Desert Sword Assemble
Valentina Allegra de Fontaine held the rifle to her chest and sprinted down the main corridor from Perimeter C to Habitation Zone A. Iceberg was the most well-defended S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in the Middle East. The main bunker was buried deep under the desert. Its tough outer skin was of reinforced concrete, coating a skeleton of hardened steel. Vibranium trusses further strengthened its critical infrastructure while emergency force fields hummed patiently in reserve. It had been built to withstand a hydrogen bomb from a hostile state, or a laser strike from a Kree battleship in orbit. The entire secret base program, of which Iceberg was but one, had been Fury’s contingency against doomsday. It had been built to be the last thing standing after the rest of South Asia had been turned into a cloud of radioactive ash.
That was what had always charmed her about Nicholas.
He was so wonderfully prepared.
Iceberg would have withstood a hydrogen bomb. It would have taken a laser strike from a Kree battleship in orbit. Valentina was not sure it was going to survive the Sentry.
Lightbulbs flickered in their ceiling fixtures as they swayed, sending the shadows of staggering S.H.I.E.L.D. troopers racing wildly across the walls and floor. The trunk cabling and exposed pipework that ran through the ceiling conveyed the groans of the exterior shell to every corridor.
It was one thing to pick up a classified dossier and understand that the Sentry was powerful. To feel that power as it was turned upon you in full was an entirely new exercise in perspective. Valentina was not sure that she had quite believed the conclusions in that S.H.I.E.L.D. report, that the Sentry was essentially undefeatable, until now. In fact, she had the feeling that the report’s authors had not entirely believed it either.
If anything, she felt that they had understated his power.
“Allah, he is attacking the city.”
Navid Hashim ran alongside her, looking to the trembling ceiling whilst easily matching her pace. Young and robust as he was, he looked little the worse for his ordeals on the Gulf of Aden. Much of the credit for his survival lay with the indestructible uniform of the Arabian Knight. While his face and arms showed a scrape or two, his outfit’s luster of emeralds, turquoises, and golds was undiminished by its beating at the hands of Wolverine. Valentina found herself idly wondering what the outfit might sell for at auction, and smiled to herself as she decided it had probably been worth more as a carpet.
“I do not know how you can be so calm.” He regarded her angrily from underneath his thick eyebrows. Valentina disapproved of that look. He had been angry since his return from Africa and she suspected it was directed at her as much as it was at Norman Osborn. No sooner had it crossed his face, however, than it was gone again, yielding to the greater demands of his anxiety by a fierce shake of the head. “You all think me naïve for hoping that Ares might be won over to our cause. I know. But of all Norman Osborn’s heroes I had believed that the Sentry, at least, was the one who would forsake his evil in the end. It was Iron Man who first made him an Avenger. He saved the world alongside Captain America and Luke Cage, did he not? Or is even he now a villain hiding behind a hero’s mask?”
Valentina stared straight ahead. “Not even Norman could find a villain powerful enough to masquerade as the Sentry.”
At the door to Habitation Zone A, she pushed her way inside. At the same moment, the ceiling above the lintel collapsed, showering Hashim in chalky white dust. With the Arabian Knight coughing and pawing at his hair, they went inside.
Habitation Zone A was gray and mostly bare: a utilitarian living space that nobody had ever actually lived in.
Envisaged as one of a network of fallback positions in the event of a global calamity or the complete disintegration of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a functioning peacekeeping force, Iceberg contained barracks for several hundred soldiers and quarters for the entire regional command structure. To ensure maximum secrecy, its pre-activation garrison amounted to six Live Model Decoys, all still in cryogenic suspension, while Valentina had brought barely a quarter of the force that the base could comfortably hold.
The Black Raazer had Habitation Zone A all to himself.
The sorcerer was an ominous, muttering cloud-form of a man, floating cross-legged above a cleared space in the middle of the room. Metal chairs and bunks had been shunted to the bare concrete walls to make room for a Zoroastrian faravahar that had been drawn on the floor with black chalk, and that now crackled with arcane static. The sorcerer’s features were masked by a thousand glamours, each one darker than the last, but so deep was his concentration that Valentina could almost feel the drying out of her skin as it succumbed to the effects of mummification. There had been mattresses on the beds. Cushions on the chairs. Paper notices pinned to the walls.
