Super Patriot: Part 4

Steve Rogers has showed up at the apartment of Rachel Leighton, aka Diamondback, for a dinner date. What he doesn’t know is that she has been secretly betraying him to the Red Skull. Worse, the Skull has just snapped her neck and is waiting on the other side of the apartment door. Armed with a new strength enhancing suit of body armor, the Red Skull charges at Captain America. Cap is unsurprised that the Red Skull is striking at him again. When he asks about Diamondback, the Skull tells him that she has outlived her usefullness.

Fighting the Red Skull off, Steve races into Rachel’s apartment and finds her dead on the floor. The Skull muses that Steve should be used to his relationships ending in sorrow.[1] This angers Cap who furiously fights back against his foe. The Red Skull, however, now has the strength to smash Cap through the walls and floors of his apartment building. The entire time, he gloats over Captain America’s bad week, with what went down with the Avengers and the many attacks he faced recently.[2]

The battle causes so much structural damage that the building eventually collapses on the two combatants. The Red Skull easily shrugs this off and then digs Captain America out of the rubble to finish him off. That’s when Diamondback pulls herself out of the rubble as well. She wasn’t the real Diamondback after all, but some kind of sophisticated robot. She attacks the Red Skull and as the two fight, she manages to hack into his battle armor and shut it down. She then begins trying to strangle him to death. That is until Nick Fury and a team of SHIELD agents arrive and give the shut down code. Fury and his agents also have Mike Nolan in handcuffs as well as the real Diamondback.

Captain America is confused by what is going on so Fury fills in the blanks. He explains that Nolan was involved in a conspiracy to overthrow Nick as SHIELD director and tried to get the Red Skull to help in exchange for resources to kill Captain America. This gave the Skull access to his suit of body armor as well as the newest version of SHIELD’s Life Model Decoys which he disguised as Diamondback.[3] The problem was that there was a design flaw in these new LMDs which led them to believe that they really were the person they were imitating, making them very dangerous as a result. As if to punctate this, the Diamondback LMD reactivates as SHIELD is putting it in a containment unit. Confused by what’s going on, the LMD calls out to Steve to rescue her.[4]

As SHIELD paramedics are patching Steve up he is reunited with Diamondback. She says they have a lot of catching up to do and suggests they hang out that evening. Since both of their apartments have been trashed, Steve suggests they get a hotel room. Diamondback responds by pretending to be shocked by Steve’s sudden forwardness.

Recurring Characters

Captain America, Diamondback LMD, Red Skull, SHIELD (Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan, Sharon Carter, Mark Nolan), Diamondback

Continuity Notes

1. The Red Skull rhymes off a number of Cap’s past relationships. They include:

   • There is of course, Diamondback herself. This isn’t really her, but a Life Model Decoy, as we’ll learn later on in this issue. Attracted to Captain America, Diamondback went straight so the two could date. Their relationship lasted from Captain America #371 to 433. She left Steve to work as Superia’s bodyguard in exchange for a cure for Steve’s deteriorating Super Soldier Serum (something that had been affecting him since Captain America #425). However, Steve was cured independently in issue #445 and the two never reconnected.

   • Cynthia Glass: Was a Nazi spy who infiltrated Project: Rebirth in 1940. Steve fell in love with her, but she was killed shortly after her duplicity was revealed. See Adventures of Captain America #1-4.

   • Bernie Rosenthal: Steve’s former neighbor first seen in Captain America #247. The two began dating shortly thereafter. The two fell in love and Steve proposed to her in issue #292. However, she eventually felt that their relationship took a back seat to his duties as Captain America and she left him in Captain America #317.

   • Sharon Carter: Was the first person Steve fell in love with since being revived in the Modern Age. They first met in Tales of Suspense #75. They had been on again and off again for years until Sharon faked her death in order to go on a deep cover mission for SHIELD between Captain America #237 and 444. The two admitted they still cared for one another in Captain America (vol. 3) #49, but Sharon decided she needed time to herself before getting into a relationship again with him in the following issue.

2. The Red Skull is really underplaying what happened to the Avengers recently. The Scarlet Witch went batshit crazy and used her powers to trash Avengers Mansion as well as kill Ant-Man, Jack of Hearts, Hawkeye, and the Vision. This all went down in Avengers #500-503. Although the Avengers do bounce back, Tony Stark’s tighter finances forces him to shut down the team in its current form in Avengers Finale #1. He will form a new, more scaled down version of the group in New Avengers #1-5. He also mentions Cap’s recent fight with the Serpent Society, which happened last issue.

3. Nick Fury is, of course, recapping the events of the last three issues.

4. This is not the last we’ll see of the Diamondback LMD. After a brief cameo in Fantastic Four: Foes #4, it will be transformed into a new suit of armor for an evil Tony Stark from another reality, as seen in Marvel Team-Up (vol. 3) #21-22.

Avengers Disassembled Reading Order

Iron Man (vol. 3) #84-85, Thor (vol. 2) #80-81, Captain America and the Falcon #5, 6, 7, Captain America (vol. 3) #29, Avengers #500, 501, 502, 503, Iron Man (vol. 3) #86, 87, 88, 89, Captain America (vol. 3) #30, 31, 32, Fantastic Four #517, 518, 519, Spectacular Spider-Man (vol. 2) #15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, Thor (vol. 2) #82, 83, 84, 85, Avengers Finale #1, New Thunderbolts #1