The Sun: "Bush Probes Saddam's Pants"

"President Vows: I'll Get To The Bottom Of It."

So, the day after breaching the Geneva Convention, and the day when Saddam threatens to sue for invasion of privacy, and after the furious US government and military announce that they are 'aggressively' hunting down whoever it was that illegally sold those photos (caption: "The Tyrant's In His Pants"), the Sun is still taking the piss.

Still, it's hardly surprising. Rebekah Wade was the same editor who, while at The News Of The World, published those 'name and shame' photos of paedophiles.

Or rather, some paedophiles and several innocent men - many of whom proceeded to get beaten up or their lives otherwise ruined.

She's also the one who whipped up racist hatred of gypsies a few months ago, by launching a campaign against them. (What exactly can you do against gypsies and travellers anyway, you psycho bitch? Buy them fucking houses?)

She's a goddamn irresponsible idiot, in charge of the most popular newspaper in the country.

Hopefully, not for long.

The Hawkins Dynasty, part two

Peter Hawkins – The Penitent / Orion (1942-1989)

Like many children of his generation, Peter Hawkins grew up without a father. Unlike most, his father was a war hero who became the subject of increasing levels of controversy and iconoclasm as the years went by. When Peter was ten, his father was accused of murdering an innocent woman in a revenge attack. When he was thirteen, the Hunter was found, beyond all reasonable doubt, to have been responsible for the killing of 15,000 German civilians.

Understandably, this affected Peter in a most profound way. Although unable to actually hate the man who his mother had instilled into him was a good man (Peter was only two when the Hunter died at Leipzig), he did strive to take his life in a very different direction than his father’s.

Growing up as part of the superhuman community, thanks to his mother’s contacts and friends within the newly formed Embassy, Peter was soon taken under the wing of Archangel (at this time in its original incarnation as Steven D’Angelo). In 1958, Peter Hawkins became the Penitent, Archangel’s teen sidekick, eager to atone for his father’s sins. Although the sword-wielding duo never actually joined the Embassy, they worked alongside them on several occasions, until 1960, when Archangel was eaten alive in China by the Dark Destroyer. The Penitent, distraught at his mentor’s death, stabbed the Dark Destroyer through the throat with his short sword.

Although the Dark Destroyer was able to survive such an injury, the Penitent realised that he had deliberately struck to kill – something that neither he nor Archangel had ever done during their crime fighting careers. The Penitent withdrew his blade and gave the Dark Destroyer first aid until a Chinese Army medical team arrived.

With Archangel dead, Peter Hawkins hung up his sword and went into retirement at the age of eighteen. He was aided in this by the Hawkins Trust, a fund set up by his father and made up of money stolen from countless murdered East End gangsters and Golden Knife cultists.

Eventually, his conscience became too much for him and he realised that living on his father’s ill-gotten gains had undone his good work as the Penitent. Hawkins began accumulating a vast database of knowledge about superhumanity, including evaluations of the powers and weaknesses of over two hundred superheroes and villains, as well as psychological profiles of three times as many masked vigilantes (many of whom, he realised to his dismay, were inspired by the Hunter). His intent was to use the information to study the superhuman phenomenon and assist the Embassy in its fight against rogue superhumans.

During his research, Hawkins travelled widely, visiting many countries around the world, including Tibet, where he studied with Master Tsang Li, and Australia, where he sparred with Olympic gold medallist boxer Dougie Ross. When he stayed in the United States, he practiced street fighting while breaking up New York’s street gangs in the anonymous guise of Orion, a subtle reference to his father. Although he never used them to directly harm anyone, he wore a pair of Colt M1911 handguns at his hips, as a personal reminder of why he fought – to make up for his father’s crimes.

In 1963, Hawkins returned to the United Kingdom. During his time in America, he had gained a reputation as a respectable superhero and one of the greatest unarmed fighters on the planet. This, and the promise of access to his database (later known as the Orion Files), meant that he had little difficulty in joining the Embassy.

In 1966, he bore a son by Danielle Gray, a junior intelligence analyst attached to the CIA. When their relationship was uncovered, she was forced to leave the agency. Fortunately, she was immediately appointed in a similar role in the Embassy. Her knowledge of US metahuman policies became vital during the latter stages of the Vietnam conflict and the uncovering of Project Darwin.

Orion’s identity was exposed in 1966 after he lost his mask during a running battle through Harrods. Within 48 hours, despite repeated requests from the Embassy, the Hawkins family and a whole raft of lawyers, the connection between Orion and the Hunter was on the front of almost every newspaper on the planet. There was a flurry of angry demands that Orion leave the Embassy, including a lengthy speech from the mayor of Leipzig. Peter Hawkins was ready to retire until the former Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer leapt to his defence, reminding Germans of Orion’s part in the1964 battle to save Germany from the terror of Albrecht von Gribblefaust’s ‘New Reich’. In his later biography, Peter Hawkins cited Adenauer’s support as being the factor that convinced him to stay on.

In the same year, Danielle gives birth to Christian Blake Hawkins.

In 1970, after acquitting himself excellently in dozens of high-profile operations, Orion was elected as leader of the Embassy after the Ice Queen stepped aside.

