Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy

by Detwiller, Dennis

  “No. Just give me a minute to think.” Camp opened the dead man’s billfold again: Robert F. Mackensie, prospector, now beneath dried, bloody fingerprints. What did it all mean?

  They drove on.

  “How did you know the others were American?” Joe’s voice sounded strained; his mind raced around the problem and found no obvious solutions. What the hell was all this? Tribes. Nulla. Australians with American accents. Aborigines with Sten guns. Once again, Joe Camp found himself longing for the security of the Burmese highlands. The jungle, the Kachins, hell, even the Japanese, at least all of those were known quantities. Here he was swimming in unknowns.

  “He wants to know how we knew they was Americans...“ Maljarna reflected quietly.

  For a single heart-pounding moment, as all the aborigines in the car burst out laughing, Joe imagined he was being driven off into the desert to be eliminated. This had all been a ruse. This...But it didn’t make any sense. They hadn’t taken his gun, they had saved him. And what of the others he was to meet? Mark Steuben? Wingate Peaslee? His orders at Nazira had sent him here to meet with Steuben to be briefed, before moving on to—where? The orders didn’t say. They just mentioned he was being extracted due to his deep jungle experience. Where, then? Africa? South America? Was the man posing as Mark Steuben, the corpse named Robert Mackensie, a German agent? How did he know their meeting code? Joe knew no other OSS contacts in Australia. But he could turn himself into the American embassy here without difficulty. Something told him the aborigines would simply let him go, even drive him back to town to the embassy, even after all this trouble. The feeling surprised him for some reason. Even though he felt safe, almost like he was among family, in the stuffy, overheated car. It still surprised him.

  “D’you really want to know about all the things us black fellas know? How we know? D’ya really, Joe? If ya come with us, if ya come to see the Nulla, you going ta have ta.” Maljarna turned back to consider him, his face, for the first time since Joe Camp had met him, completely serious.

  “How did you know, Mal?”

  “Magic.” Maljarna whispered, winking at Joe Camp, the aborigine’s lips breaking into a thin, cheshire grin.

  They flashed past a decrepit homestead. Two people on a hill, a half mile from the road, little more than silhouettes in the gathering dusk, watched as their car chose the right fork. The Packard tore south along the dirt road towards a town which a beaten, bullet-eaten, tin sign claimed was called Marble Bar. Things were rapidly spiraling out of control, but Joe Camp could see no way to slow his descent.

  CHAPTER 19:

  All that I now possess seems to me far away

  March 4, 1943: Leopoldville, Belgian Congo

  Fifteen hours on a wheezing, overcrowded train which had seen service since the turn of the century had left Thomas Arnold nearly spent. He unloaded his gear and sat down on it amidst the filth and squalor of Leopoldville, sweaty, bug-bitten and exhausted. King Leopold of Belgium had “civilized” the Congo by enslaving the native populace in the later half of the last century, ripping into the heart of the jungle to tear out whatever there was to take. To Arnold, the filth of Leopoldville seemed a fitting epitaph to a country, and a king, now under the boot of Nazi oppression. Now this was Belgium. All that remained of a once proud-country was its most foreign and hellish holding, a place which stunk of starvation, crime and a thinly veiled servility. This Conrad-esque landscape was all the Belgians who had escaped the Nazi blitzkrieg in Europe could call their own.

  The “station,” which was little more than a place where the tracks were crossed by a rapidly decaying paved road, and where the jungle broke on one side revealing a shanty town, was overrun with foot traffic, most of it native. After the wave of people piled off the train on which Arnold and his group had been for the better part of a day, thousands more piled onto it behind him, riding the same route back to Boma, on the coast. Arnold wished dearly he could go with them. Wailing children, shouts of indignation in a dozen different languages, the squeal of hogs and the screech of the wheels of the train as it slid forward, each insisted itself upon him, interrupting his vain attempt at rest, at respite. Arnold clutched his head and stared down into the dust. The four other members of the DELTA GREEN team stood nearby, guarding a crate of explosives and the rest of their gear, along with a companion who was not human. It was funny how normal the thought seemed to him now.

  The foot traffic in the “station” died off as suddenly as it had formed, the people either disappearing onto the train or off into the lopsided, decaying shacks of Leopoldville. Arnold could not take it anymore; the circumstances had become too strange. “Dr. Smith”—it—stood with the rest of the group, undetected, ignored. Smith was watching him. Always watching him.

  Even now, he could feel alien eyes on the back of his neck, trying to find a way into his mind like a thief fiddling with a difficult lock. Smith had haunted him on their journey half-way across the world, always hovering on the edge of speech, observing his every move with a detachment which made him seem at times to be ethereal, so unreal that Arnold had to remind himself that others could see him as well.

  A young Bantu child rushed up to Arnold and began chattering in French, grabbing at his packs with tiny hands.

  “I carry them, sir. I carry.”

