved a shallow trench into the earth, the soil peeling back in a visible furrow as it passed.
A faint metallic groan started somewhere in the airframe. Aerospace alloy. Not Vibranium. Batman had put the aircraft through repeated hard-angle maneuvers at near-supersonic speeds for several minutes running, and structural material that would survive any sane flight envelope was approaching the end of its tolerance.
He didn't ease off. The Batwing scraped over the HYDRA line at minimum altitude, the airwash alone scattering most of them off their feet. The riot guns in the wing mounts opened up immediately -- rubber rounds, continuous, pouring into the soldiers already knocked down. At this range, rubber was enough to break bones and rupture organs. It wasn't gentle. It was efficient.
Batman kept the aircraft away from the direction of the four figures at the gap. The one who'd raised the earth spike was in that direction. He wasn't ready to approach that position yet.
When most of the HYDRA perimeter had been cleared, the Batwing's airframe finally gave him the sound he'd been expecting -- a long, tearing metal shriek that started somewhere in the left wing and propagated inward. The aircraft had given what it had.
Batman drove his fist through the cockpit glass. He didn't use the ejection seat. He simply stepped out at altitude and dropped.
The Batwing continued on without him, trailing the sound of its own disintegration. It struck the earth outside the broken perimeter at full weight. Batman triggered the self-destruct on the way down. The aircraft became a fireball immediately -- a large one, fed by both the onboard fuel and the charges he'd built into the hull for exactly this contingency.
The explosion pushed a wall of orange light across the dark mountain sky. In the seconds it took for the light to settle into a steady burning, Batman had already landed beside Tony Stark.
"Have you engaged those four yet?"
Hawkeye and Black Widow answered before Tony could. As field agents, both of them treated intelligence as the first priority of any engagement. Their expressions were serious.
"Before you arrived they identified themselves. The one with the hood and the face covered is Baron Zemo. Green outfit is Madame Hydra. The one in the cape has mechanical components in his body -- that's the Grim Reaper. Green-and-white striped shirt is Sandman."
"All four have been operating out of the Adirondack Mountains base for an unknown period. The first three appear in SHIELD files as missing or confirmed dead. No records exist on Sandman."
"Watch yourself."
Batman nodded once. Side by side with Iron Man Tony Stark, he stepped forward to meet the four HYDRA operatives waiting ahead.