Marvel Novel Series 06 - Iron Man - And Call My Killer ... Modok!

by William Rotsler

  MECHANIZED MAYHEM!

  When millionaire industrialist Tony Stark first created the solar-charged steel-mesh armor he wears to become the Invincible IRON MAN, it was designed to support his damaged heart and save his very life!

  But now, a helpless victim of the international crime cartel called A.I.M., Stark is forced to create a suit of armor even mightier than his own . . . a suit of armor expressly designed to destroy the Invincible

  IRON MAN

  AND CALL MY KILLER . . . MODOK!

  A sinister, deadly game of chess between the powers of good and evil, where all the rules keep changing . . . and nothing is ever as it appears!

  AN INSTANT COLLECTOR’S ITEM: THE ARMORED AVENGER IN HIS FIRST FULL-LENGTH NOVEL!

  “THE GAS DID NOT WORK,”

  SOLOMON SAID, TREMBLING.

  “Exactly,” Modok said. “As you have seen, nothing sent against this armor has been effective. The suit is nearly impregnable. You could use it in fires—oil fires, for example. No troops could stand against it. A company of trained, loyal troops equipped like this—” he paused as Iron Man blasted the plastic shield again, splashing raw energy across the shiny face, creating still more, still deeper fractures, “—could conquer, control and monitor any area, against any enemy.”

  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: 0-671-82089-3

  First Pocket Books printing June, 1979

  Cover Art by Bob Larkin.

  Printed in Canada

  For Len Wein and Marv Wolfman,

  who showed us comic fandom

  One

  The opening move in the chess game was made with pawns—living pawns.

  The troop-carrying flier came up over the trees fringing the southern edge of Benford University’s brick-and-ivy campus. Book-carrying students blinked and gawked as the landing gear of the machine unfolded from its metal belly.

  “Those guys in Engineering are getting crazier every semester,” grumbled an English major. “Look at them. They’re going to set that weird crate right down in the sculpture garden!”

  An art major next to him gulped. “I . . . I don’t think those guys are from Engineering, Al. They . . . they have guns.”

  “I thought we phased out the ROTC,” Al said. “Hey, look, they’re aiming right at us! Hey, you guys, be careful there—!”

  Al looked down the barrel of a strange weapon as the sides of the flier dropped open and the yellow-clad troops jumped out. They wore strange helmets that covered their entire heads, with only a mesh-covered slit across the eyes. The weapons in their hands did not look like rifles. The weapon pointed at Al did not have a hole in the barrel; instead, there was a circular grid. The grid glowed, flashing briefly. Everything slowed for Al and his companion; their minds seemed to stop. They crumpled to the walk, their books spilling from their hands. Al badly bruised his face against the cement, but it was his only injury. He was not dead; he was sleeping.

  “All right,” one of the yellow-clad invaders snarled, sweeping a gloved-hand toward the north. “You know what to do—move it!”

  A group of young women turned the corner of the Chemistry Building and stopped, staring at the sight of twenty strangely dressed and weirdly armed figures running toward them. Beyond was a metal ship of some sort, flat backed and beetlelike, sitting in the sculpture garden on four landing pads.

  “Great Gauguin, that isn’t the new acquisition, is it?” asked one of the art majors. Before anyone had time to answer, two of the leading invaders leveled their strange weapons. The grids flashed, sending ionized alpha waves into their brains. The alpha waves neutralized the natural brain-wave functions. The women fell in a heap as the invisible beams played over them.

  The yellow-clad figures ran past them without even a glance at the exposed legs and revealed underwear, where there was any to reveal. Only one man was left and he stood behind a mounted weapon in a ring in the rear of the invaders’ ship. His hands were on the grips of the gleaming weapon. He watched impassively as the breeze flipped the white pages of spilled books and ruffled the short skirts of the sleeping students.

  “But technology got us into this mess!” the bearded young student protested from the rear of the auditorium.

  “And it will take technology to get us out,” Tony Stark replied. He held the mike in his hand and paced the lecture stage, looking up at the steeply ranked seats, each filled with a Benford University student. “It is true, as Simon Ramo said, that the world is a paradox of technological progressiveness and social primitivism. But rejecting technology will not get us out of this mess we’re in. It was rejecting a full technological synthesis that got us into it . . . Yes?” He indicated another student, a young woman, at the right side.

  “Mister Stark, you are the motivating force behind one of the biggest technological concerns in the world, Stark International, and you are here talking to us about the great advances in ecological technology. Yet your whole business was founded in war. You were a major supplier of war machinery!” She sounded bitter, yet puzzled.

  “That’s true,” Stark said. “War—any war, anywhere, anytime—always gives impetus to technological advancement. It may just result in a better shield or a better way to tie your whacking rock to a club, but war does advance technology. That is why Stark International now has the know-how to wage war on pollution, to help with that technology born in war.”

