Midnighter #1 (2007)

Aboard the Carrier in space, a bored Midnighter makes his rounds, checking in on his Authority teammates. He exchanges a few words with Apollo, but passes the others by without speaking. As he passes each teammate, Midnighter considers the roles he plays on the Authority. He decides he is not a lover to Apollo, or a father to Jenny Quantum, nor a friend to the rest of the team. He was created to kill. And kill is what he must do to justify his existence. Midnighter spins a large globe and stops it with his finger on Afghanistan. He tells the Carrier to open a shift-door to Afghanistan, and within moments he is running across the war-torn nation's desert. Midnighter runs toward a small formation of American tanks that are fast approaching a small, unarmed Afghan village. The tanks are preparing to fire upon the helpless villagers. As one of the tanks fires a missile, Midnighter intercepts the missile and kicks it into another of the attacking tanks. The tank explodes, killing the men inside. The remaining tanks focus their attention on Midnighter, but he is too quick and manages to evade their gunfire. Midnighter makes his way inside one of the tanks and fires a missile and destroys another tank. He spares the soldier whose tank he used to destroy the others, but kills his last soldier by thrusting his battle stave through his mouth into the ground. Midnighter wants to send a message to the men who sent the soldiers to Afghanistan. Having gotten the violence out of his system, Midnighter takes a shift-door back to the Carrier, but encounters an unusual delay while teleporting. He is surrounded by the yellow energies that normally compose the Carrier's shift-doors, but hasn't re-materialized on the Carrier. Suddenly, a group of men in strange red suits reach through the energy and ambush Midnighter, beating him into unconsciousness before he can attack. Midnighter awakens in a metal room with a man in a white suit standing over him. The man introduces himself as Paulus. Paulus is a man of revelations. He tells Midnighter than he has bugged the Carrier and has been listening to their conversations. He was able to intercept and change Midnighter's teleportation coordinates thanks to his group of men, wearing "shimmer suits." The suits allow the men to survive indefinitely between teleportation doors. Grabbing Midnighter between doors disrupted his ability to anticipate attacks, which has left him more vulnerable than normal. After taunting Midnighter with an anti-gay epithet, the men, led by a man named Rourke, beat and kick Midnighter into unconsciousness once again. He awakens to find a man with a pistol standing over him. The man claims to have been hired to free him from his location, just outside Hamburg. As the pair makes its way through the corridors, the man's stomach suddenly explodes, leaving a large hole in his body. Paulus and his men stand nearby. Paulus explains that he himself hired the man to free Midnighter, then killed the man in front of him for two reasons: to raise false hopes of Midnighter's escaping and to explicitly show his fate should he disobey orders. Midnighter's second heart has been surgically replaced with a bomb. Paulus has recruited Midnighter, the world's deadliest man, to kill for him. Paulus shows Midnighter a picture of his first target – a black and white photograph of a Adolf Hitler.