Delta Green: Strange Authorities

by John Scott Tynes

  “Roger,” Nick replied. “Tonya, you’ve got op control.”

  “Find a place to park or just circle, but stay out of here,” Vic said. “Looks like a facility up ahead . . . it’s a cul-de-sac. I’m pulling into an office park.” She turned the car and came to a stop in a large parking area full of cars. The target was a hundred yards down the street. Vic jumped out and crouched behind the back of the next car, binoculars poking over the trunk. “Confirmed. Target is at a gated entrance. There’s a big stone wall encircling what looks to be a large private area. Two security guards at the gate, tan uniforms with black jackets.”

  “Sign?”

  Vic looked for a long moment. “Negative. No markings I can spot, not even a street address. The gate’s opening. Target moving forward. I’ve got two more guards through the gate, waving the car in. Uniforms look like private security, can’t make the insignia. I can see a one-story building through the gate, but it’s set back at the end of a long drive. Not much cover.” The gate closed. “That’s it. They’re inside.”

  Nick sighed. “Okay Tonya, stay put. I’m coming over with a camera so we can get a few shots of the entrance. The rest of you hang loose until we’re clear. Terry, see if you can get Alphonse online. We need to find out what this place is.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” Vic said as she peered through the binoculars at the entrance, wondering if Shasta was inside. “It’s bad news.”

  David Foster Nells sat on a concrete bench in an open, grassy area. The air was warm. Breezes carried the smell of wildflowers and the distant noises of traffic. David held a rubber ball in one hand, which he squeezed rhythmically. He was wearing pale yellow silk pajamas with matching slippers, a middle-aged man dressed for bed. On the bench next to him was a paper cup half-full of water. They’d given him his medication a few minutes earlier.

  “Hello, son,” Andrew Nells said, standing over him. “Are you being a good boy?”

  David swung his feet back and forth, hanging off the bench, and shrugged.

  “Now come on, son. You know my work takes me away a lot. I need to know—are you being a good boy?”

  “I guess so,” David said quietly.

  His father smiled. “That’s my boy.” He sat down next to David on the bench.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “I think mom’s been hurt. I think maybe I hurt her.”

  Andrew laughed and tousled the little boy’s hair. “Don’t be ridiculous, son. Your mom’s just fine.”

  “But I think I saw it. I saw something in a room . . . it’s kind of fuzzy.”

  “Son, your mom’s fine.”

  “But—”

  “Look, David, if you’re so worried about your mom, why don’t you go see her?”

  David cocked his head to one side. “I dunno. I think I have to stay here.”

  Andrew nodded. “Sure, you have to stay here. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go see mom.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Nope! You can see her right now, if you like.”

  “Okay. But how do I see her?”

  “Just make a wish,” his father said. “It’ll come true.”

  David closed his eyes and wished as hard as he could.

  Sarah Nells sat in the breakfast room of her rambling Savannah mansion, tears running down her graceful face. Her gray hair was unkempt; she hadn’t had the spirit to do herself up properly today. David’s disappearance was wearing hard on her.

  He’d always been a little distant. Andrew’s death had left his son adrift. His father was such a heroic figure, a dashing pilot fighting for a just cause, with the swirl of intrigue around him and his missions. Sarah had certainly fallen for him at first sight, but eventually realized that Andrew loved being a hero more than being a father. It was easy for him to fly in and fly out, his parental responsibilities discharged as quickly and efficiently as an arms drop to the Chinese nationalists. Sarah was left to tend a boy who wanted only to fly at his father’s side, fighting the Communists and saving the world. They were awfully big dreams for a little boy, and when Andrew’s plane went down, it seemed that he took part of his thirteen-year-old son with him. David lost his sense of romance and adventure, and instead nurtured a cold grudge against those who’d taken his father away.

  Since then, David had gone his own way in the world, flying in and out of his mother’s life just as his father had. He was punctual with birthday and Christmas gifts, and visited Savannah once a year to see Sarah and his father’s relatives. But they rarely talked about anything substantial.

