a/n: putting my degree in english and two courses on reporting to work this short interlude chapter.
welcome to the end of at least a majority of the prelude. fun fact, I actually wrote a lot of plot outline for what happens in between the Iron Man arc and pre-Avengers arc. but, alas, I don't want to bore you with the extra tidbits of plot. I may just make an extra scene collection separately for when I lose motivation and need to write random scenes to get myself back into the groove.
if you're here from my Criminal Minds story, don't worry- I'm working on it.
The Iron War on Terror
Obadiah Stane's explosive fall from grace; the prodigal son of Stark Industries rises from the ashes of the Arc Reactor.
by: Jamie E. Archer
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA- I remember during my freshman year of college just how much I loved to watch the news.
And I don't mean ABC or Fox or PBS- I mean those raunchy, adolescent tabloids and gossip columns. Most kids my age had guilty pleasures like the Golden Girls, bell-bottom jeans, or Wham!. My guilty pleasure was Inside Edition.
On a specific episode that aired before the ball dropped on New Year's Eve, the program aired a story that stuck with me about this billionaire playboy that had managed to convince all of that year's Victoria's Secret Angels to go to Dubai with him on a multi-million dollar yacht. Impressive, but I had to ask myself anytime I'd hear stories about this rich boy from the California coast: What was so special about Tony Stark?
My story began the months after my Dad's story ended.
I can write novels about what made my Dad special. It was a little hard to fit all those reasons on a two by four slab of granite, so I chose to settle with the three that I thought summed him up pretty well.
Writer. Adventurer. Father.
His last adventure was one that ended when a missile leveled the laundromat he had been squatting in. He was reporting on a expose piece that would've exposed the nefarious schemes that occurred behind closed doors. After his death, he left it up to me to finish what he had started.
I am by no means any kind of hero. Just a girl who wanted the pieces to complete the last puzzle her Dad had left behind.
My red string started in Gulmira, Afghanistan. My Dad had captured horrid images while reporting undercover there. These images were unlike any I'd seen from any news coverage or official government releases. Mostly in part to the fact that in every picture he'd sent to me post-partum, the weapons used in these massacres were included. Machine guns, assault rifles, semi-automatic weapons and various assortments of missiles and other explosive projectiles. One thing all of these artillery items had in common was their manufacturer: Stark Industries.
Research was futile and scarce. My photojournalist, Logan Zimmerman, and I booked a flight from New York to Las Vegas, from Las Vegas to Atlanta. From Atlanta, we were meant to connect to Kuwait, but it was to our misfortune and to the worlds' shock that it just so happened to be the day Tony Stark was abducted and presumed deceased in Gulmira and all flights to and from Afghanistan were cancelled.
Normal people would consider this the biggest brick wall obstacle between me and my finished puzzle; an incomplete story. Thankfully, I've never considered myself to be a normal person. Normal people don't have such hard heads and stubborn ambition.
Fun fact about me- I'm fueled by people telling me I'm going to fail.
I wasn't going to stop my search for the truth for anyone or anything. Not when I got fired from my job. Not after Tony Stark had been abducted. Not even through my stay in the ICU after a failed attempt on my life. I wasn't going to stop until I had the truth, even if the entire world was against me.
With the help of Zimmerman, we managed to pin Obadiah Stane for double-dealing Stark Industries weaponry to not only the US Military, but also to terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Stane was single-handedly fueling the so-called "War on Terror" and profiting off of global disarray and turmoil. Blood money.
From our findings, we estimated that Stane was probably committing these beneath-the-table deals for the better part of the last decade or so. It's hard to pin down just how many other deals he brokered with criminal kingpins and terrorist cells across the globe, but we were certain about his close business with a terrorist cell known as the Ten Rings.
And if you're asking yourself why that name sounds familiar, it's because you may have already seen the Ten Rings plastered across the news after they abducted Tony Stark. Correction- after Obadiah Stane hired the group to kill Tony Stark in exchange for Stark artillery.
The Ten Rings- much like most other people in the world have come to find out- it's a mistake to think someone like Tony Stark would be more useful dead than alive. The Ten Rings' leader, only known henceforth as 'Raza', seemed to think Stark would be useful to him when he went against Stane's orders and kept Stark alive in an isolated cave in Gulmira, Afghanistan for three months. His actions fueled by the foolish hope that Stark would build him weapons in exchange for his freedom.
Clearly, it didn't work out the way he'd planned it to.
Raza: Compliments of Tony Stark.
Stane: If you'd killed him when you were supposed to, you'd still have a face.
Raza: You paid us trinkets to kill a prince.
