"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-12-09 22:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *news, bucky barnes |
[news update: marvel]
[It's not so much a sign as it is a tapping, a scratching on the wall.
A message goes out along old Soviet wires to transmission stations that send out even older coded pulses. They are as dark and as quiet as such messages can be. They are all but forgotten, monitored now by only a few, highly specialized intelligence agencies. SHIELD, for instance, might be listening. This particular message comes from what seems to be a failsafe switch, to be triggered only in the most dire of circumstances.
Where does the message come from? A warehouse in Eastern Ukraine. In the basement there is a tiny hidden room filled with outmoded radio and encryption equipment. A generator with fresh-smelling fuel sits at the foot of the stairs. Someone has turned the old banks of rudimentary computers on to send a message.
Where does this practically analog warning go, if traced through countless rusted stations along the way? To a bunker in the French countryside. The concrete structure is tucked under a perfectly lovely field of wheat out in the campagne.
Through the hatch to the French bunker there is darkness and cement, smoke and carnage. The structure is fifty years old, at least, and stretches half a mile. There are laboratories here, a carefully constructed hideout for a network of soviet spies and researchers working in France in a war that at least claims to be over. Those that fled here when Hydra began to topple continued their experiments, unconcerned. Such was the nature of the beast, that each head could continue without the others.
It reeks of decay, and it looks like a bomb went off inside, killing however many researchers were living in it. Further inspection reveals that the failsafe machine exploded, setting off a chain reaction that blew every piece of machinery in the structure. Each seemingly benign device fired shrapnel in all directions to bounce off the concrete walls, shredding their targets. Many of the bodies are partially or completely burned. Not a single survivor.
As it turns out, the room in Ukraine was, in fact, a convenient, long distance self-destruct trigger. If the time came to cut losses in the French facility, a Soviet official needed only to press a button and know that their secrets were safe, all from several hundred miles away. How efficient. How clean. Hail Hydra.
As for who set off this chain reaction, who pressed a button dormant and forgotten for forty years, there is no sign of forced entry in the hidden room in Ukraine. And not so much as a strand of hair.]