Marvel Team-Up #95
...And No Birds Sing!
Peter Parker arrives at Kennedy International Airport from Los Angeles. The city was interesting, he muses, but far too crazy for his blood. As he carries his suitcase out the door, he is too preoccupied to pay attention to a shapely blonde woman passenger walking ahead of him. Suddenly two men push by him, and his spider-sense tingles a warning. He ducks behind a bush, where he leaves his clothes and suitcase, and changes into his Spider-Man costume. Meanwhile, the two men follow the woman into the parking lot and approach her from behind as she opens the trunk of her car. One of them draws a gun, but before they can do anything, she kicks them in the teeth, flips them through the air, and leaves them unconscious on the asphalt. Then a third man gets out of her car with his gun drawn. Before she can react, she is struck in the chest by an exploding bullet. Fortunately, she is wearing a bulletproof costume beneath her street clothes, so only her blouse is destroyed. Then, before the man can get off a shot at her unprotected head, Spider-Man snags the gun with webbing and knocks the man out. Instead of explaining herself, the woman strips off the rest of her outer clothing and flees. As Spider-Man continues to watch, one of the cars in the lot rises into the air and opens fire at her. She ducks, realizing she hasn't the weaponry to stop the armored vehicle, and then Spider-Man snags the back of the car with webbing and climbs onto its roof. He quickly peels back the roof and hurls one of the two men inside to the ground twenty feet below. Before the other man can say anything, the woman throws a battle-stave that hits him in the head and rebounds back to her hand. She attaches the stave to another and uses it to pole-vault into the aerial car. After heaving the second man out, she introduces herself as the Mockingbird and thanks Spider-Man for his help. As she separates her two battle-staves and stows them on her forearms, Spider-Man reminds her that the car is out of control. She can see that Spider-Man does not know how to drive very well, so she tells him to move over. Then Spider-Man asks whom they were fighting. "SHIELD agents," she replies.
Dismayed that he apparently helped her break the law, he asks her to turn the car around, but instead, she jumps out and lands on a Manhattan-bound train. The car, with Spider-Man in it, flies toward the ocean. He quickly spins a web-cushion and leaps out of the vehicle, but a sudden change in the wind causes him to miss, and he hits a rocky cliff at the ocean's edge and loses consciousness. When he revives, he sees two men watching him. One introduces himself as Delandan, director of the Manhattan headquarters of SHIELD, and describes the figure next to him as a Life Model Decoy of Nick Fury. Delandan says Spider-Man is in trouble because he allowed a dangerous criminal to get away. Spider-Man replies that he did not know he was battling SHIELD agents. Delandan continues talking, but Spider-Man becomes distracted by the LMD and says it is uncanny how much it resembles Fury. Speaking exactly like Fury, the decoy tells Spider-Man that Delandan has a plan. As Delandan escorts Spider-Man through the SHIELD headquarters, he tells him he has one chance to get himself off the hook. SHIELD is setting a trap for Mockingbird, and he must help them. Splder•Man asks for information, and Delandan shows Spider-Man the SHIELD file—#11572—on Mockingbird. Her name is Bobbi Morse, says Delandan, and she was once a top SHIELD scientist whose activities brought her into contact with enemy agents. They probably convinced her to defect, he continues, and under the name Huntress, she destroyed one of SHIELD's South American operations. Afterward, she vanished, but nine months ago she appeared at SHIELD's Seattle base under her new name. She wrecked the place and looted the data banks, and since then she has systematically attacked SHIELD posts around the country. Only the Manhattan headquarters and the SHIELD Heli-Carrier itself have not yet been hit. Now she is on her way to the Manhattan headquarters to assassinate Nick Fury, the director of SHIELD himself.