  Huge, jaundiced eyes, swollen stomach, random swatches of rotting cloth used as clothes. The boy was too small to move the gear but he tried anyway, even though they were pinned down by Arnold’s weight as he sat on them. Arnold, unmoved, looked up at the boy, whose face was fixed somewhere between frustration and desperate need, and found he felt nothing. Even now he could see the child on the side of one of the filth-covered roads of Leopoldville lying in refuse, his body pregnant with gas and flies, eyes empty of everything. There was no reason to help the child, Arnold thought; soon enough the world would have its way. He would finally be at peace, the boy. No more struggle or want. A coin would do no good against time and circumstance.

  The child’s eyes fixed on the cloth-covered box on Arnold’s lap with a look indicating he was going to grab for the only thing he seemed capable of carrying. Before he could, Arnold placed a huge hand on the boy’s sparrow-like chest and gave him a rough shove. The child spilled to the ground in the dirt, kicking up a cloud of white dust. Arnold carefully checked the contents of the cloth sack. The alien device lay inside, untouched. The boy stood again despite cuts on his knees, eyes defiant and mad, and spit curses at Arnold.

  Arnold gave him a coin anyway and the child ran off into the filth to die.

  “So, sir, what now?” the smiling Gurkha asked in slightly accented English. Manbahadur Rai was one of Major Cornwall’s men, and was along as their impromptu jungle specialist, since the OSS was having some transportation and contact problems in the Pacific. Arnold’s information was spotty at best since they had left Matadi two days before, but it seemed some of their men had run into some incident in Australia; further details were not provided. Cornwall had alerted the members of the PISCES team which had been sent earlier to monitor the situation in the Congo to fill in the gaps of the DELTA GREEN team. It seemed between the British and American forces they could only scrape together four human souls who were willing to save the world.

  Rai had served in Burma himself for three months, fighting a guerrilla war against the Japanese in the canopied jungle of the Burmese highlands. He was tiny but looked in some way...ready. Rai somehow managed to always be prepared for anything which might occur. That was what came to mind when confronted with such a vibrant presence; his grasp of every situation was plain for anyone to see. Endlessly upbeat and incapable, it seemed, of tiring, Rai hauled packs like he was an ant, lugging a full load of gear which looked improbably huge upon his back. He could walk for hours (a fact he demonstrated when the train broke down at Boma the day before), hauling any load up slopes, stairs, anywhere. The Nepalese tribesman never lost his breath or looked winded. He never sweated. He was the perfect fighting ma
chine.

  Arnold, watched as Rai removed his kukri from its sheath with a tiny, childlike hand. The huge, hooked fighting knife was razor sharp and could, when used properly, take an enemy’s limb off with one well-placed slice. Often, when fighting in guerrilla actions, it was the only weapon the Gurkha used. The Japanese had learned the hard way that it was a superior weapon.

  Rai checked his perfect white teeth in the reflection of the blade. Arnold, despite his dour mood, smiled and looked back at their group.

  The three other members of the team stood in a tight circle about fifteen feet behind them, gathered around a pile of equipment. Smith stood off to one side, watching Arnold with unblinking, lizard eyes. Two were OSS men recently churned out of the newly minted United States commando production line: Louis Jackson, from Jackson, Mississippi, by way of Yale, who was in charge of explosives and who looked like a car salesman, and Archibald (never Archie) Haulewell from New York, who was there just in case something happened to Jackson. The other man was a PISCES intelligence analyst who had prepared the report on the local rumors regarding the grey city in the Congo, and who had contacts in the bush. Despite numerous introductions, Arnold could still not place the man’s name. There were just too many facts to consider which seemed far more important.

  “Well, Rai, I guess we wait for the train for Lumbaso and then we’re off to Loto. Then it looks like it’s into the jungle.” Arnold stood up and lifted his rucksack up with a grunt.

  “Yes, sir.” Rai deftly returned his kukri to its sheath in a single fluid motion that simultaneously nicked his thumb, drawing the smallest trickle of blood. Rai’s explanation that Gurkha tradition demanded that the sacred kukri never be returned to its sheath without being blooded had not made Arnold any less uncomfortable about seeing him do it.

  “How’s the explosives? Did Jackson check them?”

  “Good. Good. Yes, sir.”

  “They have me paranoid, Rai. It’s a rough trip out there.”

  “Don’t worry, sir, nothing but electricity can set it off. I hear you can even cook the composition-B in a fire, and nothing—”

  “All right, Rai.”

  “Sir,” Rai said, and trotted back to the group.

  As the hours passed their group separated, individuals breaking off to smoke cigarettes, to talk to one another in hushed tones, or to be alone. Only Smith remained completely aloof. At one point, Jackson confided to Arnold in a thick southerly drawl that the contents of their box of explosives would:

  “Give all the heads on Mount Rushmore a severe headache.”

  No one could know what Arnold did. The explosives would never be used in the manner their orders prescribed. He would never allow them to be—even if he had to kill every man on his team with his own hands to prevent it. The city of Thule would survive him, that much he was sure of. Whether it survived him by minutes or decades, only after death it would no longer be his responsibility. Until then, the city, Thule, would come to no harm.

