The Avengers Assemble by Thomas Macri

an unusual problem.”
    â€œ You should talk,” General Ross said again taking a stab at Tony’s life as Iron Man.
    â€œYou should listen.”
    General Ross took a long puff of his stinking cigar, and Tony coughed a little. Then his face became deadly serious.
    â€œWhat if I told you we were putting a team together?” Tony asked the general.
    â€œWho’s ‘we’?” The general responded.
    Tony looked pensive, thoughtful, brooding. Then Tony smirked the way he always did when he knew something others didn’t…which happened quite often.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING in the Arctic Circle, one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth. Wind whipped up snow and ice so furiously that visibility was reduced to within mere feet. Anyone who could bear to leave their naked eyes open long enough would see only thick sheets of snow and ice blowing before him. The arctic desert beat on the rescue vehicles like a frozen sandstorm. As their bright headlights cut through the thick storm around them, wandering aimlessly through the terrain for a place to land, they hit upon the figure of a man, dressed in Inuit garb and waving a flare to signal the vehicle.
    The scouts stepped from the relative warmth of their vehicle into the solid snow.
    â€œAre you the guys from Washington?” the man with the flare asked.
    â€œYou get many other visitors out here?” one of the men answered, speaking loudly to be heard over the wail of the wind.
    â€œHow long have you been on-site?” His companion asked, straining his voice as well.
    â€œSince this morning. A Russian oil team called it in about eighteen hours ago.”
    â€œHow come nobody spotted it before?”
    â€œIt’s really not that surprising, This landscape’s changing all the time,” the man with the flair said as he motioned to the squalls of snow whipping up and over snow-dunes. “You got any idea what this thing is exactly?”
    â€œI don’t know, it’s probably a weather balloon,” one of the men from Washington replied.
    â€œI don’t think so.” The guide chuckled. “You know, we don’t have the equipment for a job like this.”
    â€œHow long before we can start craning it out?”
    â€œI don’t think you quite understand.…You guys are going to need one mighty big crane!”
    With that, their guide beamed his flashlight toward a huge ice-covered steel slab jutting out from the frozen landscape, like the head of a mammoth whale breaking the surface of the ocean. It appeared to be the wing of some sort of aircraft, but neither of the men had ever before seen a craft like this. The three men looked up at it in awe, wondering what it could possibly be. The flashlights of a half dozen other workers surveyed the metal, examining it for any clues. One of the agents rushed back to the truck and brought back a device that looked equal parts drill and buzz saw. He called for some of the others to assist him, and soon set it on top of the craft.
    He flipped a switch and activated the device. The nozzle began to spin with a steady cadence. A blue stream of bright energy shot from the nozzle and cut right through the craft’s hull. The cut steel crashed a great distance below, creating a chasm in what now clearly appeared to be some sort of ship.
    The agents quickly attached grapples to the body of the vessel and lowered themselves into the craft. The softly falling snow illuminated by the bluish floodlight glowing above the blue aperture heightened the feeling that the men were traveling a passageway to another world.
    â€œWhat is this?” one of the men asked as the two scouted the area with their flashlight beams.
    The men tried to keep themselves steady as they traversed the craft’s ice-covered steel and made their way through an area lit only by their flashlights and whatever dim radiance could make its way through the incision above