Black Widow sneaks into the
Thunderbolts HQ in
Mount Charteris. She happens to look into 1 bedroom which she deduces from its starkness is
Moonstone's. But she also happens to spot a miniature surveillance camera which she crushes, and wonders if
Hawkeye knows his base is bugged. We see the team's techie
Ogre detecting the bug dying and initiating an internal security sweep.
Next she overhears
Charcoal (
Charlie Burlingame) complaining to
Songbird (
Melissa Gold) about Hawkeye dedicating too much effort trying to find the missing Moonstone (
Karla Sofen) instead of finding out who killed
Jolt (
Hallie Takahama). Melissa repeats
Clint Barton's argument that Karla may need their help.
Natasha Romanoff vaguely senses the cloaked figure of
Scourge watching her, who's been stalking the corridors undetected for several issues and who we've been given hints is the killer they're talking about.
Widow is searching for something as she reaches a lab where Clint is talking to Ogre and 1 other. Ogre she recognises as a leftover from the mutant villain group
Factor Three who built this base a long time ago (original
X-Men #28-39). The other must be a new
Mach-2. She has a flash of memory of when she and Clint were an item (starting in Hawkeye's 1st app
Tales Of Suspense #57). Mach-2 is complaining about not being able to track
Atlas after his fight with
Wonder Man last issue. Ogre says his ionic emissions have been dampened and he wrecked his communicator in
#41. (Neither they nor
BW know that the pair turned up with
Count Nefaria at the end of
Av#32.)
Clint's still more worried about Karla (but that's maybe because *they* are now an item). (We see her looking down on the
Fantastic Four's Pier Four HQ.) She never opened up about herself to him. He doesn't know why she's been troubled lately, or why she ran away in
#41. He doesn't even know how she got her powers or how they work.
Black Widow's initial plan was to get what she wanted without anyone noticing. But now she decides to just drop in (literally) on them and ask for their help in return for info on their Atlas problem. Ogre of course wants to know how she got in undetected but Hawkeye's just happy to see her.
She fills them in on stuff from
Av#31-32. Back before the
Onslaught event a robot called
Benedict abducted honorary
Avenger Masque (who seemed very similar to
Madame Masque) and in return gave Avengers' leader BW a data disc containing info on all the
Maggia families (except
MM's Las Vegas operation). Now the team got involved in a battle between the Maggia and
Grim Reaper. But then she follows on with stuff we don't know about. She went after
Cyclone of the European Maggia. He escaped but she got the information she was after - the Maggia were trying to find out about the previous
Baron Zemo's ionic experiments that created Wonder Man and the original
Power Man (now Atlas). (I didn't think the Maggia families were working together to do *anything*.) She's hoping that Zemo's successor, the
TBolts old leader, inherited his father's papers.
Mach-2 explains that all Zemo's stuff blew up with
Four Freedoms Plaza (the
FF's previous base which the
'Bolts occupied while the FF were away in the
Heroes Reborn universe). But then he realises he might be giving away the secret that he's
Mach-1 (
Abe Jenkins) who's been given a new identity,
Matthew Davis, by the Government (and a new African-American face by Ogre).
Ogre suggests the info might still be in earlier-Zemo's Central American castle. He can combine what
Erik Josten (Atlas) told him with the
V-Battalion's account of
Citizen V (
Dallas Riordan)'s adventure there in the 1998
Captain America/CV Annual and a set of
ionic energy traces he's spotted while looking for Atlas, and use all that to locate it. (But actually he can do it because we know that Ogre has secretly been replaced by ex-team member
Techno, and apparently he built Zemo's place.) And when he does the team will accompany BW there.
Mach-2 goes to tell Charcoal and Songbird about their new mission. Charlie is angry at yet another distraction from finding the killer of his friend Hallie. Ogre is left alone to work, but Scourge is watching him and we get a replay of his thoughts from last issue - he's supposed to kill the team in a specific order and Techno is next, but doing that would also switch off the life-support of 3 people hidden in the basement.
