The Gurkha motto played over and over in his head as he rushed silently through the leaves, following the ghost light to its source. In his mind, the motto matched the sing-song chant of the natives as they performed their bizarre ritual.
It is better to die than to be a coward...It is better to die than to be a coward...It is better to die than to be a coward...
He thought of the way the river would freeze when he was a boy. The way the dogs would bark when the moon was full. His bed of straw and the winding streets of Ilam. He saw his home in shorthand, everything which made his world before all this. He saw what would make him choose to die instead of run, like a perfect clean symbol in his mind.
His gunfire ripped through the jungle like a crashing wave.
CHAPTER 25:
I saw the struggle of intellect against darkness
February 27, 1943: Tobin Ranges, Gibson Desert, Australia
Joe Camp was sure he was losing what little of his mind he had left. The sights of the last day alone were more than enough to send any man over the edge, and what little he could remember of it—there seemed to be strange gaps of memory—was filled with images and feelings which would never wholly leave his mind again. The time between Maljarna’s and his entry to the cave and the present had drifted away in a haze of muttering and shouting, of incoherent responses to unreal occurrences, of Maljarna pleading with him to right himself before it all fell to pieces. Hours bled past like seconds as his mind shunted what it saw to some inner chasm, allowing stuttering bits of reality through to be confusedly considered, seemingly at random.
Joe felt the light fingers of insanity toy with the edges of his mind like a ghostly caress in the night. He felt the impossible try to fit itself in with the rest of his world-view; felt those new facts shred whatever was formerly held as reality to indistinguishable pieces with brute force; felt the pain of real knowledge as it awoke something terrible and ancient within him. This feeling within, this knowledge of real truth was as fundamental and unwavering as life itself. It was there, it had always been there, and now awakened it could not be denied—ever.
It was the truth that all beliefs besides this new and perfect terror were folly.
Joe stood and wiped his eyes again. His thin, bearded face was red with exertion and swollen from weeping. In the light of the ghostly crystal lamp he considered his blunt fingers. Scarred, callused, bruised and cut, the fingers were plain enough except for one pinky which had set badly after a football injury.
Eight years ago, his mind quietly told him, you broke your left pinky in a scrimmage at Harvard. When Danny LeVant threw you a short pass. You thought you just jammed it, but then it began to really swell. You sat out for a week. During that week your father died. During that week—
Startled, Joe Camp suddenly, for the first time in over a day, focused on the ancient cave, his vision blurry with tears. He found himself lying against the wall kitty-corner from the alien machine he had seen Maljarna examining. The device was silent and the thin sliver of light it had emitted was gone. Joe’s hands hung before his head like an exhibit, like they were not attached to his body at all, but were placed there on display by some unseen force; like Joe could walk away and the hands would remain behind. Distant neurons fired and the hands obediently spun themselves so his palms were turned away from him. The huge knuckles were wrinkled and knobby. The fingernails were thick with red dirt.
Camp realized his mouth was hanging open, and slowly shut it. He was in western Australia. Lives were at stake. The madness receded like the tide and training filled the void.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
Struggling away, Camp pushed himself roughly away from the hand, stumbling up on his numb legs; they felt as rickety as stilts until he met the unyielding surface of the cave wall with a flat palm, out of breath. Reluctantly, he turned to face his attacker. The man who had grabbed him, not unkindly, considered him with small black eyes and a careful expression on his plump face. It took seconds for Camp to realize that the man was Wingate Peaslee, one of the men he had seen encased in...
...in the bubble of slow time.
The other man, Steuben, was gone. The thought felt like a rough bump in a car with a bad suspension. It took his brain several seconds to refocus.
“Camp, can you hear me?” Peaslee spoke in a quiet, nasal voice.
“Yes.”
“Good. Good.” Peaslee shot a nervous glance over his shoulder at the mouth of the cave, which Joe suddenly realized was glowing with the light of mid-day. Heat, unnoticed before, hung heavy in the dark. How long was I out? Camp thought to himself, and struggled to regain his composure.
“What...where’s Maljarna and...Steuben?” Camp sputtered, glancing around the empty cave.
“How much do you know about all this?” Peaslee replied, eyes wide and probing. The man was built like a fireplug, snugly encased in his Army uniform, filthy with Australian red dust.
“Not...much,” Camp replied, stooping to retrieve his Sten gun from the floor where it had been carefully placed along with his pack and gear. Peaslee made no move to stop him. He had no recollection of anyone removing it from his person.
“Your friend, the aborigine, headed out to the...library. He wrote you off. He and Steuben left two hours before dawn this morning.”
“Why didn’t they—”
“We’re to eliminate any of those things that return here,” Peaslee replied, cutting Joe off.
“What?”
