Story continues from CAPTAIN AMERICA Vol. 3 35:
As A.I.M. watches, Protocide takes on
an entire SHIELD assault force and, like a one-man army, he beats
them all. A gyro brings in more elite agents and the villain takes
them all down too. SHIELD fires a particle cannon at him and he takes
the brunt of the blast on his shield and destroys the cannon. A.I.M.
back-up arrives to find the battle over and Protocide at ease. The
Director and Agent Billups wish they knew more about Captain America
so they could possibly improve on Protocide—and they want the Omega
Compound....
Meanwhile, Captain America, brutally
beaten by his evil opposite number (last issue), is on the edge of
death. Sharon Carter dispatches Dum Dum Dugan with the Omega
container and waits for Cap to revive. Cap wonders why Protocide
spoke to him as though there were a personal matter between them. A
search of SHIELD's database yields no mention of him. Cap has another
idea: he and Sharon visit Cache in jail to persuade him to reveal
what he knows. The rogue database declines so Cap appeals to his
vanity; Cache searches all the world's data and discovers the truth
about the villain. Protocide was Private Clinton McIntyre: in the
early days of Operation Rebirth which created Captain America,
General Maxfield Sanders disagreed with Professor Erskine and General
Phillips about the use of a weak and sickly man for the test subject.
Sanders got hold of the serum and chose his own test subject,
McIntyre, a brutish soldier who killed his commanding officer.
McIntyre drank the serum and was wracked with such pain that he went
berserk, fighting his way out of the base and into the streets where
he wrecked cars until his heart gave out. Phillips told Sanders that
there was more to the treatment and that he killed McIntyre.
Operation Rebirth went on as scheduled. As Cap and Sharon leave,
A.I.M. thanks Cache for a job well done; they wanted Cap to know the
truth about his new foe. And now Cache digitally alters his
appearance to resemble Captain America and walks out as A.I.M. gloat
about their coming victory against Captain America....
“The Elite Agents of SHIELD in: The
Test”
Writer: Bill Rosemann. Pencils: Scot
Eaton. Inks: Bud LaRosa. Colors: Paul Tutrone .
Synopsis: SHIELD Director Sharon Carter
and Dum Dum Dugan watch a new elite team of agents undertake their
first mission. They are infiltrating a Hydra arms bazaar in the Gobi
Desert; they are discovered and all hell breaks loose. The
Agents—Silicon, Skul, The Kid, M-80, and Nails—wreak major havoc,
finally seizing a flying car and taking off for home. Sharon explains
that Nick Fury wanted her to recover the car he drove in CAPTAIN
AMERICA vol. 3: 31 as requested by Fury because it had some sensitive
film: footage of Cap and Sharon kissing.