Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, and Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, are in Las Vegas, posing as glamorous guests at the Red King casino. They sneak into a restricted area and enter a secret door that leads to a long-forgotten Soviet base. Fighting a skeleton crew of guards they read the main chamber to find an empty stasis tube. They are too late, the first of the sleepers is awake….
Later, Bucky depresses himself by watching a news report on the controversy that exploded around him when it was revealed that the new Captain America was a former Soviet assassin. Natasha makes him turn it off but his bad memories continue—of his time in the stasis tube between deadly missions for the KGB, his training of other agents as machines of murder, and how he was brainwashed and employed against his own country. Now, three sleeper agents from Project Zephyr have been sold on the black market by the former-KGB man Red Guardian, and Bucky, the Winter Soldier, holds himself responsible for any evil they may do. They contact Jasper Sitwell of SHIELD who explains what they have found: the Vegas sleeper’s handler was Nico Stanovich, living undercover in the US as Nick Stanton for decades—until he got a call. He then murdered his whole family, burned his files, and revived the sleeper. A second handler has been identified as Mickey Bonderant of Minnesota a/k/a/ Mikel Bulgakov. Bucky and Natasha head there and capture him, forcing him to tell what he knows….
The two the proceed to the location of the third sleeper where the buyers, an A.I.M. splinter group called R.A.I.D. (Radically Advanced Ideas of Destruction), are in the process of collecting their prize. Bucky suspects R.A.I.D. is only a pawn of the real mastermind, and he and Natasha infiltrate the facility cautiously—until they are spotted, then the mission becomes a firefight. Bucky makes it to the truck carrying the stasis tube but is fired upon by a Russian-speaking gorilla. Yes, you read that correctly….
In New York, ex-Soviet mad scientist Ivan Kragoff, the Red Ghost, reports to his employer, Madame Lucia von Bardas, ex-Prime Minister of Latveria, and now a cyborg. She is the buyer for the Project Zephyr sleepers and even now, one of them is on a rooftop across from the Latverian Embassy, awaiting the appearance of Doctor Doom. When the armored monarch steps through the front door, the sniper takes aim…fires—and there is a massive explosion….