The People's Republic of China is home to one and a quarter billion human beings. That's only on the surface, though. If one could look beneath the most densely populated nation on the planet, that number would have to be increased by ninety-eight. For ninety-eight is the number of operatives the international terrorist group Hydra has stationed in its bunker beneath the streets of Beijing.

A normal day in the bunker consists of training rituals -- loyalty tests, really, as agents prove just how much damage they're willing to do to themselves to serve Hydra -- followed by meals and uneventful monitoring of the city nearly half a mile above them. Reports are written and forwarded throughout the network of Hydra bases the world over, eventually falling into the lap of Hydra's mysterious new Supreme Leader. Whether these reports are ever read, not even the commandant of China Base is certain. It hardly matters to the agents stationed there, in any case. In the showers, and in the barracks late at night, you might hear the younger agents whispering about how good they have it; posted in a deep-cover base in a country with almost no Hydra-related activity. China Base is considered a milk run by these operatives, compared to what they might be asked to go through in America or the Middle East. And a milk run it is.

But nothing lasts forever.

The day the sky fell in seemed nothing special at first. Agents rose, proved their loyalty, ate, monitored, ate again, and were possibly getting ready to monitor again, when the cavern containing the main control center began to shudder. Hardened soldiers raised their eyes to the earth above them, wondering if an earthquake was about to bury them beneath the thousands of tons of rock over their heads.

But it was no earthquake.

The ceiling exploded, and a red-and-gold missile shot into the chamber. A squad of guards tried to raise their guns at the intruder and some actually managed to get off wild shots before a blast of energy slammed them all back against the wall. By the time the alarm was sounding throughout the complex, the rocket-now slowing enough to be seen as a man in a futuristic suit of armor--had collapsed the tunnel leading from the control room into the rest of the bunker. Those few at their stations when the armored man entered were stuck with him now. One more swoop around the chamber, and he dropped down to the floor. The eyes behind the featureless gold faceplate swept briefly around the room and locked on one man.

"Hail Hydra!" the man--obviously the ranking officer present--cried as the Avenger known as Iron Man flew across the room at him. "Cut off one head and two will--"

"Enough of that," Iron Man said, slapping the gun the officer was going for out of his hand. It clattered across the floor to join the heap of unconscious men along the far wall. "I'm here to talk, and I'm afraid I don't have time for the standard fisticuffs."

"I will tell you nothing!" the zealot cried. He glanced around the Avenger's broad shoulders and saw three technicians cowering behind their stations. They would die terrible deaths for not fighting along with the rest of their brethren, they--

"I'm afraid that's not an option." Iron Man's gauntlet closed around the officer's throat and slammed him bodily up against the wall. "I want to know everything about Hydra's operations in South Korea. Now."

"Hail Hydra!" the officer sputtered, clawing at the hand at his throat. "Cut off one head and two will take its place! Hail Hydra!"

"You really believe that?" Iron Man used his free hand to pin the officer's own back against the wall, covering the palm. "Do you know what it feels like to have your flesh burned off? It doesn't feel like anything at first, your mind can't handle the pain. Then it feels cold, and then the cold turns to fire as your brain catches up with your dying nerve endings. Do you really want to test your regeneration abilities?"

"Hail Hydra! Cut off-AAAIIIIEEEE!!! I know nothing! Nothing! No bunker has knowledge of the operations of another! Please, you're burning off my hand!"

The officer fainted from the "pain". Iron Man dropped him to the ground and considered the palm of his gauntlet. He'd pumped a jet of super-cooled air out of it across the Hydra officer's hand. The man's terrified imagination had done the rest.

Turning, he strode to the bank of computers, completely vacant of the technicians who had been manning them when he'd burst in. He could hear gunfire from the other side of the wall of rubble he'd dropped across the entrance to the chamber. The other agents posted here probably wouldn't be stupid enough to use heavy explosives to break through, considering their location. That gave him a little time.

Removing a jack from the side of his helmet, Iron Man popped it into a port in the center terminal. A few silent moments of hacking later, he found that the officer had been right: communication with Hydra high command was decidedly one-way, and there was no contact whatsoever with other field sites. He might have been able to find a path back to the big guys, given ample time, but every moment he wasted here was another moment the nest in South Korea had to use the technology he was sure they'd stolen from him. Col. Nick Fury had tipped him off about this base in China, and he had volunteered to do SHIELD's* dirty work for the chance to be the first to talk to the commanding officer here, but it hadn't paid out. Time to cut and run.

(* Strategic Hazards Intervention Espionage and Logistics Directorate -- Jess)

As he was pulling back through Hydra's systems, he came across a recent order that caught his eye. He backed up and took a moment to read it. It was an evacuation order for Hydra operatives in Japan--all of them. Eyes narrowing, Tony Stark, the man inside the armor, downloaded the file into his on-board CPU and removed the jack.

