The Alvarez Incident
Robert Duncan-Enzmann
If you are sensitive, be warned, this is brutal truth.
Have no doubt. It’s from any point of view that an outsider – anyone not in ‘the group’ – learning of the Alvarez situation must be killed and immediately.
However, I was quick to realize my situation, and they were too slow to kill me on base or have me die disgraced in a navy prison – a lifer at hard labor. This is horrible reality, not fiction. Studying late one night, I heard them come and wisely hid, sitting quietly in a link trainer. I saw and heard them purely by accident. I was able to escape the location that night, but the cursed affair reappeared in various guises for decades.
I evaded many snares, traps, and assaults on base before I escaped. Largess, a USN legal officer, had a warehouse he called “rat trap temptation”. A young boy, Gulmont, just a boy of 15 who lied about his age to enlist, stole from it and got ten years in prison. A drinking sailor took a tire and tube for his car and got three years and a dishonorable discharge.
At Repair Shop, I always counted out my lockbox at issue. Once, I found it deliberately shorted and raised hell at the window. I took an exam to go to Navy College and scored highest on base. Largess said it was impossible, so I took another test and scored highest in that naval district. Not long after, I escaped a frontal lobotomy; the doctor refused to do it. Then there was the ‘gonorrhea venereal salad bowl’, but it doesn’t infect me. Largess bribed a waitress with $150, but she liked me and didn’t give me gonorrhea eye. I gave her more than Largess did. Standing in the hangar one day, an agent rushed me from behind, but I saw him coming and stepped aside. The propeller meant for me chopped him up instead.
At last, I was transferred to Richmond. This was not a sanctioned move; it was quite illegal. Largess offered me a jeep to drive to the train station. It smelled suspicious, literally, and sure enough, there was a key in the ignition and explosives in the back. I walked. At 5 a.m. Largess sent a guard after me in the car, which crashed and burned. By 6 I was safely on the train.
I have always advised, ‘don’t play in games you don’t know.’
This is a quarterless war with a number of combatants between groups that don’t have significant interests, goals, greed, concerns, or fears in common. A game does not exist. It’s just that combat, accidentally started, fuels further combat and savage encounters. The trigger for this senseless savagery is the Eidolon. And by this time, he certainly pursued a once-limited concern of his own in the wrong way – which undermines him, threatening to not just weaken but destroy him.
My situation is not just ugly but dangerous as all ‘players’ engaged know who I am and see me for what I am not.
Feedback all too quickly shows me just how the Eidolon created a formidable enemy out of nowhere and nothing. I can’t escape from this game, so I will join them and hopefully survive. The game compares to thermodynamics. If you are in their universe, you are sucked in, so everyone has to play. Once in, once under suspicion, none ever let go; no one can leave the game. You can’t really win, only temporarily survive. The odds are with the ‘house,’ which is to say evil diminishes and inevitably destroys itself. If you cheat (an evil game), the house gets you. Very few can run away but pay a great penalty. The escapee will drastically change and, at the same time, lose all memories and contact with what they were.
The Eidolon’s first move was to silence a witness; jeering at the overrated minions, he hired a group led by Stark to go and ‘teach Bob a lesson he would not be forgetting.’ Efforts failed. Disgusted with Stark, Eidolon short-changes him and then has him liquidated. Stark, infuriated by the way he was treated, that before he dies, informs me about what is planned and who is involved. This decides that I am a job to be started by the Pinkertons but competed by Walter W. Wace and Meat Grinder Gilbert.
We must here explain the stresses of WWII. W W Wace is fantastically strong. He and Gilbert are Japanese POWs who escaped. WWW can and did grab POW guards, grip, and crush all their ribs, killing them. Shortly after WWW escaped, roles were reversed. He decided to hang three who had murdered a number of Americans. He made a ‘game’ of it. He and all three of them, wearing only shorts on a sunken tennis court. Three against one. Walter carried in three nooses and soon executed them, hanging them to the fence.
Gilbert questions the non-com and commissioned officers, quickly getting results. The method was horrible. The suspects were stripped and tied in a line. Gilbert walked down the line, questioning every other one. He worked on body parts with the meat grinder. Screams were as from an insane asylum.
I am indeed fortunate that the Stark of incident-one informed the Pinkertons, lured them into an ‘easy pickins’ building, and dropped nets on them. He stripped them after a high-pressure hose persuaded them to yield their weapons. Stripped, hobbled, hands bound, and all tied together with nylon cord in a daisy chain, he walked them in step to Gilbert and WWW for questioning. This was done individually, of course, to catch lies. These people are essentially trash. Their bosses are all identified. The trash is disposed of, and a few of the bosses disposed of with unorthodox methods – bacterial, poison, letter bombs, rocket fuel fire.
After this, the mob ends all business and contact with Eidolon. To engage in a pointless, profitless war, continually escalating, is insane. They are ‘businessmen.’ I am rid of them, on the sidelines, out of this nightmare.
He puts together a very competent team. He is feeling omnipotent, as from his position, he has engineered two major defeats for the United States. However, broad conspiracies have broad contacts, and these crisscross other root systems. The Eidolons drunkard wife has a sister she denies exists. The sister is and was a communist, but not doing much of anything. The sisters are enemies. Sister lets the Soviet Secret Police know both the Eidolon and his besotted British wife are not just considering, but through a third party, are talking, negotiating with a U. S. government in an ugly mood, hallowing the electrocution of two alleged traitors.
