Part 13
by DarkMark
The balloon went up at the University of California at Berkeley, at Kent State, at Empire State University, and at the Universities of Florida and Texas at Austin immediately.
It wasn't that nobody had been expecting protest, or violence. That had been a staple of campuses since around 1966, sadly.
But most people thought it had been winding down. After all, one generation of students had already graduated and were getting jobs, getting married, settling down. They had little time to protest. The War was apparently winding down, at least as far as American involvement went. People were listening less to the Jefferson Airplane and more to James Taylor.
Plus, since the Kent State massacre, the Movement appeared to have drawn back.
How little anyone knew.
A team of revolutionaries under a black flag banner took over the administration building of Empire State University. It happened with more or less military precision. The guards were overwhelmed by twentysomething hippies who were carrying armament that even cops had never seen before. Seven hostages were taken and the word got out quickly.
The police and the National Guard soon made the scene. The president of Empire State University, Albert E. Donahue, got a line hooked up to one of the interior phones and tried to negotiate. He asked the revos what they wanted.
"We want to wait," the guy in charge said. Then he hung up, and ignored the frequent ringing of the telephone.
The police decided they'd try to get in first. They shot out windows at the ground floor and started to lob in tear gas canisters. A few minutes of that, and either the punks would come out or the cops in gas masks would be better able to come in, without harm.
Sunlight glinted off a weapon's barrel from an upper story window an instant before a red beam leaped from its muzzle.
The beam touched a purple Volkswagen in the parking space around the building and blew it sky-high. Luckily, the fragments and burning gasoline didn't hit anybody, but several nearby cars were a loss.
The squad leader of the special tactics squad raised his hand to halt his men.
"We'd better think this one out," he said.
The others were more than happy to do that.
-M-
Race riots were seemingly always in fashion. They weren't dependent upon the status of white students, and, even though the status of blacks in America had been advancing by a great degree during the last decade, old hates die hard. Moreover, it's easy enough to gather together some haters, if you look hard enough.
Sometimes it isn't even that hard.
The remnants of the Black Panthers, the Blackstone Rangers, the Diamond Heads, and several almost-forgotten black racist groups were suddenly on the move again. Most of the residents of the ghettos where they struck—Watts, Bed-Stuy, and other places—were moderates, and encouraged enough by the changes that had taken place since the Johnson Administration to hope for an even better day soon.
The revolutionaries weren't waiting around any longer.
Flames that were thought doused blazed anew. Buildings were torched in New York, Montgomery, Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Unlike many earlier conflagrations, this one hadn't seemed to have had an immediate political trigger. Black residents were just about as confused as whites. But they were at considerably greater danger. The fires were taking their businesses, their homes, and, in a few cases, their lives.
Almost as an afterthought, the tattered remnants of a white nationalist group, the Sons of the Serpent, reemerged and joined forces in a half-hearted alliance with what was left of the Ku Klux Klan, a group they usually despised as moronic, low-tech, and out of touch. They held rallies at a couple of the flashpoints, stood in costume, waved signs, endured thrown rocks, and threatened violence against any black (though "black" was not the term they used) who dared come out of the ghetto and face them.
Prudently, they didn't go into the ghetto to face the blacks.
More than a few of them were grabbed by police, but the Serpents had some weaponry left over from the last time they had arisen and been beaten down by the Avengers. A couple of enclaves in Detroit occupied buildings and fired some devastating warning shots that tore up property, but not people, thankfully.
Nonetheless, the authorities decided to wait them out. They also hoped that the ubiquitous superhero community would come to their aid.
But all the heroes appeared to be busy.
-M-
The Mandarin never received visitors unbidden at his castle. Even the troops of Mao Tse-Tung had learned the hard way never to try to breach his halls. So it was that, when he received a summons for a certain meeting, he agreed only to meet the other on the face of a nearby mountain.
There, swept by wind and surrounded by snow, the Mandarin stood uncomplaining, the ten alien rings on his fingers glinting, almost giving off sparks. He had personally taken them from the depths of an alien starship years ago, and each of them had a different and deadly power. Almost as deadly were his hands, trained in a form of karate so deadly that they could actually penetrate metal.
More than once, he had used this skill against Iron Man, his archenemy. But each time, he had been balked.
Nonetheless, for his genius, his ruthlessness, and his power, the Mandarin was not a man to be trifled with.
