Aggressors - The new hero pulp

The first of my October Halloween series of The Aggressors meet the supernatural. In this adventure of the Penetrator Mark Hardin meets Vlad Dosadan Magarac, Count Dracula. Magarac claims to be a descendant of the original Count Dracula, who was cruelly defamed by Bram Stoker. Upset by this, Magarac has decided to use a vibrating weapon to set off earthquakes which activates a volcano chain.*

The Penetrator arrives to stop this madman, who claims to be a true vampire. He discovers that several bodies have turned up around the site of the first tremors totally drained of blood.

As if this isn't bad enough the Mafia has also arrived to stop Magarac who is disrupting their activities and there is an uprising of the local indians. The Penetrator is certainly a busy boy.

After wiping out the mobsters, who decided that killing The Penetrator would be a nice side benefit to their mission. Mark manages to subdue the Indian rebellion by getting them to help him storm Magarac's headquarters.

There is nice touch where a corrupt ATF agent working for Magarac is killed by the attacking forces is surprised that The Penetrator and his allies have automatic weapons because automatic weapons are illegal in that state.

Magarac flees and is followed by the Penetrator and the pair eventually battle using chainsaws in a forest. The image of the Pentrator and the black cloaked vampire dueling with chainsaws lopping tree limbs struck me as a very cool image and would be cool to see on film. This was the one image I had kept from my first reading of this book two years ago.

**Spoiler** to head just highlight the next bit.



Not surprisingly Magarac is killed by impalement on one of the lopped tree branches through the heart.

**End Spoiler**

So it is never clarified if Magarac is a real vampire or just one sick puppy.


A very groovy work.

* This was the same weapon seen in Penetrator #21 The Supergun Mission, now nowhere is this explained in the book. Whilst the footnote can be overused by other writers (Joseph Rosenberger to name one) it can be really handy to direct us to other books like in this case.

Okay you may have noticed in two of my recent posts I reviewed DEATH MERCHANT #24 The Kronos Plot and PENETRATOR #19 Panama Power Play, both of which feature the heroes saving the Panama Canal from a Cuban backed plot and both novels were published in 1977.

What are the odds that Fidel ordered 2 seperate plots on the Panama Canal in the 1970s? Not very likey, so it seems that both The Death Merchant and The Penetrator helped stop this Panama plot but neither was aware that the other was involved.

Consider that the Death Merchant battled Panamanian Communist rebels and never encountered Cuban troops, the Penetrator battled Cuban troops but not Panamanian Communist rebels and in both books it was acknowledged that the rebels were working the Cubans.

I wonder if Richard Camellion and Mark Hardin ever discovered that they both worked on the same case?

SOmething a little different here's a short story I wrote. I wanted to explore the notion of the vigilante both the Aggressors and the pulp heroes before them.


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RETIREMENT DAY

The party had been a surprise and Ben Hearne mentally berated himself as he packed his files into storage boxes. He should have seen the clues and figured that his co workers would do something like that, after all he’d been an FBI agent for over thirty years now. He never even gave the sight of his first supervisor, Val Kildare, in the office a second thought. Perhaps the grief of the loss of his wife had affected him far more than he realised.

Ben had joined the FBI in 1971, fresh out of college, where his psychology degree had kept him out of the Vietnam war. His father was disappointed when hadn’t gone into practice, Ben knew his father had been hoping that he would join him in practice and eventually take over, but Ben had found criminal psychology much more interesting and the FBI offered the best opportunity to study the criminal psyche.

He started in the fledgling profiling section under the legendary Val Kildare. Kildare had taken Ben under his wing and had been recommended him to the Vigilante task force after three years.

The taskforce had been established in the 1930’s to track the illegal activities on American soil of unique individuals who took the law into their own hands. During the 1950’s the group had virtually been disbanded but a new wave of vigilantes had swept across America in the late sixties and revitalised the force to its former glory.

When Ben joined he had been given the task of profiling many of these new vigilantes, he threw himself into the study of the first wave of these vigilantes. He’d read reports from assistant commissioners of police, Scotland Yard, state troopers and other Law enforcement agencies, and the colourful exploits of men labelled The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage, The Avenger, The Saint, The Toff, The Falcon, The Just Men, and many others had consumed his life for three months.

He’d examined the speculations contained the reports on true identities of some of these vigilantes. And began his profile based on these hints, he’d starting by profiling Richard Wentworth as reports on The Spider, The Shadow and The Whisperer had all suggested that he was the man behind the masks, in fact Commissioner James “Wildcat” Gordon had been most insistent on this point. He’d then looked at other individuals named in the files such as Lamont Cranston, Kent Allard, Jethro Dumont, Richard Curtis van Loan and found that in many cases the suspects were wealthy men who had served in World War I and returned to civilian life unable to settle down and possibly feeling guilt over how their families had gained their wealth sought to use their skills learnt in WWI to redeem themselves. Many of these men appeared to have adopted or at least studied Eastern religions again suggestive of this desire for redemption perhaps to control the darkness in their souls that the war had unleashed.

His superiors had been pleased with his evaluation and he had loaned to various subcommittees of the taskforce to study the new vigilantes that seemed to be appearing daily. Hal Brognola had been impressed with his analysis of Mack Bolan but sadly his recommendation that Bolan be offered an amnesty and his skills be turned to counter terrorism had never been actioned with Bolan refusing to surrender and dying in a blaze of glory. He’d then worked briefly for the Penetrator taskforce with Dan Griggs from the Department of Justice. But mostly he worked with the taskforce in Washington. No arrests were ever made on the men and women had his profiles had suggested and Ben occasionally thought that his colleagues were secretly helping these vigilantes.

Occasionally, the Vigilante taskforces investigations into actions against the Mob and other criminals had uncovered illegal operations run by the CIA and other agencies using mercenary forces. He’d prepared profiles of groups known as Z-Commando, Hard Corps, CURE and Deadly Force Inc. but pressure from the higher ups had stalled those investigations. It was an office joke that they’d dealt with more letters than the postal service.

Oddly, it was these frustrations that helped him to understand why these vigilantes had started their war on crime. But in his heart, Ben knew that he never really understood these men and their quest. He had interviewed Frank Castle, The Punisher during his short confinement but Castle’s insistence on name rank and serial number answers to all his questions had given him little to work with.

Over the nineties, the number of vigilante incidents had dwindled and the taskforce was scaled back. After a warning from NSA agent Remo Murphy-Sapir to back off his investigation, Hearne had been transferred to counter terrorism in 2000.

Now in 2004 he was retiring. One of his investigations had gotten too close to a domestic terror cell and they had planted a car bomb. It had missed its target and killed his wife as she borrowed his car to quickly run to the market for some bread. In his grief Hearne had gone crazy and upset several assistant and deputy directors with his allegations of a conspiracy within the FBI.

Thanks to a former partner, Hearne had received counselling and decided to jump before he was pushed out of the FBI. By retiring first, he was able to keep his pension and benefits and he had decided that in his retirement, he would write a book on the vigilante phenomenon.

Hearne finished packing his files and began to clear the items from his desk, carefully packing his mug, lamp, gun and photos into another box. A few of Hearne’s co-workers offered to help him carry the boxes to the car, which he readily accepted.

He discussed his retirement plans as with them as they walked to his car. All agreed that the book was a great idea and that he should start right away. Patting his desk box Hearne laughed and told them that he had some research to do before he could start.

Once the car was loaded, Hearne drove off to prepare for his empirical research.