Double-Cross!

As the Avengers head to the mansion for a meeting they are interrupted by a new villain calling himself the Mechano-Marauder, who wants to make a name for himself by defeating the Avengers. Unimpressed by this threat, Iron Man deals with it solo while Thor, Captain America, and the Wasp go about their business. The Marauder is a brilliant inventor named Fabian Stankowicz, but his suit of armor is no match for Iron Man and he is quickly disarmed and turned over to the police.

When Iron Man finally enters the mansion he checks in with Jarvis to see if Hank Pym had contacted them yet, as he has a job lined up for Hank at Stark International after he was ejected from the Avengers.[1]

At that moment, Hank — penniless and destitute — is wandering around Times Square. He goes to a payphone to try and call Tony Stark and take him up on the job offer. Unfortunately, Tony’s regular secretary is on break and her stand-in thinks Pym is a crackpot and puts him on hold. When Bambi Arbogast finally returns and hears Hank Pym is on the line she tries to get ahold of him but he has already given up and walked away from the pay phone.

By this time, the Avengers have begun their regular meeting. The Wasp takes this as an opportunity to nominate herself as chairman for the team. This comes as a surprise to the rest of the Avengers given her recent divorce from Hank, but they all unanimously agree. With that out of the way, Janet suggests that they get down to business.

Later that day, Hank Pym ends up at a dive bar on 8th Avenue where he is approached by his old foe, Egghead. Elias Starr explains that, now that he is older, he realizes that he doesn’t have much time left in the world and wishes to atone for his past crimes. In particular, the fact that he was responsible for his niece, Trish Starr, losing her arm in an explosion.[2] To make up for this, he has built a cybernetic arm to replace the one that Trish had lost. However, his niece wants nothing to do with him and he hopes that Hank can convince her to accept his gift. Hank is reluctant to accept this because he doesn’t fully trust Egghead either. However, Elias tempts him with a large sum of money — income that he desperately needs — and he agrees to deliver the cybernetic limb to Trish.

Given an airline ticket, Hank flies out to visit Trish as Yellowjacket at her home in Flagstaff, Arizona. Hank had spent the trip examining the cybernetic limb and found nothing sinister about it. He convinces Trish to put it on and see if it works. Little does he know that Egghead is remotely connected to the limb and was able to alter its internal circuits to hide the fact that the artificial limb allows him to take control of the person operating it. When Trish puts the arm on, her uncle then uses the device to take control of her body. Egghead reveals his trick and orders Yellowjacket to do as he says or else he will kill Trish. Realizing that he has no choice, Hank agrees to go along with Egghead’s scheme in the hope he come up with a way to outsmart his old foe.

Yellowjacket and Trish are forced to take a trip to Omaha, Nebraska where the United States military stores the resins used in the creation of Adamantium. Using Trish as a hostage, Egghead has Yellowjacket shrink to insect size to infiltrate the base and steal the resins. Although he is on a tight schedule, Yellowjacket manages to send out an alert signal to the Avengers from the base’s communications room. He then knocks out the guards and, with the assistance of the mind controlled Trish, steals the resins. As they flee the scene in a flatbed truck, the pair are stopped when the Avengers arrive in their Quinjet and land in front of them. With Trish’s life on the line, Yellowjacket is forced to battle his former teammates.

Ultimately, Yellowjacket is defeated and he tries to explain how he was being manipulated by Egghead and that Trish is in danger. When the Avengers rush to her aid, Iron Man can find no trace of the device that Egghead used to mentally control her. This is because Egghead cut the connection and hid the evidence when it became obvious that Yellowjacket was going to lose. As punishment for this failure, Egghead used the device to alter Trish’s memories so that she no longer had any memory of Egghead’s involvement and that she was an unwilling prisoner of Yellowjacket himself. Despite his insistence that he is innocent, the disgraced Avenger is arrested and jailed for his involvement in the Adamantium heist.

Recurring Characters

Avengers (Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Wasp), Yellowjacket, Egghead, Trish Starr, Edwin Jarvis, Mechano-Marauder, Bambi Arbogast, Ernest Carrothers

Continuity Notes

1. Yellowjacket was booted out of the Avengers for misconduct back in Avengers #213.

2. Egghead mentions how Hank, as Ant-Man once saved his niece, that was in Marvel Feature #5. Trish later lost her arm in a car bomb set up by Egghead in Giant-Size Defenders #4.

Topical References

• In this story, a call on a payphone in New York City is said to be ten cents and that calls were metered based on length. This whole scene should be considered topical. Namely the cost of the phone call, which has gone up since 1982. Also, and don’t quote me, I’m not sure if payphone calls are metered unless it’s a long distance call, and while calling Long Island from Times Square may have been long distance back then, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Then there’s the issue of pay phones becoming scarce in New York City thanks to the proliferation of cell phones. Modern readers could assume that instead of using a pay phone, Hank called with a cell phone but he ran out of minutes (being broke and all) or his battery died or something.

• The amount of money Egghead offers to pay Hank is stated as five-hundred thousand dollars. This dollar amount should be considered topical due to inflation, which would make the amount 1.4 million dollars in 2021 money at the time of this writing.

• Hank is depicted travelling to Arizona on a DC-10 commercial airliner. This should be considered a topical reference as the last DC-10s were made in 1988 and they stopped using these aircraft for commercial passengers in 2014. Eventually, the fleet will ultimately be retired from service.