Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy

by Detwiller, Dennis

  At the Colonel’s funeral a rather squat and homely man in expensive civilian clothes sidled over to Thomas and introduced himself as “Billy” Donovan, a good friend and former colleague of his father, and by the way, aren’t you off to officer’s school? If you ever need a job...

  And he did, it turned out. The family house in Dunsmuir wasn’t paid up, his mother tearfully told him after the funeral. All the family’s savings had been squandered in the Crash and in trying to recover from the Crash, and on top of that Lucas would be heading to Berkeley in 1941. So Thomas Arnold got on with it and joined the army. He sent almost everything he earned back home every three weeks. It made him feel good to give something back.

  His commission took him to New York to brush up on the economies of the war powers for General Donovan in April 1940. During that fine New York summer headlining Project GEORGE, Arnold read books on European economies, wrote profiles on industrialists, studied French and German and spent a lot of time in Central Park, admiring the skirts and eating hot dogs. Occasionally he caught a skirt or a Dodgers game (sometimes both at the same time) to break up the monotony. He was young, bored, and yearning for something to give his life meaning. It would not be long coming.

  There was a time in his life when he thought that the meaning of life would be found in the love of a girl. Now, in London, such a simple wish seemed completely alien. It was like a bad taste in his mouth. Since Pearl Harbor, everything good about his life had been tossed out the window to make room for the necessary evils of war.

  Ever since that Sunday last December, Thomas’s life had tripped over into some alternate world where everything worked in fast forward. Months shuffled by like stations passing an express train, shooting through his life at breakneck speeds, disappearing into the past before he could take a good look at them. In Maryland at Area A he trained for covert operations, putting his athlete’s body to the test, becoming a skilled troublemaker and sneak who could blow up a bridge and then lie his way out of harm’s way in three languages. In Maryland he learned “Billy” Donovan had special plans for him, plans that involved a psychological warfare division of the newborn OSS code-named DELTA GREEN, and in Maryland his mom’s letter informed him that his little brother Lucas had run off to join up for army service.

  After that, it was all madness.

  Before the war he was not a violent man, but he found a reservoir of will inside him to make himself a killer, a portion of himself he put to the test in France for the first time. He discovered what he believed about himself was essentially true—there was a thin shell of civility wrapped around a heartless machine that would do what had to be done, no matter the cost. A shell that was like the illusion he now knew the world to be.

  Then came that cold day in February in 1942, the briefing by Lt. Commander Cook. He could not remember how it started or when it ended, or if it really even ended at all. Sometimes it felt like it was still going on. That was the first day he read of intelligent creatures from beneath the sea, of a Massachusetts town called Innsmouth, of things man could not explain away with slide-rules or special relativity, typed up in the earnest tones of a report that had been written by a Marine major general and initialed by General William H. Donovan himself.

  Arnold had sat in the office in Washington and considered the black and white photos of inhuman creatures that even now still lived in military custody. With a dull sense of wonder he felt his mind desperately trying to find and hold on to new and terrible facts—he could feel those new facts slip away from his mental grasp, crashing about his mind like a bull in a china shop, leaving a trail of wrecked thoughts, wishes and dreams in their path. Even back then, when he had not truly believed the reports, not deep down, it still hurt to think about them. Back then he could still shrug it off as an unpleasant sham, a test, despite the photos and films, the medical files, the recordings, and the men beyond reproach who told him these things were real while wearing expressionless faces.

  But now he knew it was all real. He had seen those sea-things in the flesh himself.

  He opened the folder on the desk and considered it for a while, a crease of concentration riding his brow. A man had died trying to do the right thing that night on the Nez-de-Jobourg cliffs, and now Arnold paged through the dead man’s translated documents. It was amazing. They had been typed in France by a German, captured by an American, and translated by a Brit. The papers had lived a fuller life than most men. Everything that Cook and Donovan feared most was revealed in fifty-three pages of type, sprinkled with raised e’s, along with forty-three swastika-emblazoned files. The secrets of the Third Reich unfolded in the notes of a dead man like some cheap magic trick. Somewhere Cook was reading a copy of the report Arnold had in front of him, cursing his luck and plotting. Donovan would be ready to pledge anything to the effort now. Once Donovan got President Roosevelt alone to bend his ear, forget it. DELTA GREEN had shifted from an obscure concern to the most important division in the American war effort in Europe.

  The entire war had changed, now, because the Nazis knew. They fucking knew everything. And worse yet, they had a head start. Their little crew, their Karotechia, had been sinking its teeth into the occult for more than four years, and DELTA GREEN was far, far behind the curve. Maybe too far behind to ever catch up. Arnold refused to let the thought sit and fester. He rooted it out with the image of the crumpled, burned form of the dead Nazi officer he had left on the cliffs of the Nez-de-Jobourg. The look of peace on the man’s ruined face, the way he had struggled and rushed and fought to get these documents out, despite the depth of his situation, to his very last breath, even, left Arnold ashamed and scared. Could he ever match such an act of will?

