Watched Iron Man 2 and The Hurt Locker back-to-back last night, and it gave me an idea to revive secretagent!AU. The fic scenario itself is taken from the thrillingly suspenseful car bomb disposal scene in The Hurt Locker, and I used an amazing one-liner from each film.

As a reminder, Ivan is a killer marksman and Alfred has a superman body in this AU.

Fieldwork

Ivan had ran up six flight of stairs to reach his vantage point at the top of a three-storey building. Already irritated due to the boiling heat of the desert (around 40 degrees celsius), he was not the least bit amused by Alfred goofing over the radio from the square below.

"It's one small step for man," Alfred said in a mock sombre voice into his headset, his heavily-suited body slowly advancing on an illegally parked car with a sagging suspension. "One giant leap for mankind. Krrrrsh!"

As Alfred had not deigned to report his distance from the target, Ivan roughly calculated it from above - about ten meters. He swept a look over the landscape and was deeply unhappy with what he found. There were too many buildings overlooking the deserted square, offering too many possible vantage points for hidden snipers. He pointed his rifle scope from one window to another, growing increasingly agitated each time he found eyes - snipers? civilians? - peering out from behind grille bars.

"Make it quick," he said tightly into the radio strapped to his chest.

Alfred reached the car at last. He circled around to the boot which was almost touching the ground, indicating that there was something very heavy in the back. Wedging in the crowbar he had brought, he attempted to pry open the boot, grunting with effort.

"I said make it quick," Ivan's voice crackled impatiently through his headset.

"Okay, okay!" Alfred snapped, his own irritation rising with the heat inside the heavy bomb suit. He dropped the crowbar, fitted his hand into the handle of the boot, and wrenched it open with superhuman strength. "Oh," he said, his blue eyes widening as the boot lid bounced on weakened hydraulics. "Oh god."

The back of the car was filled with large, cylindrical explosives tied together with bits of red wiring. He counted three, four, five… six of them, all lying along the bottom in a neat row. This was big.

"Houston, we have a problem. Krrrrsh!"

Alfred unzipped his suit, shrugged out of his padded outer vest, and proceeded to strip down to his fatigues, dropping pieces of the bomb suit onto the ground.

"What are you doing?" Ivan asked sharply over the radio.

"Getting comfortable. Can't work with all these layers in this goddamn heat."

Alfred was virtually indestructible with a fast-healing superhuman body, but Ivan doubted that even he could withstand a bomb explosion. "The suit is for your protection," he said pointedly, though he was indifferent to Alfred's wellbeing either way. Just as long as he moved quicker.

Ripping off his helmet with a satisfied grunt, Alfred dropped it on top of the discarded bomb suit pieces and readjusted his headset, bending low over the explosives. "Whew!" he whistled admiringly, running his fingers over the grey metal cylinders. "We got enough bang in here to send us all to Jesus!"*

Where he was on the roof of the three-storey building (he wished he had picked a taller vantage point), Ivan was spotting more and more curious eyes crowding onto the square. He swept his rifle over the windows, and paused at a man with a video camera trained to Alfred and the car.

"There's a man with a camera on you at 6 o'clock," he reported.

"Oooh, should I give him a little show? To go with the strip tease," Alfred said, and he waggled his ass suggestively from behind the boot.

"Are you done?" Ivan snapped irritably.

"Nope," Alfred muttered too quietly for Ivan to catch.

After running his fingers through every thread of wiring he could find, Alfred established that the detonator was not in the boot. It had to be somewhere else in the car. He walked to the nearest car door, opened it, and clambered inside. He pressed into the upholstery to feel for bumps.

"Are you almost done?" Ivan was getting anxious; Alfred could tell from the way his accent slipped through. He supposed that Ivan was a sitting duck from where he was perched.

"I'm looking for the initiator, I'm gonna cut open the seats to check," he reported as he drew out his combat knife. He slashed open the cushions one by one, pulling out yellow foam stuffing and digging his hands inside, but found nothing. "Damn! Where is it?"

He checked the sides of the doors and did not find anything either. He got out of the back, moved to the front, and climbed into the front passenger seat, running his hand over the folded visor to check for wires before pulling open the glove compartment. "Should be in here, they're always in here," he muttered. When he did not find it in glove compartment (it was completely empty), he turned his gaze towards the car radio. "Or in there."

Ivan was sweeping his rifle scope from roof to window to balcony all around the square, but it was impossible for him to keep an eye on every person that crowded around. He felt an uneasy jolt when he spotted the camera man peering out from a different window on a different floor.

"Alfred, we're done. Let the engineers handle it. We're leaving."

He paused, waiting for Alfred to give his assent and exit the car. When he did not, he pressed on his radio again and said, "Alfred, did you hear me?"

"Just gimme a sec," Alfred crackled through, sounding distracted. Ivan could not see him, but Alfred had pulled out the car radio and taken off the top to poke inside.

Ivan adjusted and readjusted the grip on his rifle. Tension was building in him, coiling in his muscles that were ready to spring at the slightest provocation; his index finger was poised to slip through the trigger guard and squeeze. He took a deep breath to try and calm his nerves. A cool anger slowly rolled over him as he exhaled.

The detonator was not in the car radio. Alfred threw it aside, swearing violently.

"Вон из машины. Сейчас же."** Ivan sounded dangerously angry.

"Look, I don't know if you'd noticed," Alfred said quickly, agitatedly, biting off the end of his words in his own rising temper. "But I don't fucking speak Russian!"***

With that, he ripped off his headset and flung it out of the car window to land, clattering, on the dusty ground. Ivan shouted for Alfred to put them back on, but of course he did not hear him.

"Shit!" he cursed in English. He searched wildly for the camera man through his rifle scope, and was slightly comforted to find that he had not moved from his new location. Still, there were too many eyes on him and Alfred in the car, and he could not watch out for all of them. "Shit!" he swore again.

Alfred was now leaning into the driver's seat, sweeping his hand under the steering wheel for anything suspicious. His frustrations melted the moment his hand caught on something.

There was a hole cut in the far corner of the under cover, which felt promising. Sliding back the driver's seat as far as it would go, Alfred wriggled into the space and leaned under for a better look. "Bingo!" he murmured. Clicking on his small torch light, he gritted it between his teeth and poked his fingers into the roughly sawed-out hole.

Not two minutes later, he had the detonator ripped out and tossed out the car window, and the trigger component tucked into his shirt pocket as a souvenir. Kicking open the car door, he picked up the headset and whooped into the mic, "All right, we're done! Let's go!"

Relief flooded Ivan, and he dropped his rifle.

He found Alfred back at the truck, pouring half a litre of water over his head, and draining the rest of the bottle in quick, greedy gulps. Before Alfred could shoot him his usual shit-eating grin, Ivan threw a punch with all of his strength into the side of his face. His fist slammed into Alfred's cheek and nose with a satisfying smack; Alfred dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

"Never take your headset off again," he said coolly before stalking off.

Fixing on a stoic expression, Alfred scrambled back to his feet, snorting blood from his nose. He pulled down his shirt sleeve and pressed the cuff to his nose to staunch the bleeding. His face was already healing - the bruise fading as quickly as it had bloomed - but it had stung.

God, he hated fieldwork.

*Taken from The Hurt Locker - James speaking to Eldridge.

**Translation: "Get out of the car. Now."

***Taken from Iron Man 2 - Hammer speaking to Vanko.