A human figure was faintly visible inside the ice block. Bella reached out with her mind instead of her eyes, but the solid ice disrupted her telepathy, and she couldn't "see" much at all.
"Oh my God!" Natasha's voice shook with excitement. "That's Captain America!"
To prove it, she pointed to the far side of the chamber. Bella turned and looked. Sure enough, buried among layers of stacked equipment, she spotted the unmistakable round shield with its white star.
From their angle, only a sliver of the shield's edge was visible. If you weren't specifically looking for it, you'd miss it entirely.
"Captain America..." Bella murmured to herself.
Unless you lived in this era, you couldn't truly grasp what Captain America meant to America. He wasn't just a person. He was a symbol, an icon.
Bella personally had limited interest in Captain Coin-Flip, but Natasha was a different story. She'd grown up on Captain America comics and cartoons, a true-blue American girl through and through.
"We have to get him out!" Natasha grabbed her wife's hand, her expression urgent. "Right now!"
For Bella, this would be trivial. Zero difficulty. She'd rescue a random stranger, let alone Captain America.
One Teleport and done. But teleport him to whom, exactly? She couldn't very well drop him off at their house.
And before any teleporting, she still had to deal with Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes.
"Are you two also here for Captain America?" she asked.
Snake Eyes, bound by his Vow of Silence, simply shook his head.
He raised his katana and shifted into an attack stance.
Storm Shadow stopped him.
Pulling off his mask, Storm Shadow glanced at the massive ice block and smiled. "Honestly, I knew McCullen and the Doctor were secretly running some kind of experiment down here. I assumed it was an advanced Nanomite variant. Didn't expect an antique like this." He shrugged. "This thing's useless to me. It's yours."
His smile faded into something more calculating. "But what I really want to say is... I've killed two people for you now, both of them enormously influential. You don't take me for a fool, do you? Killing targets of that caliber deserves some compensation, wouldn't you agree?"
Storm Shadow was arrogant, not stupid. He knew how to leverage every opportunity to strengthen himself.
Bella thought for a moment. She didn't feel she owed him anything—those had been mutually beneficial arrangements—but she asked anyway. "What do you want?"
"What can you offer?"
Bella produced two hand-crafted jade talismans and tossed one to each of them. "Crush these in a pinch and they'll turn you invisible. Visual only—thermal imaging can still pick you up. Lasts ten minutes, and attacking won't break the effect."
For two ninjas, invisibility jade talismans were nothing short of trump cards. Both men nodded their thanks and left the chamber together.
"We can't just teleport out carrying this. It'd be way too conspicuous and expose your abilities," Natasha said, her analytical mind kicking in the moment her excitement cooled.
Bella blinked. She genuinely hadn't considered that. Kamar-Taj's teleportation was just so convenient.
"So what's your plan? We leave it here and go home?"
"Don't be ridiculous. Wait here. I'm calling Nick."
Natasha dialed Old One-Eye. When she told him they'd found Captain America, there were two full seconds of silence on the other end.
The news hit him like a freight train.
"You two are really something..." He no longer knew what to call them. Lucky charms? Harbingers of chaos?
"Stay put. I'm sending reinforcements immediately."
S.H.I.E.L.D. dispatched troops to the underwater base at once. While Bella and Natasha held off five successive Cobra assaults, linked up with S.H.I.E.L.D. agents already inside, and dug in for two more hours, a Level Seven field agent arrived—Nick Fury's top lieutenant, Phil Coulson.
Phil Coulson's feelings about Captain America bordered on worship. Staring at the blurred silhouette inside the ice, he asked the accompanying medic with barely contained urgency, "Can we extract the Captain now? Is there any risk?"
The doctor didn't answer immediately, running the ice block through every piece of portable equipment available before shaking his head. "I'm sorry, sir. The equipment we brought is insufficient. I can't make a determination."
S.H.I.E.L.D. had come in their own submarine. A platoon of agents—impossible to tell whether they were S.H.I.E.L.D. or Hydra—loaded the ice block aboard under the noses of the British, French, and German forces, then slipped away from the battlefield.
Bella and Natasha departed separately.
The battle ended that evening.
McCullen ordered the glacier destroyed. He and the Doctor, M.A.R.S. Industries' chief scientist, were captured by the French Navy.
The underwater base self-destructed, burying most of its advanced weaponry beneath the glacier. Among the lost technology: fighter jets capable of breaking Mach 6, the pulse cannons that had sunk a destroyer in a single shot, and several Nanomite warheads.
NATO declared the military organization controlled by M.A.R.S. Industries—Cobra Command—a terrorist organization, disbanded M.A.R.S. Industries, and froze all its accounts.
Storm Shadow vanished into the wind. Aside from Snake Eyes, no one knew where he went.
Both Bella and Natasha suspected a hidden hand behind Cobra. The sheer scale of their technology was staggering, far beyond what a company like M.A.R.S. Industries could realistically develop. Without massive research teams, without oceans of funding and resources, those advanced weapons could never have left the laboratory.
This wasn't exactly a groundbreaking observation—anyone with eyes could see something was off. But seeing the problem and solving it were two different things. Who would investigate? Would the Americans, the self-appointed world police, take the lead? Or the French, who'd been directly attacked? That would take rounds of diplomatic wrangling. Several key prisoners—McCullen and the Doctor—were placed under maximum NATO security. The Baroness, who had defected, was also sent to prison.
G.I. Joe proved its value on the battlefield. NATO immediately approved expanded funding and personnel, preparing the unit for even more demanding missions ahead.
S.H.I.E.L.D. thawed Captain America, but after his extended hibernation in the ice, the super-soldier remained unconscious. When he'd wake—or whether he'd wake at all—was anyone's guess.
Bella and Natasha's European honeymoon continued. They left Paris, drifted south through Italy, then on to Greece and Turkey. A month of leisurely travel later, with Natasha's belly beginning to show, Bella sent her wife back to Arendelle.
Time marched into August 2004.
The presidential election was in full swing.
Benjamin Asher—a Republican candidate who openly proclaimed he was good at nothing except giving the American people courage—blazed through the primaries. His polling climbed steadily. Voters adored his war-hero image and believed the nation would grow strong under his leadership.
He'd also abandoned the traditional campaign playbook entirely, going full populist, flooding the airwaves with fiery slogans designed to whip crowds into a frenzy.