Cornwall let out a laugh which contained no humor: “What was in them? Nothing...everything. What was there was so convoluted and strange that it made little sense. What we could understand was vague. Most of the text dealt with the past, some with the future. It seems Hutchins discerned his precognitive secrets from a volume we never found, a volume about the 1940s. At least, that is what he claimed once we had him in custody, although he would not reveal where he got the books. He claimed he was in league with what he referred to as ‘those who will come after.’ He said that many people were similarly in league, but little else was discovered about his claims. And then he was gone.”
“What happened to Hutchins, sir?”
“Suicide. Under...unusual circumstances. Details are unimportant. What is important is that his death ended our investigation until your brief. We could not uncover where Hutchins had come across the books. Those books we recovered were copied, cataloged, and stored. We’ve had occasional insights into world events through some oddly worded sentences in them, but mostly they are too vague to be of any use. But if we were to find the source of the books...” Cornwall’s eyes were alight with fervor now, his fist clenched. He looked over at Barnsby and then composed himself, turning around, standing, placing his hat squarely back on his head.
“If you could find the source, no more Dunkirks, then, sir?” Barnsby’s voice rose as he finished the sentence and tears stood in his eyes. Cornwall, the man he had trusted, the man responsible for the secrets of the world, had secrets of his own. Americans were dying to protect those secrets.
“Something like that, lieutenant.” Cornwall’s voice was far away.
“Sir, what have you done in Australia?” An incredulous whisper.
“I...we have done everything we had to do, Barnsby. For King and for country.” Cornwall sniffed once and pushed his window wide. A staff car outside slipped past, its engine frantic and overwhelming in the water-heavy air. A cold wind blew in as the sun began to emerge from the low, grey clouds.
When Cornwall shut the window, an answering silence filled the room, destroying all questions before they could be asked.
CHAPTER 23:
Infinite hush in an ocean of silence
February 26, 1943: Tobin Ranges, Gibson Desert, Australia
Flame-colored pinpoints of light danced in the limitless dark. The moon had long since gone down. Now, in between, was the time of absolute night. The starlight offered little clarification except to denote the division between the horizon and the ground. Everything beneath the lip of the world was perfect black.
Everything, that is, except for the swaying, tiny lights floating out in the night, which moved slowly away from Joe Camp. Camp was crouched on a stony outcropping of rock which Mal had told him, when they set camp there that dawn, had no name. They had come more than seventy miles in two days from Lake Woolomber, across the flatlands of the Gibson Desert, traveling mostly at night to avoid the summer’s heat. Joe felt good for no reason he could discern, laden with what he was sure was pilfered equipment and clutching a Sten submachine gun in the comfortable fold of his left arm. I am in western Australia chasing OSS agents into a desert with an aborigine, he thought to himself, hoping it would sound insane. Instead, it felt reassuring; it felt right. Mal leaned in close, his voice rich with the stench of tobacco, and said:
“That’s them there.”
The tiny lights were lanterns of people moving on the five-mile-distant Tobin Ranges. It was hard to tell how many there were; the lights would bleed into one another and sometimes suddenly spilt into half a dozen individual sources. Their movement away from Joe’s position was also hard to discern in the dark, and they seemed to sway and slip over the black surface of the Earth in an almost static line. Soon enough however, one by one they disappeared into the black.
Somewhere within the mountain, Mal assured him, Peaslee and Steuben were held captive. Joe had no reason to believe the aborigine’s story except for its sheer unbelievability. Who would conceive such a bizarre story to cover up some other plan? Nothing made sense. But Joe’s mind kept coming back to the dead man in the hallway they had left behind—along with his sanity—at Port Hedland, an image which never failed to sober his thinking.
No matter how strange they seemed, these events were real.
Maljarna had chosen Joe two days before, from a group of more than forty of the Ngaanyatjarra’s most able warriors, during some sort of ritual. Joe Camp had only the vaguest idea of what they had set out to accomplish. He knew it involved the missing OSS men, which was as much as Mal would say. Old Muluwari seemed pleased that Maljarna had chosen only a single companion for the task set before him, although the rest of the warriors seemed incredulous at the young aborigine’s selection.
After a huge meal where all his questions were deflected cleverly by Muluwari, Camp was given access to the tribe’s impressive cache of weaponry, still freshly packaged in wooden crates marked with British registry stamps. The stamps were recent and the weapons were cutting edge. Submachine guns, mines, mortars, grenades, desert survival gear, all of British design. Mal refused to reveal where the weapons had come from, and old Muluwari had only said:
“The souls of those these weapons were made for are there within them still, to serve those that’ll avenge them, Joe Camp.”
Joe didn’t quite understand why that statement made him so uncomfortable. They left the Ngaanyatjarra camp after loading up with gear that night, while the remaining warriors held heated arguments in their strange language with the old man around the fire. Women and children formed a ring around Mal and Joe Camp as they walked out of Lake Woolomber to the north. Each tribesmember reached out to touch them, fingers barely brushing them, as if the men themselves had become holy items. These events of two days previous still played in Joe Camp’s mind like a surreal film, repeating over and over again in his head. It was hard to imagine something like that could really occur.
