THUNDER Agents are property of John Carbonaro.  No money is being made from this story, no infringement is intended.

**********

JULY 1970

"They can't force that on us," said the Chief.

"Like hell they can't," said Michaels. "They can force any hero they want to onto the team. This is the U.N., sir, not the U.S.A."

Sam Short swore and ran one hand through what few strands of hair he still had on top. Damn Nixon anyway. Going to Russia and China was one thing. But this...

"So Brezhnev is insistent upon this?" he said. "Can't we buy him off with something else, more input, more service?"

Steve Michaels, a young turk who had come up through the boardroom rather than Operations, shook his head. “He insists, sir. They've got a candidate ready. The White House wants it to happen, too, as a sign of our good faith with the East."

"Oh, god," said Short, popping open an antacid pill box.  "God, Michaels, ten years ago, if this had been proposed, they'd have had the head of whoever proposed it on a pike outside the front door."

Michaels still smiled. "Ten years ago, sir, we didn't know we'd be in Vietnam. Six years ago, we didn't know we'd be in there that long."

"Yeah. Oh, yeah." Short poured himself some water from the green pitcher on his desk, gulped the pill. "All right, send me the file on this guy. What do they call him?"

"In English, I think his name is 'Powerplant', sir."

"We'll have to change this." Short considered, then said, "Keep this away from our ops. I'll tell them myself."

"As you wish, sir," said Michaels, and let himself out.

Sam Short began studying the large folder before him, and scrutinized the photos of the first super-hero manufactured in Mother Russia.

****

In Southeast Asia, a member of the People’s Liberation Army was almost too drop-jawed to consider firing at the blue-skinned man before him. Almost.

As it was, training and knowledge of what would happen if he were proven to have shirked his duty overrode his shock. He pumped three shots from his rifle into the chest of the orange -clad being who stood between him and the captive Dr. Liu. The ammo was of soft enough consistency
to spread once it hit its target, though it didn't quite penetrate the blue man's back. Which was a lucky stroke for Dr. Liu, who was not in favor of giving his secrets to the regime.

The blue man didn't quite bleed. A blackish fluid spread for not a long distance from the chest wound, and the gunman could have sworn he heard the sound of a liquid sizzling, as if it had been spread upon electrical wiring.

Of course, he only had an instant to observe this. Because the blue man was still somehow upright, and had drawn his own weapon and squeezed its trigger.

One shot went dead into the forehead of the gunman.

Both he and the blue man fell at the same instant.

Dr. Liu turned away with a shriek. Now, who would free him from this prison? Assuming they even let him live after this.

A voice came from the very air before him. "Don't worry, Doctor," it said. "I'm here in the spare, with the cloak. I always pack an extra body or two. Now, just hold still..."

In another second, NoMan had encircled the scientist with part of the cloak of invisibility which this android body wore. Within its zone of absolute blackness, Liu could see NoMan, but neither he nor NoMan could be seen by others. The cloak was the gift of the late Dr. Emil Jennings,
who had helped Anthony Dunn design the blue bodies into which Dunn had transferred his mind.

He got killed at least 1.25 times per mission. You could get used to anything, in time.

"Let's get out of here," said NoMan.

*****

Elsewhere:

Dr. Sparta had rarely ever been given an audience before with the master of SPIDER. It was as close as over 99 percent of the membership ever got...just a conference with a shadowed man on a monitor screen. Even the voice was filtered. It didn't bother him that his employer was
secretive. There was, however, something that did set off his inner radar, and he suppressed his feeling of revulsion. This was, after all, a business meeting.

"The prototype device is done," said Sparta. "Within ten days, we can have five others manufactured. Then, if you can get them launched, I believe you'll have the objective
we've been working toward for the last three years."

"We have made numerous attempts in this direction in those years, Sparta," said the artificially high-pitched voice.  "For your well-being, I hope you hit closer to the mark."

Sparta drew a breath, then gave his last selling point.

"If all are successfully launched, the Spiderweb project can be implemented. And I doubt any nation on Earth will be able to resist capitulation, once they're up there."

The Master gave nothing away by his body language. He waited for Sparta to continue.

"Once the devices are in position, sir, we can crush the population of Earth beneath the atmosphere itself."

 -T-

Colonel Akhbar trusted the infidel buyer a hell of a lot more with two of his men's guns trained on his chest and a third in a gallery above, aiming for his head. The man's beard looked phony, but he was prepared to overlook his affectations of disguise as long as his money wasn't counterfeit.