“The others, the things from the library. They get into people. Take them over. Now they know. They know about DELTA GREEN, about everything. It was all true, all along. I saw it.” Peaslee’s dark eyes held secrets behind them, like a poorly constructed dam bulging with rushing water.
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, really. But I was there, in the past. They took me. I saw...them. I was them.”
Camp’s mind tried to encompass all the facts which suddenly assaulted his mind, and failed. Nothing made any sense. Perhaps he had gone mad. If it were so, nothing he did mattered anyway. What could you do but comply when your mind turned against you?
“I have to go after them.” Joe stood and slung his pack over his shoulder. He checked the web belt for magazines, looped it over his shoulder, cross-strapped the Sten around his sickly chest (had friends once called him barrel chested?) and searched several bags for rations. Finding them, he stood and faced Peaslee, whose eyes held indifference.
“No. We have to wait,” Peaslee offered serenely, but made no move to stop him.
“Why?”
“They told me to. They knew all this. When I was there, back there...back then, they told me to wait two days after I was released. I would...see something then. They told me not to go out to the site in the desert. They said something...bad...was going to happen. They said they had to...correct something. Change something near a...crux. It doesn’t make any sense, I know...”
Camp trotted out of the cave into the boiling sun before Peaslee could react. The little man did not pursue and Joe didn’t look back. He skittered down the face of the mountain in a barely controlled fall. Joe headed off into the desert to the north, towards where the lanterns had gone before. Across the sea of rock and sand, out in the wastes, where old Muluwari claimed the Nulla made its home in the earth.
Joe Camp found belief and fear fluttering in his chest, which had held only cold, hard, dead facts before. These new feelings intertwined to form some perfect basis of will, which moved him forward despite the heat. He stumbled north into the desert like a madman. Or a corpse.
From the safety of the lip of the cave, Wingate Peaslee watched with near sunblind eyes as Joe Camp became a dwindling dot on the northern horizon. A shifting black speck in a sea of bright grey and tan.
“Just like they said he would,” he mumbled to himself, and turned to the coolness of the black.
CHAPTER 26:
Dull to the betrayal of their own decay
> March 1, 1943: London, U.K.
“What’s the word on the teams?” Wild Bill demanded, slamming the tiny humidor shut with a beefy, squat-fingered hand. Martin Cook had just entered with a clutch of papers. The fat man waddled around the desk slowly.
“No word yet, Bill,” Cook replied blank-faced, as he sank into the comfort of his favorite chair. Behind him, dim rays of sunlight poured through the cracks in the sandbag-filled window.
“Cornwall shucked us, Martin. We’ve been screwed.” Donovan leaned forward in the chair and placed both hands on his head. From outside the din of traffic could be heard. The two old men sat for a time in silence and then Cook leaned forward.
“I don’t think that’s the case, sir.”
“Why’s that?” Donovan did not look up, only slicked his hair back with the flat of his palm while looking at the floor.
“We have indications from the other British sections that PISCES has lost its team in Australia as well,” Cook stated plainly.
“What?” Donovan glanced up for the first time in minutes.
“Menzies informed us less than a day ago that Cornwall had called on him for some men. To go to Australia. To perform a certain task Menzies would not detail.”
“This is in addition to the PISCES men Menzies informed us were traveling to Darwin?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank God Menzies has some sense of honor. Shit. If we only had that information sooner!” Donovan continued his vigil, head downcast, elbows on his knees, eyes searching the fantastic patterns on the Indian rug.
“Whatever happened, happened to both teams, PISCES and us, sir. Regardless of motive, we are up against something which knows exactly what is going on and what is going to happen—before we do.” Cook spun his chair and looked at the imposing mass of sandbags at his window.
“Yeah. You’re right. This can either be divisive, or bring the groups together...“
“Our new crop of freshly debriefed men for the DG unit are on their way here. We just got word on that too.”
“Who the hell’s left to debrief them?” Donovan laughed.
Cook spun his chair back. “Stillman, the wounded one, sir? The specialist from the second raid?”
“Oh yeah, Stillman. He’s back in the States then?”
“Yes, sir, in Virginia. Teaching.”
Donovan looked up and then at his hands. “More men,” he said hollowly. “This DELTA GREEN thing got out of hand pretty damn fast.”
“Yes, sir.”
The clock chimed and both men looked up at its silver face, marveling at the low, perfect sound it produced. When Cook looked back, Donovan was looking towards the shelves. His eyes were far away.
“The worst thing is, everyone thinks I have only one war to worry about. The fucking Axis is the least of my problems, believe me. But then why am I tellin’ you this? You know what I mean. Me, the president, you, Churchill, Cornwall the smart bastard, we’re all doing triple duty here.”
“This is so different from the first operation with the division,” Cook said sadly.
“You mean the seaside raid with P-Division? What was that, 1928?” Donovan lifted a questioning glance.