All of it had withered to nothing or become dust.
There was one other person in the room, and she had retreated as far into the corner as she could get. One of Valentina’s mercenaries had found her a jumpsuit that nearly fit, hanging baggily over her like a set of blue pajamas with a S.H.I.E.L.D. patch sewn into the breast pocket. She sat on a desiccated mattress at the back end of the room with her knees drawn protectively up to her chin, watching the Black Raazer with a mix of fascination and dread. Valentina sympathized. She would not want to share a room with Raazer either, but with the sorcerer’s spells currently all that was obscuring them from the Sentry, it was the safest place in the world for Lindy Lee-Reynolds to be.
Still battling the dust in his hair, Hashim started towards Raazer. His toes scuffed the chalk outline of the mystic faravahar sign before Valentina halted him with a tap on the shoulder and a disapproving shake of the head. The Arabian Knight relented, barely, and jabbed a finger across the barrier at the levitating sorcerer.
“You were supposed to be stopping him!”
The sorcerer looked up.
He continued to mutter his incantations.
His red eyes were blisters of pain.
From the corner of the room, Lindy unfolded her legs and moved to the edge of the bed. “I didn’t want this. When I asked you to take me with you, I… I wasn’t expecting the whole world to have to suffer for it.” She shook her head and wiped tears from her eyes on the back of her hand. “Please. Just send me back, before more people get hurt. Once he finds me, he’ll leave you alone. I know he will.” She sniffed. “If anybody can send the Void away for a time and bring Robert back, it’s me.”
Valentina shook her head. That simply wasn’t going to happen.
But with the sound of old teeth rattling in yellowed skulls, Raazer stirred and paused his chant. “Yes. We should hand her back to her husband.”
“It is not the tenth century, Raazer,” said Hashim, backing off reluctantly, under Valentina’s gentle pressure, from the sorcerer’s mystic wards. “We cannot simply give her to him.”
“To end this before it truly begins and save the lives of millions?” Raazer replied. “Including all of us and the woman herself?”
Hashim’s look became pained.
“It’s my choice to make,” said Lindy, glaring at them both. “I want to go.”
“I am sorry, Lindy,” said Valentina. “But we cannot let you do that.”
The woman shuffled back along the mattress, pulled her knees up again and, her courage used up, softly began to cry.
Valentina would have sacrificed her to the Void if she had to. If it served her purpose to do so, and there was absolutely no other way, then she would have shot the woman herself. But right now it served all their interests better to keep Lindy close by. So long as the Sentry remained unaware of the bunker half a kilometer beneath the city’s suburbs, then she was confident that Iceberg could ride it out.
“If the magic of the Black Raazer can no longer stop the Sentry from attacking the city then we have no choice,” said Hashim. “We must return to the surface and face him.”
“You can’t win,” Valentina pointed out, with the patience of all the saints. “Not against the Sentry.”
Hashim let out a breath. “That does not matter.”
True belief, Valentina had always thought, whether it be in a god or in a cause, was an admirable quality in a foot soldier and very much a required trait in a revolutionary. It was considerably less desirable in a person with whom one was forced to share a bunker. “The Sentry is showing his, and Norman’s, true face to the world now,” she explained. “People are going to have no choice but to look their heroes in the eye and see them for the monsters they are.”
Valentina had learned to choose her facial expressions the way she did her weapons, to pick her favorite and keep it, and compared to her practiced composure Hashim was laughably open.
His expression morphed from defiance to horror.
“You planned this. Didn’t you? Right from the beginning, just like you planned for what happened in New York. Is that the real reason you sent me to Somalia in your place? Did you always intend for the Avengers to follow me there?”
“No,” Valentina replied, firmly. “No.”
She had never wanted the director’s job. Not even when it had been there for the taking as Nicholas’ deputy. It had always seemed like so much responsibility for so little recompense. But with Nicholas out of the frame, and Norman insisting on making such a pig’s ear of the whole endeavor, Valentina had grown quite bored of watching other people fail. It was time for her to step in, and step up. Norman had not been entirely off target with some of his ideas, extending olive branches to the more amenable tendrils of Hydra and the like, but he did not have the contacts or the panache that Valentina had: she had been exposed as a double- or triple-agent for more organizations than poor Norman even knew existed.
