Madam Menace's henchmen
Madam Menace may be a canny businesswoman in the field of arms dealing, but she can't work alone. That's why she has her hired mercenaries. Literally suited and booted, Menace's henchmen are as deadly as they are efficient. They follow after their master's sense of style with their distinctive face masks, the patterns of which can communicate secret messages to her socialite alter ego, Sunset Bain.
At least one henchman appears to be senior over the others, with the "domino mask" pattern of his balaclava extending down over his nose and mouth region. Known named henchmen include Santelli and Rollins. Menace's retinue also includes a team of scientists.
Fiction
One of Madam Menace's gunrunning undertakings operated from a seemingly-deserted warehouse in Manhattan. A vagrant named Krager had tried to do business with the henchmen inside before, but his latest offering turned the lead henchman's head: Machine Man's left arm, swiped while the living android as busy battling Baron Brimstone. The lead henchmen decided this was worth Menace's attention, and so sent her a letter printed with the pattern of his own mask via special messenger.
The henchmen blindfolded Krager and transported him and his cargo to headquarters. Menace showed interest in the arm, but offered only a thousand dollars for it. When Krager tried to haggle, she took him to the lab where her scientists were developing flesh-eating roaches. Krager accepted her first offer.
Menace and her men set up a trap for Machine Man in an abandoned warehouse overlooking the Hudson River, using his arm as bait. The following day, the trap was sprung, and Machine Man was blasted with electromagnetic energy and imprisoned in a stasis field. After a brief tête-à-tête, Madam Menace and most of her henchmen – including the lead, or one with a similar mask – departed by boat for a pre-arranged business meeting, leaving Machine Man guarded by only two of the goons. By pushing against his confines, Machine Man overloaded the magnets and cracked the walls they were mounted on, before making short work of his two guards.
Madam Menace and her men met Zarkoff on a boat out in New York Bay, where she offered the terrorist the opportunity to fund a loyal army of robots. Negotiations were interrupted by the arrival of Machine Man. Zarkoff ordered his men to take out the robot and Menace while he attempted to escape with the arm. During the ensuing brawl, Zarkoff's and Menace's men fought, while Machine Man attempted to keep his frayed temper. The men that weren't flung overboard in the fight abandoned ship anyway, as Zarkoff had triggered it to explode. In the aftermath, Machine Man determined that no-one other than him had been caught in the blast. Arms and the Robot!
The ambiguity of Madam Menace's survival haunted Machine Man. Barely a week later, he returned to the riverside warehouse, where he found a group of henchmen removing or destroying all evidence of their operation on Menace's orders. Machine Man grabbed a mercenary named Santelli and threw him into the crowd, pressing his attack before they could regroup. Machine Man overcame the henchmen, but not before one exploited his overconfidence and hit him in the knee with a sonic rifle. In response, Machine Man knocked him through a wall by lobbing an electro-magnetic generator. He then attempted to interrogate a henchman for more information on his sexy superior, but he learned only that Madam Menace had gone into hiding, and that the goons were just as in the dark as he was.
In truth, Menace was still operating from her underground complex. Rollins, masked up like just any other henchman, informed Madam Menace of Machine Man's incursion, and that their sensors had recorded his every action. Menace ordered him to use the footage to compile a profile on Machine Man's capabilities so as to duplicate him for her munitions business. The next morning, having built a sonic disruptor due to Machine Man's vulnerabilities to sonic weaponry, Menace had Rollins place a classified ad in the following day's Daily Bugle to lure the living robot into a trap.
The next morning, Machine Man became aware of the Bugle ad and returned to the warehouse, which he found to be repaired and fortified. Avoiding a conventional entrance, he used the sensors on his fingers to scout the interior, finding only a maser-controlled homing device left by Madam Menace to guide him to another location. He became waylaid by the Canadian super-agent Sasquatch, but cut their fight short so as to not lose the homing signal.
The signal led Machine Man to an open manhole guarded by two henchmen, who he took out by knocking their heads together. He entered into a large sewer chamber; as he explored, Menace sprung the trap and had her henchmen jump the living robot. Machine Man considered the men to be a step down from Sasquatch, and used the encounter to recover energy. He was also attacked by a group with solar-powered nunchakus, but made short work of them. Menace was forced to give the order to deploy the sonic disruptor. Under the disruptor's beam, Machine Man's body went into spasm.
The battle was interrupted by Alpha Flight's Aurora and Northstar, who had found Sasquatch and traced Machine Man's unique bio-radiations. Determining these superheroes to have no commercial value, Madam Menace commanded her men to destroy them. Believing both parties to want him dead, Machine Man made a desperate play by detaching his head and using his gravity negation to repeatedly batter the sonic disruptor. He succeeded in freeing his body, but the realisation that his humanised face had sustained heavy damage drove him into a blind rage, and he attacked super-agent and henchman alike. As Menace realised that Machine Man had gone irrevocably mad, the henchmen apparently withdrew. Alone Against Alpha Flight!
