Marvel Novel Series 11 - The Hulk and Spider-Man - Murdermoon

by Paul Kupperberg

  THE SKY IS FALLING!

  THE SKY IS FALLING!

  StarLab, America’s spectacular spy-in-the-sky satellite is plunging back to earth out of control—

  AND EVERYBODY WANTS IT!

  The top-secret components it contains provide the backdrop to a shocking scheme of global blackmail that can spell disaster for the entire planet—and the only man who might avert the impending catastrophe is THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

  But before the wall-crawler can hope to rescue the fallen satellite, he’ll have to survive a no-holds-barred battle with seven feet, one thousand pounds of unfettered fury, the most powerful creature to ever walk the earth—THE INCREDIBLE HULK

  It’s TWO of Marvel’s greatest super-stars in ONE sensational novel!

  MURDERMOON

  An Instant Collector’s Item Classic!

  A LOUD ROAR

  FILLED SPIDER-MAN’S EARS

  He shook his head to clear away the annoying thundering that threatened to split his aching skull. His head banged against metal.

  The Web-slinger’s eyes snapped open.

  What the . . . ?

  He was upright with his hands chained to his sides and bound to a curving metal surface inside a deep, brightly lighted pit that was alive with clouds of billowing, swirling gas. He was vibrating violently . . . No, the surface he was chained to was shaking with the fury of powerful pent-up forces.

  “Ten. Nine. Eight.”

  Spidey heard the words faintly through the deafening roar. A countdown!

  They’re getting ready to launch their microwave doo-hickey into orbit!

  And guess who made it on to the passenger list at the last minute!

  Spider-Man strained against the chains, exerting, as much power as he could muster. It wasn’t enough.

  Maybe these things will give eventually, but the old clock on the wall tells me I’m rapidly running out of any and all eventuallys!

  “Two. One. Lift-off!”

  Another Original publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of

  GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION

  1230 Avenue of the Americas,

  New York, N.Y. 10020

  Copyright © 1979 by Marvel Comics Group, a division of Cadence Industries Corporation. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Marvel Comics Group,

  575 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

  ISBN: 0-671-82094-X

  First Pocket Books printing November, 1979

  Cover Art by Bob Larkin.

  Printed in Canada

  To Ann DeLarye-Gold and Mike Gold

  and

  their dining room table.

  One

  “Gamma Base, this is Sky Spy Able. We’ve spotted your bogey, headed due south in Sector Charlie. Over.”

  The army helicopter swept out of the sky from the southeast, its rotors beating a deafening tattoo in the still, dry air over the New Mexican desert. Before the two men in the military aircraft stretched a seemingly endless expanse of sand, shimmering golden yellow in the glare of the midday sun. For as far as they could see there was nothing but the sand, bleak and foreboding and devoid of even the slightest sign of civilization, of life—save for the lone figure that trudged wearily through the stifling heat far below the speeding chopper!

  “Roger, Sky Spy Able. Can you confirm bogey as Target Green? Over.”

  Captain William Martin squinted through his green-tinted sunglasses at the solitary figure moving steadily into the distance. “Can’t be sure from here, Gamma Base,” he said into his microphone. “Hold while I take her down for a better look. Over.”

  “We read you, Sky Spy Able. We’re holding on Alert Minus One.”

  Martin pushed down on the control stick and sent the chopper into a sharp descent toward the barren landscape. “Think it’s him, Max?” he shouted to his companion over the din of the whirling rotor blades.

  “Let you know in a sec, Cap’n,” Lieutenant Max Wilson shouted back. He raised his binoculars and peered through them, focusing on the figure below. “Well, it’s a guy, all right,” Wilson muttered. “Big fella, too. And he’s—he’s—”

  “He’s what?”

  “. . . green?”

  Martin’s head jerked up in surprise and his hand tightened on the throttle. “Green? You sure, Max?” he asked, his voice tense with expectation.

  Wilson shook his head in uncertainty. “Hard to say, sir, what with the heat distortion and . . . holy cow!”

