The reconnaissance began not in the mountains, but in a restaurant on Pešterova Street.
Carl had spent the morning after his late-night planning session reviewing the surveillance files with fresh eyes. The satellite imagery and patrol logs were valuable, but they had a critical limitation: they showed only the surface. Everything below ground—where Dr. Smith was almost certainly being held—was invisible to external observation.
He needed someone who had been inside.
The supply chain was the obvious vulnerability. Twice a week, unmarked trucks delivered sealed cargo to the mountain facility. Those trucks had to come from somewhere, driven by someone, loaded by someone. And in Carl's experience, every chain had a weak link—a person who was involved enough to know useful details but not committed enough to die protecting them.
Jack Morrison's surveillance logs included license plates from the supply trucks. Cross-referencing those plates through Hudson Industries' extensive commercial databases—a legitimate business tool that happened to be useful for intelligence work—produced a name.
Viktor Hadžić.
CEO of Hadžić Food Group. A mid-tier Sokovian food distribution company—not prominent enough to attract attention, not small enough to seem suspicious. Third-rate in the Sokovia business community, the kind of operation that existed in the margins between legitimate commerce and whatever paid the bills.
Morrison's team had flagged the connection over a year ago: Hadžić's trucks made regular deliveries to the mountain facility, a route that didn't appear on any of the company's official shipping manifests. The deliveries had been occurring for over a decade—long before Carl had arrived in this world.
A decade of regular, undocumented supply runs to a HYDRA installation.
That wasn't a contractor fulfilling a government contract. That was a collaborator.
Carl had filed the information away at the time, adding it to the growing dossier on the mountain facility. Now, with Dr. Smith's life potentially measured in days rather than weeks, it was time to use it.
He'd called Luka that morning with specific instructions.
"I need current surveillance on Viktor Hadžić. Location, schedule, vehicle, personal security detail. Today."
Luka, to his credit, hadn't asked why. The security team had been tracking Hadžić's movements intermittently for months as part of their broader monitoring of the facility's supply chain. Pulling together a current picture took less than two hours.
By early afternoon, Carl knew where Hadžić was having lunch, what car he was driving, and who was with him.
---
The street was busy—lunch-hour crowds flowing between restaurants and offices, cars jockeying for parking spaces, the ordinary chaos of a Sokovian city going about its day. Carl sat in the back of an unmarked sedan, watching the restaurant entrance through tinted windows.
Beside him, a compact man with close-cropped hair and an unremarkable face gestured toward the building.
"He's eating inside, sir. The red Audi that pulled up five minutes ago is his—the driver's name is Dragan, mid-twenties, been with Hadžić for about three years. Two bodyguards inside with him, two more in the black SUV parked behind the Audi."
The operative—one of Morrison's field agents, designated by his callsign rather than his name—delivered the information with clipped efficiency.
Carl nodded. "Pull your team back. All of them. I'll handle the rest."
"Understood, sir."
The operative didn't question the order. Morrison's people had learned early that Carl's instructions, however unusual, were not suggestions. The agent spoke quietly into his earpiece, and within two minutes, the surveillance team had dissolved into the lunch crowd and vanished.
Carl stepped out of the sedan and closed the door.
Alone on a busy street, surrounded by civilians who had no idea what was about to happen ten meters from where they were eating sandwiches and checking their phones.
He walked casually around the corner, turned into a narrow alley between two buildings, and confirmed he was unobserved.
"Transformation."
The jutsu activated silently—no hand seals needed for a technique he'd practiced thousands of times. His features shifted, his clothes rippled and reformed. In the space of a heartbeat, the young billionaire in the tailored coat was gone, replaced by a Sokovian traffic officer in a blue uniform, complete with cap, badge, and the slightly bored expression of a man pulling a shift he didn't want.
Carl—now indistinguishable from any of the dozens of traffic police who worked Novi Grad's streets—walked back out of the alley and approached the red Audi.
The car was parked at the curb in a zone that was, conveniently, actually restricted. Carl rapped his knuckles against the driver's side window with the casual authority of a man who did this forty times a day.
The window lowered. A young man in his mid-twenties looked up at him with the particular expression of someone who considered traffic enforcement a personal inconvenience.
