At Smith's insistence, the crew rosters across all three helicarriers were mixed — not every berth filled by Pierce's people. A significant portion were standard S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel who had no idea what they'd been standing next to for years.
Steve and Sam hit the ground running the moment they cleared the Triskelion's lower deck.
Sam matched Steve's pace stride for stride. "Captain — how do we tell who's who out there?"
"If they shoot at you," Steve said without breaking stride, "that's your answer."
Sam processed that for about half a second, then dropped his arms to his sides. The EXO-7's wings snapped open with a mechanical crack and caught the air. He banked hard and came up fast, aiming for the nearest rising carrier.
Steve didn't need the wings. The carrier was still climbing from its berth below the Triskelion's waterline, its deck sitting lower than the Trident's landing pad. He hit the railing at a full sprint and jumped.
He landed clean on the carrier's deck, rolled to his feet, and kept moving.
He made it thirty meters before a full assault squad stepped out from behind a row of equipment housings and fanned into a line across his path.
"Captain Rogers." The squad leader's voice was even. "This is a restricted S.H.I.E.L.D. installation. You are not authorized to be on board."
Steve stopped. He looked at the line of agents — none of them had raised their weapons yet.
"HYDRA has infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D.," he said. "I'm on this carrier for the safety of everyone on the ground. That's the only reason I'm here."
The agents looked at each other. The squad leader shook his head.
"We can't stand down without a direct order from Director Smith. I'm sorry, Captain."
Steve looked at the line again. Then he looked at the squad leader.
"Then I'm sorry too."
The shield left his hand before the apology finished leaving his mouth. It swept the line in a single arc, dropping every agent in sequence without breaking bones, and snapped back into his grip. He moved down the row, pulling grenades from their rigs as he went.
Sam's approach to the second carrier lasted about four seconds before the ship's defense systems found him.
A broadcast tone cut through the wind.
"Unregistered unidentified aerial personnel — vacate the landing zone immediately and submit to identification. This is your first warning."
Sam jinked left, scanning for a gap in the deck layout.
"Unregistered unidentified aerial personnel — vacate immediately. Second warning."
He found a possible approach angle near the aft section, but the sightlines were wrong.
"Final warning."
Sam didn't leave.
The carrier's close-in weapons systems woke up all at once. Anti-aircraft guns swiveled on their mounts, and three separate CIWS installations opened fire simultaneously, filling the airspace around him with intersecting streams of tracer rounds.
The noise alone was enormous.
Sam threw himself into a cobra, nose pitching almost vertical, killed his speed in a fraction of a second, let the burst pass under him, then dove hard and accelerated. His voice crackled through the headset.
"Captain — found the bad guys."
Steve, somewhere on the first carrier, dispatched the last agent in a corridor and kept running. "You okay?"
"Working on it." Sam cut left, then right, ducking under the plane of fire from a rotating gun emplacement. "These things have a lot of guns."
He was too small and too fast for the automated systems to track cleanly, but too small and too fast and able to land were two different problems. For the moment, the second carrier was a ceiling he couldn't get through.
The conference room's wall screens showed everything — both carriers, both men. The feeds were crisp and steady, the kind of real-time surveillance the Insight program was built around.
Pierce watched Sam's silhouette dart through a curtain of tracer fire and turned to Smith.
"Director Smith — you're in command of S.H.I.E.L.D. How do you want to handle this?"
Smith picked up the command walkie-talkie.
"Detain Steve Rogers. I want him alive." He paused for a half-beat. "Sam Wilson — he's being held for interference with an active S.H.I.E.L.D. operation. His condition upon arrival is irrelevant."
Tony raised an eyebrow at the ceiling and said nothing. Rogers was an internal matter — messy, but containable. This Wilson, though, had shown up from nowhere and flown directly into a restricted military launch event. That was a different category of problem.
The Council members registered no objection. Neither did Pierce.
Smith set the walkie-talkie down and looked at Pierce.
"Secretary Pierce." His voice stayed flat. "Captain Rogers' accusation deserves a response. Don't you think you owe everyone here an explanation about HYDRA?"
The room shifted. Nothing visible — no one moved — but the quality of the silence changed.
Pierce kept his expression neutral. "That's slander, Director. I'd hope you're not giving it more weight than it deserves."
"I'm not basing anything on Rogers' word alone," Smith said. He picked up the walkie-talkie again. "Bring them in."
The conference room doors opened.
Sharon Carter walked in. Marcus Corvinus came in beside her, unhurried, hands loose at his sides.
"Sir," Sharon said. "As requested."
Pierce looked at Marcus with the careful attention of a man trying to identify a threat he hadn't catalogued yet. What was this? Some kind of enhanced interrogator? A lie detector? The Security Council representatives leaned forward slightly — the French one, the Russian one — clearly wondering the same thing.
Natasha, still behind the American representative's face, studied Marcus with real interest. She knew what he was — a vampire elder, Brotherhood command, Fraternity's operational backbone under Smith's authority. She'd pulled his file twice. But blood memory extraction wasn't in anything she'd read. The vampires' full capability set was apparently deeper than her intelligence suggested.
Pierce folded his hands on the table and waited.
Three thousand feet above the Potomac, the carriers held their altitude and continued climbing toward operational ceiling.
In the broadcast room, Hill had the telemetry feeds running on three separate screens. She watched the altitude numbers tick upward and keyed her comm.
"Falcon — altitude check shows they're at three thousand feet and still climbing. What's your status?"
"Still in the fight." Sam's breathing was audible through the channel — controlled, but working hard. "Can't get through the perimeter fire."
He wasn't wrong. The second carrier's automated defense grid had locked onto his movement signature and was maintaining overlapping coverage over every viable approach angle. For three full minutes he'd been flying the problem — probing, retreating, cutting across the field to bait a tracking delay — without finding a clean path in.
Then one of the gun crews on the starboard deck rotated to cover Sam's latest feint a half-second too slow.
He folded his wings and dropped straight down, inverted the pull at the last possible moment, and came in flat across the deck, barely above the roofline of the Quinjet row. Two HYDRA agents by the gangway access had their backs to him. He hit the first one with his shoulder, put the second one down with a clean elbow strike, and landed.
"Captain — I'm on."
He had exactly one second to register the Quinjet lifting off the deck fifteen meters away, its nose already swinging toward him.
"—"
Sam ran.
The Quinjet's chin gun opened up. Sam dove under the wing of the nearest parked fighter, using the aircraft's body as cover. Rounds walked across the deck plating behind him, struck the parked Quinjet's fuselage, and punched through. The fighter's fuel cell ruptured.
The explosion threw Sam sideways across the deck. He hit the edge rail hard, grabbed it with one hand, and hung for a moment with his legs over open air three thousand feet above the river.
The attacking Quinjet banked around for another pass.
Sam pulled himself back up, drew both submachine guns, planted his feet at the deck's edge, and leaned back as the fighter came in low and fast. He squeezed both triggers and held them. The burst walked up the Quinjet's nose, cracked the canopy glass in a spiderweb pattern, and drove the pilot's head back.
The Quinjet pulled off its attack run.
Sam spread his wings and went over the side — dropping under the carrier's hull, using the massive keel as cover. The Quinjet reacquired him, rolled inverted, and came after him below the ship.
Sam ran the undercarriage at full speed and let them follow.