In 1975, the pressure of leading the Embassy and adverse publicity relating to Orion’s father’s actions during the war were cited as contributing factors to the breakdown of the marriage of Peter and Danielle Hawkins. They divorce in early 1976, in full gaze of the world’s media.

During the later years of the decade, Orion struggles with depression, finally finding solace with a young woman named Miranda Winters, who he trains in martial arts and eventually falls in love with. She disappears without trace in early 1980.

Depressed by the failure of two relationships, and in an attempt to return to his roots, Orion takes increasingly long leaves of absence during the 1980s. He prowls the streets of many of the world’s major cities, fighting crime the way he did in New York twenty years earlier.

In December 1989, Orion intervened when he saw a man and woman struggling in a street in Kyoto. The male pulled out a handgun and tried to shoot the woman. Orion stepped in front of the bullet. By fluke, the shot passed through his Kevlar and struck him fatally in the heart. The woman was unharmed and fled the scene.

The police report concluded that the murderer had mistaken the woman for a prostitute and had reacted badly when she slapped him.

The Hawkins Dynasty, part one

Blake Hawkins – The Hunter (1908-1944)

Blake Hawkins’ father died at the Battle of Jutland, leaving him and his mother, Edith, alone in the crime-ridden East End of London. After the war ended, thousands of demobilised British soldiers thronged the cheaper districts of London. One of them, former-private Nathan Collins, shot Edith dead in 1923, after she slapped him for drunkenly mistaking her for a prostitute.

Orphaned at the age of 15, Blake was taken in by Colonel Steve Stackhouse, an American veteran maimed during the final days of the war and a lodger in the Hawkins house. Collins was arrested but walked free after his friends intimidated witnesses into silence. Blake swore vengeance on Collins. Stackhouse, as overcome with grief as the young Blake, taught Blake how to use the Colt M1911 automatic handguns he had carried until his injury. The idea was that Blake would kill Collins because Stackhouse couldn’t do so himself.

In 1926, Collins slipped up during a drunken argument and admitted to shooting ‘a tart’ in 1923. He was finally convicted of the murder of Edith Hawkins and hanged in 1929.

In 1930, Stackhouse was kidnapped and sacrificed by the Cult of the Golden Knife. Enraged at Stackhouse's murder, and with a desire to mete out the vengeance that had been denied to him with Nathan Collins’ execution, Hawkins donned a mask and became the Hunter, self-proclaimed ‘Enemy of Crime’. For years, his main targets were East End gangsters, although he frequently went up against Golden Knife covens.

Scotland Yard spent years trying (half-heartedly) to track the Hunter down, while simultaneously taking advantage of the trail of dead he left behind to crack literally thousands of unsolved cases. In 1939, the war began, and the detectives tracking the Hunter were transferred to the more vital pursuit of trapping German spies. At about the same time, the Hunter stopped leaving such a trail of bodies.

It emerged later that he had joined the army and was fighting in North Africa. MI5 located him, in the aftermath of a battle for an oasis town in Libya, where he had single-handedly taken out an entire company of Afrika Korps infantry, before moving through the town and executing locals who collaborated with the Germans. MI5 gave Blake Hawkins a choice: remain the Hunter and become a propaganda hero for the British war effort, or be arrested and hanged for several hundred murders stretching back to 1930.

Patriotism won out, and the Hunter became a poster boy for the British press, who conveniently ‘forgot’ that he was a serial killer and repainted him as a ‘Crusader for Justice’ and ‘The Hunter of Hitler’. His true identity was not made public. After a series of covert and overt operations alongside various Allied superhumans (despite not actually being one himself), Blake Hawkins married Sally Smith, a clerk in the typing pool assigned to the superhuman taskforce. In 1942, their son, Peter, was born.

On May 12th-15th, 1944, the Hunter and a team of SAS commandoes went up against Albrecht von Gribblefaust in Leipzig. Slaughtering his way through wave after wave of increasingly tough genecrafted troops, the Hunter eventually found himself trapped in an ammunition storehouse, where Albrecht had been storing his V4 cruise missiles. As Albrecht’s forces closed in on him, the Hunter decided to destroy Albrecht’s missiles and blew up the ammo dump. The blast destroyed four square miles of Leipzig and killed an estimated 15,000 Germans, mainly civilians.

His body was destroyed in the blast, but Churchill led a minute’s silence in the House of Commons and memorials were erected first in Westminster Abbey and later in Avalon Cemetery. The minute’s silence was repeated at 2.48pm on May 15th, 1946, across Britain, exactly a year after the Leipzig blast.

Four years after his death, at the request of his widow, the British people were finally told the Hunter's identity, and Blake Hawkins' name was inscribed onto the Hunter's memorials.


(In recent years, the Hunter has become known simply as ‘Hunter’. During his life, he was referred to by the definite article.)


The Hunter’s Best-Selling Bad Guys

The Cult of the Golden Knife - I’m still working on these. Cthulhoid bad guys, basically, with an immortal leader that the Hunter killed several times.

