Hennessey soon found himself joined by three other handcuffed Marines: a captain by the name of Houseman, a sergeant named Dylan, and a private who claimed his name was “Death.” The feeling of kinship was immediate and mutual. After the debriefing back at the Boston Naval Annex’s brig, Hennessey was reassigned to units of the 6th Marine Regiment based in San Diego. He never again saw the men he’d spent the night handcuffed to in that truck. Except for one, decades later, at the Chosin Reservoir. That had been even colder than Innsmouth. Maybe the coldest place this side of Hell. Hennessey saw Private “Death,” this time sporting a gold oak leaf and quartering a Chinese soldier with an entrenching tool. For a second, recognition passed between them, but nothing was ever said. By the end of that day, the Chinese, like the monsters of Innsmouth, had learned to fear them.
And their fear was all he’d ever wanted.
* * *
“Sergeant Hennessey?” Levine thought the old man was dead. The way he started stuttering and then slumped over with that outrush of breath, Levine was sure he’d just had a coronary. He reached forward and grasped Hennessey’s stick-thin wrist to search for a pulse. As soon as he felt the bird-like bones, Hennessey jumped to life again and snatched his hand away as if the young Delta Green agent were made of red-hot coals. “I’m sorry!” Levine stammered. “Are you all right?”
The question tugged an involuntary and terrible giggle out of Hennessey. “Awl’right? Shit no! I’m not all awlright at all! How many more times I gotta go through that fucking nightmare with you?”
Nearly as soaked with perspiration as Hennessey, Levine glanced to Parker and noted the big Army Major’s nearly imperceptible nod. “I think this will be the last time, Sergeant,” Levine said. “We’ve got all we need, I think. You’ve been extremely helpful, and your government appreciates the service you’ve done us today.”
“And did for us back then as well,” Parker added flatly. That was about as many words as Levine had heard Parker speak at one time.
“That was it?” Hennessey looked more surprised than relieved. “You won’t be coming back?”
“No, sir,” Levine said as he moved to turn off the video camera.
“Are you sure, son? ’Cuz you know, I might remember more next time.” The voice went thin with desperate entreaty.
Levine turned and looked at the old gnarled root of a man coiled in the wheelchair in front of him and instantly recognized that he wasn’t the same man he’d spent the last four days with. That man was filled with hate and jealousy for the men who were still young enough to walk to the bathroom and have a regular bowel movement. This new man was filled with fear, fear that he would die alone in this VA hospital with no one to even notice.
“I’m…I’m afraid we have other duties waiting for us back in Washington.”
“That’s not the only time I saw them fish men, y’know,” Hennessey blurted out.
That stopped them cold. “I thought you said you never saw where they took the prisoners?”
“Not the prisoners,” Hennessey chattered. “Others. And others sorta like them. During the war in the Pacific I got picked up by a section of the OSS. I went on a dozen missions in the Marshalls, the Philippines, Manchuria, and even French Indochina. I saw stuff. I could tell ya all about it.”
“Really?” Parker’s voice sounded like the earth moving.
Hennessey took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Maybe you can answer me one question first? Why is the Navy coming to me for answers? Why ask me when you guys have a whole filing cabinet full of debriefings on this? I ain’t telling you anything I didn’t tell Naval Intelligence right afterwards. So why ask me all over again seventy years later?”
“Sergeant Hennessey,” Levine said evenly, “please believe me when I tell you that I truly wish I could tell you what this is all about. But it’s national security. You understand, don’t you?”
Hennessey apparently tried to look angry, but instead he just looked tired, old and tired. His head dangled at the end of his stumpy neck and he rubbed his eyes with his swollen-jointed fingers. “Maybe you can’t tell me who sentcha, but I can sure as hell tell you who you smell like to me. You smell like those OSS guys. Answered every question with ‘Sorry, that’s Delta Green clearance only.’ I know you ain’t gonna tell me whether I’m right or not, but before I tell you one more thing, there’s something I gotta know. And dammit, you owe me.
“I’ve done a lot of hard shit for my country. Forty-two years in the Marine Corps: Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, Chosin. And those are just the ones I can talk about, if there was even anyone around to listen. After forty-two years in a business where doing anything, including doing nothing, can get you killed, somebody or something should have punched my ticket. Instead I’m propped up in this fuckin’ chair, my legs next to useless, my back and fingers twisted with arthritis. Everything’s failing except my memories. From breakfast to bedtime, all I do all day is wait for my heart to stop. So I’ve paid my dues and done my duty thirty times over and you assholes owe me this answer before I say another word.
“You can’t make me talk. I’m too old to threaten. The only reason I’m still alive is that I’m still a good Catholic and suicide’s a one-way ticket to Hell, so killin’ me would be doing me a big fuckin’ favor. I’m too old to bribe, either. There’s nothing you can promise me that I’ve got the capacity to even enjoy anymore. So don’t even try.
“So if you want to know more, you’ll have to answer one question first.”
“What is it?” Levine asked.
The old bastard looked up. He looked terribly small and frail just then.
“Are we winning?” he asked.
Levine knew the answer to that question. Everyone in Delta Green knew the answer. Some more than others. Some wouldn’t admit it, but they knew. What the hell could Levine tell him? The truth? That rather than face what Innsmouth meant the government had chosen to ignore it? That when others formed a force to fight the war anew, they were disbanded, not once but twice? That all those precious files were either misplaced or destroyed? Could he really look the old man in the eye and tell him that the Delta Green Hennessey knew was now a pack of renegades having to beg, borrow, and steal to fight a war for the very survival of the human species, all because nobody wanted to believe in the things Hennessey fought seventy years ago?
Levine knew that he sure enough owed the old bastard. He’d fought the first battle in a war that raged behind the shadows even today. A war with no end in sight. Hennessey won the first battle and made the first advances. He’d beaten the ugliness back. And then some other assholes had pissed it all away.
Levine owed the old bastard a few restful nights, a few nights of sleep where he could lay his head down and know that he had not sacrificed in vain. That the world was safe. That Jerusalem was delivered from the infidel.
“We’re winning, Sergeant. Of course we are.”
•
The Hour of the Tortoise
Molly Tanzer