Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy

by Detwiller, Dennis

  It would be a long flight.

  INTERLUDE 4:

  The enemy’s in view; draw up your powers

  February 24, 1943: In transit, Boston, U.S.A. to Matadi, Belgian Congo

  How could it thank the humans who had allowed its plans to come to fruition? The creature called John Smith had never before known the sensation which now moved its shell towards irrational reactions. Sitting within the ridiculously primitive flying craft in the midst of the journey to the...end of everything, Smith was overcome with—what? Smith had read of it in human texts before...gratitude? Thankfulness? It was an unusual sensation. Those who had inadvertantly helped it, and who would suffer at Smith’s hands (or at least his intentions) suddenly seemed...to deserve Smith’s protection? But why? The shell would give no answers.

  The feeling remained.

  Smith wiped away the liquid from its face and considered the portal. They moved forward in utter blackness. Since their course correction and refueling in the Bahamas, they had set out across the sea into the night. This was what the human mind saw of time, Smith knew; a black future, a constant repetitive now, a clear past. How could a creature with such limited faculties be worth Smith’s pity?

  Still the sensation remained.

  This would not stop its plan, however. A plan for which it had suffered through thirty-six linear years of this most primitive time, suffered the inanities and foolishness of the natives, and worse suffered their form and feelings. Smith would gladly remove the ward from the Congo, but it seemed now it would not have to. Others would end the world in Smith’s stead and it would watch with a sensation of pride, one of the few feelings it had grown to accept and enjoy.

  It was truly the stolid members of the council of Pnakotus, of Smith’s own race which provided the answers to its problems. Smith’s plan had run without flaw until the winter of 1938, when in the course of its studies Smith noted the ever growing human conflict in both Asia and Europe. This was an unforeseen occurrence. All the texts of the great library of Pnakotus which Smith had consumed about what the humans called the twentieth century indicated that the second great human conflict would not occur until the summer of 1941. Suddenly, and without indication, Smith’s time for study of the ward at Thule was up, but much more to uncover still remained. Smith could not leave for the Congo, even while travel within the zone of conflict was still possible, if it could not lift the ward when it arrived there.

  Instead it waited and studied. It studied the hundreds of books it had removed from the ruins of the once-grand library of Pnakotus in the desert of Australia. With human assistance Smith removed hundreds of the odd books to Darwin, Australia, and had set about cataloging and studying them during the 1930s. Before Smith’s departure from the library it had released a single member of the not wholly material race which had come after Smith’s own, the Great Race’s ultimate enemy, utilizing the methods found in the restricted texts to guard the treasure of the books. This trap remained for any who might trespass. Not unlike the trap it had left for its pursuers in Bary, Massachusetts.

  Smith pored through hundreds of these restricted books throughout the 1930s. Although Smith found some startling things in them, some were mundane and juvenile native studies of individuals throughout the Earth’s existence. Several were completely blank, but this in itself was not unusual; often the Great Race stored blank tomes along with completed ones on the shelves for future use.

  Amidst these mundane texts was one book which was startling to Smith. It outlined the mechanically induced recollections of none other than Wingate Peaslee, the offspring of the human shell Smith had once occupied. Wingate had been snatched from the year 1943 by agents of the Motion and questioned at length about Smith’s actions by the council of Pnakotus, 150 million years before, about which he knew next to nothing. However, the text revealed a human group, of which Wingate Peaslee was a member, who were pursuing the Thule ward with the same ire and intention as Smith! Smith would not have to destroy the ward. The humans would accomplish this action for it.