But it had, and to him, just 48 hours before.
Presently Mal leaned in again and pointing at the horizon where the lights had vanished, said, “They’re out into the desert now, out to the old stones to see the Nulla. This is as good a time as any.” Suddenly the aborigine was up and gone, scuttling down the far side of the rise of rocks, nothing more than an afterimage, a shadow slightly darker than the surface he tread upon. Camp rose and trotted after him, trying to keep his gear quiet, but rocks spilled to the ground in his wake. Mal watched him clumsily traverse the rise.
“Gonna have to do better than that, Joe.” He chuckled, his wide mouth split in a smile.
At the base of the rise, on the flatlands of the Gibson Desert in the pitch black of night, Mal started forward at a brisk pace. Joe Camp followed as best he could, just like the last two nights on their walkabout. Like the previous nights no real movement could be discerned from their walking, except in the passing of small objects on the ground close enough to be seen in the dark. The lump of the Tobin Ranges in the distance stubbornly rode the horizon for over an hour before Camp realized abruptly, as the shadow began to loom ahead of them, that they were almost there.
The sharp rise of spiraling, fissured rock was barely visible in the pre-dawn light. The huge, squat surface of the mountain where an hour before Joe Camp had spied lanterns looked insurmountable, impenetrable, totally inhospitable to human life, but it was there now in front of them as big as life and twice as ugly. Mal hunkered down behind a meandering field of boulders and took a drink from his canteen. Camp did the same, and then leveraged himself up onto a foothold on the boulder so he could spy the range above.
He searched the surface of the immense mountain face for about fifteen seconds before he saw it, a crack in its surface, dim light leaking out of the rock like poison from a wound.
“There,” he said, and Mal smiled back at him from the dark. Surprised at his own conviction, Camp found that the nagging questions which had first entered his mind since his rescue now seemed dim and insignifican
t. He smiled back at Mal and the two began to close the distance to the rock.
Maybe he did have malaria after all.
There was no real way to approach the mountain while under cover. For about a hundred meters in every direction around the rock was just dead space, open ground, and they would be easy pickings if snipers were stationed anywhere nearby. The rock was laden with thousands of possible hiding places for the enemy. Since their arrival at the boulders, the sky had grown in color to a deep purple while the eastern horizon showed the dimmest whispers of indigo blue. The mountain was now a vast black shadow backlit by the growing light of the sky. It would only get lighter, and Mal silently assured Joe with a glance that waiting was not an option. They would go now.
Mal ran for the rocks which marked the edge of the mountain without regard for stealth, and arrived unscathed beneath an outcropping of huge tan spires of stone in less than a minute. Camp followed, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. The two men poked their heads up above the rocks and considered their destination. Up on the black-shadowed face of the mountain a single tiny light shone. Camp and Mal now looked at it intently. It was a cave lit from inside by something like a lantern. Shadows occasionally obscured its glow, as if people were moving about within.
“How many people do you think will be in there?” Camp whispered.
“No people up there except for your friends,” Mal muttered. “All the rest are just the Nulla.”
Joe Camp tried to smile but found a heaviness in his chest made it impossible. The aborigine began a slow climb up the crevice-filled surface of the mountain as the darkness bled away into the Australian dawn. Joe Camp followed like a shadow.
By the time they reached the cave, Joe knew something bad was going to happen. He could feel it hanging in the air like a stench. He shifted his .45 Colt pistol into the front of his belt and checked the slide bolt on the Sten gun. His sweaty hands searched for the best point to grip the unfamiliar submachine gun, but nothing could quiet the murmuring in his mind: Something bad is going to happen.
Mal stood at the lip of the cave to one side, submachine gun pulled up to his chest, eyes wild and wide. The light in the air was growing. Joe nodded and the aborigine began to skirt slowly around into the entrance of the cave. Joe Camp followed about six feet back and a bit to the right, to keep him clear of his field of fire.
Inside the cave, strange indistinct shadows flowed across the smooth surfaces of rock.
The two men leapt around the corner of the twisting rock passage in unison, and Mal opened fire suddenly, the stubby gun jumping in his hand like an unruly animal, belching blue-white fire. Joe held his breath as his heart began to beat double time in his chest, but held his fire. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing at first, but after the clatter of the noisy submachine gun died, Joe could spy two human forms within the main chamber of the cave.
A globe of scintillating crystal lit the room from the floor like some sort of huge, baroque lantern. The strange crystal drew the eye, and Joe Camp found himself wondering at the bizarre play of light within the sphere. The shadows which crawled across the cave were produced by the odd, pulsing light of the that shone through the faceted surface of the glass. Joe pulled his gaze away from the globe and scanned the cave. The two human forms in its center remained deathly still, like mannequins.