Without turning around, the colonel said, "Is the sum correct, Iban?"

The flunky in the soldier's uniform shuffled through a sheaf of American bills in high denomination. "It appears to be correct, my colonel."

Akhbar said, "Fitting, then. We perfect the germ bomb to be sent against Israel, and you buy it to use against New York City. Ah, well, for this kind of money we can afford to build many more."

"With you, it's nationalism. With us, it's business," said the American. He was dressed in one of those white business suits that always made them look so absurd over there. "When we let this go off, we can claim to have a dozen more, and we'll charge a billion apiece not to use them."

"There will be investigations, of course," said the colonel.

"We can be assured of that." The brown-haired buyer sifted on his feet. The sentries shifted with him. Akhbar guessed the man was nervous, but, of course, he had reason to be.

"Show him the missile," said Akhbar.

Obediently, two aides went to a structure buried under a tarp in the hangar in which the meeting was going on.  Outside of the colonel's private plane, there was nothing else in the hangar. The men pulled off the tarp to reveal a missile, locked in position in a launcher, with a deadly
warhead that bore a germ to make the Black Plague look like athlete's foot.

The buyer began to walk towards it. Akhbar held up his hand. His guest stopped.

"There is one other thing," said the colonel.

The buyer waited.

"We have your millions of dollars," the colonel continued.  "We have the missile. Both you and your bodyguard outside are covered by three men apiece. I have other guards throughout the installation. What does that suggest to you?"

The American worked his jaw before speaking. "A double cross," he said. "You dirty back-stabbing ragheaded..."

"Ah," said Akhbar. "Insulting one's host is not a forgivable breach of hospitality in my country. Guards, I am displeased."

Before he had finished indicating his displeasure, the guards had begun to fire.

But an instant before that, the buyer's hand had slipped to the waistband of his pants, reached inside, and made a turning motion. Akhbar noted it, and flashed on the fact that the man had been searched for a gun, and one had been taken from him.

What happened next demonstrated that the gun had only been for show.

A dazzling crackle of electrical energy burst from the man, as if he had been wrapped in active power lines and dunked in a barrel of water. The air was split by a thunderous CR-RACK! The American seemed unhurt by the event. In fact, he seemed to be disregarding it.

"Allah," gasped Akhbar, and hoped he would be forgiven.

The guards' bullets were spanging off the man's frame as if he were made of high-grade steel.

The colonel hit the floor, fearing the ricochets.

"Guy, come on in!" yelled the man, even as he leaped towards one of the gunmen, wrenched the gun from his hands, and tied it neatly and loosely around his neck. He thwacked the man under his chin with two fingers. The man fell back, unconscious.

The other two gunmen on the floor and the one in the gallery were still firing, and the man's outer clothes were being torn away. A strange blue and white costume could be glimpsed beneath, and it seemed constructed of some strange metallic mesh. The American had taken the second
gunman and pitched him into the third, then stamped their rifle barrels flat with one stomp of his foot. Then he looked up at the sniper in the gallery, who was still trying to pop off shots at him.

"You're making me angry," said the American.

Akhbar watched what he did next, and was even more awestruck.

The infidel went into a crouch, as if preparing for a standing jump. That proved to be an accurate assessment. The man leaped a good twenty feet upward and twenty outward, arcing towards the metal catwalk the guard stood on. He reached out, grabbed the railing, and bent it with his weight before he succeeded in swinging himself over. As he walked towards the last gunman, the man's
feet actually made dents in the catwalk beneath him.

The man stood before the guard, hands on his hips. The guard was not firing anymore. He was shaking a bit.

"Now. Do you have anything else you'd like to do before we start? Like go to the bathroom, or cancel your subscription to PLAYBOY?"

"The Prophet," gasped the man, "would frown on us subscribing to such a magazine." Thinking for a second, he said, "Once I have seen it. But only once. I only looked at some of the pictures."

The brown-haired man reached out, grabbed the man's rifle, and separated it into its component parts. "Now, more than ever, I'm glad I'm of a different religion," he said.

Then he tapped the man under the chin and let him bang against the catwalk.

The door had already been opened. Colonel Akhbar had taken his own weapon out, and had it shoved beneath his chin. Better the general did not find out about this before he spared himself the torture...

