Trial by fire - John Ostrander

In the late 1980s, a secret government program designed to neutralize super-powered threats to national security was reactivated. Task Force X had gone through many transformations since it was first created during World War II, but one thing had never changed: its members called themselves the Suicide Squad, and they lived up to their name. Faced with a rising tide of metahuman crime and terror, the program's hard-headed director Amanda Waller sold the President on her vision of an updated Task Force X: a covert action team composed of incarcerated super-villains who earned time off their sentences for every mission they completed. Deniable, disposable, and deployable to any spot-on Earth, this new Suicide Squad would be the perfect weapon of last resort - as long as they could be kept under control.