"You'll need to move the vehicle. This is a no-parking zone."
"It's fine, officer," the driver—Dragan—said with dismissive impatience. "My boss is just finishing lunch. Five minutes."
"I'm afraid that's not—"
Carl's hand moved.
Not fast enough to alarm—not the explosive speed of a combat strike. Just a casual gesture, as if reaching for something in his pocket. The small aerosol canister he'd palmed was commercially available—a fast-acting sedative compound that Hudson Pharmaceuticals had developed for medical use. The dosage had been calibrated for field deployment.
One precise spray through the open window, aimed at the face.
Dragan's eyes rolled back. His head dropped forward against the steering wheel.
Sometimes technology is simpler than chakra, Carl thought as he reached through the window and unlocked the door. In three years of rebuilding Hudson Industries, he'd learned to appreciate the tools that this world offered. Firearms. Sedatives. Surveillance equipment. They lacked the versatility of ninjutsu, but they were effective, silent, and left no traces that couldn't be explained.
He worked quickly. Pressed the trunk release, moved around the car, shifted Dragan's unconscious body from the driver's seat to the trunk with the efficiency of someone who had practiced exactly this kind of operation. The whole process took less than ninety seconds.
Carl slid into the driver's seat and activated the Transformation again.
When the jutsu settled, the face in the rearview mirror was Dragan's—same jawline, same haircut, same slightly sullen expression. Carl adjusted the mirror, familiarized himself with the vehicle's controls, and waited.
Ten minutes later, the restaurant's front door opened.
Viktor Hadžić emerged first—a heavyset man in his fifties with the complexion of someone who ate well and exercised never. His suit was expensive but poorly fitted, straining at the buttons in a way that suggested recent weight gain. Two bodyguards flanked him, scanning the street with the practiced alertness of men who expected trouble but hadn't encountered it in long enough to become complacent.
Behind them, two more guards peeled off toward the black SUV.
Hadžić opened the rear door of the Audi and settled into the back seat with the grunt of a man whose knees objected to the motion.
"Back to the office," he said without looking up, already reaching for his phone.
"Yes, sir," Carl replied.
Dragan's voice. Dragan's inflection. The Transformation reproduced vocal patterns as accurately as physical appearance—one of the technique's most useful features.
Carl pulled the Audi smoothly into traffic.
He drove normally for three blocks—long enough for Hadžić to settle into his phone, long enough for the bodyguard SUV to fall into its usual position two car lengths behind. Then, at a traffic light, Carl reached for the aerosol canister again.
"Mr. Hadžić."
The businessman looked up from his phone. "What—"
The spray caught him full in the face. His eyes widened for a fraction of a second, then glazed, then closed. He slumped sideways against the door, phone sliding from limp fingers.
Carl accelerated through the intersection and turned onto a side street that would take him toward the eastern highway. In the rearview mirror, he watched the bodyguard SUV hesitate at the intersection—the light had changed, and two cars had inserted themselves between the Audi and the SUV.
He turned again. And again. Within four blocks, the SUV was gone.
They'll realize something is wrong within minutes, Carl calculated. But they don't have GPS on this vehicle—Hadžić was too paranoid about tracking to allow it, according to Morrison's files. They'll search the route between the restaurant and the office first, then expand outward.
By then, I'll be done.
He drove east, away from Novi Grad, into the rural terrain where scattered villages gave way to forest and the land began its gradual ascent toward the mountains. Twenty minutes of driving brought him to a location he'd identified that morning: a stretch of unpaved road bordered by dense woodland, far enough from any settlement that a parked car would attract no attention.
Carl pulled the Audi off the road, killed the engine, and stepped out.
The forest was quiet. Late afternoon light filtered through the canopy, casting everything in shades of green and gold. Birds called in the upper branches. The air smelled of pine resin and damp earth.
A peaceful place for an unpleasant conversation.
He opened the rear door, pulled Hadžić's unconscious body out, and set him on the ground. A bottle of water from the car's center console served as a wake-up call—poured directly over the man's face.
"Šta—?!"
Hadžić sputtered awake, arms flailing. His eyes were wild, unfocused. The sedative's after-effects left him disoriented—aware that something was terribly wrong but unable to process what.