  The big man had stopped dead in his tracks as the helicopter passed over his head. He was a giant of a man, clad in the tattered remains of a pair of purple trousers, fully seven feet tall, with thick, rippling sinews. As he stared up at the aircraft, his eyes were dull and brutish beneath a protruding brow.

  And his skin was a deep emerald green.

  The Incredible Hulk’s lips curled into a savage snarl of rage at the copter. Though his thoughts were muddled, confused, the sight above sparked a hint of recognition in his bestial mind. He dimly remembered that thing in the sky, or things just like it, and he remembered it with hatred. Many times in the past they had come after him when he desired nothing more than to be left in peace.

  But always they attacked him.

  Always they hounded him.

  “No!” he roared. “Everywhere Hulk goes puny men follow.”

  The Hulk flexed his thickly muscled legs and propelled himself into the sky toward the speeding aircraft as effortlessly as a normal man might step up onto a curb.

  “But no more! Hulk will smash!”

  Lt. Wilson saw the green-hued man-monster grow in his field of vision through his binoculars. He whipped them away from his eyes and stared at the approaching figure in awe. It just wasn’t possible!

  “Come in, Gamma Base,” he shouted hoarsely into the mike. “We confirm bogey in Sector Charlie is Target Green! Repeat, we have the Hulk in . . .”

  “You mean he’s got us,” Martin cried.

  The helicopter shuddered, its nose dipping suddenly toward the ground a hundred yards below as the Hulk’s massive hands wrapped around the craft’s landing gear. “Jeez,” Martin hissed through clenched teeth. “H-he’s pulling us down, Gamma Base. I can’t stay aloft!” The army pilot wrestled frantically with the controls, but it was a fight he could not hope to win. All he could do was watch in wide-eyed terror as the ground seemed to rush up toward the service ship, dragged down by the Hulk’s ponderous weight.

  “We copy, Sky Spy. We have gone to Alert Zero. Reinforcements are on their way. Over.”

  With a spine-wrenching jolt, the Hulk landed, holding the copter above his head. The machine struggled against the green giant’s hold, its rotors beating uselessly against the air.”

  “Stupid men try to stop Hulk with stupid machines,” the man-brute growled.

  Martin and Wilson clawed desperately at the buckles of their safety harnesses and released them. They leaped from the cockpit to the relative safety of the burning sand. Wilson grunted and scrambled to his feet. With a trembling hand, he pulled the pistol from the holster at his side and leveled it at the monstrous being that held the helicopter like a small, frightened bird.

  “Cap’n . . . ?”

  Bill Martin rose slowly to one knee and gestured at the other man. “Put that damned thing away, Wilson!” he ordered harshly. “You can’t hurt him with it but you can make him madder’n hell.”

  The Hulk stared with emeral
d eyes full of rage at the man with the gun. “Puny man,” he grunted. “Puny man wants to hurt Hulk with toys, but Hulk cannot be hurt by you!”

  Casually, the man-monster tipped the helicopter to the sand, then dashed it against the ground like a toy. The still-whirling rotors dug into the sand with a loud screeching before breaking off and flying through the air. The Hulk turned to face Wilson with the twisted remains of the landing gear gripped like a club in his mighty green fist. With a snarl, he advanced toward the frightened army officer.

  Wilson blanched and screamed incoherently in fear. His finger tightened spasmodically on the trigger.

  Bang! Bang!

  The green Goliath growled in annoyance as the bullets bounced harmlessly off his thick, virtually invulnerable hide.

  “Now it is Hulk’s turn, little man!”

  Suddenly, the desert calm was shattered by the distant scream of approaching sirens and the steady, loud chopping of propellers in the sky overhead. Like an army of invading locusts, the closely grouped horde of approaching helicopters darkened the distant sky. The speeding military vehicles on the ground kicked up a billowing cloud of sand in their wake.

  The Hulk growled menacingly.

  Wilson backed away from the man-brute, his breath leaving his lungs in a shuddering sigh of relief. The cavalry had arrived!

