After Warhawk became an operative for Sebastian Shaw, he received a number of improvements. These apparently only lasted while he was an Hellfire Club operative - even the new skills he displayed were never seen again.

Our No-Prize Hypothesis is that his new skills had been telepathically taught, and required psychotronic implants to work. Presumably Warhawk could have retained these skills with enough time and practice (by paying for Character Advancement, in DC Heroes terms), but he didn’t work for Shaw long enough for that to happen.

As an operative of the Hellfire Club, Tanner further demonstrated a mastery of certain K‘un-Lunese combat techniques. With these, he could fight Wolverine on a roughly equal standing. How he had learned those was never explored. Our No-Prize hypothesis would be that the Hellfire Club had documented these martial techniques during a clash with Orson Randall and the Confederates of the Curious, decades before.

After deserting from the Hellfire Club, Warhawk reverts to the capabilities he had in the previous writeup. He has those stats during all the events in the “AWOL” subection in the History section.

History

(The History section starts right where the one in the first writeup ends).

It is presumably at that point that Warhawk came to work for the Hellfire Club. From what can be pieced together, it would seem that the Club rescued him from drowning and used telepathic conditioning to put an end to his hallucinations and other psychiatric symptoMs. They also apparently implanted him with psychotronics, including Hellfire Club psionic shields, and taught him new skills, presumably via mind-teaching and/or psychotronics. Tanner was kept in line using the threat of unbearable psychic pain.

Warhawk was sent to work for Cross Technological Enterprises, running surveillance on the villain Atom-Smasher. Tanner eventually received a kill order and shot his target dead as Atom-Smasher was fighting Black Goliath (Bill Foster). The goal and context of this mission were never revealed.

The Hellfire Club, very curious about the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, then armed Warhawk with non-lethal weaponry and sent him on a daring one-man raid. Warhawk sabotaged the telephone lines, then went in as a phone company repairman. After neutralising the unsuspecting Moira MacTaggart, he surreptitiously reprogrammed the danger room. Warhawk then ambushed and took down Professor Xavier and Jean Grey, then locked the other X-Men in the Danger Room and activated it using the modified settings.

Nightcrawler managed to teleport Wolverine out of the Room before passing out. Logan engaged Warhawk in hand-to-hand combat, but the skilled Tanner managed to knock Wolverine back into the Danger Room. At this point the X-Men got out and took Warhawk down.

The mission was nevertheless a complete success, as the Club now had extensive intelligence about the X-Men.

AWOL

Warhawk stopped working for the Hellfire Club under unknown circumstances, losing the psychotronics and augmented skills but retaining a degree of psychological stability. He was lucid enough to realise that he wanted to die, and decided to go out with a bang by taking out the one man who had bested him - Iron Fist.

In 1981 Warhawk ambushed the Daughters of the Dragon and their friends as they celebrated the opening of the Nightwing Restorations agency. He wounded Iron Fist and Colleen Wing, then defeated Misty Knight in close combat. Tanner purposefully left enough clues to be tracked down, and arranged for Iron Fist alone to confront him on a freighter. The boat was packed with explosives ; Warhawk shot Iron Fist with a tranq dart (using one of the last rounds remaining in his Hellfire Club gun) and engaged him in combat, planning to detonate the boat and kill everyone. However, Iron Fist’s special chi techniques allowed him to resist the worst of the dart’s effect.

Iron Fist fought particularly well, and managed to knock out Warhawk, locate the bomb and partially submerge the boat before it exploded. Nobody died, and Iron Fist delivered the unconscious Warhawk to the police.

Tanner soon escaped, and resumed hallucinating that he was in Viet-Nam, though less severely than before. Thinking that the New Yorkers in Chinatown were military occupiers, he attacked the neighbourhood and was soon met in combat by Iron Fist. This time it was Warhawk who demolished his foe in hand-to-hand combat, though for some reason he chose not to kill him.

Learning that Iron Fist was in an ICU, the furious Luke Cage came looking for Warhawk and found him terrorising Chinatown. Shrugging off bullets and even a rocket, Cage stormed Warhawk’s vantage point and angrily beat him unto unconsciousness. Dr. Bernstein, now an ally of Cage, provided a gas and rebreather to keep Tanner sedated.

Description

See illustrations.

Personality

While he was a thrall for the Hellfire Club, Warhawk hated his unseen masters and swore to make them pay. Through they had stabilised him psychologically, they held him under their thumb and Tanner hated that.