“Yes, sir. That one. Innsmouth. It all was so clear then.” Cook spun his chair back and stood, walked to a cabinet and began to fix himself a drink. Donovan turned down the silent offer of a drink with a swift shake of the head.
“What was so different?” Donovan mumbled as Cook dropped ice into a dirtied, empty glass.
Cook drank three quarters of the amber liquid in his glass before answering. His jowls shook as he coughed out his answer.
“They weren’t...human. They weren’t even near human. It was...simple to see them...to kill them.”
“That made it easy?”
“No. That made it hard. What made it easy was that it was obvious—even the most wet-behind-the-ears Marine could see it. It was us or them. Now—” Cook gestured vaguely, indicating the uncertain world, drained the rest of his glass and poured another. “What are we going to do?”
“What can we do?” Donovan glanced up, eyes expectant and needy. “Jesus.”
“Pray?” Cook replied, startled by the look of despair in Donovan’s eyes.
“To what?” Donovan spat out and stood.
“We can still hope...right?” Cook countered. Donovan stood still for a time while Cook sipped from his second glass.
“We can still do that, thank God.” Donovan returned, his raised face flush with anger.
“It’s all out of our hands now, anyway,” Cook wheezed.
“Yeah, but whose hands is it in?”
The phone began to ring. Cook lifted the receiver in his thick hands and listened for a moment.
“Three of our men came out of the desert yesterday,” he said.
“Good boys,” Donovan whispered, his eyes far away.
CHAPTER 27:
Uncertain shapes, visitors from the past
March 14, 1943: Somewhere near Itoko, Belgian Congo
A field of trees. Golden, thin. Standing in rows like a picket fence erected by nature. They rose up from the cold, marshy embankment on the far side of the river, distant. Behind them, the face of the mountain crawled up, spattered here and there by drifts of snow, imposing and as big as the sky itself. The air was rich with the smell of coming snow. A cold wind passed down the valley.
In the river, a reflection of the trees and the mountain hung, rippling gently in the early morning breeze, catching the golden colors of the sun as it rebounded off the world.
On the river was a boat, small, L-shaped and red, a vivid color, so that it stood out on the water despite its distance. A boy and an old man sat in the boat. In the water, a reflection of the boy and the old man sat in the reflection of the boat.
Manbahadur Rai was that boy.
His grandfather sat across from him on the rickety red boat. Dilprasad Rai, the old man, spoke suddenly. Manbahadur looked up, startled. The boat rocked, sending a million reverberating ripples out into the river, intersecting and changing until the trees and sky disappeared from the surface, lost momentarily in the confusion.
“I am sorry, grandfather, I did not hear you.”
His grandfather smiled toothlessly and wagged a crooked finger at him.
“You have not learned much in life, have you?” the old man chided.
Manbahadur simply stared at his grandfather politely, waiting for the old man to continue. Anything else, he knew, would be disrespectful.
“I was saying that you are having a hallucination. You are in a jungle in a place called—‘Congo’? You should wake up now.”
The world leapt back to him like a nightmare.
Manbahadur Rai lay on his side in the damp heat of the oppressive jungle. It was still night. Which night, he did not know. The smell of seared meat hung in the still air, with the foul stench of burned cotton, cordite, and shit rounding out the scene. Somewhere nearby in the dark, someone was hitching thick, liquid breaths. Memory crept back as Rai attempted to gain some semblance of order in his jumbled mind.
He had leapt into the clearing to dispatch the natives who had pinned Lieutenant Arnold to the ground. He had shot two of them nearly point blank as they crouched on the semi-conscious American. One he had shot in the head with the Webley, the other in the chest with the .45. The last native had produced an odd, silver cylinder before Rai could get a bead on him.
Something had happened then. Something bad which he could not remember.
Rai shifted his weight and rolled onto his shoulder. Sharp, perfect pain ripped through his arm as he placed his hand down to facilitate his movement. Sweating and struggling to regain his breath, Rai lay still for some time, listening. He heard what he now knew to be the native he had shot in the chest take his last few breaths, slowly drowning in his own blood. Hardly any time had passed, it seemed. Rai carefully tested his legs, which responded weakly to his commands. He slowly shifted himself back towards the knob
by roots of a huge tree, pushing with his thick-heeled boots against any purchase his feet could find in the dark. Slowly, straining with effort, Rai propped himself up in a sitting position with his back against the bark of a tree. His breath came in ragged gasps and his heart rang in his chest like a jackhammer.
Time passed.
Rai noticed the dawn as it slowly insisted itself upon the land. A slight shift in the dark, from perfect black to a thin, navy blue and then to a hazy glow of white which seemed only to gather near the ground. The jungle glowed all around them, crouched and ready to spring like some creature.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 27