"Fury," he said into his helmet's transmitter as he fired his boot jets and blasted off for the hole he'd left in the ceiling, "the snakes are all back in their pen. Come and round 'em up."

Johnny Ko stepped through the side of the mountain into another world. Though he trusted the man who had told him of this place implicitly, he hadn't quite believed until now that it would actually be here. His car had been left in a small, concealed lot at the mountain's foot, and a stern guard in a strange green uniform had nodded him through the entry. Now he found himself in a plain metal corridor, branching off in different directions from the entrance. Other men in the same ridiculous regalia as the guard milled past, all on their way somewhere, and none of them sparing a moment to even glance in the young Korean man's direction.

Abnormality seemed to be the theme of his day-or night rather, since dawn was still more than an hour off. His friend Tony Stark had burst into his office barely two hours ago, making ridiculous accusations of Johnny being in league with the international terrorist cartel, Hydra. Johnny might have thought Tony was drunk, except he'd watched the man down nothing stronger than ginger ale at the banquet they'd been attending that evening. Immediately after Tony had stormed out with threats of retribution, Johnny had received a call from the one man who could possibly convince him to drop everything and drive out to the middle of nowhere in the last hours of night.

"Father!" Johnny Ko said, turning at the unmistakable tap-tap of his father's cane. Ko Yung-Kil was nearly sixty years old, a proud Korean and a patriot. He walked with his head held high despite the childhood injury that had left him partially crippled in one leg. "Father, what is this place? Why did you call me out here at this hour?"

"Too many questions, my boy," the old man chuckled, patting him on the shoulder. "This... well, this isn't something I can tell you about. I have to show you. Come."

Johnny Ko had spent more than twenty years obeying his father unconditionally. He was not going to alter that habit now. Without another word, he followed the older man deeper into the mountain.

Tony Stark flew the Iron Man armor across the Yellow Sea at the highest speed he dared. In his helmet was a wonderful piece of unpatented technology he'd created with the help of Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. It was called a subspace transmitter and it allowed instantaneous communication with just about any spot in the solar system that had a compatible receiver. Tony activated it.

"Pepper, what have you got for me?"

Half a world away, Pepper Potts, Tony's longtime friend and secretary, sidled up to her own transmitter in the headquarters of Stark Solutions. "Not much, Tony. Johnny Ko is pure as the driven snow, from what I can tell. The background check I ran on him didn't even say anything about trouble in school."

"But that would jive with what his sister told me. She said her father bought him out of the trouble and had his records erased."

"True, but... Tony, he got a C on a history test once, and that's about as ominous as his records get. He's active in his community, very outspoken on things like environmentalism and homelessness. As far as I can tell, he's never been anything but a straight arrow."

Tony considered that. He'd said some harsh things to Johnny Ko the night before, in his fear and anger. If he was somehow wrong... but no, he couldn't think about that right now. There were other things to worry about, and that order he'd downloaded from the Hydra nest's computer was at the top of the list.

"Alright Pep, drop the search on Johnny Ko. I need you to bring in some professional help. Maybe Hank Pym, or, if you can get him, Reed Richards. I have to compare some ideas with somebody who knows something about aeronautics."

"Why boss? What's going on?"

"I think Hydra intends to shoot one of my rockets at Japan."

"It's the Japanese, Johnny. Always the Japanese. We will always be in their collective shadow. Only they no longer have to conquer us, destroy our heritage and rape our women. All they must do is outperform us in the global market, and we will never be able to rise to their level. We will never be anything but 'third-world' in anyone's eyes."

"What do you suggest we do, father?" Johnny asked sarcastically, "Wipe them off the map?"

His father met his eyes as they walked, and held them until Johnny felt obliged to drop his own. A moment later, the steel corridor opened into what looked like some kind of control room. Huge video screens lined the walls, displaying aerial photographs and diagrams of the entire Eastern Hemisphere, several of these screens focusing in on the Korean peninsula and neighboring Japan. Green-uniformed technicians manned computer consoles around the room, and at Johnny's and his father's entrance, the lot of them turned, stuck a hand into the air palm-down, just as Johnny had seen Nazis do in the old wartime movies, and shouted out a salute that made his blood go cold.

"Hail Hydra! Cut off one limb and two will grow in its place! Hail Hydra!"

Johnny spun to look at his father, and saw that his nightmare was getting worse and worse. The old man stood facing the green throng before him, his hand up in a salute similar to their own. "Hail Hydra!" he agreed.

"Father," Johnny began, "What is this? What have you done?"

"I have purchased freedom for my people at the cost of my soul, my son. We are going to-how did you say it?-wipe Japan from the map."

"But how did you-why, father? My God, Tony accused me of being in bed with Hydra earlier this evening! Is this why?"

