Execute Program, Part 3

After being accused of being late when answering a priority Avengers call, Tony Stark has returned to his lab to go over everything. Nothing appears to be wrong, if there was a bug he’d remember. This gets him thinking about Ho Yinsen, the man who saved his life.

Tony recounts how years ago, he was caught in an explosion and captured by terrorists. Yinsen was the man who saved his life by installing a device that would keep the shrapnel from his heart. This was part of the first suit of Iron Man armor that he used to fight his way to liberty. For years, Tony believed that Ho Yinsen was gunned down buying him time to escape.[1] Now he isn’t so sure. Tony then connects to defense satellites to see what the intelligence community might know that he does not. What he finds is a video that purports to be of Yinsen being executed on camera by terrorists. Tony stops the video before it ends, and assumes that Yinsen was executed because he left him behind.[2]

Meanwhile, Nick Fury is meeting with Secretary Jack Kooning and the Chiefs of Staff.[3] Following the deaths of Dennis Kellard and Ara Tanzerian, they have concluded that Tony Stark has gone rogue. Fury outlines all of the evidence that points to repulsor technology being used to down a commercial airliner and slaughter an entire army. Fury has also made a connection, the two men were responsible for the death of Ho Yinsen, the man whom Tony Stark owes his life. There are three other that can be considered responsible: Zakim Karzai, Aftaab Lemar, and Kareem Mahwash Najeeb. Najeeb, since reformed, is going to be involved in the world peace summit that Stark Industries is sponsoring. Kooning points out that this hardly indicts Tony Stark, reminding Fury that the armor has been commandeered by others in the past.

That’s when Fury drops the final nail in his accusation: Since being transformed by Extremis, only Tony Stark can interface with the Iron Man armor, it couldn’t have been anyone else in the suit.[4] Nick then goes over the documents they have on Extremis, pointing that animal tests showed an increase of hostility, violent ideation, and social isolation, all symptoms that people have observed in Tony Stark recently. When Kooning asks if Fury is suggesting that Tony Stark — a man with access to the President — is the bad guy. Fury confirms that this is the case. However, before Kooning can cancel the summit, Tony Stark hijacks one of the television screens in the meeting. He tells them that he has been listening in to them all. He refuses to let them cancel the event because it is too important to world peace. He insists that he is innocent even though he can’t prove it, but he has an idea how he can prove it.

Tony Stark then surrenders to the authorities an has them incarcerate him at Fort Leavenworth Penitentiary. This prison is chosen because it doesn’t use any electronic locks and an analogue security system. There is nothing that Tony Stark can hack into to escape. Tony insists on being locked in this hellhole because it is the only way to prove that he is innocent when the real killer strikes again. Fury has SHIELD watching the other two targets and beefed up security at the council. He also tells Tony that they have hidden his Iron Man armor where nobody can get to it, not telling Stark that it’s been stashed at Fort Knox. When Tony insists that he is innocence, and Fury hopes that he’s telling the truth.

At that moment, in London, the real killer is at a library to use their free wifi to activate his kill program.[5] He decides that the next target Aftaab Lemar. When he initiates the program, Iron Man’s armor suddenly pops out of the briefcase it is stored in. It then rockets out of Fort Knox.

In Southern Iraq, a SHIELD unit in a spy plane is observing a terrorist group run through training drills. That’s when the agent manning the radar detects a small bogey heading their way at mach 8.7. It’s Iron Man who engages the terrorists and beings slaughtering them. The SHIELD agents send an emergency call to Nick Fury. While they are reporting this, Iron Man unleashes all of his weapons all at once, wiping out the entire army. As it turns out Aftaab Lemar and Zakim Karzai were meeting together and are now trying to flee the scene in an attack helicopter. Iron Man quickly targets them and smashes their helicopters. He then flies them above Earth’s atmosphere where they can’t breath and drops them to their deaths. Iron Man then lands in the ruins of the terrorist camps and suddenly pulls off his helmet, revealing that it is Tony Stark in the armor. Tony looks around is horrified by what he has done.

At that same moment, Nick Fury is learning how the Iron Man armor smashed out of Fort Knox, recovering Tony Stark from prison, and killed Lemar and Karzai. Now that their worst fears are true, Fury contacts the Sentry at Avengers Tower and asks for his help in taking Iron Man down.