  Although Sarah traced her son’s distance back to his father, she didn’t really feel any bitterness towards poor Andrew. She saved that for Joe Camp, Andrew’s Army buddy who was always, maddeningly, two steps ahead of everyone around him and didn’t mind letting you know it. Joe worked in intelligence, and she knew that it was Joe who got Andrew his job with Civil Air Transport after the war. Men and their secrets—they were obsessed with intrigue, almost romanced by it. Andrew had fallen for it, had envied Joe’s winks and whispers about things he couldn’t discuss. Sarah felt it had cost Andrew his life.

  As if to compound his crime, Joe Camp seduced her son, as well. David had told her as much, back when he was still posted to China fifteen years ago; it was the last time they had a meaningful conversation. Sarah hadn’t heard a word about Joe Camp since Andrew’s death, and when David mentioned in passing that “Uncle Joe” had said hello, her blood ran cold. David confessed that he’d been doing some work for the old man as part of his job as a military attaché to the embassy in Beijing. Sarah lost her temper, started crying and shrieking that Joe Camp had taken her Andrew away and he was damned well not going to take her David, too. She’d had a few glasses of wine, just for the holidays, and was perhaps too strident on the subject. David had walked out, yelling that his life was his own. And so it was.

  Ever since that day, Sarah lived with the fear that David would be taken away, as his father had before him. No matter the distance between her and her son, Sarah still loved him fiercely and feared for his safety.

  Now he was gone, a thousand nightmares come screaming to life. The police were investigating, the CIA was investigating. They claimed to not know what had happened. But the same faceless bastards had told her the same thing when Andrew’s plane went down, and she hadn’t believed them then, either. They all knew. They just wouldn’t tell her. Now, she was sure, she would never see her son again.

  She buried her face in her hands and sobbed, hunched over in the chair, orange juice untouched on the breakfast table. Outside a mockingbird sang.

  “Mom?”

  Sarah shook. The voice came again. “Mom?”

  Through her tears, through the tendrils of gray hair that hung down over her eyes, through her fingers, there stood her son. A boy of thirteen.

  “Mom? Why are you crying?”

  It was David, just as he’d been in 1964. The men had come to the house with the news, and left her to weep for her beautiful young warrior, forever lost in China clouds.

  “Mom? Are you okay?”

  “Oh, God . . .” Sarah murmured. “Oh, David . . .” She was confused. This was her kitchen in Savannah. She was an old woman, not the young British socialite who’d married a Yank and then lost him. The men from CAT had walked away thirty-five years ago. Or was it thirty-five seconds?

  “David,” she said, bewildered and dislocated in time and memory. “David, it’s your father. He’s had an accident.” They were the same words she’d spoken then. She didn’t know what else to say.

  David smiled a boy’s confident smile. “I know, mom, it’s okay. I know. That was a long time ago.” He knelt down before her, took her hands in his. His hands were large, and worn with age. He was tall, with silver hair like her own. He was older now than his father was when he died.

  “David?” Her voice broke with emotion. “Is that you?”

  He laughed a funny little laugh. “It’
s me, mom. Are you okay?”

  “Oh, David!” she cried, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pulling him close. “David, I thought you’d left me, I thought you’d gone away like your father.”

  “I’m right here, mom. I’m okay.”

  “But what happened?” she asked, pulling back and touching his face. “Where did you go? They’re looking for you!”

  “I’m not sure, mom. I don’t really understand what’s going on. But I wanted to see you. I wanted to know you were okay. I thought—I thought maybe something had happened to you.”

  “No, no, I’m fine, David. I’m fine, now that you’re here. I thought you were gone forever!”

  “Forever. That’s a funny word.”

  “What?”

  “Mom, I can’t stay. I have to go. I just wanted to see you, make sure you were all right.”

  “But David, wait, you can’t go!”

  “No, I have to. I can feel it.”

  “David, please!”

  David Nells, age eight, touched his mother’s face, then spoke in the sweet little boy’s voice that was indelibly etched in her memory.