The soviets quickly place a charming, personable spy with the Eidolon. He quickly dispatches the besotted wife and proceeds to make Eidolon a diabetic. Now painfully distracted by diabetic agonies, surviving only by dialysis, the situation has all the elements of the alleged traitor Alger Hiss – an American Blueblood. It would parallel the Whittaker Chambers pumpkin papers scandal. The matter must be hushed up. The ‘first team’ moves in.
I am just one of at least a dozen small-fry targets that will quietly vanish, but enough of a gadfly for Largess to drive. Largess is really, in the vulgar, pissed. Largess’s feelings of fury during world war time burn brightly yet again.
In my physical prime, I take a life or death chance, allowing myself to be lured into a hearing van Largess drives. On the way, I sat in the back seat between two lively things, long-experienced killers in their mid-forties. In form, Largess drives, and a third thug sits beside him. They make only one mistake; I am not tied, although I had, with some friends, prepared for that contingency.
Over halfway to the ride’s end, I act. First, projectile vomit to the right. A disgusting spatter. At almost the same moment, a pencil in my left hand is driven side to side through the neck of the thing to my left. A death blow, tearing a carotid artery.
With lightning speed, a pencil is driven into the front seat thing’s neck, just below the skull. It is quick and so quiet that Largess smells the vomit but hears nothing. The hitman to my right mistakenly tries to reach into his right pocket for his gun. It is enough. I was wearing a heavy ring, and with every ounce of desperate strength, I hit the thug’s spine just below the shoulder blades. In moments the man is paralyzed from there down. The beautiful firearm, a revolver (which almost never jam), is forced butt-first into the paralyzed thug’s mouth. Not easily done, but quickly accomplished. At last, Largess realizes what is happening and turns, a moment too late. My finger hooks into his eye socket with a yank, and the car crashes.
Immediately a car following stops, and they have Largess. He is taken away for a game of ‘royal flush.’ Largess is smart, crafty, and patient. He is ‘played’ for about an hour. Desperate, he tells much but not all and gains an opportunity to escape. Royal Flush is sophisticated upper-class waterboarding invented in Soviet Russia. The finest, most beautifully functioning models are made for the Party by talented Dresden ceramics and glass blowers who used to make dolls. One of these creations, and possibly others, had fallen into the hands of extreme right-wing undesirables who have now captured Largess. Gene Carver yells, “hold still, fat boy, the head frame must be firmly and correctly fastened to move you during the Royal Flushing. Largess retorts, “you idiots are being hunted. You will be caught.”
Flush tank levers were flawlessly matched to the headframe and allowed for fat boy’s pudgy face. He is told to answer the questions, so the flushing will end. If he doesn’t answer, water in the toilet bowl just covers your mouth and nose. If you want to breathe more air, signal, and we flush the toilet. This is the royal flush.
The party ends with a drink he can’t refuse. But first, toilets are made to be used. We turn the head frame and your body, so you can look up. You will see me, lovely Marva, au natural. Better by far than the black and white photocopies made of me. It’s carefully and precisely calculated, but not too many. If there is an error, we will compensate after you drink. We won’t flush, but if you drink deeply, you will lower the liquid enough to breathe again.
They drink wine; Largess drinks and drinks, finally deeply enough so he can breathe through the edge of his mouth. And so, as is said with one for the road, the party is over, he is released from the head frame but still in leg irons and handcuffs. Gene Carver tells him not to feel neglected; there is more to come. As Yogi Berra said, it ain’t over till it’s over. Marva scolds him, “shame on you, betrayer of the Soviets.” Largess moans that we are right-wing fascists. Rupert hollers, “Treason is treason; shows lack of character!” Largess retorts, “You were glad to get information about your enemies.” Marva spouts, “Treason! Contemptibly disgusting.”
“Our hot room is of Soviet design; it is ready to welcome you tomorrow.”
Largess is horrified. It is something he, a trusted agent, watched at final indoctrination. Naked, the traitor enters. First, his feet roasted, then have to kneel; soon useless, he collapsed, roasting his back, screaming. Soviet hot rooms caused agonies lasting longer and far in excess of death by fire in an auto da fe.
Sheer terror must have impelled him to mutilate his wrists and ankles to the bone and then some. Come the morning; he is gone. However, he’s been fed the same tarins that made the Eidolon a hopeless diabetic living only with dialysis.
One might imagine with both Eidolon and Largess gone that the troubled times were over. Nothing of the sort. A dead horse on Prairie, steppe, or veld, even a dying horse, attracts one vulture, maybe many. Both Eidolon and Largess got involved, by inadvertent accident, with the Portsmouth incident, a matter of ‘lost’ atomic weapons pursued by governments to this day. The New Hampshire Portsmouth Incident is a tar baby. Touch it in any way, and it fastens to you for the rest of your life. I didn’t just touch it; I innocently, totally unknowingly, took hold of it. There is no way to get loose, unstuck, so I will tell it all. Behold the years of observation and feedback dumped on me. Has anything good come of it?
