“‘Military support for civilian law enforcement’ he called us,” Hennessey hissed. “But the operation the brass laid out was more like the kind of thing we’d been doing for United Fruit in Nicaragua.”
“What exactly had you been doing for United Fruit?” asked Parker.
“Whatever we were told to do,” Hennessey snapped, glaring angrily at Parker’s interruption. But Hennessy’s watery eyes couldn’t hold Parker’s cold stare and he quickly looked down to his own trembling, knotted hands. After a second, Hennessey cleared his throat and looked up. “’Bout the same thing our boys did in Vietnam. ’Cept we didn’t have TV cameras breathing down our necks. We’d move into a pueblo that our officers said was supporting Sandino, round all the spics up, shoot those that gave us any trouble, burn the corn and rice in the field, torch the huts, and march everyone out to a ‘controlled area’ where they couldn’t support Sandino. ’Course, often as not those same corn fields would be turned into banana plantations by the next time we marched through, but what the hell did we care. It ain’t changed much since ’27 as far as I can see.”
“The film,” said Levine.
“Huh?”
“Could you tell us again about the film they showed you.” Levine had not only undone his tie, but also rolled up his sleeves. He could feel the sweat in his armpits and around his collar. Parker, however, didn’t spill a drop—lotsa jungle work.
“Did I leave that out? Well, there was some film shot from an airplane. It showed the town and the surrounding countryside. The captain described the main features of the town, pointing out this road and that. The last part of the film showed a small, black, rocky island, or maybe it was the top of a reef poking out of the sea. But they stopped the film before that got too far along. The captain acted like it was something we weren’t supposed to see.
“Then there were the slides. Someone, probably one of Hoover’s boys, had wandered through town with a hidden camera in a suitcase. The shots weren’t very well aimed and most were out of focus. The camera must’ve been hid real good and run real quiet because some of the locals were awful close when he snapped the shutter. One just about looked right in the camera lens. When that blotchy, goggle-eyed face flashed onto the screen, I guess I must’ve gasped along with everybody else. Everybody except Paskow, of course. Fucker’s heart pumped ice water.
“But that face…it was like something out of Lon Chaney’s makeup kit. The head was all wrong. During Korea I saw a kid in Seoul with the same kind of head. ‘Water Heads’ they’re called. The skull was somehow soft and bloated-looking. The guy’s eyes were bulging and watery, and even though it was just a still shot, those eyes seemed not to have any lids. That’s when I knew this was going to be worse than anything I could imagine.”
* * *
“You Marines better get used to that face; you’re going to be seeing a lot of that the next couple of days,” roared the Captain from Naval Intelligence. “The federal agents who’ve been conducting surveillance of the town have reported a high incidence of …inbreeding.” The Captain said the word “inbreeding” like he could taste it. “This town has been isolated from the rest of Massachusetts for nearly eighty years. The people up there have been marrying their second and first cousins for three or four generations. During the Civil War federal draft agents determined that over half the males of combat age in Innsmouth were unfit for military service.” The Captain paused to let that sink in. “Do not be surprised by anything you see. Appearances to the contrary, they’re not congenital idiots. They’ve used their appearance as part of their propaganda campaign to keep the uninvolved locals quiet and outsiders away.”
Private First Class Robert Hennessey sat there in that drafty warehouse, on those polished benches and listened aghast to that Navy prick spin a yarn about rum-running, drug smuggling, white slavery, murder, piracy and an elaborate scare-story crafted to frighten away the curious. The captain pointed out the objectives with a collapsible metal pointer. As he ticked off the objectives, he struck the map like he was disciplining it for getting caught in the liquor cabinet.
“First Company will deploy along the docks on both sides of the Manuxet. Your mission will be to prevent anyone from fleeing the city by sea. First Company’s Second Platoon will move with a detachment of Treasury agents and secure the Marsh Refinery and the company offices. Second Company will be assigned to hold a perimeter along Southwick Street in the north while its Third Platoon will move to the Marsh estate and secure the Mansion and assist the Treasury agents in serving the arrest and search warrants. Second Company, Second Platoon will move to secure the former Masonic Hall on Federal Street, which now serves as the headquarters of a quasi-spiritualist group calling itself The Esoteric Order of Dagon. There are three churches—here!—” cracking the map again—“along Church Street. Current intelligence indicates that all three have lost their original congregations and are now used by the Esoteric Order of Dagon.”
Hennessey hung on every unbelievable word. He’d done sweeps of hostile pueblos down in Bananaland, but this was Massachusetts, for Christ’s sake. Hennessey turned to Lance Corporal Charlie Paskow, who was sitting with his elbows on his knees. A Camel hung limply from his mouth, slowly dripping ash. “Hey, Charlie?” Charlie turned and pushed a lazy cloud of smoke out of the corner of his mouth. He raised an eyebrow to invite the question. “Are they serious? Are we really going to attack a town here in America?”
“I certainly hope so,” Charlie hissed. His thin mouth was wrinkled into something akin to wry amusement. Once, outside Bluefields on the Mosquito Coast, Hennessey had seen Charlie shoot a ten-year-old kid out of the saddle from two hundred and fifty yards. Charlie’s only comment, as he ejected the spent round from his Springfield, was, “Spics oughtn’t give rifles to kids.” Charlie was as cold-blooded a fish as Hennessey had seen in the Corps. It should have come as no surprise that Paskow was getting a chuckle out of doing to an American town what they’d been doing to Nicaraguan pueblos.
The Captain had already run through the information on the “Esoteric Order of Dagon.” Some kind of creepy South-Seas religion as far as Hennessey could follow the Captain’s lecture. Like something out of a Fu Manchu pulp. Idolatry. Secret initiations. Murder and human sacrifice. It was all too much. Maybe this kinda thing could happen in Borneo or the Amazon, but this was America, less than thirty miles from Boston Common.
Hennessey’s head was spinning by the time the lecture was done. His company, the Third, was to cross the Manuxet to the north side of town, then cut west along Martin Street to Phillips Place. There they would break into four platoons and begin “internment operations.” They were to round up everyone in a four-block area and march them to the old railway station, where battalion HQ would have a processing center set up with the Bureau of Investigation to sort out the “criminal aliens” from the rest of the townsfolk. When their blocks were cleared, the company would work its way eastward, clearing the next four blocks and so on until they reached the harbor. To the north, Second Company would be doing the same, while on the south side of town, Fourth Company would be spread out along Garrison Street clearing blocks and moving north. The noose would be drawn tighter and tighter until everyone in town was accounted for and “sorted out.” A couple platoons of Marine sappers were standing by to begin “excavating certain structures” once the population was clear. Hennessey figured that when the Captain said “excavate,” he probably meant “blow up.”