  Since its discovery of the Wingate Peaslee narrative from Pnakotus in 1932, Smith had decided to insert himself amidst that human group when the time came right. Thanks to the council’s careful bookkeeping, it had names, dates, and locations to do it. Smith spent a tiny portion of the interim years studying Africa, the human native languages there, and all aspects of its cultures. In late 1939 it returned to the United States and cultivated a job at the university it had become familiar with for a brief time in the guise of Professor Nathaniel Peaslee—Miskatonic. As Dr. John Smith it joined the faculty well ahead of the arrival of the human agents, so no suspicion would be aroused. It waited at Miskatonic, a place with which it knew the Peaslees were well associated, for the events it knew would unfold. The human group, DELTA GREEN, would meet Wingate Peaslee there on January 28, 1943, and by then Smith would already be in place to provide the answers they sought.

  As planned, it was brought into the human group, DELTA GREEN on February 3, 1943, by a human leader named Cook when the rather trite book that Smith itself had (in the shell of Nathaniel Peaslee) collected in 1912— Observations on the Several Parts of Africa—was returned to it for study due to its expertise in native African cultures. What did the book mean? The human wanted to know, and so Smith told them, already knowing the outcome of the human’s decision.

  The ward would be destroyed by human hands, and Smith would watch and...smile?

  But still, at the back of its adoptive brain, discontent.

  PART THREE:

  The sky is darkened as I descend the stair

  CHAPTER 18:

  And in trust itself, the greatest trap

  February 21, 1943: Port Hedland, Australia

  Joe Camp knew it was coming when Steuben stopped climbing the stairs. The ambush, the trap, something—it would come here, on the third floor, amidst the rotting wood and flaking plaster of the derelict building. Steuben, or the man who pretended to be Steuben, watched Camp walk the length of the decaying, third-story hallway with dead eyes. Camp walked slowly, with a feigned ease, ready at any moment to burst into all-consuming movement. Steuben pushed a door next to him without a lock or handle open and gestured for Camp to enter the darkened abyss beyond. The gesture seemed random, as if the man had just thought of it a second before to slice through the very palpable air of distrust which had unexpectedly congealed around them. Camp’s ears, attuned to the minutiae of the jungle, easily picked out the stealthy sounds of a door carefully being shut far down below, of footsteps rising rapidly but quietly up the creaky stairs, of motion in a room further along past Steuben. The awkward moment remained static for a improbably long time. Then, as something ticked over in his mind, Camp’s hands began to move on their own. He felt fast. He felt strong, as the adrenaline kicked in and sent his heart into overdrive.

  What if he’s an agent? What if he’s an agent? What if he’s an— Joe Camp’s mind shrieked as he reached for his pistol, swiping aside his jacket with his free hand with the flourish of a hero in a western. His palm fell upon the grip of the Colt .45 automatic, feeling the reassuring worn wood finish of the pommel, and as he tried to pull it free—felt his fingers one by one slip from the grip. The gun had become entangled in his belt, and the sweat on his palms had unexpectedly made a bad situation much, much worse. Camp’s eye’s widened as he saw Steuben (or the man who pretended to be Steuben) produce a .38 Webley revolver effortlessly, as if by magic, leveling it at his chest with the casual poise of a waiter lowering a tray to a expectant diner. The look on the man’s face was stern, the only one he seemed capable of, that of a man setting to a hard and disagreeable task which was somehow necessary, despite any unpleasantness it might impart upon him.

  These are the last seconds of your life, a voice which was not Joe Camp’s own spoke quietly in his mind, and Camp felt his innards go cold and drop away, like a huge, dark shaft had opened within him. Everything was lost behind the sound of his heart in his ears
.

  Then, like a silent movie, sudden violent action erupted in the hallway, without a sound. The banisters to Joe Camp’s right exploded into splinters of wood. Holes of instant and unknown manufacture stitched their way up the wall near the open doorway, twice bisecting the would-be Steuben with perfect pin pricks of red (and spraying the wall behind him with tiny splatters of black). Steuben’s stern expression never changed during the eruption. Joe Camp stood transfixed, staring, as the world ahead of him was perforated a hundred times or more, all in complete silence. Steuben collapsed with a meaty thud, and the sound returned to the scene along with a high-pitched tinny whining like the siren on a police car heard from far away. An incredible amount of blood flowed out from beneath the body in a huge pool, spreading down the gaps of wood in the floor like rivers and spilling over the opening to the stairs like tiny waterfalls of red, spattering far down below in drips and drabs. Camp smelt gunpowder and felt his legs almost give way. His hands, of their own volition, found the remains of the banister for a moment, long enough to steady himself. Sharp splinters of shattered wood slipped into his fingers unnoticed.