  Before he took another question, Stark strode across the stage in thought, ignoring the many hands that were raised. Then he stopped and turned toward his audience. “There was a time on this planet—and it was not very long ago—when the seas seemed limitless and the skies vast enough to hide the mistakes of mankind. The world was a big place and men could afford to be small. But now the world is small—and men must be big.”

  “Sounds like you got religion,” sneered one student in the second row. “Now that you’re rich.”

  “It is never too late to admit your mistakes,” Stark said with a smile. More than one female student felt a little bump in her heart as she watched the handsome, dark-haired Stark. He was a little old, they thought, into his thirties certainly, but sometimes an older man could be very interesting. Especially a rich older man, one with an international reputation as a playboy.

  “Have you heard Barry Commoner’s ‘Four Laws of Ecology’?” Stark asked. Several students shook their heads and Stark continued. “One: ‘everything is connected to everything else.’ Two: ‘everything must go somewhere.’ Three: ‘nature knows best’ Four: ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’ ”

  There was some laughter but the student at the back who had asked the first question called out, “And you’re going to save us?”

  “At a price!” another student challenged.

  “No, I’m not going to save you. We’re going to save us. You and me and anyone else that’s interested. This is Spaceship Earth. We have no other planet to escape to. Stark International has a multifold plan.” He held up one finger. “One: to combat technological flaws by technological—and legal—means
. Two: to help establish colonies in space—commonly called O’Neill colonies—and to help them become self-sufficient as swiftly as possible, in order to establish an outpost of man—independent of whatever may happen here—so that someone will survive. Three: Stark International will do whatever it can to increase food production and solar energy use, to—”

  “To make more money for Tony Stark!” someone jeered.

  “Look,” Stark said seriously, “knowledge will never replace respect when it comes to ecology, but knowledge might give us the tools to help.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Tony saw the grim face of Happy Hogan, arms folded, looking dourly at the young audience. Happy was Stark’s combination chauffeur and bodyguard, and one of the few people in the world who was privy to the secret that was center-most in Tony Stark’s life: that Stark was Iron Man.

  “Money can help,” Tony said, “but money is not always necessary. Having to solve problems without funding usually results in people using their heads instead of their pocketbooks. That way they find creative ways to use what we already have, to use nature itself. Money usually makes us lazy, and in the end we pay for our laziness and have second-class solutions to first-class problems.”

  There was a short silence as the students digested his words. They had come partially simply to view—and judge—the famous playboy and industrialist, friend of Iron Man and Captain America and the other legendary figures. But now they were unconsciously judging themselves and their society.

  “Aw, you just want to pick our minds,” someone called out.

  Stark smiled and ran a fingertip over his dapper mustache. “I was hoping to recruit some of you, actually. To give you jobs at SI. Not all of you, but the best of you. The ones that are not afraid of commitment, of paying dues for living here and now. I’m looking for bright young minds with bright new ideas. Minds that are not cast in cement, minds that can see new solutions where others see only problems.”

  The young man at the back of the auditorium was reassessing Stark. The legendary figure had always seemed to be cold, a man with a stainless-steel heart, an executive with a cash register where his brain should be. But unless he was snowing them, he was sounding good. The student could feel it in the air, in the murmurs and the stirring around him. The young man knew that no one built a multimillion-dollar empire without having vast business acumen as well as technical genius. But what the people seemed to know best was Stark-the-playboy, the different-woman-every-night chauvinist, the big spender, the jet-setter.

  “Aw, the only reason you’re into this ecology thing,” someone said, “is that Viet Nam is no longer a market for your munitions and war machines.”

  “Wrong,” Stark said at once. “I work where I think my country needs me most. It was conducting a war; I felt obliged to help. It is still waging war—against pollution, and against those who would pervert it, destroy our freedoms—”

  “Oh, the old Commie-menace crap,” someone said.

  “No,” Stark replied. “Yes, that, too, but that sort of thing is in the province of the President, the State Department and the Defense Department. There are others, powerful and evil, who have designs upon our richness, our great country, who want to—”

  “Aw, come on, Stark,” someone shouted. “You’re getting paranoid in your old age! Secret plots! Evil villains! Do you look under your bed every night?”

  There was laughter and Stark waited it out, looking relaxed and debonair. He’d heard it before, at other college campuses, at business meetings. They always ignored the things that happened, regarded them as unique, as single-shot adventures of desperate men.

  “Just as our environment is suffering from pollution, our social and political structures are being menaced by creatures that—”

  There was a crash at the back of the auditorium and people gasped, turning in their seats. Tony Stark’s dark eyes jumped to the highest level. An exit door had smashed open. Yellow-clad men with weapons were charging through, coming down the aisle. They were firing indiscriminately into the audience. Students were screaming and swearing, falling over to collapse limply under the feet of others.

  A second door thudded open and more yellow-clad invaders poured in. But Tony Stark was already in motion. In an instant he had recognized and identified the troops of AIM and was sprinting across the lecture stage toward his all-important attaché case.

  An invader paused on the steps to fire down at the running figure in the dark, conservative business suit. The grid flashed but the invader’s aim was disrupted by a protesting student.

