The Initiative, Part 4

When SHIELD Director Tony Stark (Iron Man) went on a covert mission into a Chinese mental health institution looking for Karim Mahwash Najeeb. As Iron Man he discovered that Najeeb was dead. Sending his body back to the SHIELD helicarrier for autopsy, Tony and Alpha Team — a special unit of armored SHIELD agents — were ambushed by the patients of the asylum, who had been transformed into killer cyborgs.

Monitoring the situation on the helicarrier is Dum Dum Dugan, who is ordered not to send a rescue team as it would tip the Chinese off to their unauthorized presence in their country.[1]

That’s when the alarm goes off on board the helicarrier. This is because someone had loaded Najeeb’s body with a biological weapon. Now a massive organic mass is spreading across the ship, assimilating everything in its path. This reaches the bridge, cutting communications, leaving Iron Man and his team without support. Worse, the Chinese military is now aware of their presence and are scrambling to their location. Iron Man tells his team that it is time to go. When asked who blew their cover, Tony says that it was someone on the helicarrier.

That person is a SHIELD agent who has been assimilated by the biomass that is spreading all over the ship. Dugan and Maria Hill are trying to stop it, but the mass shrugs off their bullets and assimilates their subordinates. Hill scrambles to call Iron Man on her SAT-phone and uses its built in camera to show him what’s going down. Iron Man is rightly horrified. That's when one of the transformed SHIELD agents uses the helicarrier’s portside cannons to blow up the command tower. With the situation rapidly deteriorating, Stark orders a full evacuation of the helicarrier, but not to scuttle the ship because they can’t let the biological weapon get loose.

Flying full throttle, Iron Man manages to arrive at helicarrier in moments. Using his chest mounted uni-beam to blast through the mass, saving Maria and Dum Dum from assimilation. He orders Dugan to get into a helicopter and extract Alpha Team. As Dugan races off, Iron Man tries to use Extremis to assume control of the ship, but all of the command codes have been wiped. On its current trajectory it will be in North Korean airspace in about 12 minutes.

With Alpha Team recovered and most personnel evacuated, Tony orders them to retreat to the Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan. Maria does a headcount and tells him that the only people that are unaccounted for are Maya Hansen and Sal Kennedy. They were last reported in main lab on level 3 performing their autopsy. Iron Man smashes his way into the lab and finds Maya quickly. When he asks where Sal is, Maya can only point. When Tony looks and is horrified to discover that this bio-weapon killed Sal. Suddenly, Tony begins to see visions. The first is of Sal telling him that he doesn’t like what working for SHIELD is doing to him. The next is of Happy Hogan, days before his death, telling Tony that he is the only one who can see both sides of the superhuman civil war. Lastly, he sees Captain America, telling Tony that if he is wrong, he’ll deal with it.[2]

Blasting the creature back with a full power bust from his repuslors and uni-beam pushes the creature back temporarily. However, it is reproducing new cells faster than Stark can incinerate them. Tony grabs Maya and pulls her back up onto the deck of the helicarrier. She accuses Tony of killing Sal. She says if he had allowed her to continue her work on Extremis, she could have come up with a countermeasure against such an attack. He tells her to get a grip of herself and try to think of something. Before she can, a squad of North Korean fighter planes arrive and order them to turn the helicarrier around or else they will be shot out of the sky. Iron Man tries to warn them about the biological weapon on the loose on the helicarrier, but it begins using the carrier guns to blast the planes out of the sky. To save lives, Iron Man uses Extremis to override the fighter plane computers to force the pilots to eject.

Turning back to Maya and tells her to explain her idea of how to deal with this threat. Maya says that the bio-weapon attacking the ship is basically a neoplastic cancer and it spreads by disabling a biological process called apoptosis, rather than eliminating damaged cells they continue to multiply. Tony figures out the rest, Extremis boosts the immune system, accelerating the process of cell-death, creating a healing factor that is, in theory, immune to cancer. Tony decides to put this to the test by going back into the ship and disengages his armor. He then allows the bio-weapon to come into contact with him and assimilate his body.

In a matter of moments, Tony is completely absorbed into the huge mass. Suddenly, the the mass stops spreading and everyone assimilated by it stops dead in their tracks. Seconds later, Tony breaks free from the massive cancer, causing it to erupt into a torrent of blood and gore, destroying it.