  He turned and met the gaze of the dark man, the man from the car which had followed him from the docks. An aborigine dressed in a white shirt stained with sweat and red dirt, with a flat nose and wide-set, intelligent black eyes. He smiled at Camp revealing a set of perfect white teeth (and to Joe, there seemed to be too many teeth to properly fit in the man’s mouth). Two other aborigines were poised on the stairs armed with Sten guns, their muzzles still smoking. It was they who had obliterated Steuben, firing from behind and to the right of Camp, out of his range of vision.

  What the hell were aborigines doing with 9mm Sten Mark 2 submachine guns? Were they British intelligence?

  “You okay there, friend?” The aborigine shouted through a thick, Australian accent. Everything sounded muffled to Camp, like he had cotton in his ears.

  “No,” Joe Camp said and stumbled towards Steuben’s body, retrieving his Colt from his belt, successfully this time. Surprisingly, the Aborigines simply watched him, neither leveling their weapons at him or warning him away to keep his gun where it was. Camp lifted the .45 and stepped back to Steuben, his feet tacky in the dead man’s blood. He had no idea what he was doing. Steuben’s Webley lay on the blood-soaked floor like an island in the middle of an immense red sea.

  “That there ain’t your fella. He’s still alive. They got ‘im out at the Boora-ground. We got to go, mister. You got no time there to be thinking. Choose ‘em.”

  Joe Camp looked into the eyes of the aborigine for a moment, put his gun in his belt and lifted the revolver from the pool for blood, placing it in his jacket pocket, his hands and pocket stained red. He looked into the aborigine’s eyes and then, risking it, Joe Camp returned his pistol to his belt and shoved the body over, turning his back on them. The dead man who might or might not be Mark Steuben lay face-up now, in the hallway, chest cut to ribbons, drenched in his own blood. His white shirt was now a stained several shades of pink, and his face (which still held a stern expression, eyes open) was slathered with dark black blood. Camp fiddled in the man’s pockets and came up with a small billfold.

  Flipping it open with bloodstained hands he found a photostatic copy of a prospector’s license for a Robert F. Mackensie, resident of Darwin, Australia, and a few Australian pound notes, along with a small bank key tucked carefully in a well-worn pocket of leather. Camp thought maybe it went to a safe deposit box. The man hadn’t sounded Australian. Camp mulled this over and turned to look at his strange saviors, who looked back at him with the implacable stare of the divinely inspired. Camp felt he had wandered into the religious ceremony of a denomination he could not identify.

  “Where to now?” was all that Joe Camp said, and the aborigine who had given him the ultimatum smiled.

  “They got them a right powerful munkumbole out there in the desert, those’re the ones that got yer’ friends.” The leader of the group of Aborigines, Maljarna, spoke plainly, without any attempt at beguilement, as Joe Camp sat in the back of their rotted-out Packard. It sped to the west, out of town, pushing its engine to the limit by the sound of it. The sun was a bloated, orange sphere nearing the horizon, and the sky was aflame with a million warm colors. Joe Camp was very aware of being very far from home. Even Burma felt more like home than Australia. Everything somehow looked foreign; even the colors seemed slightly wrong.

  “What’s a mukumo—” Camp began.

  “Munkumbole. A wizard.”

  “How do you know all this?” Somehow Camp didn’t doubt what the man had to say—the honesty of his words shone through his bright, calm face—but he wanted to know everything he could about it. Despite his questionable circumstances, Joe Camp felt safe for the first time since he had stepped from the plane at Port Hedland. The aborigines reminded him of the Kachins, and the comfort, love, and respect he felt among the 4a seemed also to radiate from the natives of the Australian continent naturally, like they knew of no other way to be. Maljarna turned to face Joe in the back seat.