He stood in the red mask that covered the top of his head and circled his eyes, his green, loose-fitting uniform of pants and shirt, and a cloak which couldn't have served to protect him much from the cold. But he did not shiver. In fact, the first sign of reaction he showed was when he heard someone speak his name.
The Mandarin whirled, his right hand fisted, five rings pointed at the direction of the sound.
Before him stood another. He had not even perceived the man's presence until he spoke, and that was truly disturbing.
The newcomer was Chinese, like himself, tall and half-armored in gleaming metal that covered his forearms, his legs, and the top of his head. He wore dark blue robes trimmed in gold, with the insignia of a three-clawed talon on his chest. He looked no less dangerous than the other, and the two of them stood immobile, taking the measure of each other.
Finally, the Mandarin spoke. "And you would be the Yellow Claw," he said.
"I have been called that," said the man in armor.
After a pause, the Mandarin said, "I seek no alliances."
"Nor do I offer any," replied the Claw. "I only wish to know where one stands in this situation."
The Mandarin eased a bit, standing up from his half-crouch. "Then the Westerner contacted you as well. How did he find you?"
"I know not. Probably the same way he found you." The Claw waited for the Mandarin to follow up the offered trail of conversation. When he did not, the Claw spoke again. "Would you join the fray?"
"Would you?"
The Claw looked away, contemplating the landscape below, much of it shrouded by mist. "There is little for oneself in it. I have no enemies amongst this generation of Westerners, save for James Woo, who is uncertain if I still live. There is the mystery of who dared malign me by making automatons of myself and my associates, and using them against SHIELD. But that does not directly affect me."
"Wisely said," acknowledged the Mandarin.
"However," the Claw continued, "one cannot say the same for one who has made many enemies among the West. Particularly one in armor."
The Mandarin's face was stony, but his stance changed subtly enough for the Claw to know that he had scored a hit. "All of one's enemies are not within the West," he replied.
"Even so," said the Claw, "would you let another claim the foe you target for yourself?"
"My battles are my own, Claw. Unlike others, I do not offer myself the luxury of hiding for a decade or more, in fear my enemies would find me."
This time, it was the Claw's stance that changed. The Mandarin could barely conceal his signs of pleasure. "A cobra may stay within its burrow until it is time to strike," he replied.
"But the bold cobra confronts his attackers, and overcomes them."
"When the time is right, my friend. When the time is right."
Neither of them had much to say after that. The Claw began to step back, into the snow and mist, which had inexplicably become thicker behind him. The Mandarin knew well that he could dissipate that with the merest burst from one of his rings. But it would serve no purpose.
He waited until he felt the Claw's presence no longer.
Slowly, the Mandarin turned back towards his flying vehicle, hidden elsewhere on the trail. He would never have admitted it to anyone else, but the Claw had read him well. True, he had left Iron Man to many other foes in his absence, between rounds, as it were. But the thought of his greatest foe dying at another's hands...that would be an indignity not easily borne.
No, the Mandarin would have to take himself to America once again, and join the fray at a time of his own choosing.
Then, at his leisure, he could deal with the Yellow Claw.
That was a prospect that gave him as much pleasure as contemplating the death of Iron Man.
-M-
The nine Avengers were finding the battle a bit more challenging, to say the least.
They might have been well-matched against just the Masters of Evil. But the infusion of the Squadron Sinister into the mix, whose members had been specifically created by the Grandmaster to destroy them in a game with Kang, had tilted the mix arguably in favor of the villains.
Quicksilver, for instance, had a running grudge match with Whirlwind, each of whom were certain was certain his mutant speed power was greater than the other's. But the Whizzer, the Squadron member whose speed approached Pietro's, was helping the deadly dervish double-team him. In fact, Pietro was being held from behind by the yellow-and-blue clad Whizzer while the Whirlwind bored in with his green metal helmet, spinning hard against Quicksilver's chest. The accelerated Avenger gritted his teeth in pain and felt in danger of his rib cage collapsing at any moment.
Then Whirlwind gasped in pain, stiffened perceptibly even though he was spinning like a rotary drill, and fell back. Quicksilver saw the reason why. A green-sleeved, gold-gloved hand was protruding through his whirling body.
The Vision was on the job.
With Whirlwind taken care of, Pietro was able to free one arm from the Whizzer's grasp, grab him from behind by the head, and throw him over one shoulder. Before he could touch the ground, Quicksilver was on him with a nerve grip. The yellow-and-blue clad man struggled, his mouth open, not used to combating someone who could move at the same speed. In a few more seconds, he was out.
