restore Mac OS Mountain Lion to factory settings without discs or time machine backups
OK,

Reading you question lets clarify few things first.

You say Control-R! but it has to be the Command-R.

Then you say you can get in to the Safe mode!. If so:

With your Mac running in Safe Mode, you can troubleshoot the issue you were having, such as by deleting an application that's causing problems, removing a startup or login item that's causing issues, or launching Disk First Aid and repairing permissions.

If you get in the CMD-R mode use the option 4 first to see if it can be repaired.



If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically.