Iron Man #218
Deep Trouble!
Travelling to England for a mission of vital importance, Tony Stark is picked up by men who he is led to believe are security officers. However, they turn out to be hired thugs hired by a Russian spy named Irina Tarasova. He is driven out to the town of East Malden, where Tarasova informs him that she is there to stop his mission from succeeding. However, rather than killing Stark, they leave him stranded.
Little do they suspect that Tony is also secretly Iron Man and once they are gone he changes into his armor to fly to London. On the way, he pulls Irana’s car off the road and smashes the engine, warning her that Tony Stark is under his full protection. As Iron Man flies away, he thinks about the circumstances that led him here…
Three days ago, Tony Stark was visited at his office by a representative of the State Department. He tells Tony that a recent undersea exploration of the ruins of the Titanic has turned up something of great concern to national security. It is a canister containing a powerful chemical weapon that was lost at sea decades earlier. Years of being at the bottom of the ocean has caused the canister to corrode, and they don’t know how dangerous it could be. The government needs more information on it but its inventor, Carter Hastings, has become a paranoid recluse that doesn’t trust the government. They hope to send Tony instead in the hopes he can convince Hastings to tell him more about his creation.
A meeting with Hastings is the reason that Tony was sent to England and when Iron Man arrives in Carter’s neighborhood he quickly changes out of his armor to meet with him face-to-face. Sure enough, when he arrives on the Hastings property, Carter comes out with a shotgun and demands that he go away. Thankfully, the old Stark charm is enough to convince Carter to let him inside and talk about his wartime invention. Now an old man in ill health, Carter relates how he lost the canister at sea during a shipwreck and that it carries a powerful death gas that could threaten countless lives if released. When it was lost at sea and the project scrubbed by the military, Carter Hastings figured it was all over but had been dreading a day like today for the rest of his life. Tony promises Carter that he will do whatever it takes to recover the canister before its contents can be released. Little do either man know that the Russian spy planted a bug on Tony during their encounter and have heard every word. Finding this information very interesting, Irana tells her minions to report this back to their superiors at once.
Two days later, Tony Stark has taken his private yacht out to the site where the Titanic sank so he can performing a diving operation to recover the canister. Nearby is an American military vessel monitoring the area for possible interference from the Russians. With everything in place, Tony goes into his ship and straps into a specially constructed suit of deep sea diving Iron Man armor.[1] Although the suit was built to spend an externed period of time on the ocean floor, Tony hasn’t had time to properly test it and diving into the inky depths of the sea is stressful and he really gets a sense of how alone he is once he reaches the remains of the Titanic.
As he searches for the cannister, the captain of the military vessel spots a Russian ship not far away and warns Iron Man that there could be trouble. Sure enough, he is soon attacked by a swarm of undersea drones. He makes short work of them and quickly finds the canister and is relieved to discover that the seal hasn’t been broken. As he is containing the cylinder in a storage compartment, Tony is ambushed by Irana Tarasova who is remotely piloting a massive undersea robot. Caught in robot’s grasp, Tony gets away by escaping from his armor’s outer-shell and setting off the self destruct. This destroys the robot and allows Iron Man to swim back to the surface. However, before he goes he decides to teach the Russians a lesson by blasting a hole in their boat, causing it to sink. As everyone begins evacuation, Irana can’t help but be impressed by Iron Man’s resourcefulness and hopes to even the score some day.
Several days later, once the canister has been safely disposed of, Tony Stark returns to England to visit Carter Hastings again. Since their last visit, the elderly man has been admitted to the hospital for end of life care. Tony tells him how he was able to save the world from the weapon he created so many years ago, and he is happy he can finally die with a clear conscience. Carter passes away moments later and Tony hopes that the next world he finds himself in is less mad than this one.
Recurring Characters
Iron Man, Irina Tarasova
Continuity Notes
Here, Tony recounts how he had to build this new suit after most of his others had recently been destroyed. After Obadiah Stane took over Stark International in Iron Man #173, Jim Rhodes and Morley Erwin destroyed all of Tony’s spare suits of armor to keep them out of the hands of Stane in issue #174-175. Tony wasn’t around because he was on a disastrous drinking binge that lasted from Iron Man #167 through 182.
Topical References
Elements of this plot are now impossible due to the Sliding Timescale. Particularly, the life story of Carter Hastings, which states that he was alive during World War I and rode on the Titanic. Someone who lived during that still being alive in the Modern Age of the Marvel Universe is now an impossibility. For example, the last known World War I veteran died in 2011. As such, elements of this story should be considered topical. See below.
This story uses a number of dated Cold War references like “Iron Curtain” and referring to Russians as the “Reds”. Russia is also called the Soviet Union here. These should all be considered topical as the USSR dissolved in 1991.
Explaining Carter Hastings
As stated above, it is now impossible for someone who was alive in World War I to still be alive in the present day, making Carter Hastings’ back story impossible with out some means of slowing, stopping, or suspending the aging process. While that is a more common plot contrivance for characters rooted in World War II, it seems unlikely that this would be the case for Hastings, a one-off character who dies of old age in the very story he appears in.
As of this writing (January, 2022), Marvel has not provided an explanation and it seems unlikely that they ever will.
In my opinion, Carter Hasting’s history as a scientist during World War I should be considered topical. Likewise, should the statement that he rode on the Titanic with the chemical weapon. Instead, perhaps Carter merely lost the canister at sea and it ended up settling somewhere near the remains of the Titanic and wasn’t found until shortly prior to this story.
