The flare traced a red arc twenty meters into the night sky and hung there, burning — bright enough to paint both their faces in the dark, bright enough to register from orbit if anyone’s satellite happened to be looking at this particular stretch of Afghan desert at this particular moment.
Someone’s would be.
That was the point.
“A few minutes,” Tony said, throwing down the flare gun.
“They’ll ping the satellite image, cross-reference the coordinates, and scramble a team.” He scanned the horizon out of old habit and then stopped himself, because old habits were part of what he was here to reconsider.
“They’ll find us.”
He looked at Yinsen.
“Come back with me.
You and your family — wherever they are, I’ll arrange everything.
Come to America.”
He got the words out before he saw Yinsen’s face, and understood immediately that they had not landed where he’d aimed them.
Yinsen’s eyes had gone somewhere quiet and distant.
“My family is dead,” he said.
The simplicity of it was worse than anything dramatic would have been — not fresh grief but settled weight, a fact he’d been carrying long enough that he’d found the calmest possible way to carry it.
“For some time now.” He looked at Tony.
“I’d rather go back to Iran.
There are people who need help.”
Tony said nothing.
He looked at Yinsen and understood the shape of what Yinsen was actually describing.
Going home to help people was what he was calling it.
What it meant was: going home to spend whatever time he had left doing as much good as possible, because he had no one left to make longer plans for.
Tony opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Then, quietly:
“I didn’t know about your family.
I should have—” He stopped.
Asked would have been inadequate.
He left it at the apology.
“I’m sorry.”
Yinsen shook his head.
“I understand wanting to go back.” Tony pressed two fingers to the arc reactor in his chest, thinking.
“I do.
But what I’ve been thinking about since Leon showed up—” He paused, and this pause was the kind that happens when someone is saying something out loud and realizing, while saying it, that it’s true.
“I came back from this to change something.
Not just to rebuild what I had before.
What I’ve been doing—” He looked at his hands.
“It shouldn’t just be about making things that explode.
That’s been the whole business model, and I’ve been very good at it, and I watched the proof of it stacked in those storage containers, and I’m done.”
Yinsen watched him.
Tony tapped the reactor.
“What we built in there — this is the direction.
Energy.
Not destruction.
A thousand applications I can see from here and probably ten thousand I can’t yet.” He looked at Yinsen directly.
“I’m not asking you to relocate or accept charity.
I’m asking you to come work with me on something that could actually help more people than anything you’d be able to do going back to Iran alone.
I mean that.”
Yinsen looked at the reactor for a long moment — the small blue pulse of it between Tony’s fingers, the technology that shouldn’t exist yet sitting right there in a cave in Afghanistan because Tony Stark had needed a way to stay alive — and said nothing.
His expression didn’t resolve into anything easy.
He was still weighing it when the sound arrived.
Both of them went still simultaneously.
A single aircraft, running lights off, swept low over the ridge to the east — climbing fast on a northeast heading, pushing its engine to whatever ceiling its airframe allowed — and was gone into the upper dark before either of them had exhaled.
“Not ours,” Yinsen said.
“No.” Tony tracked its trajectory with his eyes.
“And that pilot is about to discover that problem is non-reciprocal.” He started moving in slow circles on the sand — the fidgeting pattern that meant his brain was already at its next destination.
“They are going to lose their minds if I come back in that armor.
Completely appropriate response, honestly.
I’d lose mine too.” He stopped circling.
“Yinsen.
When we build your armor —”
“My armor.”
“Obviously you’ll need one, I can’t be the only one in the team, that’s just statistically unreasonable.
What do we call it?
Iron Legion?
No, that’s—” He waved it away.
“We’ll figure it out.
The point is, the suit.
We should think about your specifications.”
He continued this way for approximately three more minutes.
Then the sky filled with rotors: three helicopters in tight formation, searchlights sweeping the desert floor, banking hard toward the two figures standing in the open with their arms in the air.
As Tony had predicted, the patrol plane never got close.
Thirty seconds after the flare, Leon had cleared Afghan airspace entirely.
By the time the pilot pushed his aircraft into its ceiling and turned northeast, Leon was already decelerating over the Caspian with the Mark I armor under one arm and a tube of rolled blueprints in his other hand.
He’d gone up before going across — thermosphere, Mach 30, the clean mathematics of ballistic travel in air thin enough to offer almost no resistance.
The crossing from Central Asia to the California coast took nineteen minutes and cost him nothing he’d notice.
He dropped back into the stratosphere over the Pacific, bled off velocity in long shallow arcs, and came in over the coastline at what he’d considered a reasonable speed.