Zimmerman risked his life to provide our investigation with voice recordings of a brief interaction between Stane and Raza on the night Obadiah Stane had his hired guns slaughter Raza and his men at their encampment. With the hard proof we needed to bring this case to the authorities, we still had another obstacle to overcome: threats.
Shortly after Tony Stark's return to the States, I'd made an appearance at the very first press conference Stark Industries held at their HQ where Obadiah Stane recognized me from a previous, but brief, interaction I'd had with the CFO in a parking garage in Atlanta, Georgia. We managed to obtain a document from Stane's personal computer files that corroborated our theory that the car accident that landed me in the ICU for a little less than a week was a planned attempt against my life.
Even then, I wouldn't be stopped.
With the help of a confidential informant, we managed to tip-off the FBI about what Stane may have been involved with. The FBI conducted a raid on Stark Industries Headquarters and found several sealed files on Stane's desktop, all of which referenced to some kind of Stark Labs branch called Sector 16.
Sector 16 was an underground, private sector run, operated, and created by Stane. It was his attempt at hiding certain weapons, technology, and programs that were rejected or were even deemed illegal by the US Government and Stark Industries themselves. The raid revealed that Stane was building something, something related to the Arc Reactor.
Created in the 70's by Howard Stark and Anton Vanko, the Arc Reactor was meant to be a beacon for clean and renewable energy. The project was scrapped after Vanko was extradited to Russia and Howard Stark was killed in the brutal car accident that left Tony Stark an orphan and the sole owner and CEO of his father's company and legacy.
Having the most knowledge on his father's creation, Tony Stark somehow managed to replicate this source of energy to create a device that helped his escape from Gulmira and the Ten Rings. During his final visit with Raza, Stane and his men collected whatever Stark had left behind in that cave to revamp it with the bright minds of whatever scientists that were involved with Sector 16.
During the Stark Labs Incident, Zimmerman and I had only gone to warn Tony Stark about what Stane may have been planning, but what we saw when we made it to the Labs was nothing short of a warzone.
I was able to witness the travesties that Stane wanted to inflict on the world first hand. The weapons kept behind vaulted doors within the Sector 16 database were beyond what I could've imagined, but seeing what Obadiah Stane had done with Arc Reactor technology put everything within the walls at SI HQ seem small and insignificant. With this bulky, highly weaponized suit of armor, Obadiah Stane could've leveled the Lab had Tony Stark himself not stepped in to stop him.
After returning from Gulmira, it seemed as though Stark had no intention of stopping his advancement of the Arc Reactor technology. In the coming months, while Stane was busy trying to preoccupy the Stark Industries Board of Trustees in New York after Stark's abrupt announcement about the company's weaponless future, Stark was busy replicating the armor he'd used to escape captivity. He was successful.
The "Iron Man" suit in action was unlike anything ever seen before in modern technology. With the flight capabilities of a F-22 Raptor and agility of your average soldier in light-weight, bulletproof red and gold armor, Stark has managed to develop what Obadiah Stane attempted to with the "Iron Monger" suit, a more bulky and less capable prototype.
But while Stane had intended to use this technology as a way to further his reign over the weapons industry to conquer the War on Terror, Stark created this suit as a means to right the wrongs of his company committed beneath his nose. After a wake-up call in Gulmira, Tony Stark rose from the ashes of the former playboy billionaire drunk we've all come to recognize on TMZ and Inside Edition.
This isn't a piece praising Tony Stark, he has enough of an ego already. This piece isn't meant to indict Obadiah Stane, he did that himself when he blew himself to kingdom come on the roof of Stark Labs.
This piece was meant to be a continuation, a stepping point from the place my Dad had left me. The scattered clues and missing puzzle pieces have finally all fallen into place to reveal the bigger picture. A grotesque, bloody, horrific picture full of death, destruction, and chaos all in the name of money. Because what the bigger picture reveals is that those in positions of power don't know the names of the everyday people whose lives are lost during this so-called War, they don't know the cost because all they know is a price. Because what this is, it isn't war. It's the aftermath.
The aftermath of a battle between regimes, organizations, manufacturers, politicians, and companies, all revolving around one thing. The single thing that makes their world go round while the rest of our world burns to the ground. Money.
The average price of the standard Stark Tech missiles ranges anywhere from around 1 to 2 million dollars (USD). The price of revealing the truth behind Obadiah Stane's crimes cost me my Dad's life, and probably many others' lives as well.
This begs the question for the greater public to decide: was it worth it?
Photo Credits: Logan Zimmerman
Published by: the Daily Bugle
