Once upon a SHIELD case (Howard Stark)

Chapter 7

{Maria}

I waited with Peggy at the train station. It was torture to not be with the men, but Howard and the rescue team's captain had insisted that it would be easier to make a clean exit with as few people as possible.

So I paced and wondered how it was going.

***

{Howard}

I kept up with the rescue team as we breached the facility. Security was lax during the day and even more so at night.

Or so we thought.

In our haste to rescue Bucky, we had forgotten about the reason we were in Germany in the first. To locate the assassin known as the Winter Soldier.

Apparently, we had found him.

We made it to the second floor with no problems. The few guards on site were easily taken care of—no lethal force necessary.

It wasn't until we neared the room Maria had marked as Bucky's that we realized there was a problem.

The building had grown eerily quiet—an unnatural quiet. The first team member breached the door and was instantly thrown back into the men behind him. A figure appeared in the doorway and just stood surveying us.

"Fall back!" The team captain yelled.

The men at the front grabbed the man who had fallen and started moving toward us. I backed up slowly keeping an eye out. I had no doubt who we were up against, and if the stories were true, he could take us all out without much effort. Thankfully, Peggy and Maria were at the train station. They had strict orders to get on the train no matter what—even if we didn't show up.

The Winter Soldier took a menacing step forward and reached for the fallen soldier. He grabbed him and tossed him aside like a rag doll. A loud crack sounded when he hit the wall and we knew he was dead.

Still the Winter Soldier moved forward without fear. And we moved back to the stairs. They had been expecting us and we had fallen right into their trap. There would be no way to get Bucky out. We would be lucky to get ourselves out alive.

As we retreated, the Soldier unleashed different weapons on us. Different types of grenades and other weapons that I hadn't seen before. At least not on the market. They looked like some of the prototypes I had developed. Crude but effective.

We fired back but he was wearing some kind of armor that made the bullets bounce off. A few more men went down before we made it outside. It wasn't until we reached the moonlit path to the vehicle that I realized who our foe was.

Bucky.

He looked different, haunted. A shadow of the man that I had known as Steve's friend. And he was unashamedly trying to kill us.