Late at night at Gotham's docks, the salty, fishy sea breeze carried industrial fumes through the gaps between shipping containers, making a sound like the wheezing of leaky bellows.
The fog was thick enough to coat your lungs.
Deep in the container yard, several pale searchlight beams sliced through the dense fog like scalpels.
Atop the high crane towers, a few mechanical birds swiveled their eyes, their eerie green electronic lights blinking in the darkness, looking very much like scavengers crouching in the shadows, waiting for the feast to begin.
Bruce Wayne-or rather, Batman, now wearing that suit of carbon-fiber armor weighing dozens of kilograms-was treading the damp concrete.
The tracker placed the source of the arms-deal signal at Warehouse Three up ahead. Its frequency hopped merrily, as though taunting him.
He stopped.
The warehouse doors stood wide open. It was pitch-black inside, without so much as a guard dog.
Too quiet.
In Gotham, quiet usually meant some lunatic was cooking up trouble.
Exactly which one was hard to say.
Gotham had too many lunatics. Well, it could also be several lunatics cooking up something big.
Overhead, a pigeon fluttered past, stirring a faint current of air.
At that very instant, every hair on Batman's body stood on end without warning.
He twisted sharply, rolling with his momentum into the gap between the containers to his left.
Bang!
A sniper round punched straight through the concrete where he had just been standing. Chips of stone scattered like shrapnel, their friction against the air producing a scorched smell.
Then muffled gunshots joined into a continuous barrage.
Three elevated firing positions and two ground-level blocking positions spewed muzzle flashes wildly through the thick fog.
Bullets struck the containers' sheet metal with a dense clatter, sparks flying everywhere like a massive fireworks display.
Batman pressed his back against the cold metal wall, his breathing steady.
He closed his eyes, his ears twitching slightly.
Two o'clock, atop a high container: a light machine gun, firing six hundred rounds a minute. Its fire was steady. A veteran.
Eleven o'clock, another light machine gunner, a little clumsy with his reload.
Three o'clock, the sniper had already worked his bolt a second time. The metallic click remained clear against the noisy background.
On the ground, two sets of footsteps were rapidly approaching. The rhythm of boots scraping the ground indicated that they were fanning out to flank him.
The web of gunfire was tightening like an iron cage slowly closing.
A burning pain came from his left shoulder.
That earlier bullet had grazed the edge of his armor, stripped off a layer of paint, and plowed a gash through his flesh along the way.
Blood seeped out, its warmth sliding down his arm.
Batman pressed one hand over the wound and shoved the pain interfering with his judgment straight to the bottom of his consciousness.
The loudspeaker above the yard suddenly crackled to life. Penguin's distinctive ducklike rasp echoed across the empty docks, sounding both affected and so infuriatingly polite that it made you want to slap him twice.
"Welcome, my dear bat. Look at all this. I spared no expense on this 'retirement ceremony.' I don't actually expect these useless idiots to turn you into a sieve. I just need to show that old man Falcone that the legendary Dark Knight bleeds too, and hides behind containers panting like a beaten stray. You understand me, don't you?"
The laughter from the loudspeaker was piercing.
The moment he finished, the light machine guns opened up even more furiously. Bullets punched a neat row of dents into the sheet metal above Batman's head, sending metal shavings raining onto his black helmet.
He was waiting.
Waiting for the gap during a reload, for that fraction of a second when the laws of physics left an opening.
The gunner at eleven o'clock finally emptied his magazine, leaving an extremely brief break in the gunfire.
Now.
Batman took a cylindrical smoke grenade from his belt. With a flick of his fingers, its chemical capsule ruptured on impact.
Thick gray-white smoke swallowed a twenty-meter radius in an instant, like exploding cotton candy.
This specially formulated chemical smoke carried a powerful interference charge. The infrared night-vision equipment up above showed nothing but white on its screens, like old televisions that had lost their signal.
The machine gunners panicked and began firing blindly into the smoke. Bullets careened through the thick haze, but could no longer find their target.
The sniper's scope frantically searched the edges of the smoke.
He held his breath, his finger resting on the trigger, trying to catch that dark silhouette.