Carl let him sit up. Let him take in his surroundings—the forest, the empty road, the car. Let the confusion curdle into fear as the businessman's survival instincts caught up with his cognitive function.
Then Carl spoke.
"Hail HYDRA, Hadžić."
The words hit like a physical blow. Hadžić's head snapped toward Carl—toward Dragan's face—and what Carl saw in the man's eyes confirmed everything.
Not confusion. Not the bewilderment of an innocent man hearing a nonsensical phrase.
Recognition. Followed immediately by terror.
"Long live HYDRA," Carl continued, keeping his voice flat, cold—the tone of a man delivering a sentence rather than starting a conversation. "You've been compromised. The Baron has ordered your termination."
"What?"
Hadžić scrambled backward on the ground, his expensive suit collecting dirt and leaves. His face had gone the color of old paper.
"Dragan—Mike—listen to me, this is a mistake. A mistake. I haven't betrayed anyone. I've been loyal—for twelve years, I've been loyal! Every shipment, on time, no questions. You know this! You know this!"
Carl watched the man's panic with clinical detachment.
There it is.
Not a denial that HYDRA existed. Not confusion about "the Baron." Not the indignation of an innocent man falsely accused. Instead: immediate, desperate self-defense within the framework of the accusation. Confirmation of membership. Confirmation of the supply relationship. Confirmation of the chain of command.
All in the first ten seconds.
Amateurs, Carl thought. Professional operatives are trained to resist interrogation, to deny everything, to force the interrogator to prove their case. This man is a collaborator, not an agent. He breaks the moment pressure is applied.
"The Baron's orders are clear," Carl said, drawing a pistol from inside his jacket—a compact Glock 19, standard issue for Morrison's security teams. He'd appropriated it that morning. "Immediate termination. No further contact."
He chambered a round. The sound—that distinctive, unmistakable mechanical click—cut through the forest's tranquility like a blade through silk.
Hadžić made a sound that wasn't quite a word. His hands came up, palms out, the universal gesture of a man who had run out of options and was resorting to the only thing left: begging.
"Please—please—Dragan, you have to let me explain. Someone has lied to the Baron. Someone is framing me. Let me call him directly—just one call. I can prove my loyalty. I've always been loyal."
His voice cracked on the last word. Tears were forming in the corners of his eyes—not from grief, Carl noted, but from pure animal terror. This was a man who had never been in physical danger before. Who had spent twelve years serving HYDRA from the comfortable distance of supply manifests and truck schedules, never imagining that the violence his organization dealt to others could be turned inward.
"You don't seem like a man with firm convictions," Carl said quietly.
Something in his tone—or perhaps the discrepancy between the words and the voice delivering them—made Hadžić pause. A flicker of something beyond panic crossed his face.
"Dragan... you're not..."
"No," Carl said. "I'm not."
He released the Transformation.
Dragan's features dissolved like watercolors in rain, replaced by Carl's own face—younger, harder, with eyes that held the particular stillness of someone who had made peace with violence long before this moment.
Hadžić stared at the stranger standing over him and understood, with the sudden clarity that proximity to death provides, that everything he'd assumed about this situation was wrong.
"I'm going to ask you questions," Carl said. "About the facility in the mountains. About its layout, its security, its personnel. About what's underground."
He crouched, bringing himself to eye level with the trembling man.
"You're going to answer completely and honestly. Not because of loyalty or ideology or any of the other things HYDRA pretends to care about. But because the alternative—"
He reached down and took Hadžić's right hand. Positioned his thumb and index finger around the man's smallest finger. Applied pressure—not enough to break, but enough to make the geometry of what was about to happen unmistakably clear.
"—is considerably worse than talking."
Hadžić talked.
---
It took forty minutes.
Hadžić was not a brave man, and he was not a stupid one. He understood, within the first two minutes, that the person interrogating him was not bluffing, was not negotiating, and was not going to be satisfied with incomplete answers. So he gave complete ones.
The facility had three underground levels. Hadžić's deliveries went to the upper level—he'd been inside, escorted, perhaps a dozen times over twelve years. His access was limited, but his observations were detailed. A man who'd survived in HYDRA's orbit for over a decade without being promoted or eliminated had learned to pay attention.