Recurring Characters

Iron Man, “Nick Fury”, Jack Kooning, Sentry

Continuity Notes

1. This is a retelling of Iron Man’s origins which were originally told Tales of Suspense #39. However, this is actually the “modernized” version that was hawked in Iron Man (vol. 4) #1-6. See below for more on this. The narrative of this story states that these events happened 15 years earlier. This is not accurate either. See below for more.

2. Ignoring the issues with the “modernized” origin story, the revelation that Ho Yinsen was apparently executed on live video by terrorists contradicts Iron Man (vol. 3) #31-32 and Annual 2000. See below (again).

3. This is not the real Nick Fury. The real Fury has gone AWOL following Secret War #1-5, when it was revealed that Fury was involved in an unsanctioned invasion of Latveria. As explained in New Avengers #1, SHIELD has been using a Fury Life Model Decoy to hide the fact that he has gone rogue. While everyone believes he fled to escape punishment, in reality, he uncovered a Skrull invasion plot and is working to thwart it, as will be explained in Mighty Avengers #12.

4. Tony Stark’s entire body was transformed by Extremis, creating a perfect man/machine synthesis with his armor. See Iron Man (vol. 4) #1-6.

5. The identity of the young man, his killer, and the purpose of this hitlist is all explained in Iron Man (vol. 4) #11. The young man claims to be the son of Ho Yinsen and he is using Iron Man to murder the people involved in the capture and death of his father. As of this writing (April, 2023), the name of Yinsen’s son has yet to be revealed.

Topical References

• The attack helicopters used by the terrorists are identified as Sikorsky models. This should be considered topical as Sikorsky is a real world company.

Regarding Iron Man’s Revamped Origins

This story builds on the "modernized” version of Iron Man’s origins that were detailed in Iron Man (vol. 4) #1-6. Originally, per Tales of Suspense #39, Iron Man’s origins have taken place in Southeast Asia. He and Ho Yinsen were captured by Wong Chu, built the original suit of Iron Man armor. To help Tony escape, Yinsen created a distraction and was fatally shot by Wong Chu’s men.

The “modernized” origin, in this volume of Iron Man changes the location from Southeast Asia to the Middle East and the pair being captured by terrorists from that region. Since then, subsequent retellings of the origin, particularly in Invincible Iron Man #593 and History of the Marvel Universe #3 go back to the original setting. Marvel has yet to explain these discrepancies.

The first issue that’s wrong here is that Tony states here that his origins took place 15 years prior. Since the revamped origin reframes the Iron Man origin as happening during the first Gulf War of the 1990s, this measurement of time. Since the conflict is a topical reference, then the number of years between Iron Man’s origin and this story would also be topical. Per the Sliding Timescale, Tony Stark first became Iron Man 12 years prior to this story.

The idea that Ho Yinsen was executed on video by terrorists is topical as well because, during the invasions of Iraq and Afganistan, al-Queda would regularly kidnap Americans and other foreigners and then record their executions for propaganda and terror purposes.

This also contradicts the stories all of the other stories that reference and build on the original origins. Particularly Iron Man (vol. 3) #31-32 and Annual 2000, which after Yinsen gets shot, his body is taken into the wilderness by Sun-Tao. The body then gets stolen by Doctor Midas, who then sells it to Wong-Chu who will, years later, use Yinsen’s disembodied brain to lure Sun-Tao, Iron Man, and the Sons of Yinsen into a trap.

As I stated in my entry from last issue, I think the easiest way to explain this is that Ho Yinsen was captured in the Middle East and then given to Wong-Chu in Southeast Asia. Since we never see Yinsen getting executed in the video that Tony views, we can assume that they were only threatening to execute Yinsen. Instead of executing him, they handed him over to Wong-Chu.

Why does Tony Stark think the video is over Yinsen’s execution? Well he stops the tape before it ends, and he just kind of assumes that’s how it ended. He assumes that Yinsen survived and was left behind. Nobody tells him this, he draws this conclusion on his own. The other thing here is that Tony Stark is suffering exhaustion because Yinsen’s son has been taking over his body. If Tony was in his right mind, he’d know this isn’t how things played out.

You could also argue that since Yinsen’s son is controlling Tony’s body, the data he is pulling up isn’t from defense department data, but a fabrication created by the young man. It’d be easy to believe that the boy doesn’t actually know how his father died — since the facts surrounding how Tony became Iron Man is both secret and/or top secret — and this is just his fantasy of what happened. Since the Nick Fury seen here is also a LMD and the only other person who references the Yinsen execution, one could also assume Yinsen’s son hacked the Fury LMD as well.