Too hurt at present to talk, Quicksilver nodded a grudging thanks. The Vision's face was, as usual, impassive. They were teammates, allies. But, since Quicksilver had seen the evidence of his sister falling in love with an android, they were something less than friends.
Thor, Sif, and the Scarlet Witch were doing battle with the Executioner and the Enchantress. It wasn't particularly easy, as the Executioner could hold his own with Thor in combat savvy, and almost in strength. The Scarlet Witch's hex power had increased since the last time she'd faced the Enchantress, but it still wasn't quite up to the Asgardian woman's power. However, Sif was there to wield sword against her foe, and Amora had to cast a spell that created a swordswoman of soil out of some choice infield land. The soil was congealed to a hardness sufficient to block and parry Sif's powerful swordthrusts, and poking the golem-woman through and through didn't hurt her at all.
It did hurt the groundskeeper, looking on from afar, who knew he'd have a lot of reworking to do after the fight.
The thunder god angrily beat back the Executioner's guard. Skurge fell back a few steps, grimacing beneath his helmet, but grudgingly admiring Thor's power. He saw Mjolnir coming for him, brought his own weapon-hand up, and knocked it aside with a blow of his axe that barely missed Thor's fingers.
In his own right, Thor was respectful of the Executioner's own power, as much as he despised him.
Then a powerful bare hand gripped Thor's shoulder from behind. And, despite his strength, that which could match the Hulk's at any day, the thunder god found himself turned around, away from the Executioner, and facing the one who grasped him.
"Good afternoon," said Hyperion, and punched him in the face.
The others were having a hellacious time with the remaining Masters of Evil. For one thing, the red-hued Klaw had created several beasts of solidified sound...a huge ape, an elephant, and a lion, all emblematic of his African sojourn...and had set them against the heroes. Iron Man had disrupted the noise-beasts somewhat with sonic bursts from a device he'd stashed in his belt. But Doctor Spectrum had pinned Iron Man down with a giant hand from his Power Prism, and the Melter was pointing his melting gun straight at the armored Avenger.
A star-spangled shield came into line between him and Iron Man. Smiling, the Melter went ahead and triggered his ray.
The beam ricocheted harmlessly off Cap's shield. Part of it was diffused. Another part of it reflected right back into the Melter's weapon, causing it to blow up in his hand. The Melter screamed, his hand injured superficially. He only managed one scream before Captain America vaulted before him, uncorked a mighty right, and sent him ass-over-teakettle down the sward, totally unconscious.
But Cap himself was tackled from behind by a slim but no less strong figure in a bird's-head mask and a light blue-and-black costume. "Hello again," said Nighthawk, as he bore him to the grass below.
As the two of them began to trade mighty blows, Hawkeye and the Pyms tried to deal with the Radioactive Man. Outside of the fact that his body was as deadly as unshielded U-235, they didn't expect that much trouble. For one thing, the Chinese villain was never known as much of a fighter. For another, either they or Thor had beaten him every time he'd shown his green-glowing face.
But Hawkeye had known of the baddies' identity beforehand, and he'd come prepared for the roentgen-radiating rogue. Smiling a bit acidly, he fitted an arrow with a bulbous plastic head to his bow. The Wasp, flying by his ear, murmured, "Make it good, Clint. This guy's deadlier than a cobra, just remember."
"Don't worry, Waspie," he confirmed. "Nobody ever taught me how to miss."
The Radioactive Man looked in Hawkeye's direction and pointed his hand, sending off a burst of blinding power that seared the grass and ground beneath it. No matter what, he was no man to take lightly. Clint Barton lurched away, rolled, and still managed to loose the arrow on the fly.
He was right: nobody ever taught him how to miss.
The arrowhead struck the Chinese villain full in the chest and erupted, unleashing a shower of grey, lead-bearing paint. The Radioactive Man cursed in his native tongue, some of which got a few drops of paint on it. A second and a third arrow splatted onto his chest and forehead, dousing him with more paint. He could probably burn his way out, given time, but the threesome didn't intend to give him any of that.
From two opposing entryways into the field, an army of insects scurried. They seemed as well-disciplined and swift as columns of army ants, though these were different in nature. Those who saw them, spectators and combatants alike, gaped in surprise and even shock. The Avengers, though, knew it was just a sample of what Hank Pym's cybernetic helmet could do.