“Sorry, jumpy,” Mal said, his voice resounding in the cave like an echo.
The two men within the cave, the men Mal had fired at—one plain-clothed and the other dressed in an American Army officer’s uniform—looked... wrong. Not the men themselves, but their circumstances. They hung in the air like a snapshot, like they had been caught in time and frozen. The thinner of the two, the one who wore plain clothes, was caught in eternal mid-stride, with one leg ready to fall to the ground, leaning forward in a position no one could hold naturally for more than a second. The other man, in the army uniform (Camp could spy the first three letters on his name tag: P-E-A), leaned forward as well, as if he had been shoved. He was turned as if he was heading for the back of the cave when whatever happened had happened. The two hung frozen, and the fusillade of bullets that the aborigine had fired at them had apparently vanished, leaving the two strange men untouched.
“God,” was all that Camp could squeeze out. All the air seemed to have left him.
Mal never even hesitated. He trotted forward into the “room,” unconcerned that the impossible was occurring in front of him, and began searching among the rocks on the floor. The cave was not large, a little more than fifty square feet, covered in debris, boulders and roughly hewn walls. A stack of tin cans covered in dried filth lay in the corner, along with various bizarre artifacts: a shattered camera, portions of what looked like a carburator freshly lathered in oil, and strange grey, hinged boxes. It looked like more than a dozen men had made their home here for some time. The smell of the cave was pungent, rich with human waste.
Now only the two frozen men remained. Camp could still not bring himself to look directly at them. His eyes strained to find something else to focus on.
The wall beyond the men was fashioned from immense, time-worn blocks of sandstone, each as large as a car. Only three of the huge blocks were visible, but the edges of more bled into the cave walls, as if the cave itself had congealed around the blocks. As if the crafted stones were older than the mountain. Camp wandered into the room, submachine gun forgotten in his numb hands, and goggled at the two men stuck in time. His mind searched for purchase on new, terrible realities.
As Joe approached them, he could feel something like the pressure of deep water squeezing down on his face and in his skull. Tiny pebbles hung in the still air before his eyes, in a complex geometric pattern which reminded Joe of stars hanging in the void of space. These tiny beads, slightly shiny, floated several inches from the two men, like magic. Joe’s mind reeled as he suddenly realized that the pebbles were Mal’s bullets. The bullets had been frozen by whatever power had immobilized the two men. Joe lifted his hand, still five feet away from the frozen, portly man in the army uniform, and reached for one of the bullets as it hung in the air. He felt his hand slow as his fingers slipped closer to the round. The tips of his fingers began to tingle and then grow numb as he forced his hand into air as thick as jelly. Mal looked up from his task, distracted:
“Don’t go near them, Joe,” Mal warned, his voice full of confidence.
“What? Oh, yes.” Joe stepped back, his mind blank, and followed Mal’s eyes to a small, radio-like device the aborigine was fiddling with.
The box that contained it was the broken casing of a radio, as far as Joe could tell—it even had the Phillips brand name stamped into it—and a complex arrangement of mirrors had been fitted on top a bed of carefully strung wires, which were soldered to various metal plates embedded in the case. A tiny sliver of perfect red light wound its way through the maze of mirrors on the device, like a filament of fire. The entire contraption emitted a soft, nearly inaudible hum. Mal leaned in, squatting on his knees, to consider the back of the device. His hands traced connections on the machine without touching it.
“What is...that?” Joe Camp sputtered. A feeling rose in his mind like an all-encompassing denial. The facts which his senses were delivering to him were repelled by something deeper than reason, something primal inside which told him that everything he could sense here was wrong. This was not real. It could not be.
“One of the Nulla’s tricks,” Mal responded, lost in thought.
Camp had no reply. It was obvious the aborigine had seen such a device before, or at least had heard of such a thing. To Joe Camp it was completely alien. He had never seen the type of light that the device emitted produced by any human device, much less by one the size of a radio. A slow, crawling sensation like dread dropped into his gut when he realized that it was most likely what kept the two men suspended in air.
“How?” Camp whispered.
How? was all his brain could manage in response to the impossibilities befor
e him. Everything Joe Camp thought he had learned—in school, in life, in the war—collapsed silently in his mind like a house of cards.
“What the hell is going on here?!” Joe Camp screamed, spittle flying from his lips. He raised the submachine gun and faced the little aborigine. His finger came dangerously close to depressing the trigger out of sheer reflex, but something in his mind suddenly dropped away and the Sten gun clattered to the floor. He stumbled backwards, tears streaming. Mal watched silently as Joe’s hands covered his face, rubbing up and down his eyes like he was trying to wipe away the things he had seen in the cave. He stumbled to the far wall, and there Joe Camp collapsed in the corner.
“Take it easy, Joe. Take it easy,” Mal said.
“Something bad is going to happen,” Camp whimpered.
It the vaulted silence of the cave, it sounded like a prayer.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 25