  “I love you, mom.”

  And then he was gone.

  Interlude: Thirty Four Forty Three and a Wake-Up

  Friday, January 9, 1998

  Ex-Captain Forrest James jogged around the exercise yard, his breath coming out as vapor in the cold Kansas air. He had an hour before dinner.

  The day had gone quickly. They all did. It was the nights that lasted forever.

  After four months of well-behaved incarceration, James had graduated to medium custody. He was moved to a cell on the fifth floor and allowed to mingle with the other prisoners. He joined the work detail in the woodshop, studying the basics of carpentry. The USDB’s sizable workforce trained and worked in a wide variety of occupations, vocational training intended to give them useful job skills upon release. James began in a classroom, then moved to normal work after a few weeks. The prison workers constructed and repaired many products for the military, ranging from replacing zippers on sleeping bags to repairing damaged doors for humvees. In the woodshop, the inmate carpenters made furniture, desk accessories, plaques, and other items, many of them finely crafted, ornate pieces. They made riot batons for units in Germany, plaques for Saudi Arabia, and museum display cabinets for Fort Dodge. The civilian plant manager for the wood shop was a hard-working but affable guy named Clyde. His top crew was engaged in a four-year project to replace the hardwood floors in thirty-seven historical homes within the Fort Leaven-worth Army Base.

  Around the exercise yard, inmates did push-ups, played basketball, or just congregated in groups to shoot the bull. A few eyed James as he jogged past.

  James had made a point of keeping his distance from the rank and file. He hung with the other ex-officers, who tended to cluster together anyway and who were housed in the same part of the prison. They ate meals together, watched television together, and exercised together. It wasn’t anything official, but you had to associate with somebody or you’d go nuts. The ex-officers had a common bond of duty and experience, and tended to be a cut above the enlisted inmates—or at least, they liked to think so.

  As James jogged, he picked out inmates he recognized. There was Eric Reynolds, a Marine private who’d gone AWOL during basic training and stolen a car. He got into a high-speed chase with the cops and slammed into a schoolbus, killing a child. He’d spent six months in the hospital and still had a limp. They’d given him forty years. He was six in. Eric worked in the woodshop with James and had a seemingly endless stream of prison lore, stories handed down from con to con across the generations, stories of deaths, pranks, rapes, escapes, and a thousand other things. He swore he’d write a book someday. On the basketball court, Jake Larson went out for a pass. An Air Force lieutenant, Jake had dealt crystal meth supplied by a civilian buddy from off base. He got eight years, four in, and was active in the prison’s underground economy. He dealt in cigarettes, toiletries, and the occasional illicit batch of joy-juice—rough alcohol made from fruit, sugar, and water, stuffed into a plastic bag and allowed to rot and ferment for a few weeks. They called him Jake On The Make. It was clear he had no intention of going straight when he got out; he was too addicted to the art of the deal. Off in a corner, Tommy DeLuca shuffled aimlessly, hands in his pockets, while big Gerald Lewis leaned against a wall nearby, smoking a cigarette. Tommy had been a sergeant in the USMC, caught with his pants down in the company of a fourth-grader. A kiddy-raper, Tommy was low man on the totem pole inside the Castle. He’d been a constant target for harassment in his first few months of medium custody until Gerald turned him and made him his punk; after that, nobody did nothing to Tommy unless they were willing to go toe-to-toe with Gerald, and thus far nobody had.

  James shook his head. By definition, the Castle was full of losers and fools, men too stupid or too drunk or too weak to toe the line. Some were victims of their passions, others addicts to vice, and a few were just mean S.O.B.s who cursed the world for birthing them and wanted to make everyone else suffer. They did their time, their varied sentences to pay for their crimes. They worked, they played, they attended endless classes on decision making and personal responsibility and general coping. They watched television, they told jokes, they beat off or played sister for smokes. When they could, they got drunk or high. When they couldn’t, they might just break down and read a book. They did whatever they had to do to get by.