Cockroaches.
The persistent little bugs had been summoned by Ant-Man. They were fully capable of surviving great amounts of radiation, which was just why he had called on them. Within minutes, the brown twin-columned army had taken the field, wound its way around the other combatants, and swarmed its way towards the green-hued, paint-covered menace.
"No!" cried Radioactive Man, his paint-rimmed eyes afire with revulsion. The things were coming for him.
"Oh, yes," chirped the Wasp, as she bowled the bad guy over with a powerful blast of her Wasp's Sting. She struck him again and again, stunning him and sending him to the grass, rolling him over on his front. Several more arrows from Hawkeye struck him, coating his back with the same lead paint.
Chen Lu, the Radioactive Man, pushed himself up a bit from the playing field and saw the bugs only inches away. Despite the fact that he had the power to sear entire sections of the bleachers into ruin, he shrieked in distaste and horror.
Then the cockroaches were on him.
The Master of Evil was covered in a mound of the tiny beasties, a man-sized glob of writhing brown bodies. He howled imprecations, tried to fire bursts from his fingernails, made the paint steam and crack, rose to his feet, hardly distinguishable among the mass of tiny warriors who kept coming and coming and coming.
"Man," said Hawkeye. "That is some kind of job for Orkin."
"Shut up, Clint," advised the Wasp.
Chen Lu raised both hands to his face and wiped the cockroaches away, but others took their place. He dropped to the ground and rolled, but the insects weren't balked. Nothing would deter the insect soldiers from their mission.
The Radioactive Man was being beaten by a bunch of bugs.
He lurched to his feet again. Before he could put hands to his face, the tiny army seemed to withdraw from it. The villain blinked, able to see what was before him for the first time in several seconds.
A normal-sized Ant-Man was standing there with thin, protective gloves on his hands.
"Say goodnight, pal," said Hank Pym, and uncorked a haymaker that lifted the Radioactive Man off his feet and put him on his back.
Hawkeye came over and high-fived Ant-Man, grinning. Henry Pym returned the smile. The two of them and the Wasp had been friends almost since Hank returned to the team as Goliath, deepened their comradeship when the trio of them had become the core of the Avengers for some years, and became even more bonded when Clint had abandoned his Hawkeye persona for a time to become the second Goliath, after Hank had reverted to his Yellowjacket identity. It was complicated, even for the other Avengers, but change in their team was always a constant.
The Wasp, through a mental effort, quickly grew from insect-sized to woman-sized in seconds. The cockroach army was withdrawing from the Radioactive Man's unconscious body, forming a ring around it and standing at attention. "Nice work for the military," cracked Jan Pym. "So what do we do next?"
Hawkeye turned his head to take in the battle scene around and behind them, and then pointed in one direction. "I say we help out Cap. The others are kind of over our power line."
Janet Pym smiled, knowingly. When Hawkeye had entered the team as part of the second group of Avengers, he had bristled at Captain America's authority and rode the senior Avenger as much as he could get away with. That had changed over the years, and Clint had become Cap's biggest booster. She suspected he saw Cap as the father he never had...or had always wanted.
"Good idea," she said. "Saddle up, Hank."
The married hero and heroine quickly shrank to insect size again, Jan sprouting wings from her back, Hank summoning a winged ant to ride. They were almost impossible to see, for folks who hadn't worked with them. But Hawkeye had so much practice in their company that he thought he could notice them in a crowd at Grand Central Station.
"Let's go do some Assembling," said Hawkeye, dragging a stun arrow from his quiver on the run. "Or disassembling. Whatever."
It turned out to be a little needless. Nighthawk was tough, certainly, enhanced to perfection by the powers of the Grandmaster. But Captain America had seen action that nobody this side of Thor could equal, and no normal-strength Avenger would dare have challenged him to a fight that wasn't just sparring. Without letup, Cap had judo-tossed, karate-kicked, elbowed, and punched his opponent into a slightly pulverized state. As the trio of Avengers came near, he drew a bead on the loggy Nighthawk's chin, unleashed an uppercut, raised him several inches off the field, and saw him fall like any number of foes before him.
Despite his ethics, Cap had to admit to himself that it always felt good when he did that.
He turned, adjusting his shield, and grinned at the Pyms and Hawkeye. "How'd yours go?"
"Good, Cap," said Hawkeye. "You sure know how to make a guy feel needed."
