Dedication
For my wife and daughter and everyone who ever gave me a chance.
Contents
Foreword
The Corn King
Final Report
My Father’s Son
The Dark Above
The Rules of Engagement
Prologue
Chapter One
Interlude
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Interlude
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Interlude
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Foreword
I don’t remember now whether I knew John Scott Tynes (or “Tynes,” as I called him, or “Rev,” to people who knew him before I did) before I knew Delta Green. I met them both around the same time, across a glass darkly, around 1997. Whether it was 1997 or a few years before or a year after either way, it was a pretty great time to drink and talk all night, to write games and ramble around, and to pretend we knew what the future held. We were just like everyone in every independent film you ever hated. We had no budget, but we thought we had a killer script. It was the great age of the slacker, that Generation X version of the Beat. It was a great time to talk nonsense with a straight face. Bliss it was in that decade to be alive; and to have an open bar tab was very heaven.
Delta Green came out of the Nineties, out of what was, in retrospect, America’s Indian Summer vacation between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. It presented a vision of a black-suited conspiracy in league with alien entities that were using the entire U.S. government as their puppets, or perhaps as their host body. Opposing that conspiracy? Our heroes? Not the heroes of previous decades; not lovers, or reporters, or Rambo. No, our heroes were guys in (slightly different) black suits, members of that same federal government, themselves forced to lie and sneak and conspire to defeat a faceless, multi-headed military-industrial-bureaucratic complex in the name of How Things Used To Be. Our enemies weren’t Us—this ain’t Pogo—but they weren’t quite Them, either.
This grand jetée of navel-gazing paranoia was, to put it mildly, in tune with the Nineties. That decade’s zeitgeist perhaps most famously also created The X-Files—which debuted a year after the first Delta Green scenario saw print, a datum I must have heard Tynes adduce a hundred times in a fugue of irked pride. Like Cody Goodfellow’s Radiant Dawn (a glorious 1999 Cthulhu Mythos novel of medical horror and technocratic implacability), our fables clung rigorously to the nuts and bolts of the clandestine and the quotidian, like all proper thrillers running just a few weeks ahead of the headlines. And such headlines they were! Why, in the Nineties, conspiracy theorists used to argue about one guy dead in a park, or taped conversations about blowjobs! People hugged themselves to sleep dreaming up conspiracy porn featuring alien autopsies, black helicopters, and shadowy survivalists in the woods somewhere.
Then.
The next decade, everybody—not just the conspiracy theorists—argued about how many secret prisons the federal government should be allowed to run in foreign countries, and whether the president or just the vice president had connived at murdering 2,800 New Yorkers. JFK’s former press secretary declared that a missile, not a hijacked airliner, hit the Pentagon. If you wanted conspiracy porn, you had your choice of beheadings or prison experiments, depending on your politics. Surely, the days of Delta Green had passed. It was fun while it lasted, like souvenir T-shirts from Roswell or I WANT TO BELIEVE posters.
But.
Cthulhu came out of the Twenties, out of what was, in retrospect, America’s Spring Break between the trenches and Dachau. You see where I’m going with this; I don’t have to spell it out, beat it to death. Pulp begets prophecy. Put simply: Cthulhu heralded an apocalypse, of madness and destruction and suicide, and then he ushered it in, and he rode it. Somehow Cthulhu survived Hiroshima—and like Lynn Willis’ joke says, “now, he’s radioactive.”
Somehow Delta Green survived Abu Ghraib—and now, it’s fucking radioactive. Now, we really know what a malevolent conspiracy can do. We’ve seen its outlines, rising like Surtsey in the Pentagon and in Pakistan. We sense the approach of our own blind idiot god.
John Scott Tynes will show you its face.
Time to get this show on the road. You have no idea the kind of Hell he has prepared for you.
None of us did, back in the Nineties. Before the apocalypse.
Kenneth Hite
Chicago, 2012
The Corn King
Friday, December 24, 1993
David Nells ran his fingers through his hair, pausing to scratch at his scalp. The NRO had sent over a new batch of satellite images showing a Chinese missile base in Tibet, and he had to prepare a preliminary update for his superiors in the CIA on what appeared to be a new construction project. He’d already worked through dinner. Jill had been pissed when he’d canceled their date a couple hours ago, but Jill was always pissed at him for one reason or another and he’d just hung up on her when she started to yell. Relationships usually bored him quickly, but his thoughtlessness and her temper kept them in a cycle of break-up/make-up that he found invigorating. David suspected that was why they were still together after fifteen months.
The fact that both were Delta Green agents probably had something to do with it, too. The scale of their secret life dwarfed that of their romantic life, putting things in perspective. Or so he liked to say, when he was getting that weary feeling and wanted to pick a fight with Jill.
He took a gulp of coffee laced with bourbon. Just a little. His boss had instituted an unofficial policy for his small analysis team when they had to work late: bourbon after Brokaw. They were all old China hands, marking time until retirement, and regarded the clean-cut academics who staffed the other groups with something approaching contempt. What business did you have analyzing imagery of a country you’d never lived in? David knew it was a ridiculous attitude for his team to hold, given that they spent their time staring at bird’s-eye images of silos and structures that could be in Nebraska as easily as China, but like attracted like and everybody needed somebody to look down on.
