บท 178: Accidents
Just after sending off the little Spider, Hill walked in hurriedly with a few people.
"It's almost certain this wasn't a random incident!"
Hill held a tablet in her hand and, while speaking, projected a document from the device into the air.
"This is the record from New York Airport. According to this document, the plane should have been about a hundred kilometers to the east of us before it collided with us."
"There are no signs of tampering in this document, which suggests someone hacked into the airport system and deliberately manipulated the radar scan records."
"Have we tracked down the hacker?"
The Captain glanced at the document briefly before asking.
"Yes, Captain. Agent Hill immediately alerted us to trace the hacker's information. When I began tracking them, they were already erasing their traces. The network signal bounced through routers all over the world before finally being pinpointed to a serviced apartment hotel in Boston!"
Jarvis picked up the conversation and projected two video feeds: one from the hotel lobby and the other from the street outside the hotel.
In the footage, a man wearing a baseball cap and carrying a backpack walked out of the elevator and headed directly for the hotel's exit.
He then appeared in the second video feed outside the hotel, but before he could walk far, he suddenly collapsed into a pool of blood.
Though there was no sound, the reactions of passersby in the footage suggested gunshots had just been fired.
"The shooting happened ten minutes ago. Boston police are already on the scene. Preliminary analysis suggests the bullet came from two blocks away. I've reviewed surveillance footage from all ten surrounding blocks but found no suspicious individuals!"
As Jarvis spoke, Hill, standing nearby, helplessly spread her hands, indicating that her own checks had turned up nothing.
However, her expression quickly changed.
"There's one clue from another angle. This plane was a private business charter flight, traveling nonstop from New York to Berlin. Curiously, there were no passengers aboard when it departed. It's unclear why the crew decided to take off."
"So I looked into the flight crew. I discovered that the captain, Blau Jack, was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer two months ago. He had initially informed the company about his condition, but strangely, a month later, the airline asked him to return to work."
As Hill spoke, she displayed Blau Jack's text message records from two months ago and one month ago, when he had conversations with a friend.
The first set of messages showed him lamenting his terminal diagnosis, while the later messages discussed the company's request for him to return to work.
His friend had been curious and asked why, but Jack said he didn't know. Later, after resuming work, when his friend asked again, Jack refused to discuss it.
"After he returned to work, all records of his terminal liver cancer vanished. Moreover, every staff member involved in handling his case at the airline has since died one after another in various accidents. Interestingly, just half an hour ago, a bus explosion occurred outside New York Airport."
"The bus carried airport staff who had just finished their shifts, including security personnel. All of them died in the crash."
Hill opened a news report about the accident. Without further explanation, everyone understood why this civilian airplane had carried a significant amount of explosives.
While the quantity wasn't massive, if Tony hadn't reinforced the base earlier, today's explosion might have sent the entire base plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean.
"But who's behind this? I don't understand. This seems meaningless—just to send the base into the sea? Unless they were confident about wiping us out completely, they'd have to know this act would provoke our full-scale retaliation. These explosives aren't enough to take us all down!"
Blake's doubts were shared by everyone. Using this kind of attack, even if they managed to kill non-enhanced superheroes like Natasha or Hawkeye by sheer luck, it would only provoke the Avengers' most brutal retaliation.
"It's likely their original plan was to wipe us out entirely!"
Hill pulled out a small fragment of metal, which had some markings and numbers that Blake couldn't understand.
Although it was just a small piece, Natasha's face instantly turned pale the moment she saw it.
"A Soviet-era nuclear warhead!"
Natasha's startled exclamation sent a jolt through everyone. Nuclear warheads—an attack of that magnitude was something even Blake and Thor could not guarantee surviving.
"But why this nuclear warhead?"
Before the Captain could finish his thought, Tony, the weapons expert, immediately offered an explanation.
"In the last century, after several major powers developed their own nuclear weapons, they convened a multilateral international conference—the so-called Non-Proliferation Treaty—to ban other countries from researching, testing, or developing nuclear arms."
"But everyone knows that powerful nations secretly continued to develop nuclear weapons for their own deterrence. Meanwhile, smaller countries with limited resources could only dream of having their own. The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, gave them an opportunity—their only chance to acquire nuclear weapons."
"Everyone knows the Soviet Union had an alarming number of nuclear weapons. No one knows exactly how many. After the USSR dissolved, an unknown number of these weapons leaked onto the black market. It was such a frenzy that even the U.S. government purchased over a hundred small nuclear warheads from European black markets at the time."
"The world went mad over this. Of course, the Russian government quickly stepped in to stop it. They intercepted a large batch of nuclear warheads and dismantled the cores, extracting key chemical elements like Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 for reprocessing into new weapons."
"But some individuals, seeking profit, took the decommissioned warheads and stuffed them with TNT to create fakes. They sold these knockoffs to fools with more money than sense—or to despots in Africa and the Middle East."
Clearly, they had encountered one of these fakes today.
Blake and the others broke out in a cold sweat.
"Can we trace who originally sold this warhead?"
Blake almost felt like buying a gift for the person responsible—what a close call!
"Many Russian power players were involved in these transactions back then. Tracing the exact seller is nearly impossible because they never handled the deals personally. However, finding out who bought it is much easier!"
Natasha picked up the conversation and immediately called her "father," Alexei. Meanwhile, Tony used his arms-dealing network to trace the origins of this particular warhead.
It didn't take long for both sides to report back.
"This warhead was initially purchased by a Middle Eastern oil tycoon as part of his private collection. He owned three warheads in total. However, a few months ago, someone paid a high price to buy one of them from his heirs."
The buyer's identity was unknown. As with the Boston shooting and the airport bus explosion, the killer organization behind the events had gone to great lengths to conceal their client's identity.
However, the financial trail revealed that the funds originated from an offshore company based on a British-owned island. The company's registered owner? A Japanese individual.
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