  When the second train came in, the one that would wind its way to Lumbaso in the center of the jungle, Arnold and his group loaded their gear onto it and were given a seat up front by the white Belgian conductor who smiled at them through rotted, yellow teeth. The crowd outside mysteriously congealed again as if by instinct, pushing and screaming and moving, each person sure of his or her own importance above all others. Small clusters of hogs, boxes of chickens, and hundreds of other animals were rapidly pushed aboard by the natives, who treated each small animal with the love usually reserved for children.

  Arnold settled into a polished wood chair as the car filled up in a matter of minutes with children, old women and animals. The rest of his team shoved their way on to the seats across from him. And as he knew he would, Arnold found himself looking directly into the flat eyes of Dr. Smith who stared through him with the implacable gaze of a man trying to dissect a particularly difficult puzzle. Smith looked carefully at the bag on Arnold’s lap. The bag which held the alien “camera” device. Trying, it seemed, to look through the bag and wood to the alien interior of the machine. Its eyes remained fixed on the box for a long time. The train began to slowly lurch forward.

  “Why do you not take any pictures?” Smith suddenly asked. Arnold could not be sure, but he thought he heard a note of amusement in its voice.

  INTERLUDE 5:

  To restore all as it was, my life in reward

  March 1, 1943: Boston, Massachusetts

  The Motion agent dropped the brown paper sack full of electronic components down on the table in the cluttered apartment. The humans had stopped hours before, exhausted, but the thing in the boy’s body continued its labor. They had been toiling for the last five days straight, slowly assembling intricate and bizarre contraptions at the behest of their master. The boy considered the exhausted servant for a moment with contempt, searched through the paper sack for a small roll of silver wire, and waved the human away with an impatient gesture. The human shuffled out, the same way he had come in, head downcast and eyes bloodshot. Moving a large electronic component out of the way, the Motion man swept the door shut and locked it behind him.

  Inside an apartment, as it had done in a thousand places a thousand times before, the Motion had set up shop to construct the devices of the Great Race, utilizing the crude tools of the era to fulfill the council’s demands. The attic room was empty except for the barest essentials. None of the usual furniture was present (except for a large wood table and three mismatched chairs), but the apartment was filled with various hand-made components which had yet to be fitted into the machine the group had been working diligently to complete. The being called One considered the fruits of its labor, the device it had been constructing on the table for five days now. Since its conversation with the human, Thomas Arnold, its intellect had been processing all the requirements of such a device, looking for flaws and errors in the humans’ contributions with a critical eye. It would have to redouble its efforts to complete it in time. Even now the precipice in time approached.

  The device covered the entire table in odd, geometric shapes and was composed of hundreds of separate segments of wires, glass and mirrors fastened to slots of wood and cardboard with tiny, soldered hooks of melted metal. The construction was filled with large geometric gaps which opened to its wire-filled interior, within which the various separate components now scattered about the apartment—built by the harried Motion agents under One’s direction—would be inserted when the time was right. One would have to complete the device soon, for now it knew, after contacting the council, that the ward at Thule would fail on March 21, 1943. Past that, no recovery of the timeline would be possible.

  Temporal communication with the council of Pnakotus indicated that the traitor’s actions had devastated the future timeline. Causality in which the Great Race could exist past November 5, 1945, was completely gone, replaced by a void within which no species existed that the Great Race could occupy. Human civilization, and with it the circumstances which would lead to any future civilizations on the Earth, completely disappeared on that day. The council had already lost four scouts probing the darkness past that time. With the information One had provided on the trap the traitor had set for it, the council now knew that their greatest enemy would be released on March 21, 1943, when some event would destroy the ward. The Great Race’s greatest secret had been compromised.

  Following orders, One had informed the human, Thomas Arnold, of the dire consequences of destroying the ward in the Congo. One had given the human a device to prevent this circumstance from coming to pass, the companion device to the one it was constructing now. If One did not complete the device it was working on before the humans and Smith arrived at Thule, existence past November 5, 1945, would cease to be. It would forever eliminate the careful and precise path through time that the Great Race had spent eons sculpting and maintaining. Once released, the great enemy would never be confined again.

  Soon enough it would all come to pass, One though
t to itself. It continued to rapidly solder components. It was learning that pointless conjecture was one of the first effects of its intellect being housed within a human shell. The traitor and One would meet again in the limited future, and what would become then? It did not know, but it had an idea. They were equals, and like equals they would cancel each other out when their time came.

  It knew the truth of time in a way no human could. Events occurred, or they did not. There were few possible outcomes for any event. The traitor would perish, or the future of the world would die in its stead.

  CHAPTER 20:

  The art of our necessities is strange

  February 23, 1943: Ngaanyatjarra Camp, Gibson Desert, Australia

  Old Muluwari, a hunched, wrinkled, dark-skinned aborigine, looked into Joe Camp’s eyes and smiled a toothless smile, and Camp felt the warmth of the good man flow into him. It was just that plain. Camp could think of no other way to put it; the feelings flowed out of the man in waves, like heat from the sun. After two days of relentless travel, by car and at last on foot, Camp had somehow found himself in the midst of Western Australia’s Gibson Desert in the middle of the drought season, surrounded by a gathering of more than a hundred aborigines.