The Ultimates: Against All Enemies Read Online Free Page A

General Nick Fury, director of SHIELD, was driving a green Toyota Corolla. "I saw that look," Fury said. "This is my incognito car."
    "So we're incognito?"
    "Just don't feel like drawing attention."
    "Okay," Steve said. "Where are we going?"
    "Bar I picked because it has the same name as a restaurant I like in San Francisco. It's called the Boulevard, up in Greenpoint."
    Greenpoint, Steve thought. The name brought to mind Polish butchers. "I used to get pierogies in Greenpoint sometimes."
    "You still can. Don't walk around thinking New York's completely different. In some neighborhoods, fifty-eight years isn't that long." They were driving under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Fury turned left and doubled back, parking right in front of a bar set in the middle of a block of four-story walkups. Inside, the Boulevard was a woody, comfortable spot. Bar on one side, booths on the other, with a space in the back for a pool table. The back door was open, and Steve could see out into what looked like a small courtyard. Two TVs played the Yankees game. There were six or eight people sitting around, all wearing the costume of a breed Steve had learned was called the hipster. The bartender was a big longhair with tattoos, wearing a black shirt that caught Steve's eye because of the German lettering on it. He gave the shirt a closer look and realized it was a soccer jersey. Deutsche Fussball-Bund.
    "For Pete's sake," he said to General Fury. "We go and fight a war so this yahoo can be a soccer fan." Fury shrugged. "Past is past, Cap."
    Not to me , Steve thought.
    Fury bought a beer and a ginger ale and the two of them sat in a booth beneath one of the television sets.
    "So, General," Steve said. 'You must have brought me out here for a reason."
    "I did," Fury said. "I brought you out here because I spent the morning getting my ass chewed by politicians and I wanted to talk to a rational human being."
    "Tony's new toy?" Steve asked.
    Fury nodded. "Washington's afraid that if we use it too soon, the bad guys will figure out a way around it. Plus I got in the middle of a pissing contest between two Cabinet departments." He shook his head and drank. "Should have known better. Anyway, long story short, they quashed it. Gave me this long rigmarole about how Tony shouldn't be trusted with certain materials, how I couldn't be trusted because I was running SHIELD like some kind of shadow junta, blah blah blah."
    "Let me get this straight," Steve said. "They know we have a tool that would work against the enemy, and they're telling us not to use it because if we use it, the enemy might find out about it?"
    "That's the upshot. And you'll appreciate this. One of them actually gave me a high and mighty speech about Enigma, how the Allies didn't always act on the information they got after they broke the code because they didn't want to let on that they'd cracked it."
    "Is that true?" Steve asked.
    Fury just looked at him.
    "And good men died because of it," Steve said.
    'Yes, they did," Fury said. "But it wasn't necessarily the wrong call. Would more of those good men have died if the Nazis switched to a new code and the war lasted six more months?"
    "Wrong question," Steve said vehemently. "You have information, you act on it. You have the enemy in front of you, you take him out."
    "I don't disagree," Fury said. "But you and I aren't always the ones who make the call." Politicians , Steve thought with disgust. "They're out there, though. We didn't get them all. Washington must know that."
    "Washington," Fury said, "knows what it wants to know. And it doesn't want to know this. Well, some of them do. And I had this thought as I was walking out of the meeting, Cap. I thought, you know, SHIELD
    could do whatever it wants. But we decide to go through these channels because that's the way things are done in this country, or should be. And then I had another thought, which was that ninety-nine times out of a hundred that might be the best way to do