"Possibly," the older man agreed, returning his attention to the bustle of activity in the control center. "I've gone to great lengths to plant evidence of your involvement in this scheme--copies of project plans hidden in your apartment, phone calls placed to known international arms dealers, Hydra insignia on some of your clothes. You see, I know you, my boy, and I know you're far too good and kind and sympathetic toward those monsters across the sea to involve yourself in all of this unless you had some incentive."

Johnny stared at his father silently in numb horror.

"Help me with this, stand beside me, and I'll see to it you aren't implicated."

"You're insane," Johnny whispered. "Father, don't you see how wrong this is? The Japanese are people, not monsters! I'll stop you if I have to-"

Without looking at his son, the old man reached into his jacket, drew out a pistol, and shot him in the chest. The impact threw Johnny back against the wall. Still staring in uncomprehending horror at the man who'd raised him, he slid down the metal surface and thumped to the floor in a sitting position.

"My son," the old man was saying as he approached him, "I spoke of dreams at the banquet last night, but I'm afraid I've never exactly shared yours, as I claimed-all that nonsense about delving the secrets of the stars and that. You see, my dream has always been to live to see the day when the accursed Japanese and all of their ways and tradition-even their memory-was wiped from the face of this planet like a disease. The designs you and Mr. Stark provided gave me the way, and the men in this room have, for their own reasons, given me the means."

Johnny barely heard what his father was saying through the pain and the disbelief that this could be happening. The bullet had passed through the right side of his chest, and he guessed it had punctured a lung on its way. Johnny Ko realized with sudden fear that, if he didn't get medical attention soon, he was going to die on this cold metal floor, drowned in his own blood.

"Father, help me...."

"Oh no, Johnny, not yet anyway, not until my story is done. I've been funding this Hydra base for nearly two years now with part of the government money you've pulled in on the Ju Che project. That's why it was so dreadfully over-budget. But you never cared to check that out, did you? You were too lost in your armchair physics and conceptual analyses. Well, give me your analysis of this. I intend to saturate the Japanese archipelago with radiation; radiation that will kill ninety-nine percent of the population and turn the remaining one- percent into such repulsive monsters that the very thought of Japan will be enough to give strong men nightmares for decades to come. I regret that you won't live to see that world now, my boy, but you've made your choice, haven't you?"

"The Japanese... why...?"

"Because I can never be free of them! My mother, your grandmother, was taken into sexual slavery by the Japanese during the second World War. She was often raped dozens of times in a day. I am the product of one of those rapes, Johnny, as are you and your sister, by extension. We are all the bastard offspring of some faceless Japanese soldier. I will never let them or their kind harm my people again. And if that means I have to give you up... well, son, you can see I've already made my choice."

"He's gone, father."

Ko Yung Kil turned from his barely conscious son and faced the new arrival. "Not yet, I'm afraid, but soon."

Meiko Ko sneered. The evening gown she'd been wearing when Tony Stark dropped her off at her apartment hours earlier that night had been replaced by a sleeveless green unitarrd and matching six-inch stiletto heels. "Don't wax regretful now, father. You're as heartless as the people you've vilified all your life."

Her father shook his head wearily. "Come, my daughter. Order the launch. Let's be done with this. I will have my dream, and you will have yours, and we will both be the poorer for it. Order the launch... Madame Hydra."

A smile split Meiko's lips and she strode forward, heedless of the old man or the boy dying on the floor. Making sure she had the attention of everyone in the room, she said in a voice just loud enough to be heard, "Begin the countdown."

It had taken them some time, but Iron Man felt certain, as he circled the kilometer or so of South Korean coastline below him, that they'd picked the right spot. It was a good spot for a launch across the Sea of Japan, and there were some strange emissions coming from the mountain below him.

"Anything, boss?"

"Hold on, Pepper, I'm-oh my god."

Iron Man came up short, as the side of the mountain he was monitoring seemed to fall away, leaving an enormous cavity in its face. Before he could digest this, the mount belched fire, and a dozen missiles were thrown into the sky.

Iron Man shot into a ballistic climb after them. One look was enough to tell him they weren't ordinary ICBM's. The unique tapering of the fuselage told the tale. Whatever their purpose, these rockets had been built from the designs he'd made on the Ju Che rocket. Desperately, he increased his speed, aiming every passive and active sensor he had at the flock of missiles. Were they nuclear? That was the obvious answer, but he needed to be sure before he tried to stop them. One thing was certain: judging by the shallow arc of their ascent and their general direction, they were definitely headed for the big island of Japan. And they would be there within minutes.

As he approached the trailing missile, the laser beam feeding data straight onto his retina flashed in warning. He could hardly credit what it told him, but experience had taught him to trust his own equipment, and a second scan confirmed the first.

"Tony!" Pepper cried. "What's going on out there?"

"Hydra just fired half a dozen rockets at Japan, Pepper."

"Nukes?"

"No.

"They're Gamma bombs."

Next Issue: BOOM!