In the early 1980s, as the Cold War stubbornly refuses to thaw, a new battle heats up…for the soul of the intelligence agency Checkmate. As the agency''s super-heroic public face, Jackson King—a.k.a. the armored Battalion, former leader of Stormwatch and the symbol of American might—has long suspected that Adeline Kane is up to dirty tricks overseas, engineering horrors that betray everything he believes about service to one''s country. But King doesn''t know that Kane has a clever new ally—an ambitious young woman named Amanda Waller. She has her own ideas about how metahumans can serve their country. And honor, dignity, and long lives don''t factor into them…