Someone had to make the hard decisions.
Since everyone else who had tried it had failed, that someone might as well be her.
“The plan was always to sell the files on, to bleed H.A.M.M.E.R. from a thousand small wounds while we waited, watching with the rest of the world as Norman flailed and his organization weakened. But it was always going to end this way, Hashim. Norman was never going to just fade from the scene. There was always going to be the moment when his back was pushed to the wall, and he decided to push back hard. Yes, there are five million people up there, but there are seven billion who are counting on us to make their deaths count for something. Being able to think those thoughts is what it takes to be the Man on the Wall.”
She held Hashim’s gaze.
It was clear that all he wanted to do was look away.
“The only question you need to ask yourself then is this, Hashim – do you believe that the world would be better off with me, or with Norman Osborn?”
“I… Forgive me, I do not even know anymore.”
Valentina nodded. She was neither disappointed nor surprised. “Majid would have understood. If she were here.”
That comment seemed to settle something for Hashim.
He drew his sword.
It was an impressively heroic gesture, with half a kilometer of rock separating them from their omnipotent foe.
“Every fight she took on was for her people and her home. The people up there.” He looked up. “They are mine. If it had been the Sentry in Somalia instead of Ms Marvel, then I believe she would have fought him anyway. I am going to take the Perimeter C elevator to the surface, and I am going to fight.”
He held out a hand to Raazer.
The sorcerer shook his head, the movement as faint as that of a dark shawl blowing in the sand on an empty line. “After two thousand years of un-life, I have no desire now to die.”
“Can you even die?”
“I fear that the Sentry will show us, one way or the other.”
“Please, Raazer.” Leaving Valentina’s side, Hashim took another step towards the faravahar. “You joined us to rid your old king’s empire of the Americans once before. The odds were against you then, and you fought. Fight with us again now. This is your land, Raazer. We may find that the Black Sword of Baghdad can cut him. With all of Desert Sword assembled, maybe we can even beat him.”
Valentina noted the subtle appeal to the ancient one’s pride. Hashim may have had more rough edges than the desert, but she had chosen well when she had recruited him as her second in command.
Raazer was silent for so long, Valentina wondered if the last residue of life had finally left him and been returned to its prison in the Black Sword.
“I cannot believe that you would even consider this,” said Valentina. “This is not the Raazer I found hiding in the mountains, preying on Kurdish shepherds while the world fell apart around him.”
“I was a hero once,” said Raazer, his voice the breathless caw of the never-dead. “I wore the splendor of Ahuru Mazda. I shone with the majesty of kings.” Without his appearing to move at all, his sword was suddenly held flat across his mummified hands. “Before I sought the strength and long life of this accursed sword.” His voice dropped to less than a whisper. “I yearn to retake the glory that was once mine, as it hungers for a taste of the Sentry’s golden soul.”
Valentina felt the electric tension that had been a constant throb in her gums and beneath her skin recede. She felt no better for its abeyance.
It was the feeling of her protection from the Sentry evaporating in the ether.
Hashim stepped across the faravahar.
There was a ghost of movement and Raazer became upright. He lay a hand on Hashim’s shoulder, and neither the living man nor the dead one recoiled from their brief recognition of brotherhood. His eyes shone starkly red against the black within his hood. “I will carry you more swiftly to your grave, at least. I promise no more.”
“Raazer!” Valentina screamed, but before the word was out the two men were already gone, both of them reduced to tricks of the swaying lightbulbs and the uncertain vagaries of memory.
She cursed, once again resorting to her favored language to do it.
Norman had been right about that as well.
Heroes always disappointed you in the end.
From the back of the suddenly empty room, Lindy sniffed. “If he’s gone…”
“Then he’s no longer shielding us from your husband,” Valentina finished for her. Looking up as another earth-shaking blow rocked down through Iceberg’s protesting bones, she made another hard decision.
She did not believe for a moment that Desert Sword could defeat the Sentry.
But maybe they could distract him for long enough.
“I hope you were not getting too attached to the place,” she said, turning back to Lindy. “Because we’re leaving.”