He described the entrance: a vehicle bay accessible through a reinforced tunnel that opened from the motor pool on the surface. Wide enough for supply trucks, controlled by a blast door that required both a keycard and a verbal authorization code.
The codes changed monthly. He knew the current one.
He described the upper level: barracks along the northern corridor, armory on the eastern side, a communications center that he'd glimpsed through an open door—banks of equipment that bore no resemblance to standard Sokovian military hardware. Mess hall. Medical bay. Administrative offices.
The middle level, he knew less about. He'd never been granted access, but he'd overheard conversations. Laboratories. The word "subjects" used in contexts that made him uncomfortable enough to stop listening. Screams, once, filtering up through the ventilation system. He'd told himself it was equipment noise.
The lowest level was a mystery. He knew it existed only because of the elevator controls he'd seen—three buttons, three levels—and because of the way the base's personnel spoke about it in hushed tones. Whatever was down there, it was Strucker's personal domain.
Strucker's experiments, Carl thought. The precursor to the enhanced individual program. In the original timeline, this is where Wanda and Pietro would have been taken.
"Personnel," Carl said. "How many?"
"I—I don't know exactly. Eighty, maybe more? The security teams rotate. There are always at least thirty guards on duty. The scientific staff stay below—I've never seen them leave."
"Strucker. How often is he present?"
"He's always there. He lives in the facility. I've never seen him outside it."
Carl filed that away. Strucker doesn't leave. That simplifies certain things and complicates others.
"The supply entrance—the vehicle bay. What happens after the blast door?"
"A checkpoint. Two guards, always armed. They inspect the cargo—not thoroughly, just a visual confirmation. The driver stays with the truck until unloading is complete, then exits through the same route."
"Camera coverage?"
"Everywhere. Inside and out. There's a monitoring room on the upper level—I saw it once. Dozens of screens."
"Ventilation?"
"I don't—I'm not an engineer. There are vents. I've felt air circulation. But I don't know where the external intakes are."
Carl nodded. He'd expected that. External ventilation access points would need to be identified through direct observation—tomorrow night's reconnaissance objective.
He continued the interrogation methodically, cycling through topics, returning to previous questions from different angles to check for consistency. Hadžić's answers held up. The man wasn't sophisticated enough to maintain a coherent lie under this kind of pressure, and the physical demonstrations Carl had provided early in the conversation had eliminated any remaining impulse to try.
By the end, Carl had a functional mental map of the facility's upper level, a partial understanding of the middle level, and confirmation that the lowest level existed but remained an unknown.
He also had the current month's access codes for the vehicle bay entrance.
That alone was worth everything.
Carl stood. Hadžić remained on the ground, cradling his right hand—Carl had broken two fingers early in the interrogation as proof of intent, and the businessman hadn't required further convincing.
"What happens to me now?" Hadžić asked. His voice was hollow—drained of everything except the resignation of a man who already knew the answer.
Carl looked at him.
In another life—his first life—Carl might have felt something. Pity, perhaps. Or at least the discomfort of standing over a broken man and knowing you were the one who broke him.
But Viktor Hadžić had spent twelve years facilitating HYDRA's operations. Had delivered supplies to a facility where human experiments were conducted. Had heard screams through ventilation shafts and chosen to believe they were "equipment noise." Had profited from an organization whose founding philosophy was the subjugation of humanity through force.
He wasn't innocent. He was complicit. And complicity, in Carl's experience, was just guilt with better public relations.
"You worked for people who kidnap and experiment on human beings," Carl said. "For twelve years."
Hadžić opened his mouth, but Carl didn't wait for whatever justification was forming.
One clean motion. A sharp crack. Hadžić's head dropped at an angle that living necks don't produce.
Quick. Painless. More mercy than HYDRA's test subjects had received.
Carl retrieved the unconscious Dragan from the Audi's trunk. The driver was still under the sedative's effects—his breathing slow and steady, his face peaceful in a way that seemed obscene given the circumstances.
Another crack. Another body on the forest floor.
Carl placed his palms flat against the earth.
"Earth Release—Burial."
