Stormwatch: Team Achilles #14

Issue Details

Synopsis

An African-American family is driving down a rural road and are stopped by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klansmen separate the parents from their son. But amazingly, the boy attacks his captors with remarkable reflexes and kills some of them. However, he is too late to save his parents from being hanged and is then fatally shot by an unmasked, teenage Klansman. In the present, President Patrick Kent alarmingly wakes up, revealing that the lynching of the African-American family was a nightmare. Kent's aide checks in on the President, who is trying to compose himself, and asks if it was the dream about the family's lynching. Kent angrily demands his aide on how he could have known of that? The man replies that he and everyone in the United States are having the same dream over and over again. The aide also notes that the unmasked Klansman in the dream strongly reminds him of someone, as President Kent puts his hands on his face in shame. Ben Santini wakes up from the dream and have Team Achilles to meet up in the briefing room. Ben takes Avi Barak and Flint to the Stormwatch Detention Cells and reminds the two that everything down there stays there. Ben then unlocks one of the cell doors, revealing an imprisoned Senator Sonny Terns, having been previously replaced by Alias. Ben has Barak interrogate the former Senator on the identity of Citizen Soldier. Santini meets up with the other members of Stormwatch and shows them what is happening on the news. On the screen more than a million protesters are marching on Washington, D.C. in response to the dreams that they had in which they saw the eerie resemblance of the young Klansman to President Kent as being the same person. Santini explains to Achilles that the dream and the protest was only stage two of what is about to happen, as "stage one" began with the theft of $200 billion dollars in gold from the Federal Reserve which caused the death of Blake Coleman. The team then questions the dreams as members Galena Golovin and Charles Pickney never had them. Santini theorizes that only American citizens had the dreams. But Jukko Hämäläinen points out that, as a Finn, he had the dreams too. Khalid Tefibi explains his hypothesis to Jukko that he is exiled from Finland and without a nation to call home, and therefore the traditional place for people without a country and looking to start a new life is in America. Santini agrees with Tefibi and notices that there are several details in the dream that points to one person who is probably responsible. Meanwhile an agent loyal to Citizen Soldier assassinates the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, claiming that people like him are "destroy(ing) the independent farmers for generations", by using his powers in growing seeded food within his stomach to impale him from the inside-out. The agent then suddenly dies. Santini shows the man who is responsible for the dreams to be a World War Two-era superhero known as the Citizen Soldier, who was regarded as a terror to the Germans, and was honored and feared by everyone. The origins of the Citizen Soldier was not that of a man created from a government superhuman project, but was in reality having been existed through past reincarnations of American soldiers who fought and died honorably for their country in America's wars. What stands him out is that he possesses star-shaped irises. So far Citizen Soldier had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared in 1947. Barak then arrives with Flint and - having look inside Terns' head - fills in that the American government questioned Citizen Soldier for his suspected affiliations with communism as he had fought for the socialists in Spain. However, instead of being question for the House of Un-American Committee he was murdered. So forth, Citizen Soldier had reborn as the African-American boy from the dreams and so on. But Barak doesn't know what happened to Citizen Soldier after his death in 1955. Santini plans to take out Citizen Soldier. At this time Stormwatch watches the news of Citizen Soldier's third stage: a small-scale riot is breaking out in the New York Stock Exchange.