Tasha accompanies Clint to his quarters where he changes into a new variation of his Hawkeye uniform that apparently Ogre has rustled up - the major difference being a belt-buckle with the team's lightning bolt insignia. Clint says he's happy leading the 'Bolts. Tasha intuits that he's also got a new girlfriend and assumes it's Melissa, but is then shocked to learn it's Moonstone.
Moonstone herself has done her own sneaking-in, using her intangibility (and hence also invisibility?) to gain entrance to the FF HQ where she's now scanning their database entry on the
Inhumans. Which is where
Invisible Woman and
Mr Fantastic confront her. Karla Sofen is conflicted, with a war going on between the villainess she used to be and the heroine Hawkeye and the others expect her to be. (And actually as we have seen in
#28,
Annual 2000 and
#41 the conflict seems to be between herself and some sort of spirit within her empowering
Kree Moonstone.) Anyway that conflict now expresses itself in the question whether to ask the pair for help or just kill them.
Now we cut to
Andrea Sterman who is researching a subject for her 2nd book which has brought her to a curio shop in Notting Hill, London to ask a former superhero who used to work for
Roxxon about
Hard Air. The lights are off but when the owner turns them on it reveals lots of transparent objects, including the desk that is supporting the cash register. He says they're made out of Hard Air and they are invisible until illuminated in a certain way.
She establishes that he is
Colin Hume who used to be
Windshear. He worked for Roxxon (
Alpha Flight #88-94) until he joined the Canadian
AF team (
AF#95-130, the end of the series). He hasn't been seen since then until now. He uses his mutant power to create Hard Air projections and he provided Roxxon with large amounts of it. But they had to keep it in vacuum-sealed containers to stop it quickly disintegrating, or doing so on contact with anything solid. Since then he has has learned to make it more stable.
Andrea asks him if Roxxon could have improved it to make it last longer but still vanish on contact. Colin presumes they might. She wonders if they could make bullets that dissolved after penetrating the victim.
We'll leave that plot strand and connect briefly with another 1. A little girl in
Latveria goes to collect water from a river(?) and finds a costumed body washed ashore which we recognise as Citizen V. (She had a long fall into water from
Crimson Cowl's base last issue.)
Now the Thunderbolts arrive at Zemo's jungle castle. Ogre detects week-old (ionic?) energy residues but shields prevent him from scanning for life inside. Mach-2 and Songbird swoop down and find the place recently trashed, and
M-2 detects a moving heat signature. The pair enter through the roof and note signs that equipment has been removed.
The others enter at ground level and Black Widow asks Ogre why he's chosen this as his 1st away assignment. He says it piqued his scientific curiosity. She notes signs of people going down into the basement and the whole team descend to find a science lab, also with most equipment taken away. Ogre can't find any recent tracks, but deliberately doesn't mention dried gelatinous footprints. Natasha Romanoff thinks there's something not right about the persona he projects.
Then there's an explosion and Cyclone appears accompanied by a horde of what Hawkeye recognises as
Protoids, people genetically manipulated by
Arnim Zola that Zemo once sicced on
Captain America (in
CA#176). Techno momentarily drops his bumbling Ogre act to turn his hand into a sonic scrambler which tears apart a Protoid that attacks him. But everyone else takes Clint's cue not to harm them.
Cyclone reappears carrying 2 scientists. Mach-2 follows him but he gets away in a jet craft. However M-2 manages to fire a tracer at it. Ogre ends the fight with a device which emits a
biocellular resonance wave that turns the Protoids back to human. He hand-waves an explanation of how he did it. Hawkeye congratulates him but BW is suspicious.
Songbird investigates where Cyclone got the scientists from and finds an ion generator, which confirms what they understand the Maggia wanted. But then Mach-2 gets a message automatically relayed from their HQ saying that Atlas and Wonder Man have been seen with the also-ionically-powered Count Nefaria and they're fighting the Avengers.
The crossover continues in
AVENGERS (1998) #33.