Comic Book Synopsis / Plot
Doc Savage and his team pick up elderly
Lauren Silver at her nursing home and bring her to the shuttered
Serenity Convalescent Center where Doc seeks to access her deepest
memories. She is the only surviving member of the 1974 Arachne
cult....
In 1974, Professor Silver and his wife,
old associates of Doc's, asked him to find their missing daughter.
Lauren was a grad student at Columbia University and rather stable
until she suddenly disappeared. Doc and his team discover she had
been inducted into a cult called Arachne; further search leads them
to directions to a Caribbean island and punch cards for missile
programming. A trip to the island reveals the cultists, Lauren Silver
among them, preparing to launch missiles to goad the USA and the
Soviet Union into thinking the other is attacking, triggering World
War III. After a brief battle Doc and crew have the fanatical
cultists captive and put an end to their mad scheme....
Back in the present, Lauren Silver is
brought out of her trance. It is revealed that the cultists had been
taken to the Center and, with Doc's expert treatment, their mental
conditioning was isolated and reversed so that they had no memory of
what they had almost done. But Doc knows the cultists were handpicked
by a mysterious mastermind and hypnotized into doing what they did.
And Doc knows who that mastermind is....