The phone on his desk buzzed and he picked it up. A delivery at the front desk. He stood and yawned, looking down for a moment at the photos on his desk, taken by a sleepy satellite glimpsing the Earth far below as it drifted through the silent twilight of orbit. Then he wandered off through the halls towards reception to see what the delivery was.
It was a single long-stemmed rose, wrapped with a green bow. Martha had him sign for it. There was no card, but it didn’t need one.
David went back to his desk and typed up a brief report on the images; looked like the Chinese were building a new barracks, nothing to wake the president for. He put the images back into their envelope and dropped them and the report into his boss’s document safe. Then he got his coat on, picked up the rose, and headed for the door.
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Nells,” Martha said politely as he walked by. David grimaced. No wonder Jill was so pissed; he’d forgotten. It was Christmas Eve, 1993.
Jill Sanders sat at the small dinner table in her apartment, picking at a slice of pie. The voice of Billie Holiday filled the room from a boom box. She’d had other music picked out for tonight, but then David Fucking Nells blew her off on Christmas Goddamn Eve so out came Billie, her favorite music for doing a slow burn. As she fiddled with the lemon meringue she’d picked up from the neighborhood bakery, her thoughts were on the diatribe to come, when she’d tell David she was throu
gh with him and his bullshit and so on and so forth. They’d had so many arguments that it was getting harder and harder for her to come up with new ways of telling him what a jerk he was—but the challenge only whetted her appetite for conflict. The trouble was that David was a charismatic guy who could be really charming and considerate when he felt like it. Plus he’d almost taken a bullet for her when he didn’t have to, and that had to count for something.
Fucker, she thought. No. She’d used that one before.
There was a knock at the door. Shit! It had to be David, come to make up, and here she was with her battle plans still sketchy. As she got up and walked to the door she just tried to flow with Billie, confident that she would be ready to tell David a thing or two, at least. She opened the door.
Sure enough, it was him, holding a rose for God’s sake. “Ratfucker!” she blurted, then saw the green bow around the stem—a DG op signal.
David grinned.
“You have got to be kidding,” she managed, totally flumoxed.
“Merry Christmas, kiddo. Get strapped and let’s go.”
Billie sang on.
As they walked to the car, Jill reluctantly agreed to table their discussion of David’s merits and flaws until later. Business came first.
“So where are we going?” she asked once they left the parking lot. “Joe?”
“Nope, Joe’s not in on this one.” David sounded cheerful, infuriatingly so.
“Where, then?”
“It’s time for you to meet the old man. He’s leading this op personally.”
“I thought Joe was the old man.”
“All right. We’re going to meet the older man.”
“David, who is this guy?”
“Major General Reginald Fairfield, retired.”
“Never heard of him.”
“You aren’t supposed to. He’s the captain of this whole ship of fools. The guy’s a fossil, but for some reason he’s going out in the field with us. Usually he just pulls our strings.”
“So what’s the op?”
“Beats me. I called him from a pay phone and he just said to grab someone and come over, on the double.”
“And you chose me.”
“Hey, you were the one who wanted a date tonight.”
“Don’t start.”
“Fine.”
“So where are we going?”
“The Bentson, downtown. He’s got a suite.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes. It was snowing on the Potomac and the highway was a white snake, ghostly in the dim. Eventually David spoke, hesitantly.
“There’s something you should probably know.”
“Yeah?”
“Reggie . . . I don’t think he’s ever worked with a woman before.”
“What?”
“I mean in the field, you know. On an op. He’s kind of old-fashioned.”
“You mean he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Thanks for bringing me along.”
“Hey, if you’re going to be mad, you might as well be mad at someone else for a change.”
“I’ve still got plenty of mad left for you.”
“Never a dull moment, kiddo.”
They reached the Bentson around 11 p.m. and drove into the parking garage. Leaving David’s Chrysler behind, the pair walked outside to the front doors and into the lobby. At the front desk, David rang the bell for a clerk. A young man emerged from a doorway. He was impeccably groomed.
“Yes sir?”
“Please ring Mr. Fairfield’s room and tell him his guests have arrived.”
“Oh, yes. He left a note for you.”
“He’s not even here?” Jill said, irritated.
“He just left,” the clerk said, handing David a small envelope. David and Jill drifted away from the desk while David opened the note.
Outside, it said. In your car.
David looked up sharply. Through the front doors he could see his Chrysler, idling in the snowy street outside.
“Oh hell,” he muttered.
“David, isn’t that your car?”
“Yeah. We’re in for it now.”
The man in the driver’s seat was a vigorous kind of old. Jill guessed he was in his early eighties, observing the hunched shoulders but muscular arms as she climbed into the back seat. David got in the front.
“Fucking amateurs!” the man bellowed. “I could’ve taken both of you in the goddamn garage.”
“Sorry, sir,” David said quietly.
Reggie wrenched around to look at Jill and then scowled at David. “What the fuck is she doing here?”
“She’s my partner, sir. You said to bring someone.”
