(Chapter 25)The Winter Soldier Program

Welcome to where dreams come to die," said Aleksander Yeliseyev the scientist presiding over the black box operation I was here to help crack the Super Soldier Serum. Or, more hopefully, steal the secrets from their research to allow me to administer it separately. Yeliseyev was wrapped in thick winter clothes and shivered so hard I thought I could hear his teeth clicking, the mountainous range of ice and snow around us all but hiding the personal jet I'd been sent with. A flat roofed bunker entry was behind him, no doubt leading the way to his laboratory.

"Don't sound too enthusiastic now. How'd you get the job here?" I asked, walking through the bitter cold to the large metal door.

"I asked for it, fool that I was," he responded, pulling the door open and beckoning me in, "Get in here quickly, quickly."

We stepped onto an elevator down into the bowls of the dungeon. I felt the warmth of the place rise considerably and Yeliseyev started stripping off his outer layer to reveal a Hawaiian shirt. I snorted. It wasn't warm enough for that down here, even if I were used to it.

"Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, Mr. Trent." Yeliseyev was an older man, who must have been working when the Berlin Wall fell, with a scratchy beard he did not bother to keep well groomed. We entered the inside of the facility, walking down the hall. "I wanted to create a new breed of super soldiers - As superior in spirit as they were in body. Wise. Disciplined. A mirror of the original super soldier, Captain America. They gave me… blunt instruments."

We came to an office and I walked in after him. He pulled out a thick file and dropped it onto a metal desk. Then another file, and another, and another, and another. "Five bloody minded instruments. Warriors, not soldiers. Once the deadliest squad Hydra had ever produced. Still the deadliest squad, I suppose. But I would not recommend it if you intend for civilization to survive within a five mile radius of the drop zone."

I opened the files and started paging through the one on the top. It was a monumental thing, page after page of information of vitals, activity, reaction time, physical endurance, thawing period. "No sample on the original?"

He sat down in a rickety old wooden swivel chair, "Nothing more than you, I'm afraid. After the failure of the second project, it was decided that the focus should be on usage of existing resources and not expansion of it. I thought I could do without the original on the budget they were offering after Karpov. It hasn't…." And here he spun the chair in a circle, "turned out that way."

"You been spending the time working on your comedy material?"

"Of course not," Yeliseyev growled. "I am always trying to devise new solutions. I've just run my mind over this for so long I can't see straight. Erskine… Eighty years and we're no closer to cracking his formula then when Herr Schmitt injected himself. Every one of our achievements on this, stolen. Even these five, stolen. An unconquerable genius."

"Well," I said after a moment, "If it's so hopeless, why not give up? Hydra has always been agreeable to my transfer requests."

"Ah, Mr. Trent, you are rich and powerful and a genius. These things are rare individually, still rarer when they are united in one man. I am a failure. No doubt, at some point, one of my superiors will have pity on me and transfer me to some more functional position. Or I will crack the Super Soldier Serum and become the most well-regarded scientist in Hydra after Arnim Zola." He yanked on his Hawaiian shirt, "Probably not the latter though. We must be realistic."

"Well, not much competition from a dead guy."

Yeliseyev began to laugh, a mocking, cruel laugh. "Oh, they have not told the golden boy?" He paused, savoring the moment. "Zola is not quite dead, Mr. Trent. They have his brain on magnetic tape. The gears are, as you might say, still turning."

Oh.

Right.

One thing you need to understand is that for all my enhanced mental prowess, my pre-insertion memories were not necessarily more reliable. And I had just forgotten that Arnim Zola was even in Winter Soldier. And that must have been the Swiss voice in Greene's ear.

Damn it. I thought I had done a good job of remembering important plot points. If I had remembered Zola, I might have remembered that he was in Captain America's base. If I had remembered that, I could've taken Coulson there and avoided this whole fiasco.

Also, hold up - "We have brain upload tech?!"

Yeliseyev nodded his head. "It is… not very civilized," he admitted. "Usually, a mind… disembodied. They do not enjoy it. We are feeling, touching, hearing creatures. Not smelted steel. But it has worked at least… once." He held up the finger with a slight smirk that, on a Russian, must have been very cheeky.

Well, file that under Long-Term Lines Of Investigation I needed to address. I was pretty sure souls existed in the MCU. If nothing else, Strange seems to have a non-corporeal essence. I didn't know if they persisted naturally after death or how they were formed or functioned. Peter Parker didn't seem to have a bunch of memories of his afterlife. Was that because the afterlife was basically non-interfaceable or was the Elan Vitale of the soul tied to the body? It was an interesting question for which I had no reliable answer.

We spent the next few minutes in silence, as I thumbed through the materials. Most of the knowledge was minutia, stuff that I could've learned on a flash drive. Maybe it was one of those petty little gestures to make me come out and see it in person. "Well, this is a very thorough documenting. Can you take me to your subjects?"

"Of course," he said, leading me down a hall.

We came into a mortuary and I looked at him, "What happened?"

"A heart attack," he said tapping one of the door of one of those metal cubbies you always see on TV crime shows. "Musculature became cancerous, antibodies attacked nervous system, the negative aggression effects but no other benefits" and so it went, up and down the line for something like twenty cubbies.

I didn't want to ask. I knew the answer. But I could hope. "Weren't there only five subjects of the Stark Serum?" That was the official Hydra designation for the batch of super soldier serum held at this facility. Presumably they'd stolen it from Howard.

"No, no, the originals are not test subjects. These are my failed replication attempts."