  The valise he had found on the cliffs had obviously been meant for Allied hands. The careful arrangement of its contents, the classified Nazi documents, the typed confession explaining every aspect of their occult research program, all told of a man who saw what was wrong and tried to make it right. The hero of the situation had been a man named Karl Bruning, a man with a skill that had been turned against him, a man who, like Arnold, struggled despite being out of his depth. Arnold only hoped he performed as well as Bruning had when his last moments came.

  The phone chattered. Arnold flipped through the folder until he found the photograph of Bruning, looking distant and austere and far away. Bruning’s chin was chiseled and clean shaven, his hair was clipped and blond, his black SS uniform was ironed and perfect. In all respects he appeared the perfect Aryan, the perfect Nazi, but something was there that Arnold could see that the Reich had not touched. Something which made Bruning human. Arnold’s eyes drifted down to the last page of the document and read:

  Now, there is nothing left to say except I am sorry for having burdened you with these secrets.

  Hauptscharführer Karl Bruning, Ahnenerebe SS

  The phone continued to chatter as Arnold closed the folder. He carefully placed the three folders back within the safe and turned slowly around the room, his mind full of random images. His brother Lucas in long johns, jumping up and down on an old mattress. His father in uniform one California morning, backlit by the sun. Monsters stumbling from the waves in the French night like madmen.

  The telephone stopped ringing and the room settled into a thick silence. He sat down in the creaky chair slowly, listening to his knees pop and wincing at the aching in his legs. Arnold wished somehow he could tell Bruning that it had all worked out all right, that he had done his duty to humanity, that the burden of secrets had been successfully passed. Arnold twisted his class ring around his finger and considered the blank wall, his face empty.

  The phone began to ring again, crying like a petulant child, but Arnold just continued to stare. If it was bad enough, he knew, they would call back.

  “Merry Christmas, Tom,” Lieutenant Commander Martin Cook said, distracted. The little man was crouched behind a mountain of paperwork, rapidly crossing sections out on a report with a censor marker.

  “Y
eah. You, too,” Arnold mumbled and sat down in a huge, overstuffed leather chair. The room in the Joint Intelligence Headquarters suited Cook. It was decorated in early English librarian. Dozens of titles, most of which Arnold would lay even money never had left the shelves (at least not in Cook’s hands), covered every available space on the walls. Behind Cook’s head, a window taped and filled with sandbags ruined the illusion of a cloistered study.

  “The general will be here in a few minutes along with the rest. I wanted to talk to you alone for a minute.” Cook looked up through bloodshot, squinty eyes. Every time Arnold looked at the man, all he could think about were strange dogs bred for idle amusement. Cook’s face was a maze of furrows and wrinkles, with jowls like a bulldog and deep-socketed eyes that somehow managed to look tired and alert at the same time. Before Arnold could smile, he bit his lip and looked away.

  “Uh...sure, sir. What is it?”

  “I, um...heard about your brother. Me and Bill, um...General Donovan discussed sympathy leave?” Cook’s face quivered as he tried to look compassionate, but his eyes remained cold and piercing.

  “No, sir. I’m not going anywhere. Thank you. No.” Arnold shook his head and searched the ceiling, trying to hide his discomfort. He shifted in his chair like a schoolboy being reprimanded by a schoolmaster. California seemed unreal to him, now, like a country he read about in a fairy tale, and the thought of returning there for Lucas’ funeral was as alien as the things he had seen on the Cap de la Hague beach. What the hell were they going to bury, anyway?

  “All right, lieutenant. I’m not going to argue.” Cook sat back down and shuffled through the papers on his desk. “Did you get the translations?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Same thing you did, I’m sure.”

  “Yes. I’m sure.” Cook pulled a folder from the pile and opened to a page.

  “Did you read this...Parsifal file?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re going to coordinate this with the Brits. The file points towards some Abwehr operatives in England checking up on this...Arthur, um...Jermyn, about a shipment from...the Congo, I believe. It’s the easiest thing for us to check up on, too. We’ll want to find those agents... and this Jermyn fellow.”

  “What do the Brits know about all this?” Arnold sat up in his seat.

  “Enough, apparently. General Donovan has been talking to some of their military intelligence men who seem to understand the gravity of the situation. We’re bringing in one of their men, an assistant to the man who heads up their, believe it or not, Military Intelligence Division Thirteen. They handle investigating...ahem...‘oddities’”.

  “Let me guess ...”

  “You got it.”

  “Does everyone have an occult division except us? And here I thought we were being pretty original until about four months ago. Now everyone’s got one.”

  “So it seems.”

  “So how’re we going to play this?”

  “Close to our chests. Full poker faces.”

  “Got it.”

  The door burst open like whoever was on the other side was listening to their conversation, waiting for a pause to make a dramatic entrance. The presence of Donovan filled the room before the man even entered. His booming voice could be heard outside as he chided Cook’s British secretary for not having seen “Gone With the Wind,” laughing along with the woman’s harpy-like laughter, and his entourage of men entered the room before him. The other five men of the DELTA GREEN team Arnold had led to the French coast entered, wearing suits, hats in hand, each dressed in black or tan, wearing no insignia except the bulges under their coats. Arnold stood as well.