The Life Model Decoy will lure Mockingbird into the trap, and Spider-Man will make sure she does not escape. Two hours later, as Spider-Man waits, Mockingbird, wearing an overcoat, walks down an East Side Manhattan street toward the Citicorp Building. SHIELD agents with walkie-talkies secretly follow her every move, but to her, they are almost too obvious. She realizes it would be virtual suicide to walk into SHIELD headquarters now, but that is what she has to do. She approaches the entrance to a closed subway station, triggers an electronic signaller, and, when the secret entrance opens, walks in. The corridors are empty, but when she throws her overcoat through a doorway, it is riddled with gunfire. She quickly disables the three agents inside. Suddenly Nick Fury appears behind her, and when she sees him, he runs for reinforcements. She trips him with a battle-stave, but when she approaches him, she sees that he is just a decoy. Then Spider-Man enters, clinging to the ceiling, and she asks him what he is doing there. She tried to kill him this morning, he replies. Had she been trying to kill him, she says, he would not be alive now. She does not know why he is interfering, but she will get to Fury even if she has to go through him to do it. Using her battle-stave, she vaults up at him, but he easily repels her attack and webs her feet to the floor. She will not kill Fury, he says. Then she says that he has it all wrong. She is trying to help Fury, not kill him, and she has been attacking SHIELD posts to gather evidence. SHIELD is riddled with corruption, she continues, and she has the proof on microfilm—names, places, dates. Fury is the only person who can do anything about it.
Then she tells him to look in her right earring if he does not believe her. The film is inside. Then Delanden bursts into the room. Now that he knows where the evidence is, he shouts, he can destroy it—and both of them as well. He is wearing a SHIELD battle suit and the Satan Claw, which makes him a match for Spider-Man in battle. A punch and a burst of gas from the claw knock Spider-Man out. Delandan contemptuously hurls Spider-Man aside, delighted that Mockingbird is still stuck to the floor with webbing. Mockingbird hurls her battle-stave, but Delanden catches it with the claw and incinerates it. Then he does the same to her earring. As he raises the claw for the death blow, Spider-Man revives and pulls Delandan off his feet with webbing. This causes the Satan Claw to accidentally cut through the webbing holding Mockingbird, and then she and Spider-Man circle the renegade SHIELD agent.
Mockingbird attacks first, on the other side of Delandan from the claw, and when he slaps her, Spider-Man snags the claw and pulls it off. Mockingbird hits the floor, stunned, but Spider-Man crushes the Satan Claw in his fist. Then Delandan blasts him with a shock wave from his battle suit, and Spider-Man joins Mockingbird at Delandan's feet. One last detail remains to make their executions perfectly legal, says Delandan, so he turns on the intercom and announces that Spider-Man and Mockingbird have joined forces and are at large in the complex. SHIELD agents should shoot to kill, he says. Then he prepares to execute the two crime fighters. But a sudden shot knocks his weapon from his hand, and the Nick Fury decoy enters, its gun smoking. Delandan is mystified because this was not in its programming, but the decoy reveals that it is the real Nick Fury after all. Then Spider-Man stands up and wraps Delandan in webbing. Fury says that he had been watching Delandan for some time. When Delandan ordered a Fury Life Model Decoy, Fury took its place.
Then, when Spider-Man recognized him, Fury let him in on the plan. The battle with Spider-Man and Mockingbird is now on tape as evidence. It is unfortunate that the microfilm was destroyed, continues Fury, but he can find out whatever Mockingbird did, given time. Then, just as Mockingbird rises and says that she duplicated the microfilm, several SHIELD agents enter and open fire before Fury can countermand Delandan's shoot-to-kill order. Mockingbird falls to the ground, but she remains alive. The agents apologize, saying that they had their orders, and Fury tells them to take Delandan into custody. SHIELD has become something it was not meant to be, says Fury as he leaves, but now, thanks to Mockingbird, he may be able to clean it up once and for all.
Recurring Characters
Spider-Man, Mockingbird, SHIELD (Nick Fury)
Continuity Notes
The file on Mockingbird has the year 1977 on the file. This should be considered a topical reference per the Sliding Timescale. The file details her brief stint as the Huntress in Marvel Super Action #1.
