After a brief recap of the origin of Captain America, the
story begins: Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes are summoned to duty as Cap and Bucky
by the FBI. Their liaison, Agent Betsy Ross, picks them up and gasses them.
They awaken in a top secret underground lab called Operation Firebird. There
they are to help with attempts to recreate Cap’s Super-Soldier Formula. The
guys are introduced to Dr. Todd who wants to study Cap in depth to see if the
data collected will yield any results; while Todd is examining Cap, his prim
assistant Miss Vinegar will interview Bucky (while she is clearly attracted to him).
Later, Betsy Ross tells Cap that she blames herself for allowing the Nazi spy
to enter and kill Dr. Erskine and won’t let anything like that happen again.
Cap and Bucky take her to a makeshift dinner to cheer her up but an alarm goes
off. A giant ape-like monster is running amok in the building. The two heroes
knock it out and then it is discovered that it is Dr. Kellog, who was
experimenting with vitamins to recreate the formula and tested it on himself,
with unhappy results. Then Dr. Smythe, who was working on a remote-controlled
robot soldier, vanishes and an outline of a red skull is painted on the wall of
his lab. A search turns up nothing so Betsy calls in the FBI’s espionage
expert, Mickey Flynn, a chatty and comical Irishman. A quick survey of the lab
and Flynn concludes that the Red Skull had nothing to do with Smythe’s
disappearance….