Issue No. 83
December 1954Hammer and Sickle - A long preface shows the Soviets developing a long term secret plan called Project Red Flag which they think will finally but an end to the Blackhawks. The secret turns out to be two red costumed agents called Hammer and Sickle, who have been specially trained in acrobatics and combat. They are equipped with, what else, hammers and sickles as weapons. They also have their own two-seater Mig-15. The two agents do give the Black Knights some trouble, but Blackhawk figures out their weakness (a fear of fire from an accident when they were circus performers) and uses it to defeat them.
Chop Chop - Chop is invited to a fox hunt. Chop demonstates no equestrian skill at all, but by accident catches the fox and wins the silver cup.
Trapped in the Kremlin - A femme fatale, Madam Double Cross, blows up her own men in order to turn herself over to the Blackhawks. She tells them of a fiendish plan by Malenkov to smuggle H-Bombs into free countries. She claims it is too awful even for her and offers to help the Black Knights recover the secret plans from where she has hidden them in a statue in Red Square. Of course, she betrays them (she is called Madam Double Cross after all, it makes you wonder why the guys trusted her in the first place) but our valiant heroes escape with the bad woman tied up as their prisoner.
The Magnetic Mountain - While testing a new jet bomber, the Blackhawks are drawn irresistably to a strange magnetic mountain peak where they find a graveyard of crashed airplanes and missing aviators, including Amy Hart (Amelia Erhart, get it). There are also a bunch of Soviet and Nazi pilots who think they should be in charge, but the good guys soon convince them otherwise with a lot of right hooks. But the Black Knights are captured by Loreli, a beautiful Red agent who has set herself up as queen of the mountain. She imprisons the team except for Blackhawk. She has taken a fancy to him (as all the beautiful female agents do) and shows him the anti-gravitor device she has her scientists developing to free them from the mountain. It will also let them fly to the moon, and with a base there, "Russia could be master of the Earth democracies." When Blackhawk refuses her advances, she has him strapped to an airplane propeller and shoots arrows at him. An arrow shatters the edge of the propeller and Blackhawk uses the sharp edge to cut his bonds and escapes. He frees the other good guys and they fight and defeat the allied Nazis and Reds. But Loreli takes off in her anti-gravitor equipped bomber. Fortunately, Blackhawk in his spare time had built a glider completely from wood. Since it was uneffected by the magnetic mountain, he flew it up and crashed it into the bomber, damaging its controls so that it flew off into space to never return. They build more gliders and escape from the mountain.
Thanks to David Chapman for submitting the cover for this issue.
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