Meanwhile, Dum Dum Dugan is meeting with Secretary of Defense Jack Kooning at Okinawa airbase. Kooning is unhappy with what has went down and has officials breathing down his neck. As far as he is concerned, Stark is finished at SHIELD and he wants to appoint Dugan as the new Director. Dum Dum refuses, stating that while Nick Fury ran the spy agency because he knows what the world is, Tony Stark sees the world for what it can be.[3] He says that if Stark goes, so will he. When Kooning tries to blackmail him by threatening to reveal where bodies are buried, Dugan counters by saying that he knows where all of Kooning’s are as well.

Later, Okinawa Beach, Tony Stark has private council with Maria Hill. He tries to make sense of the attack that just happened. He suspects that this person has been upping the use of bio-weapons in terror attacks because they know that Stark has Maya Hansen, but refuses to allow her to continue her research on Extremis. Had Tony allowed her to do so, he could have prevented Sal Kennedy’s death. However, he couldn’t bring himself to do it after the superhuman civil war, not after Captain America’s death. Maria thinks that Tony is reading too much into it, that this was a simple trojan horse attack to take out multiple casualties. However, Tony is certain this was something more, unfortunately he has no idea what the enemy is planning.

At that same moment, Maya Hansen has decided to take up Jack Kooning’s offer to continue working on Extremis in secret. She has been taken to Prometheus Gentech, located in Fremont, Nebraska. She is given a quick tour of the facilities before she is brought to meet the CEO of the company, a man named Tem Borjin. Little does she know that Tem Borjin goes by another name: The Mandarin.

Recurring Characters

Iron Man, SHIELD (Maria Hill, “Dum Dum Dugan”, Maya Hansen, Sal Kennedy), Mandarin, Jack Kooning

Continuity Notes

1. The man who appears to be Dum Dum Dugan is actually a Skrull spy who infiltrated SHIELD as part of a planned invasion of Earth, as will be revealed in Secret Invasion: Prologue #1. The core of this invasion plot will be told in Secret Invasion #1-8.

2. These are all visions of people that have recently died. We’ll learn in Iron Man: Director of SHIELD #27 that these visions is a byproduct of Extremis expanding his mind. These visions are helping him process a solution to the current problem. The visions seen here are:

   • Sal saying that he doesn’t like what working for SHIELD is doing to him was uttered last issue. As of this writing (April, 2023), Sal is still considered among the deceased.

   • Happy Hogan, said the line about Tony’s unique position was made in Iron Man (vol. 4) #13. Hogan was left in a vegetative state after he was attacked by Spymaster in the same issue. Tony used Extremis to shut off Hogan’s life support in the following issue to end his suffering. As of this writing he too is considered among the deceased.

   • Captain America (Steve Rogers): This is from when Captain America disagreed with the passage of the Super-Human Registration Act. This led to a clash between the two, eventually Cap saw that the general public mostly supported the Act and surrendered to the authorities, as seen in Civil War #1-7. When being brought to trail, Steve was seemingly killed by an assassin in Captain America (vol. 5) #25. In reality, he was unmoored from time, he will be brought back in Captain America: Reborn #1-5.

3. Nick Fury was the former Director of SHIELD for years. Recently, Fury went AWOL after the events of Secret War #1-5 when it was uncovered that he led an unauthorized mission into Latveria. Everyone believes that Fury went underground because of that, but in reality, it is because he uncovered the planned Skrull invasion and is now trying to prevent it. See Might Avengers #12.

The Initiative Reading Order

Civil War: The Initiative #1, Ms. Marvel (vol. 2) #13, 14, 15, 16, 17, Thunderbolts #112, 113, 114, 115, Omega Flight #1-5, Moon Knight (vol. 3) #13, Captain America (vol. 5) #26, 27, 28, 29, 30, New Avengers #27, 28, 29, 30, 31, New Warriors (vol. 4) #1-8, Black Panther (vol. 4) #27, 28, 29, 30, Iron Man: Agent of SHIELD #15, 16, 17, 18, Avengers: The Initiative #1, 2, 3, Fantastic Four #547, 548, 549, 550, Punisher: War Journal (vol. 2) #6-11, Mighty Avengers #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Sub-Mariner (vol. 2) #1-6, The Order (vol. 2) 1-4, Penance: Relentless #1, 2, 3, 4, 5