Mach 1.8.
Quiet, by his standards.
Barely perceptible to commercial traffic.
Apparently not quiet enough, he noted, as his ears registered the characteristic signature of a targeting radar conducting an initial lock.
He slowed fractionally.
The Stark estate in Malibu was thirty kilometers east, on the other side of the Coast Mountains.
Simple enough.
What wasn’t simple was the precise speed he’d come in at — fast enough to produce an anomalous signature on imaging satellites, slow enough to leave a coherent return for long enough to be classified as a trackable object.
Below the speed of sound, he was just noise.
Above Mach 10, the transit time was too brief to be catalogued.
In the specific unfortunate band between those two points: a clear, confusing, apparently-autonomous flying humanoid doing sustained supersonic without any visible means of propulsion.
File under: lessons learned.
He could hear the command frequency clearly.
Every word, as though he were in the room.
“—get me a visual, what am I looking at—”
“Sir, there’s some kind of interference degrading the satellite feed—”
“I don’t care what it is, get a lock—”
“Radar’s not returning clean, sir—”
“Then DATABASE COMPARISON.
NOW.
And get me Colonel Rhodes—”
“Colonel Rhodes is in Afghanistan, sir, looking for Tony Stark—”
“Then get me ANYONE.
CIA, Navy, I don’t care who—”
“Sir, CIA and Navy are already on the line, they’re both asking if this signal is ours and requesting intel handover—”
“OURS?
We have a small sustained-supersonic flying humanoid with apparently unlimited endurance and we just haven’t mentioned it?
Is that what they think we have?”
Rhodes, Leon thought.
Right on time. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
Four engines shifted heading above him simultaneously, the sound of aircraft transitioning from patrol to intercept — a distinct change in pitch and purpose.
He tracked them through the clouds without needing to look up.
Then came the launch tone.
Guidance lock.
Fire confirmation.
Four missiles off the rails, Mach 5 and building, contrails spiraling as they corrected toward him.
Leon watched them through three hundred meters of cloud cover and gave the situation some thought.
The rational decision was to accelerate and leave.
Clean, efficient, total resolution inside of four seconds.
This was the obviously correct answer.
The interesting decision was to hold his position.
Let the missiles arrive.
Step through the fireball at low altitude, unscathed, unhurried, in full view of the aircraft above him — and let the satellites capture whatever they could capture through the interference field.
There was an old saying he had always liked about winking in the dark.
You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
The utter waste of it.
What was the point of being bulletproof if no one ever saw the bullets?
Maslow had categorized esteem needs at the fourth tier of his hierarchy.
Recognition.
Status.
The deeply human need to be observed doing something impressive.
Leon was no more exempt from that tier than anyone else with a functioning nervous system, and he was currently holding four inbound missiles and the choice to make a very dramatic point.
He wanted to catch a missile.
He thought about this want seriously, for approximately two seconds.
Then he thought about Tony.
Tony was coming home.
Tony was going to build a new suit — better than the Mark I, obviously, Tony would accept nothing less — and he was going to take it out over the coast with the full confidence of a man who has never been meaningfully humbled, and the US Air Force was going to intercept him.
And the intercept was going to go quite badly.
And Tony was going to land somewhere with scorched armor and a deeply revised opinion of his own invulnerability.
And then, Leon thought, I show up.
The sequence assembled itself in his head with great clarity and considerable satisfaction.
Tony in maximum deflation.
Leon in demonstrably undamaged condition, pants pristine.
Tony’s face during the comparison.
That’s the moment.
He looked up at the missile contrails and grinned.
Then he accelerated to Mach 20.
The transition, from the outside, was immediate and total — one moment a target existed, and then it didn’t.
The radar return collapsed.
The satellite feed cut to interference static.
Four missiles, suddenly deprived of their guidance returns, began the undignified process of coasting without direction.
“TARGET LOST.” The pilot’s voice came back sharp on the command frequency, and the alarm in it was genuine.
“Repeat — the target is lost.
It may have a stealth capability—”
“What do you mean it’s LOST—”
“Sir, it was on the feed and then it wasn’t, no transition, no—”
“That is physically not how—search the entire grid!
Global Hawk, early warning assets, everything—”
“Sir, Global Hawk confirms loss of contact—”
“Early warning command confirms loss of contact—”
“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ‘LOSS OF CONTACT,’ I WANT TO HEAR—”
The command room dissolved into the specific productive panic that happens when everyone is trying to locate something that no longer has any interest in being located.
Leon listened to it fade behind him and angled toward the Malibu coast.
Someone in the military, he thought, is going to have a very long night.