  General “Wild” Bill Donovan entered with a swagger, followed by a pigeon-chested British officer whose eyes were so wide that it looked like he didn’t have any eyelids. Donovan’s personality engulfed all the men in the room. Donovan glanced slowly around and his eyes seemed to mark every man individually, and they all looked back at him, even Cook, with something like the awe a child holds for his father. He was somehow bigger than life itself, and it seemed Donovan could do anything. He reminded Arnold of his own father.

  “Merry Christmas, gentlemen.”

  A murmur of greetings were returned from everyone in the room. Arnold eyed the Brit carefully. Nervous and thin, the man suddenly exploded in a flurry of movement, removing his officer’s cap as if he had just realized it should no longer be on his head, nearly dropping the bundle of files he carried in his right hand in the process. Arnold noted the finely made, black, rabbit-skin gloves he wore on his hands and the perfect press of his uniform. The Brit’s face was gaunt and his brown hair was close-cropped, causing his jug-handle ears to stick out comically. But his face was serious, if scared, and his green eyes darted from point to point all over the room, like he was expecting some sort of ambush to occur at any moment. Arnold found himself smiling at the Brit, amused by his discomfort and lack of social grace.

  “Tom. I’m damn sorry about Lucas.” Donovan walked up to Arnold and shook his hand. His face was filled with the most sincere expression of grief Arnold had ever seen. “How’s your mother taking it?” As Donovan leaned in to study Arnold’s eyes, Arnold found himself looking at the ugly, square face of “Bill” Donovan. Not General Donovan, but suddenly, somehow, just plain “Bill.” In that stare were the implacable condolences of a man who had seen thousands die, and who would still send thousands more to fill their ranks without hesitation, each time he was called to do so.

  “Fine, sir. She’s strong.” Arnold looked away and tried to picture his mother in his mind’s eye. All he could see was Lucas’ burned body floating on serene blue waves, washing towards some distant shore.

  Donovan glanced up at Cook, who shook his head. Arnold knew the message had passed between them that Arnold would not be taking sympathy leave. “Good, we need you,” was all Donovan said about it. Arnold could feel the void in him filled instantly by Donovan’s confidence.

  “Oh. Excuse me.” Donovan turned and placed a huge hand on the shoulder of the tiny British officer, who seemed to shrink noticeably when the room’s attention became focused on him. “This is Lieutenant Alan Barnsby, British military intelligence.”

  “Good...um...afternoon, sirs...um...gentlemen.” The Brit’s voice was fey and bookish; maybe that’s why Arnold thought he seemed so at home in Cook’s library-like office. Even now the gun on the Brit’s hip looked wrong, as out of place as a holstered pistol on a nun.

  “I...am here as a representative of our concern within the British government which handles such...ahem...affairs as your group was involved in on the French Coast.”

  “Sit down, please.” Cook gestured at the overstuffed chair.

  Barnsby sat uncomfortably and Donovan circled the desk to the other side. Arnold began looking through the titles of the books on the wall.

  “What exactly are we talking about here, Barnsby?” Donovan demanded, while retrieving a huge cigar from a humidor on the desk.

  “Sir. The incident on December 8.” Barnsby shifted in the chair like a child who had to go to the bathroom.

  “Yes? Go on, please.” Donovan took three quick puffs and glanced up, his eyes alight with humor.

  “Sir. The shelling of the Nazi camp on the beach at the Cap de la Hague by your special operations team.”

  “And...?” Donovan stepped around the desk and sat down on a large, leather couch. It let out a squeaking crunch as he settled into it. An acrid and unpleasant smoke filled the air.

  “All right...sir. I am afraid I cannot say any more. I am under orders from Major Cornwall to not reveal any of our intelligence until I am sure about what you Americans know about all this...” Barnsby’s face had grown a deep and bright pink, and his eyes traced loops on the patterns of the rug, desperate for something to look at because he could not meet the General’s gaze.

  “Well...what do we know? Hey, Martin, what d’you know?” Donovan snick
ered and looked over at Cook, who looked up, eyes sad and knowing.

  “All right, son,” Donovan said. “Here it is. We came upon something in that raid. We have...information about the Nazis’ researches into our mutual area of interest. We’d like to work this out between us. Ideally your Major Cornwall will be smart like General Gubbins and Major Menzies, and cut us out a piece of the pie. Or we’ll have to make our own pie. And ‘too many cooks spoil the...’ I’m sure you know the saying. So, work this out and we share. But don’t get any ideas. Because if you take what we’ve got and turn your backs on us, you’ll be sorry.” Donovan stood and considered his cigar with distaste. “What the hell kind of stogie is this?” He asked sadly, not really directing the question to anyone at all, and threw the cigar into the wastebasket with a loud clang.

  “Sir,” Barnsby said in reply and stood, carefully placing his officer’s cap on his head, eyes downcast.

  “You can go, Barnsby.”

  “Sir.” Barnsby turned and left the room like there were rabid wolves at his heels.