  James stopped and hunched over, hands on his knees, taking deep, chill breaths, sweat beading on his forehead. His hair was going gray, big time. He’d put on a little weight. He hadn’t had a drink or a smoke since he’d been here. Other than that, he didn’t feel much different. His life had been a long and lonely one, and that didn’t look to be changing. He’d never been married or had a long-term girlfriend. He’d kept his nose to the grindstone and done his duty, drinking himself to sleep in the bad times and laughing with his buddies in the good.

  He stood up, still breathing heavy. He decided to head back to his cell so he could get changed before dinner. As he strode across the yard, he thought of Delta Green.

  In 1981 he’d been a Lieutenant Commander with the SEALs. A spy ship, the USS Santa Cruz, had gone down in Vietnamese waters. His team went down to recover some sensitive equipment and swam straight into a nightmare. Things came at them out of the darkness, powerful creatures that were built like men but owed their allegiance to some deviant evolutionary track. His men were slaughtered around him, and he was injured. When he made his way back, he concocted a story about Soviet Spetsnaz divers and enemy attack subs.

  In the years that followed he’d ransacked the Naval archives for other evidence of what he’d seen. His research eventually attracted the attention of a rear admiral named Harley Patton, the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Harley was a garrulous old soul who knew a fighter when he met one. He recruited James into Delta Green.

  James had fought a number of strange enemies in his clandestine years of DG service, and emerged from bad-dream scrapes that took the lives of lesser men. He weathered it all with stoic equanimity—except for the memories of that first time, on the deck of the Santa Cruz nine hundred feet down. That one came back, again and again, tearing at his sleep. He bore the scars of that attack on his chest and in his mind, a milestone of the first time in his life that he had plumbed the depths of primal fear. It was the legacy of that encounter that had triggered the incident in San Francisco, when a combination of alcohol and stress had sparked a flashback that put an innocent woman in the hospital.

  He walked faster and then jogged, crossing the rest of the way across the yard and re-entering the prison. As he moved he tried to leave that memory behind, that sensation of awesome terror and helplessness, of being alone in the wet and the dark and the cold while things with claws tore at his flesh. But it followed him, that memory, shadowing him for all his days, swallowing him for all his nights.

  By compa
rison, life in the Castle was easy. But only by comparison.

  Chapter Four: The Profit and Loss

  Thursday, February 18–Saturday, March 13, 1999

  Thursday was a very long day; for most of it, not a damn thing happened. Vic, Abe, and Stephanie had made their report to Alphonse last night, and Nick had brought the photographs he took of the entrance to the Bountin property. They were hot to make a move, but Alphonse sent them all off to get some rest and said he’d be in touch when he had news.

  Wednesday night had not been a problem. Cell T was exhausted from little sleep and much tension, and they crashed as soon as they got back to the motel. But all three were awake at six the next morning, taking turns in the shower and slowly getting their act together. Vic was third in line, and came out of the shower shivering and pissed that the hot water was gone. She glared at Abe and Stephanie darkly and stomped out to get some coffee.

  “She always this much fun in the mornings?” Stephanie asked as she toweled her hair.

  Abe chuckled and pulled on his socks. “Vic? She’s the Queen High Bitch of the Galaxy until she gets her java fix.”

  “So what about you? What’s your jones?”

  “Basketball,” Abe replied, lacing up his loafers. “I haven’t been on the court since Saturday and it’s driving me nuts. If we weren’t hanging out for Alphonse, I’d find a gym and get a game going.”

  Stephanie balled up the towel and tossed it at the trash can. It missed and got hung up on the television.

  “Brick,” Abe said.

  Vic found an espresso stand whose coffee she thought she could stomach and got a grandé triple mocha, plus a cheese-twist pastry. The punky barista boy behind the counter looked her up and down. “That’s a lotta coffee for a little lady,” he said, smiling.

  Vic gave him a withering look. “That’s a grandé triple mocha,” she said. “Not a grandé triple mocha with a stupid fuck on the side.”

  The barista scowled and handed her the drink and a sack with the pastry in it. “Bitch,” he muttered.