He clapped Clint on the shoulder. "Don't worry about that. I'd rather have backup and not need it than need it and not have it. I think Iron Man could use our help."
It had seemed like that for awhile, with Spectrum's power beam holding Iron Man to the ground. But the Armored Avenger had used his repulsors to blast a hole in the soil beneath him, tunneling underground faster than the prism's power could reach him. He came up in a different spot and blasted away at Dr. Spectrum with both hands, knocking him out of the sky with the power of his repulsor rays. Then, jets activated, he soared from the Earth's surface and swooped towards his foe, red-gloved finger jabbing for a control on the ring of his chest emblem.
The Vario-Beam sent off a ray of ultraviolet light, bathing the Squadron member in a color above his gem's range. This was the way he had defeated Dr. Spectrum in their initial encounter, and he hoped it would do the trick again.
For a second, the multicolored villain seemed to stagger beneath the output. Then he rose to his feet, incredibly, and held his gem towards Iron Man's flying figure.
"The Enchantress helped me out with my little weakness," he explained.
[And now,] sent the sentient, telepathic prism, [let us find out about yours.]
A blast of purple power struck Iron Man like a sledgehammer. Both of his legs flew up as his upper body fell backward. The force of his boot-jets propelled him downward, and, before Tony Stark could shut them off, they'd half-buried him in the field.
The Vision and Quicksilver suddenly made the scene, the meteoric mutant dealing out blow after super-speed blow to Spectrum, staggering him. But the gem, acting apparently on its own initiative, formed a giant hand that grasped Pietro and held him helpless above the ground. The Vision decreased his bodily density, shoved an arm through Spectrum's body, and began to solidify. He wouldn't get very much above gaseous state, but the disruptive force of his matter changing state within Spectrum's corpus would undoubtedly discombobulate the villain.
Unfortunately, the Vision was struck by a flow of energy that the gem maintained within Dr. Spectrum's body in case of just such an attack. He opened his dark mouth in shock and fell back, his circuits almost overloading with a semblance of pain.
Spectrum held his gem over the Vision's supine body, intending to blast it to smithereens. But before he could manage that, the edge of a disc-shaped, red-and-white striped shield with a star in the middle slammed into his neck and knocked him backward. It rebounded towards Captain America, who caught it as easily as if it had been a baseball.
Iron Man had recovered and had joined the advancing Cap, Hawkeye, Wasp, and Ant-Man, converging on the fallen Spectrum. The Squadron Sinister member had plenty of power, all right, but Stark figured that the team could take him. They'd have to. Thor, Sif, and Wanda still needed a hand against Hyperion, the Enchantress, and the Executioner.
Spectrum didn't get up from the ground. Instead, he raised the arm holding his gem, and a beam from it went not towards the Avengers, but to a spot several yards behind them.
A space-warp formed in the air. The Avengers team slowed for an instant to see what, or who, was to emerge. They didn't have to wait long. The persons that emerged were well-known to them.
The Titanium Man. The third Crimson Dynamo. Batroc the Leaper. The Porcupine. The Unicorn. The Eel. The Tumbler. The Scarecrow.
They were all piling out of the hole in the air, and they were all advancing on the Avengers.
"And there's more where they came from," Dr. Spectrum assured them.
-M-
Nobody from the outside would have taken the place for an AIM installation, and that was the whole point of it. Inside, the men in the yellow uniforms and the hatbox-shaped mask-helmets were conferring with Gary Gilbert and a couple of his chosen lieutenants.
Gilbert had just handed over a suitcase of cash. "Of course, there's more besides that."
"Of course," said the AIM representative, opening it briefly, then shutting it. The "more" would be stocks and bonds, precious gems, even gold deposited to secret AIM accounts. But all of the depositing would be held up until the goods were delivered, and Gilbert was safe.
Even with AIM, in business dealings, you had to watch your back.
"Are you certain you still want this, Mr. Gilbert?" said the AIM man. "Remember, once the purchase is made, there's no returning the goods."
"Get on with it," said Gilbert, a sword-edge of irritation in his voice.
The masked man led the two of them to another checkpoint, one with a door that it would have taken more than a Howitzer blast to breach. He pressed his gloved hand to a plate beside the door, and a voice from a hidden speaker said, "Identify yourself."
"Agent 376," said the man, knowing his voice prints would match what they had on file. "With visitors."
"Password," said the voice.
Gary Gilbert stepped up.
"Fire," he said.
To be continued...