’Simple’ Simon McCloskey - An East End crime lord whose schemes were repeatedly foiled by the Hunter. Despite a feud running from 1934 up until the Hunter’s death, the two of them only met on one occasion, in 1938, during which the Hunter blew off three of McCloskey’s fingers. Having thought himself previously untouchable, McCloskey went into hiding, leaving the day-to-day running of his empire in the hands of his son, also called Simon. McCloskey Senior succumbed to delusional paranoia, and refused to meet anyone face-to-face in case they were the Hunter (after all, no one knew what he looked like at the time). He only re-emerged into the sunlight after the Hunter’s death in Leipzig had been confirmed beyond all doubt. During his time in hiding, McCloskey had come into contact with a race of beings he called ‘Ghouls’, who lived in the Victorian sewer tunnels beneath the streets of London, feeding on drunken vagrants or corpses dug up from cemeteries. McCloskey & Son used the Ghouls as muscle in a series of gang wars throughout the 1940s and 50s, and the McCloskey gang still form a prominent part of the London underworld today.

Overmind - A stage hypnotist turned psychic puppeteer. Overmind controlled those around him into committing crimes on his behalf: robbing banks, bumping off detectives, holding up lorries, stealing valuable artefacts and so on. The main problem that the Hunter faced in fighting his plots was that the vast majority of Overmind’s puppets were innocent civilians, rather than criminals that the Hunter could allow himself to kill. He was never much more than a minor annoyance to the superhuman community until after his death, by the Hunter’s guns, in 1938. Nazi spies, who had long been observing Overmind’s abilities (and who had once come close to becoming his slaves when he detected them), stole his corpse and transported it to Germany, whereupon Dr Franz Grauss, an SS necro-scientist and occultist, managed to restore life to the brain. The necro-scientist fled with the bottled brain in 1945, eventually settling in a village in East Anglia. In 1948, Grauss, and the entire village, were transformed into mindless automatons under the (now insane) Overmind’s control, until they were freed by the Embassy. Overmind managed to get through the British Army’s perimeter cordon and escape the Embassy heroes by turning soldiers to his cause and ordering them to open fire on his pursuers.


Stories that came to light after Hunter’s death:

(1949) In 1944, the Hunter violently assaulted a French civilian in Caen, following the town’s liberation. Lucien Perot, a hotelier, had refused to give up his own room for Hawkins after all the other rooms had already been filled with British and American soldiers. Perot was hospitalised, and Hawkins was reprimanded (but not charged) by his superiors.

(1951) After years of rumours that Steve Stackhouse had actually been Edith Hawkins’ lover, letters were discovered that proved he was actually a homosexual and had been in a relationship with a man known only as ‘G’, who visited the Hawkins house on regular basis. Salacious (and unfounded) tabloid gossip speculated that Blake had been abused by Stackhouse as a child. Some went so far as to say that Blake Hawkins and Stackhouse had been lovers, and that Hawkins’ marriage to Sally Smith was a sham, designed to protect the Hunter’s reputation once he became known to the British public as a war hero.

(1952) For years, no one was quite sure where the money in the Hawkins Trust came from. Many assumed that Blake Hawkins had made some wise investments with his army pay, or that Stackhouse had left the money to him. In actuality, £5000 of the trust fund was Stackhouse’s money, but most of the £100,000 sum was made up of money stolen from the Hunter’s victims during his war on crime. The fact that the trust now belonged to Peter Hawkins, and that it had been so thoroughly laundered, and of course that it was the proceeds of crime anyway, meant that no one managed to ever reclaim any of the money in court. Nevertheless, Peter Hawkins made a series of sizeable donations to the widows and orphans left behind by his father’s vigilantism.

(1952) In 1933, Nathan Collins’s mother was shot dead in a village in the Cotswolds, ten years to the day after Collins murdered Edith Hawkins. The police never found the culprit. Several newspapers in the early 50s noted that Mrs Collins was killed with .45 calibre bullets, of the same kind used by Hunter’s trademark Colt M1911s.

(1954) It emerged that Hunter had been present at the field execution of seventeen surrendered Wehrmacht soldiers in the weeks following D-Day. A month later, evidence of involvement in three other wartime massacres was published in the Daily Mirror, although no one ever suggested that Hunter had personally pulled any triggers.

(1955) Radio transcripts leaked from inside the Ministry of Defence archives revealed a panicked conversation between an SAS sergeant from the Hunter’s team in Leipzig, and a British Army command post in the main Allied force outside the city, in which it becomes apparent that the Hunter’s death was not as heroic as had been portrayed in 1944. The Hunter was planting dynamite in the V4 racks not because the unit had been cut off, as had been the official story, but because he had taken a terminal rifle wound to the stomach and was bitterly angry that he would not be able to personally kill von Gribblefaust (who he erroneously believed to still be in Leipzig at this time). Worse, he had fired warning shots at his own troops when they tried to stop him.

(Can anyone think of any more damaging rumours, revealed between the late 40s and early 60s, that could have tarnished Hunter’s reputation, posthumously?)


Descendents:

Peter Hawkins – Orion (1942-1989)


Christian Hawkins – Orion the Hunter (1966-present)

One of those oddly moving ones...

Click the link in the title.