A yellow blur wrenched the hand with the gun away from his chin. The bullet went through the side of the hangar. The blur seemed to slap him on the side of the head. Akhbar went reeling, hitting the concrete floor of the hangar and rolling several times before he came to rest, unconscious.

In his last moment of awareness, he believed the thing that hit him looked as tall as a man, but was moving too fast to see, and was probably a demon.

That, at least, was reassuring.

The mighty American on the catwalk looked down. He tore off his tattered white suit and peeled off the phony beard. "Took you long enough, Guy. Heat getting to you?"

"A little matter of finding all the guards on base and bashing their heads against hard objects," said Guy. He was standing still now, and was revealed as a man with a track-star build, clad in a skin-tight yellow costume with a dial on his chest. "You ready yet?"

"Almost," said the other. He leaped down, walked to the missile launcher, climbed atop the missile, and wrenched the head gingerly free from the missile itself. "Wanna play catch?"

"Don't even joke about that." The yellow-clad man zipped over to the valise of money, shut it again, and set it beside the plane. By the time his partner had jumped down with
the germ-laden warhead, the cockpit of the plane was open. A second after that, the hangar door was retracting.

The man in the blue-and-white uniform turned off his belt after boarding the plane and stowing the warhead in back of his seat. Guy whizzed back to the plane, picked up the valise, hurtled into the pilot's seat and tossed the money bag at his partner's feet.

"Should we take the colonel with us?" said the blue-clad American. "It might be nice to show him what a kosher deli is like."

"Sorry, Len," said Guy. "You know he's got to fill out a full report on this. And our entertainment budget probably wouldn't pay for a single corned beef sandwich."

"You're probably right," sighed Len. "Bureaucracy is hell, Guy."

A couple of minutes later, the plane roared away from the hangar, leaving a small installation of unconscious people behind, bound for Israel. There, Mrs. Meir's representatives would attend to Dynamo, Lightning, and the warhead, but not necessarily in that order. And the two THUNDER ops would head back to New York shortly after that. But only after Dynamo had gotten Mrs. Meir's autograph, and some sort of souvenir, for his girlfriend Alice.

She could get downright mean with him if she thought she was being neglected.

******

The Master allowed few persons within his installation, and those who were human often wondered how many of the others were androids.

If anybody had come into the presence of the Master himself, they weren't telling. The personnel at SPIDER Central got their orders through monitor feeds, the same as those at the branch offices.

SPIDER, the Secret People's International Directorate for Extralegal Revenue, had a corny name. That mattered little. It possessed power and numbers enough to challenge THUNDER for four years' running, and the UN's top secret enforcement agency had been hard-pressed to cope with its operations. Its doings ranged from bank robbery to world domination, and it was getting all too close, THUNDER estimated, to the latter goal to be comfortable.

Now, another old enemy of THUNDER's was receiving orders there, from another view screen. "Sparta has confirmed the weapon's creation," said the Master. "And you?"

The Mastermind, who had threatened the agents with android doubles of his own making, had devoted his expertise to another project recently at the Master's behest. "The delivery vehicles will be ready within a week's time."

"Make sure of it," said the Master. "We will have no longer a time than that."

"You may rely on it, sir," said the Mastermind, proud of his ability.

The Master said one more thing. "For every day that you are over the deadline, if you are," he said, "you will forfeit an appendage of your body. I will not begin with your digits."

Mastermind swallowed. "As you wish, sir."

The Master's image winked out.

Mastermind turned and quickly went back to the preparation of five misses. It would be worth missing several nights's sleep to keep all of his parts together.

*****

The flight that came in from Europe touched down at JFK without incident. Three of its passengers had been treated courteously by the crew, but had made not effort to socialize with the other passengers. The others didn't much mind.

Two of them wore business suits. The third, a tall, blonde man, was in a soldier's uniform. It gave him away to the men who were looking for them, and the team leader of the welcoming committee cursed silently about how lousy it would be if some SPIDER guys had gotten wind of the arrival and decided to stage a little welcoming party of their own. Luckily, they hadn't.

"That's him, I guess," said the leader, a man with jet-black hair and an aura of Sean Connery manliness. "Let's go."

The three THUNDER men approached the Russians. "Mr. Rostov? We're your contacts. My name is Lawson. Craig Lawson." He stuck out his hand.

The big blonde man stuck out his own hand, and shook Lawson's hand. He was wearing rubber gloves, and his touch was surprisingly gentle.

"I am Gennedy Rostov," he said. "You must be the one called Raven. Please call me Powerhouse."

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