Synopsis
Avengers, The (1963 series) #340 synopsis by
T Vernon
Rating:
Several Avengers (Captain America, Iron Man, Wasp, She-Hulk, Hercules) attend the dedication of a superhero medical research and treatment facility. After the ceremony, a woman comes running toward the Avengers but she is hit by a car; she seems relieved to see Cap, asking him to help the children. Cap blames himself for the accident while Wasp tries to calm him. Nearby, a couple of cops are saying how the Avengers won’t do anything to help little people like her….
Hours later, Wasp and Jarvis interrupt Cap in his training regimen with info they have found about the car victim, Mrs. Heidi Ehman. She is married to arms dealer Itzhak Berditchev and bore him a set of quintuplets he is raising on his walled estate. And Berditchev’s visit to his native Austria coincides with the disappearance of a cache of plutonium there. So Cap and Wasp plan to stop by Berditchev’s estate to look in on the children and the plutonium and Jarvis will be their entry, disguised as a big shot customer….
So while disguised as a wealthy gun runner, Jarvis enters through the front door, Cap and Wasp jump over the back wall and avoid the guards, who are Berditchev’s sons. They trip an alarm so that they will be sprayed with knockout gas, having already ingested the antidote. Janet is taken “prisoner” while Cap moves on. Meanwhile inside, Jarvis pushes two of the boy guards down the laundry chute. Berditchev appears to Cap via CCTV and opens a trap door beneath him, which Cap gladly drops into so he will be inside the mansion. Berditchev has admired Cap ever since the War when Cap rescued him from a Nazi camp and he has devoted himself to following Cap’s ideals and protecting his sons from the next war even if it means holding the world hostage with nuclear weapons. When his kids question this, the baddie responds that this Captain America must be an impostor. In the garden Cap encounters a giant called Bulwark and he goes through the motions before tricking the guy into sticking his cattle prod in the pond and frying himself (non-fatally). Inside, Wasp and Jarvis have linked up, locked up two more of the boys, and contacted the other Avengers about Berditchev’s warehouse where he is keeping the plutonium. Then they encounter the last of Berditchev’s sons, who is still puzzled why Cap didn’t kill him when he had the chance. Wasp shows him the news story about his mother’s accident and he offers to help them against his father. So the good guys and the kids subdue Berditchev, who cracks up and regresses to childhood when confronted by Captain America. Berditchev and Bulwark are turned over to the police and the Avengers learn that the kids’ mother will make a full recovery. Wasp notes that usually when they defeat a villain, they know right away that they were successful…but this time they won’t know until the kids are grown….