  “Hey, who the blazes are you guys? What are you—” The invader swung the butt of his glittering weapon hard into the stomach of the student. The youth’s air was expelled in a gasp that was lost amid the screams and yells. When the AIM trooper swung his sleep gun back toward the dais he had no target. Tony Stark had disappeared. Angrily, the AIM mercenary swept his weapon toward the surrounding crowd, felling several who collapsed at once.

  The sergeant in charge brushed past the trooper brandishing an odd, bulky hand weapon. “Find him, find Stark!” he commanded with a shout. The sergeant aimed his pistollike weapon at a halfback who was coming up the aisle, head down. The weapon made a high-pitched ponging sound and the football player screamed and fell, twitching as the weapon made a close hit on his nervous system.

  Below, Happy Hogan met the first AIM warrior with a left jab and a right cross that caved in the cylindrical helmet, dropping the trooper where he stood. The ex-prizefighter moved ahead, weaving and dodging, knowing that he was giving Stark time. Vital time.

  His progress down the aisles was impeded by hysterical students, who did not know the weapons were sleep-inducing guns. They thought their fellow students that had fallen were dead. They inflicted injuries on their classmates as they scrambled over seats and fought to get out the exit doors. The AIM soldiers were not in the least interested in the students. They had hoped to knock out enough of them to make a quick dash through the crowd and grab Anthony Stark.

  Happy Hogan ducked under the beam of one sleep gun and pummeled its wielder unmercifully. The gun dropped and, before Happy could seize it, it was kicked under the seats by panicking students.

  But not all the students were in panic. Some were using whatever weapons they had—books, pocket calculators, their own bodies. One senior saw his first love topple back into her seat, and stood gaping at her for a long moment. All his life he had thought he was a pacifist, but standing there, seeing the seemingly lifeless body of his precious Amy slumped in her seat, his rage grew until it consumed him. He jumped over the supine body of a math major and grabbed the arm of an AIM mercenary. Without a moment’s hesitation, the student sank his teeth into the yellow-garbed arm. The AIM trooper let out a scream and tried to fire his sleep gun at the gnawing student, but the crowd was too tight.

  The student pulled the soldier into the space between the seats, took several blows upon the head, then began smashing the soldier’s head against the concrete floor. The helmet slipped off and the student could see the bulging eyes and blood-splattered head. But he kept right on battering until a passing AIM soldier casually zapped him. The student fell forward, pinning the unconscious trooper beneath him.

  Suddenly, the side door flew off its hinges and a gold-and-red figure crashed through.

  Iron Man!

  The colorful Shellhead was recognized at once, by both students and invaders. At once, the golden armor was a target for a half-dozen beams from the AIM weapons. But Iron Man was not to be toppled by anything that simple. With electronic precision and at the speed of light the suit’s sensors absorbed, analyzed, and neutralized the charge. The sleep beams never penetrated the armor, the alpha-wave particles never tangled Tony Stark’s brain.

  “Iron Man!” the AIM sergeant snarled. His hopes of snatching Stark easily were smashed. Their intelligence had said that Stark would be there that day with only Hogan as bodyguard. Iron Man’s whereabouts were unknown, but he had
not been reported in Stark’s vicinity for several weeks. So much for intelligence reports.

  The snarling sergeant aimed his hand weapon at Iron Man, seeing that the sleep guns were doing nothing. Another intelligence report down the drain. The tame AIM scientists had been certain the alpha waves would snarl Iron Man’s thinking, bring him down like a junked car into the compactor.

  Iron Man was darting back and forth, his metal fists smashing into yellow helmets, his boot-jets sending him up and over clots of collapsed students, to come face to face with the minions of AIM. The sergeant took careful aim, then triggered his nerve tangler.

  Iron Man felt the faint electrical charge and knew that his armor was approaching an overload of conflicting pressures. The NEED circuits—for Neutralizing Exterior Electronic Defense—were receiving too much data. Iron Man made a quick mental note: build redundancy circuits, put in more. Figure out a way to keep the weight and—most importantly—the power drainage down.

  The golden armor glinted fire as Iron Man sprinted away, dodging through the AIM horde, felling them with right and left punches. Some fell without his touching them and Iron Man realized the invaders’ leader was sacrificing his own men to get at the Avenger.

  Iron Man touched off his boot-jets, rising like a rocket above the melee and streaking in toward the figure with the blazing hand weapon. Reacting swiftly, the sergeant reached out and grabbed a cowering coed. He pulled the screaming young woman to her feet and put the muzzle of his strange-looking weapon to her temple.

  Iron Man—uncertain of what the nerve tangler might do at that range—banked off, skimming closely by the struggling pair. He saw the stark terror and panic in the woman’s eyes as she stared helplessly at him.

  Iron Man landed behind the sergeant and ripped a seat from its bolts, lifting it into the air, hoping to smash it into the captor’s back. But the sergeant was quick. Having diverted Iron Man for the needed split second, he made a vital decision.