TONY WOKE SLOWLY in a dark room, his head throbbing, his vision blurred. He couldn’t see past whatever it was that covered his eyes. A bandage? No, it was too rough. As the ringing in his ears began to abate, he heard voices speaking a language he didn’t recognize. The wrappings over his eyes seemed to cover his entire head. It was rough, like burlap. Come to think of it, it was burlap. His hands were burning. No, not burning—numb. He couldn’t feel anything but a tingling in them. He couldn’t move them. Or his feet. He was tied.
With a quick whip, the burlap hood was pulled from his head, and the little bit of light in the room stung his eyes. As he adjusted to the dimly lit room, he could make out what felt like sticks prodding him. But as things came into clearer view he realized they weren’t sticks, but guns—rifles, machine guns.
The men surrounding him were hooded, threatening, menacing. And it was clear they had Tony’s life in their hands. He looked down and noticed that his chest was bandaged with gauze. The room was still blurry, and he was having trouble focusing. He lost consciousness over and over again and had no idea each time how long he had been out. But during this time, he experienced nightmarish flashes of crude operations being performed on him. He felt sharp stabs of pain, and felt like he was being torn apart and stitched back together over and over.
Then he enjoyed a long period of rest, without these visions, and finally awoke in a cool, dark room. A hose had been placed up his nose while he was unconscious—to help him breathe or to drain blood, he figured. So whoever it was that did this to him clearly wanted him alive. He slowly pulled the hose from his nostril and attempted to sit up on his make-shift cot.
As he shifted, mechanisms rattled, and he realized he was connected to something. He turned and saw—a car battery, with wires running toward his chest? Tony tore the gauze off his chest and discovered what looked like a very simple transistor affixed there.
At the far end of the room, an old bespectacled man stood stirring a pot of something over a fire.
“What did you do to me?” Tony rasped.
“What I did is to save your life,” the man replied with a pleasant smile. “I removed all the shrapnel I could, but there’s a lot left near in your atria’s septum. I’ve seen a lot of wounds like that in my village. We call them the walking dead, because it takes about a week for the scraps to reach their vital organs.”
“What is this?” Tony asked pointing to the apparatus on his chest.
“That is an electromagnet, hooked up to a car battery. And it’s keeping the shrapnel from entering your heart.”
Tony shrugged uncomfortably and zipped up the sweater he found himself clothed in.
The steel door on the far side of the room rattled, and the man looked up, nervous. Then he snapped at Tony with a quick urgency.
“Stand up!” he told Tony. “And do as I do!”
The door opened and a dozen or so armed enemy soldiers entered. One walked in front of the others. He was large and carried papers in his hands. Tony figured he was the guy in charge here. He spoke in a foreign tongue to the man who had been helping Tony. The man translated that the enemy soldier wanted Tony to build him one of the Jericho missiles he’d demonstrated upon his arrival in Afghanistan. The enemy army had a stockpile of Stark Industries weapons. Tony could use those for parts and then supply a list of anything else he would need to build the missile. And when the missile was completed, the man would set Tony free.
“No, he won’t,” Tony mumbled under his breath, at the same time tentatively shaking the enemy’s hand.
“No, he won’t,” Tony’s companion agreed.
The two men were returned to the cave and were set to work.
“I’ll be dead in a week,” Tony said.
“Then this is a very important week for you,” his companion replied.
Tony got to work immediately. He barked orders for everything he’d need for the project. And light—he needed more light to be able to work effectively. Men rushed in and out of the cell with munitions, wiring, batteries—all supplied somehow or other by Stark Industries.
Tony and his partner, whose name he learned was Yinsen, worked tirelessly, welding, soldering, melting metals in ingots and pouring it into molds. They rarely rested. But when one of them was resting, the other was always working. They established a twenty-four-hour operation, all while they were under the trained eye of their captors, who observed them through webcams strategically placed throughout the cell.
Their captors knew all about war, but nothing about science. So when Tony completed his first project, they had no way of knowing that the result was a palladium-fueled Arc Reactor. He would use it in place of the unreliable battery-powered magnet that was keeping him alive. It could power his heart for fifty lifetimes.…
Or it could power something huge for fifteen minutes.
Tony had a plan.
He unrolled a series of blueprints. The paper was transparent enough to see through the overlapping sheets. Tony shifted them strategically, so that a portion of each blueprint overlapped another—like a complex jigsaw puzzle. Yinsen raised his eyebrows as he examined the prints. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. And it certainly wasn’t the Jericho missile that their captors were expecting.