  “We been watching them, the ones in league with the Nulla. My people have been at them for a long time. It gathers people from time to time, out in the Talbot Ranges. Bad people. Mostly whites though—no offense.” Maljarna shook his head sadly, and Joe Camp was reminded of Keta’s words in the jungle about the Tachoans. Very bad people. The similarities gave him the creeps. Although he had read extensively on the aborigine culture at Harvard, Joe Camp could not put his finger to the term Nulla, even though he could swear he had heard it before.

  “Why did they take them? How did you know about me?”

  “Got lots of questions, don’tcha?” Maljarna smiled again and laughed, a short harsh sound, like the cry of a huge bird. “Yeah. We saw it all go on. We trail ‘em when they come into the city from out the Gibson Desert, which ain’t all that often—so we knew this was somethin’ special. They snatched the whole group of your guys one by one as they came in. Before that they took some Brits, I think. I assume you’re one of ‘em, yeah? The Americans that came in after? Course you are. First it was messy, but then they learned something which got the other two to go with them easy. We thought they got all they wanted, but then they went out for you.”

  “Yeah, I’m an American.” Camp didn’t think he could hide it anyway; he just looked American, naturally, like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. He imagined himself as the foolish-looking lovesick boy with the drooping flowers calling on a girl for the first time, all knobby edges and gangly limbs, with thick, black-rimmed glasses to hide his blue eyes.

  “So why did they take them, yeah? I don’t know. They took ‘em, though, we know that. We know it ‘cause we were there. But there were too many of ‘em before to try to stop ‘em. This last one was a poor showing for them, you was lucky there, son. Don’t know why they took you to the building there. They never did nothin’ like that before, but usually they are in numbers.”

  “Prolly to kill ‘em, Mal,” the squat aborigine who sat in the back seat next to Joe offered, helpfully.

  “Yeah, ah’suppose.” Maljarna turned back to consider the road and directed the driver to turn at an intersection away from the hillside streets and the hundreds of peaked rooftops and brightly painted houses which led down to the ocean. The car’s tires spun in the dirt as they turned, kicking up a huge cloud of red dust, as they began to head south away from the city. The ocean soon disappeared and the land became more rugged, with sparse, sun-dead grasses and gnarled trees broken only by old abandoned homesteads. The sky had become a luminous uniform yellow, rich with highlights of orange and red.

  “I, uh...appreciate...uh...all your help. All of you. Call me Joe.” He felt foolish as he said it, but the men in the car seemed genuinely pleased with his casualness.

  “Yeah, sure Joe. What else?” Maljarna replied over his shoulder distracted, directing the driver to take another fork. The dirt path ahead seemed to be an endless series of fork
s.

  Camp pushed himself back in the seat and looked at the frayed leather ceiling. Through pin-sized holes in the leather he could see the sky and feel tiny lines of wind as they blew through the roof. He sighed and looked at Maljarna, but his mind was working too quickly for anything of use to come out. Caught somewhere between Harvard and the dead man in the hallway, it seemed he could not focus on the now.

  “What are we going to do now?” Camp choked out, his mind suddenly blank.

  “We’re headin’ out to our camp at the range. When I say ‘our,’ I mean us, all of us, the Ngaanyatjarra. Old Muluwari is holdin’ his own Boora ceremony out there. We’re goin’ to have a good old Corroboree. We’re goin’ to stop ‘em. The lot of ‘em, like we done before. Like all our dads done before.”

  “These...whites? Are they German or...?”

  “Nah. Nothing like that, mate. It’s got nothing to do with yer little spat. It’s somethin’ else. Somethin’ older. Anythin’ else there, Joe?” Maljarna almost seemed annoyed with the last question, like the facts were on the table and already obvious to anyone with half a brain. Almost like Camp’s question was something a child would ask.