Sergeant Barnes: The Last Mission (COMPLETE)

Chapter 38: Doctor Fletcher

I walked to my lab, carrying a few select pieces of equipment from the General's office. I managed to scan my ID card and get through the doors to my lab on the fifth floor, and I set down the General's computer, ID card, map, and some kind of...taser? I think it's a taser. He calls it something in German, so I don't know, but it looks like a taser.

I pick up Zola's notebook from earlier, sat on my bench (I should have grabbed the chair from the General's office), and thumbed through it again. Most of the pen marks faded long before now, but I had traced over what I could see with new ink as soon as I had received it from the General. I had to fill in a few blanks, when the Doctor had decided to write in chicken scratch, but the whole book was filled with knowledge, front to back, cover to cover.

The mind wiping techniques outlined in the notebook were outstanding, and far ahead of its time. For the 1940's, it was revolutionary, and Barnes shouldn't have been able to break through, even with Rogers' help. Nowadays, in the 2020's, it was a little rusty, and needed improvement. That's why Zerreissen found me, and brought me here from America.

I snapped the book shut and undid my pony tail. It was supposed to be a simple job. Take the book, figure out what it said, put it in a simpler format (so the Germans could perform the procedure without the book), and go home. By the time I had deciphered it, however, there was no one who understood it like I did, and HYDRA wouldn't let me go. I had to call my family, and tell them why Mom had to stay a little longer. Now, it had been five years, and I still wasn't home.

Did I really want to look at the Winter Soldier book? No. Well, kind of. It was cool, incredible, even, but I didn't really care. Did I want to become HYDRA's top doctor? No. Did I want to make Captain America into a Nazi? No. Did I want to bring the Winter Soldier back? No, but I did want to go home, and this was the only way HYDRA would let me go. I saw what happened to people who ditched early, and I did not want to be tortured. There was no other way.

I shook out my golden locks and opened my computers along the wall. Immediately, files for all two hundred cyborgs popped up, including the scrapped cyborgs that had been inactive for years. I opened the group file for the cyborgs sent to Berlin, the ones that were supposed to kill the Black Widow, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. About a half of them were destroyed, probably from the plane bombs. The other half of them were beginning to pick through the wreckage, from the looks of their live feed cameras. I didn't bother with that, I knew they were dead.

I closed the group, a little guilty that I had killed three (or was it two?) Avengers, but I swallowed and moved on. Instead I opened the search bar and typed in Rogers' birthdate: 07041918. I was the one who used the American date system for the cyborg ID numbers. It was a small way to retaliate against the Nazi's. The file popped up right away, and I opened the live feed.

Static. The cam's were down, and no vitals were sending through. I tried to unmute the audio feed, but all I got was white noise. Even his GPS was deactivated.

The GPS was never deactivated. HYDRA always wanted to know where their cyborgs were. Always. So either the transmitter was damaged, or the entire cyborg was deactivated. Neither option ought to be possible. I had to check.

I exited out of the live feed and opened the memory that had been saved on the HYDRA database. I opened today's folder and skipped to five minutes from the end, about when I had closed the General's computer earlier. I unmuted the audio and pressed play.

Rogers had already fallen off the truck by then, but he was still watching it drive away. A minute later, it slowed and made a U-turn (illegal, but I'm sure Barnes didn't care). The truck drove towards the Soldier, but I paused it. Barnes was on the roof of the truck, and the other three were dead in Berlin. Who was driving?