But a hand wearing a black Kevlar glove silently reached out of the shadows behind him.
It clamped precisely onto the back of his neck with the force of an iron vise.
Before the sniper could even grunt, his face made intimate contact with the hard roof of the container.
Batman pinned his spine with one knee, reached back to pull out the man's rifle sling, and secured his hands behind his back in a few quick movements.
The second sniper position lost contact immediately afterward. Only radio static remained, like the chirping of dead cicadas.
At eleven o'clock, the gunner with the clumsy reload was sweating profusely as he fed a fresh ammunition belt into the tray.
A Batarang sliced through the fog and embedded itself precisely in the sheet metal beside him.
Bzzzt-
High-frequency electronic noise erupted instantly. The gunner screamed, dropped his weapon, and clamped his hands over his ears, rolling on the ground in pain.
The main firing position fell silent.
Overhead, a grapnel line stretched diagonally across the yard.
Batman glided through the night like a gigantic bat, his cape spread behind him with a whipping flutter.
As he swept past the last firing position, he released the line and dropped into free fall.
His knee drove savagely into the gunner's chest with the weight of his entire body behind it.
Bang!
They slammed into the container roof together with a dull, teeth-grating impact. The light machine gun flew from the man's hands, tumbled over the edge, and hit the ground with a sharp metallic crack.
In less than two minutes, every firing position had fallen silent.
The smoke slowly settled, and the yard sank back into deathly silence.
The gunman at the last ground-level blocking position hugged the container wall, his muzzle jerking nervously back and forth through the fog.
He was sweating.
Sweat ran down his forehead into his eyes, stinging painfully, but he did not dare wipe it away.
A faint sound came from behind him, like a boot sole scraping a metal plate.
He spun around, his finger pressed tight against the trigger.
Nothing.
There was nothing but swirling fog.
The next second, a grapnel line dropped from above and wrapped precisely around his ankle.
"What..."
Before he could pull the trigger, a tremendous force yanked him into the air.
The world spun.
He hung upside down between two containers, the other end of the line firmly pinned to the metal wall by a Batarang.
His rifle fell to the ground two meters away with a mocking clatter.
Swaying in midair, he stared at the black figure slowly emerging below, so frightened that he even forgot to call for help.
But what he had not forgotten was...
Has the bat picked up bad habits from that spider? Why is he hanging people upside down too? Can't he tie people up properly without leaving their heads pointing down? Hanging like this is making me a little dizzy.
Now there really was nothing but static on Penguin's radio channel.
"Hello? Anyone still standing? Answer me! Answer me!"
Penguin roared into the microphone, his voice growing shriller with anger.
His answer was half a scream from the last machine gunner as he was dragged into the shadows.
Then communications cut out completely.
All that remained in the yard was the sea wind moaning through the gaps, as though playing a requiem for these unlucky bastards.
Batman stood at the edge of the highest container, looking down over this steel jungle.
Blood still dripped from his left shoulder, running down his black forearm and falling onto the rusty metal plate. Drip, drip.
Expressionless, he tore off a strip of his cape and briskly wrapped it around the wound, gripping one end between his teeth and tightening the knot with one hand.
His movements were so practiced it hurt to watch.
Batman, a peak human without superpowers, began collecting the scattered weapons one by one and tallying the casualties. Then, like dragging sacks, he hauled the unconscious or incapacitated gunmen one at a time to a safe area beyond the reach of any subsequent crossfire.
Once he had finished all this, he melted back into the shadows.
Deeper in the docks, the real gunfire was growing increasingly intense.
Maroni's men had taken advantage of the chaos of Penguin's ambush on Batman to launch a raid on the actual warehouse district.
Falcone's remaining troops were desperately returning fire, the explosions making the ground tremble slightly.
Batman was in no hurry.
The ambush had proved one thing: that fat bastard Penguin might have thought he had everything figured out, but his plan was full of holes.
The arms deal was fake. Bait.
But the shootout between Maroni and Falcone was real, and on a far larger scale than expected.
He did not continue pursuing that supposed arms lead.
Batman turned, leaped nimbly off the container, and made his way toward the warehouse district where the gunfire was heaviest.