“I didn’t say to bring some goddamn broad!”
“Agent Sanders is a capable field operative, sir. I’ve done three ops with her and she’s cool under fire.”
“I’m at your service, sir,” Jill said diplomatically.
“You couldn’t service me with a tire jack, Sanders. Who cuts your checks?”
Jill turned red, though no one noticed in the dim car. “I’m a criminal investigator for the Office of Export Enforcement,” she said, straining to keep an even tone.
“What the hell is that?”
“Department of Commerce, sir.”
“You’re an accountant with a strap-on! Nells, have your brains turned to shit and shot out your ass? We’ve got serious work to do tonight and I need men I can count on.”
“Sir—” David began, but Jill interrupted.
“Shut up, David. Listen, you toothless old fuck, if you don’t think I can pull my weight we can step outside and I’ll hand you your ass on a platter. It’s Christmas Eve and I’ve got better things to do than get screamed at by some dickless poster child for prostate cancer. So put up or shut up, motherfucker, because I’m not going to tolerate this bullshit for another minute.”
David stared straight ahead and tried to pretend he was somewhere else. In the rearview mirror, Jill could see Reggie’s eyes, alive with some weird kind of excitement.
“All right. You’ll do.” Reggie put the car in gear and punched the gas.
Back on the highway. Back in the snow. Reggie drove like a madman, swerving through traffic to pass car after car, cursing loudly at the other drivers. But for all his seeming recklessness, he kept an iron grip on the wheel and moved the car with a precision Jill could only admire—he drove aggressively, yet he had the confidence to back it up. When she whistled quietly after a particularly dangerous but deft maneuver, Reggie grunted. “Try booting a Willis through the Ardennes at twice this speed and then you’ll have something to whistle about, agent.” Soon they entered Virginia on I-66, and Reggie seemed to relax a little as the metropolitan traffic thinned out. David eventually worked up the nerve to ask a question.
“Can you brief us now, sir?”
Reggie nodded gravely. “Not much to brief. There’s a party tonight on a mountain called High Knob, and we’re going to crash it.”
“What are our objectives?” Jill asked.
“Shoot anything that moves.”
“That’s it?”
“Torch whatever’s left.”
“And then?”
“Go the fuck home and wait for Santa.”
David spoke again. “What kind of opposition are we facing?”
“Wetworks death squads. Demons from higher dimensions. Partridge in a pear tree. Fuck if I know.”
“Are you sure we have enough agents?”
“I’m sure we have enough bullets. Assuming you and your lady friend can shoot straight. Either of you handle a rifle, or am I hauling my cataracts up a tree to pick off punks at five hundred yards?”
“I’ll take sniper,” Jill offered.
“Don’t shoot me by mistake, you hear? I’ll be the screaming bastard with the big balls.”
Jill shook her head. “Don’t tempt me.”
Reggie laughed, then glanced at David. “Nells, bourbo
n.”
“I’m out, sir.”
“Don’t shit a shitter, boy, I smelled it on your breath when you got in the damn car.”
“I left it at the office.”
“Give me the goddamn bourbon or I’ll turn this car around and make you buy me some.”
David grimaced and took a flask out of his coat pocket.
“Mary, Mother of God,” Reggie muttered as he took a swig, then held the flask towards the back seat. “You want some of this, agent? I’m slap outta tea and cookies.”
Jill took the flask and had a slug, then handed it back to the driver.
“Finish it off, Nells,” Reggie said. “That shit stinks like a pig but isn’t fit for one. We’ve got a long way to drive.”
They reached High Knob a little before midnight, taking a lonely road through the snow flurries. After a few turns, Reggie wheeled the car off into the bushes and got out. David and Jill followed.
They opened the trunk. Inside were several large plastic cases. Reggie removed an M21 sniper rifle and a twenty-round magazine, then handed them to Jill. “Load it,” he barked.
Jill put the mag in and chambered a round, then briefly sighted on a tree through the scope. “Ready,” she said, slinging it over her shoulder.
Reggie handed her three more magazines, which she stashed in her jacket, then pulled out two AK-47s for himself and David and bags of mags for both. Finally he strapped on a backpack.
“Demolitions,” he explained. “Let’s go.”
For the next eighty minutes they slogged uphill through the trees, Reggie guiding them by compass at brief intervals. It was cold and quiet. No one spoke.
At last they crested a stout rise, crawling up slowly under Reggie’s direction. About two hundred yards below was a clearing fed by a dirt road. Three Broncos were parked end to end, blocking the road. About a dozen men in tactical gear loitered near the trucks, setting up some large light sets to illuminate the clearing and running power cables back to the trucks. None of them wore any sort of uniforms or identifying logos, and the trucks were unmarked.
“Cocksuckers,” Reggie muttered.
“What now?” David asked.
“You two watch close. I’m going to get down there and set a charge on the outermost truck. We blow that one and it’s instant roadblock. Anybody gets too close to me, Sanders picks them off and Nells, you just start spraying so I can get clear. But don’t shoot unless you have to—this party hasn’t started yet. If we get separated, meet back at the car.”
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 1