  His bestial mind quickly forgot about the two army men in the face of this newer, more potent foe, and the big green man absently brushed Wilson aside. The lieutenant sprawled in the sand several yards from the Hulk, bruised, but otherwise uninjured.

  “Go away!” the Hulk roared to the skies.

  But they kept on coming.

  Captain Martin rushed to his comrade’s side. “You all right?” he whispered quickly.

  Wilson shook his head. “I’m still breathing,” he said.

  “Good.” Martin yanked the other man to his feet. “If you want to keep breathing, though, we’d better get the hell out of the area. ’Cause any second now, those guys are going to start lobbing everything they’ve got at the Hulk and I sure as hell don’t want to be caught in the middle of that shooting match!

  “C’mon!”

  All the emerald-skinned mammoth’s attention was riveted on the approaching helicopters. He did not notice the two men scrambling for safety.

  The lead helicopter swooped over the Hulk.

  “Dr. Banner!” A voice was calling to him from the chopper’s PA system. “We do not wish to harm you, Dr. Banner. Repeat, we will not hurt you if you surrender to us now.”

  “Bah! Don’t talk of puny Banner to Hulk! The Hulk is not puny Banner, Hulk is Hulk!” the behemoth roared, shaking his emerald fist threateningly at the heavens.

  “I ask you one more time, Dr. Banner! Surrender yourself to one of our helicopters and we will not hurt you!”

  With a savage snarl of defiance, the green Goliath whirled and loped over to Martin’s downed chopper. He dug his thick, powerful fingers into the twisted metal body and with scarcely a sign of effort, hefted it above his head.

  “Hulk said Banner is gone and Hulk knows!” he bellowed. “Because Hulk is the strongest one there is!”

  With a grunt, he heaved the wreckage at the hovering chopper. The pilot shouted in surprise and tried to wheel his craft out of the speeding missile’s path. But the Hulk’s aim was true and, with a scream of tearing metal, the wreckage sheared the tail section from the copter.

  The Hulk’s emerald lips curled with a growl of satisfaction as the damaged aircraft, struggling to remain airborne, spun like a wounded bird to land with a crash in the sand.

  The clank of machinery caught the green mammoth’s attention next and he turned to see a huge, specially modified military tank wheeling steadily toward him. The mounted cannon swiveled on the tank’s turret and took aim at the man-brute.

  “When will stupid men learn to leave Hulk alone?” he yelled angrily at the steel-blue metal creature. It continued rolling on.

  The tank fired, belching flame and smoke from the cannon, and the Hulk leaped. The missile whizzed by him and, a second later, the great green man landed heavily atop the tank.

  “Hulk will teach puny men,” he grumbled. He crouched and grasped the cannon in his emerald hands. He tugged it toward him, wrenching it free of its mooring.

  Then the man-brute leaped to the ground, swinging the heavy cannon like a massive baseball bat.

  Thwoom!

  The big tank tipped, one side lifting off the ground from the force of the mighty blow. It hung balanced on one tread and then began spinning in a circle like a child’s toy before toppling over on its side.

  The man-monster turned to face two more similarly modified tanks rumbling toward him across the desert.

  “Men still want to fight Hulk, eh?”

  In reply, both cannons fired simultaneously. The shells hissed through the air and thudded into the sand on either side of the Hulk. With a loud whoosh, the shells burst open, releasing their noxious cargoes of gas into the air. The fumes swirled around the Hulk, the golden cloud enveloping him as if attracted to him in some mysterious way.

  The man-monster swung his muscular arms wildly before him, trying to disperse the gaseous cloud that was already beginning to sap his prodigious strength. He remembered clouds like this from other times, other places. And though his primitive mind was veiled by a foggy haze of rage and hate, he knew one thing for certain:

  “Hulk must fight cloud!”

  Like a maddened bull, the green-skinned behemoth charged from the gas, swiping angrily at the wispy tendrils that clung to and followed his giant form. The first thing he saw through stinging eyes was another one of the tanks.