The ground opened beneath both bodies—not dramatically, not with the explosive force of a combat technique, but with the quiet efficiency of soil parting and then closing again, like water accepting stones. Within seconds, the forest floor was smooth and undisturbed, the leaf litter settling back into place as if nothing had ever happened.
An E-rank technique. No combat application whatsoever. Just a ninjutsu designed to make bodies disappear.
Sometimes the most useful techniques are the ones nobody bothers to learn, Carl thought.
He stood, brushed the dirt from his palms, and surveyed the scene. The Audi sat on the shoulder of an empty road. No blood. No signs of struggle. No evidence that anything had occurred here except a car pulling over for an unremarkable reason.
The vehicle needed to disappear too.
Carl drove it deeper into the forest along a logging track, parked it in a ravine where the undergrowth would conceal it within weeks, wiped his prints from every surface, and walked back to the road.
The walk back to the nearest village took forty-five minutes. From there, a local bus to the outskirts of Novi Grad. Then a taxi to a commercial district where he could disappear into the evening crowds.
By the time Hadžić's bodyguards raised the alarm—by the time anyone began looking for their missing employer—Carl was sitting in his office at Hudson Tower, clean and composed, reviewing the intelligence he'd gathered.
---
He worked through the night.
The mental map from Hadžić's interrogation was useful but incomplete. Carl overlaid it against his existing surveillance data—the satellite imagery, the patrol schedules, the supply route timings—and a more comprehensive picture began to emerge.
The vehicle bay entrance was the primary infiltration point. With Hadžić's access codes and the Transformation Jutsu, Carl could enter the facility disguised as a supply driver. The upper level's layout was now largely known. The middle level—the laboratories—remained partially mapped but would need to be navigated in real time.
Dr. Smith was most likely being held on either the upper or middle level. A kidnapped scientist had value as a source of information; Strucker would want him accessible for interrogation, not buried in the restricted lowest level.
The extraction plan crystallized:
Phase one: Enter through the vehicle bay using Hadžić's codes and Transformation. Locate Dr. Smith on the upper or middle level. Extract him through the same route.
Phase two: If extraction succeeded cleanly—no alarms, no detection—withdraw and reassess. The base could be dealt with later, through different means, with Dr. Smith safely recovered.
Phase three: If extraction was compromised—if alarms were raised, if escape through the vehicle bay became impossible—then the plan shifted from surgical to destructive. Use ninjutsu offensively. Create chaos. Fight through to the exit with Dr. Smith or die trying.
Carl didn't like Phase three. It relied on capabilities he hadn't tested in real combat against armed opponents. He could generate fireballs that melted steel, yes. But he'd never done it while people were shooting at him with automatic weapons. The gap between training and combat was the gap between theory and reality, and people died in that gap every day.
But Phase three is the contingency, not the plan, he reminded himself. The plan is stealth. Get in, get Smith, get out. No one knows I was there until we're gone.
He reviewed the System's standing quest:
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ACTIVE QUEST ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════╣
║ ║
║ Shadow Clone Technique ║
║ ║
║ Objective: Destroy the HYDRA base in the Sokovian mountains ║
║ ║
║ Reward: Shadow Clone Technique scroll ║
║ ║
║ Status: IN PROGRESS ║
║ ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
The quest demanded the base's destruction—not just Dr. Smith's rescue. Complete fulfillment required Phase three regardless.
But quests could wait. Dr. Smith couldn't.
Rescue first. Destruction second. I can always come back for the base once Smith is safe.
Carl closed the files and locked them in his desk safe.
Tomorrow night, he would approach the facility for direct reconnaissance—confirming the external access points, the ventilation infrastructure, the blind spots in the perimeter security that satellite imagery couldn't reveal.
The night after that, he would go in.
Forty-seven kilometers east of where he sat, the mountain facility hummed in the darkness. Guards walked their patrols. Cameras recorded empty corridors. Scientists worked behind sealed doors. And somewhere in the upper levels, a kidnapped pharmacologist sat in a cell, wondering if anyone was coming for him.
Someone was.
Carl turned off his desk lamp and headed home.
He needed sleep. Tomorrow would be a long day, and the day after would be longer.
---
[END CHAPTER 8]
---
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