Captain America: Civil War (Charlotte Stark)

Ch. 7 The Other Super Soldiers

Berlin was a big city, and that made for lots of good places to hide. Steve, Sam, and I had Bucky shackled in an old warehouse near a railroad siding that looked like it hadn't been used since the end of the Cold War.

Steve and I were at a back door, keeping an eye out for search parties, when Sam called, "Hey, Cap, Charlie!"

The Winter Soldier was awake. He looked around, not trying to escape. "Steve," he said. "Charlie."

"Which Bucky am I talking to?" Steve asked him.

"Your mom's name is Sarah. You used to wear newspapers in your shoes." Bucky chuckled at the memory and then glanced at me. "You and I use to fight side by side, our first mission was in France, 2002. You saved my life by shooting the guy in the head before he could shoot me."

Good, I thought. The shock of the crash had reset Bucky's mind and freed him from the mind control. "You can't read that in a museum," he said.

Sam wasn't quite ready to believe Bucky was back. "Just like that, we're supposed to be cool?" he wondered.

Bucky caught Sam's tone of voice. "What did I do?" he asked. It was clear he was dreading the answer.

"Enough," was all I had to say.

"I knew this would happen," Bucky said. Steve and I felt terrible for him but didn't know how he could make Bucky feel better. "Everything Hydra put inside me is still there. All he had to do was say the words."

"Who was he?" That was the important question. They couldn't start looking for him until they answered it.

"I don't know," Bucky said, his tone just short of despair.

Steve had been trying to go easy on Bucky, but time was getting short. "People are dead. The bombing. The setup. The doctor did all that just to get ten minutes with you. I need you to do better than 'I don't know.'"

Bucky paused. "He wanted to know about Siberia. Where I was kept. He wanted to know exactly where."

"Why would he need to know that?" I asked him.

Bucky's face was bleak as he answered. "Because I'm not the only Winter Soldier."

Bucky told Cap most of the story. The 1991 mission. The extraction of extra Super-Soldier serum samples from the back of the crashed car. His return to Russia and the brutal experiments. A month later, there was a group of Winter Soldiers. Over the next two decades, they trained together, fought against one another... and then one day all turned on the guards... except Bucky.

"Who were they?" Steve asked.

"The most elite death squad. More kills than anyone in Hydra history," Bucky said. "And that was before the serum."

"They all turned out like you?"

Bucky shook his head. "Worse."

"The doctor, can he control them?" I ask.

"Enough," Bucky said. "He said he wanted to see an empire fall. With these guys, he can do it. They speak thirty languages, can hide in plain sight, infiltrate, assassinate, destabilize. They can take a whole country down in one night. You'd never see them coming."

Sam took Steve and I aside. "This would have been a lot easier if we could..."

"If we call Tony," Steve finished.

That was not what Sam had meant. "Oh, he won't believe us. Even if he did, who knows if the accords will let him help?"

I nodded. "We're on our own."