Washington Metro News assistant news director Joanne Phelps is among many seeing footage of a mysterious hitman after he is filmed firing on a black SUV that has eluded an orchestrated attack by marked police vehicles, on the driver. As the news te...
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The first time the Winter Soldier was officially caught on film was in Washington, D.C., during an explosive incident involving fake police and guns for hire attacking an unknown individual in an armoured SUV. No one knew the Winter Soldier by that name at the time, but cell phone videos of the dark haired, masked mystery man soon flooded social media. The majority of comments were wondering who the hell this guy was.
The videos showed him standing in the middle of a busy street in downtown Washington, with a weapon in hand as the severely damaged SUV sped towards him. Casually, the man lifted the weapon, fired it, and a disk attached itself to the underside of the vehicle, exploding shortly after and flipping it onto its back. He stepped deftly aside as the vehicle landed where he had just been standing. The SUV spun some distance away before coming to a complete stop.
As the man strutted towards the vehicle, his attention focused solely on that target, he astounded everyone who was filming when he ripped the driver's side door completely off with what appeared to be a hand made of metal, only to be greeted with an empty car interior as the driver had managed to escape with some high tech device that allowed him to tunnel directly into the sewer system. It was like witnessing a spy movie come to life in the streets of the city.
As he turned towards the people filming him, it was obvious that the empty vehicle was unexpected. For several long moments, the man stood there as if waiting for instructions. A dark van with no windows suddenly pulled up, its side door slid open, and the mystery man entered it. As it sped away a few people closest to the vehicle noted it had no licence plates and no identifying features. Every news agency in the city begged for different views of the incident, and the incidents that preceded it as the black armoured SUV had been initially attacked some distance away.
Joanne Phelps worked for one of those news agencies, Washington Metro News, as their newsroom was inundated with inquiries from people who saw this as an opportunity to get rich, demanding payment for their video. There were just as many who sent it in unsolicited without expectation of payment, and several of the staff at the office poured over every detail they could trying to find out who this guy was. The senior news director, Jack Walton, who had worked in Washington for years, made a discreet phone call and came back to the office where several people were going over the latest video, his face betraying that something wasn't right.
"Anyone have a spare external hard drive?" he asked. "We have to delete every video we just received. SHIELD has declared the incident top secret. We can't report about it, comment about it, or keep the videos on our servers. I want to upload all of them onto the hard drive, then I'll keep it in a secure place. If you're asked, you can tell them we deleted it from our servers. They're sending a team to each news agency in the city and scrapping them off of servers everywhere." He looked at the clock. "We have 30 minutes tops to comply."
An intern ran out, coming back several minutes later with an external hard drive, connecting it to the server and began transferring them over. It was a race against the clock and when the last one was fully transferred, he disconnected the hard drive, handing it to Jack who disappeared for several minutes. By then, they received word from the security desk downstairs that a SHIELD team had arrived to confirm that all evidence had been removed of the attack on the SUV and on the mystery man who finally stopped it.