  With an unintelligible roar of rage, he leaped toward it. He landed directly in front of the rolling tank and, planting his feet firmly in the sand, threw his weight against it. The armored machine shuddered and the driver gunned the engine. The treads spun wildly in the sand, digging in as the mighty Hulk strained against the tank. Then, his muscles knotting beneath his glistening, emerald skin, the man-brute forced the tank slowly back. Gears screamed in protest as the driver urged his vehicle forward to roll over the superhuman obstacle, but in this meeting of irresistible force and immovable object, the object won.

  Oily smoke billowed from the tank’s engine as the Hulk shoved it backward across the sand toward the remaining tank.

  Klaang!

  Both machines buckled under the violent impact. And, though the damage to the second tank was not great, the other tank wedged tightly beneath it effectively immobilized it.

  The Hulk stepped back and surveyed his handiwork with a savage snarl of satisfaction. He looked about. The helicopters had retreated, maintaining as much distance and altitude as was possible while still keeping the emerald colossus in sight. But there was something else up there, beyond the hovering choppers—several tiny dots that grew larger even as the Hulk watched.

  And then the sky was alive with the rapidly approaching whine of speeding jet fighters.

  They roared out of the east, a quartet of rocketing fighter planes flying in tight formation. They zoomed in low, overflying the Hulk and then climbing back into the sky. Still in formation, they executed a smart 180-degree turn and headed back in toward their target.

  “More stupid men in metal birds!” the brute grunted. “They think they are safe from Hulk way up in sky.”

  He bounded over to where he had dropped the dislodged cannon and hefted it in his jade hands. Whirling, he tossed it into the air like a javelin.

  “But stupid men are wrong!”

  Like a missile, the heavy cannon streaked skyward. It tore through the wing of the fighter on the right wing of the formation before the astonished pilot saw what it was that had hit him. Suddenly, though, he had lost control of his fighter and was spiraling down toward the ground. He ejected just seconds before his plane exploded against the desert floor in a billowing mushroom cloud of flame and black smoke.

  The other fighters v
eered off, breaking formation.

  They formed a line and, one by one, passed over the green Goliath as, one by one, they fired small missiles from beneath their wings.

  The missiles seemed to take on a life of their own as they streaked toward the Hulk. Instead of striking, they buzzed about the man-monster like a swarm of mosquitoes, circling the Hulk as if seeking an opportunity to strike.

  They were drones, computerized slave mechanisms guided via radio from a bunker more than a dozen miles away. Miniaturized cameras in the missiles’ noses allowed their operators to home in easily on the large green man. And, when they did, the three operators gave three simultaneous radio commands to their flying charges.

  Fwhit!

  Shiny steel cables, no more than an inch thick, shot from the missiles. Guided by computerized sensors, the cables snaked toward the Hulk. They slithered from the missiles and whipped around him.

  Growling in annoyance, the Hulk flailed his massive arms at the silvery tentacles. His hand wrapped around one cable, but before he could put it out of commission, a second cable wound its way around his neck.

  The jade giant’s hands flashed to his throat, desperately trying to dig his fingers under the cable and tear it away. But the steel snake’s hold was firm and, before the man-brute realized it was happening, the others were winding their way around his massive body. Within seconds, the cables had enveloped him like a cocoon woven of solid-steel strands.

  He struggled in the stifling bonds, but with each moment the trap thickened and tightened around him. Cautiously, the choppers moved in to take a closer look, certain now that the great green menace was at last subdued. After all, they reasoned, those cables were made of a new, nearly indestructible alloy developed for Gamma Base by Stark Industries. Nothing alive, they were told during the course of their briefing, could snap them.

  Not even the Incredible Hulk.

  The man-creature snarled savagely. He was securely trussed up from neck to knees, his mighty arms pinned awkwardly to his chest.

  “Let Hulk go or Hulk will make puny men sorry!” he roared.

  The Hulk gritted his teeth, growling. They would not release him, he knew. Every time they caught him in their traps they took him away and put him in a cage.