Nolan had raided other people's bases more times than he had counted. Having someone raid his was a new experience.
He noted the novelty without spending much time on it. The emotional register that the situation might have produced in someone else, the anger, the wounded pride of violated territory, did not find much purchase in him. What he felt instead was the particular cold focus that came with a problem requiring solutions. He started issuing orders while David was still finishing the briefing.
The Doom Squad. Five Scyllax Guardian-automata. A detachment of Intelligent Control Corps with the corresponding load-out for an urban support operation. Supplies and equipment staged for immediate departure.
Three Thunderhawks lifted from the Twin Islands' landing platform within the hour, the ceiling panels retracting to let them rise into the cloud cover. David piloted the lead aircraft. The other two followed in formation. The flight to Japan took the time it took, and Nolan used most of it reviewing what little information had come through ahead of them.
Mount Fuji.
The volcano base had been Madam Hydra's installation before the Yashida clan had absorbed it into their network, and the Yashida family had made it their own in the months since, the infrastructure expanded and the operational reach extended across Japan and into the broader Asian region. It had been functioning quietly and effectively for long enough that Nolan had stopped thinking of it as a new acquisition.
The base looked wrong from the moment the Thunderhawk's ramp descended.
The metal floor of the landing platform was marked with energy discharge patterns, the blast residue of weapons fire that had gone in multiple directions from multiple engagements. Servo robots lay in pieces across the interior spaces visible from the hatch, not the result of a targeted disabling but the kind of distribution that came from overwhelming area combat. Yashida clan servants moved through the space with the careful efficiency of people managing a disaster, their expressions controlled and their tasks specific: damage assessment, debris clearance, triage for the wounded who were still being brought through.
The number of wounded was significant.
Bucky met them at the platform edge. His face was marked with bruising that had gone deep blue in several places, the kind of colouration that indicated impacts his enhanced physiology had absorbed without quite nullifying. John stood a pace behind him, one arm wrapped in field bandaging that was white over whatever had required it to be applied.
Nolan stepped down from the ramp and looked at both of them.
"Injuries?"
"Command level is intact," Bucky said. His expression was the one he used when he was managing something and preferred not to show how much managing it required. "The ninja units are the problem. More than a hundred dead on site. Close to five hundred disabled." He paused. "Mariko and Yukio built those troops over years. Losing more than half of them in one engagement is going to take time to address."
Nolan looked at John. "You're not using the panacea."
Old John straightened slightly. "Asgardians do not require chemical assistance for minor injuries." A beat. "There is also limited stock, and the training ground personnel have more need of it as a reserve than I do at present."
"We will discuss your definition of minor later." Nolan turned back to Bucky. "Walk me through it."
They moved inside. Mariko arrived at the corridor junction with Yukio beside her, both of them coming from the direction of the medical area, and the look on Mariko's face was the particular combination of relief at Nolan's presence and controlled grief at what the base had just lost. He acknowledged both with a nod and kept moving. The conversation could happen in a room where everyone could sit and the information could be shared in order.
They found a meeting room deep enough in the base that the sounds of the ongoing clearance work were muffled. Nolan sat. The others arranged themselves. Doom stood near the wall with his Doom Squad positioned at the entrance.
Bucky laid it out in sequence.
Approximately sixteen hours before Nolan's arrival, several hundred attackers had approached the base disguised as climbers, the deception sufficient to clear the perimeter checks and the servo robot patrols. They had used high explosives to breach a backup entrance rather than attempting to force the primary access, which suggested advance knowledge of the base's layout, or at least enough reconnaissance to have identified secondary entry points. Once inside, the attack had developed quickly.
The garrison's defensive plan existed and was reasonable under normal circumstances. The servo robot complement was substantial, and the combined Yashida and base personnel were not untrained. The problem was four individuals.
Four attackers leading the assault, all of them energy-based superpowers, the specific classifications still being assessed. Against ordinary soldiers and automated systems without any countermeasures for that category of threat, four people of that capability tier could suppress an entire base. The energy-blocking collars that Nolan had seized from the Gemini Island operation and from other Hydra sources had never been distributed to the Japanese base. The Scyllax Guardian-automata had not been allocated here. The equipment gap had been absolute, and the garrison had paid for it.
By the time Bucky and John had arrived by helicopter, the four superpowered attackers had the base in a controlled suppression. It was the superpower mercenaries that Bucky and John had recruited in the months prior, assembled from various sources as additional security, that had turned it. Barely, and at cost, but it had turned.
The attackers had withdrawn.
Nolan sat with the sequence in his head and identified the failures in order. These were not Mariko's failures or Bucky's. They were his, as the person responsible for the organisation's overall readiness. The dereliction was specific and clear.
He acknowledged it internally and moved past it, because the time for self-assessment was after the situation was resolved.
"The attackers," he said. "What do we know about them?"
Bucky's expression settled into something more complicated. "That is where I am genuinely uncertain. We have had no meaningful conflict with any regional force. Our reconnaissance and infiltration operations in Asia have been low-signature. We have not given anyone in this area an obvious reason to commit this level of resource to a direct assault."
"Which leaves an organisation acting on intelligence rather than provocation," Nolan said. "Or acting on behalf of someone who has a reason we have not accounted for."
"There is one detail," Bucky said. He rubbed the bruising on his cheek without seeming to notice the gesture. "The leaders. The four superpowers. Asian features, all of them. But the way they operated was not consistent with any official security or military force in the region. Official forces hold back against civilian adjacent personnel. These people did not hold back against anyone."
"Non-state," Nolan said.
"Non-state, well-resourced, and with at least some intelligence on our presence here." Bucky shook his head slightly. "I did not want to pursue the analysis further without you here to make the call on next steps."
Nolan looked at the table for a moment.
"The collar distribution starts today," he said. "Every sub-base gets a full allocation from Twin Islands inventory before the week ends. The Scyllax Guardian rotation gets redesigned to include Japan on a permanent basis." He looked up. "These were gaps I should have closed before they were exploited. They are closed now."
He looked at Mariko. Her expression had not changed through the briefing, the control of it absolute, but the grief was in there and visible to anyone looking for it.
"We will find out who sent them," he said. "And we will address it."
It was not a complicated statement. He meant both parts of it exactly.