Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (12 page)

Thomas Arnold wore no uniform or insignia as he entered the Joint Intelligence Command on Cable Street, just a battered, muddy, long coat which still had flakes of snow on the collar. He let the wind slam the door behind him. His face was empty of emotion and unshaven for weeks, with a striking red beard two shades darker than his short, curly hair. He looked like some sort of wayward traveler, as he always did, confused and a bit off kilter. In truth he was as deliberate as death itself. His wide shoulders and barrel chest stretched his long coat out so his shoulder holster was plainly visible under the wet jacket. This drew no scrutiny. He was well known here.

In the overheated front hall he surrendered his .45 automatic to the military policeman at the security door and offered up his fresh OSS identification card to the clerk at the desk, who rapidly checked it against a mimeographed sheet and opened a book like a hotel registry. In a small photo on the card, a fresh faced, clean shaven Thomas Arnold looked back, six months younger. Piles of wood crates lined the cramped room and dust slowly drifted in the musty air.

“I was very sorry to hear about your brother, sir,” the clerk said in a clipped Harvard accent as he scribbled Thomas’ name in the book. He handed back his folded identity card. How he had found out about Lucas’ death, Thomas had no idea, but it really wasn’t a surprise. After all, everyone he knew here worked for military intelligence. It was a short grapevine.

He pushed it all away, the nostalgia and pain, and looked the clerk in the eyes.

“So was I,” Thomas said, without a hint of irony, and headed up the stairs, pushing his way past a clot of clerks moving the hulks of old typewriters up to the offices. It seemed things were finally coming together in London for the fledgling Office of Strategic Services. Soon their entire program would be up to speed and the OSS could begin in earnest to harass the enemy, instead of harassing its Allies like a bothersome child begging for scraps from the international intelligence table. Only fourteen American agents had been inserted into the European theater of operations so far, with the cooperation of the British navy, and First Lieutenant Thomas Arnold had been one of them, thank you very much. In fact, he had just finished almost two months on a “French holiday” in Normandy, at a quaint little out-of-the-way stop called the Cap de la Hague. It was less than picturesque, but he took lots of photos anyway. Unfortunately, they were all classified.

It had all gone perfectly, without a hitch, the first mission of the OSS in the European Theater—his mission. Wading ashore through the freezing surf of France, Arnold was scared. Having never killed before was a difficult obstacle to overcome for a professional soldier, and imagining the instant death or slow triumph possible in the midst of battle still made him queasy. But once you were briefed for DELTA GREEN clearance, the concept of combat didn’t seem so bad anymore. Shelling an enemy camp from the heights of a cliff? Sure. Killing women and children in the bargain? Hey, no problem. When you read the briefing for Lt. Commander Cook’s little DELTA GREEN psychological warfare unit, and learned to regard what it had to say as truth, you’d be willing to consider putting a couple slugs in your mother so long as you didn’t have to read any further. Once you saw the things from Cook’s briefing walking and talking to the Krauts, though—after that, putting one in yourself didn’t seem like such a bad idea, either.

But Arnold hadn’t considered suicide after he found out that the unbelievable crap the OSS had been shoveling him was on the level after all. He just did his duty. Not for General Donovan, or for his dad or Lucas. He did it in spite of them, to prove to someplace within himself that he was more than the sum of his experiences, that without the outside motivations of his family and friends he would still move forward in the right direction. Above all, he did it because he was trained to do it. He was supposed to do it.

Arnold unlocked his office, switched on the lights, and tried to push the bad thoughts away. It took more effort than he could believe. Sinking into his chair he tried to completely clear his mind. He spun the safe tumbler with the ease of habit, opening the thick door to reveal a clump of papers. He removed three tan files marked TOP SECRET and placed them on his desk, shutting the safe door behind him. Leaning back in the creaky chair, Arnold looked up at the blue-white light of the lightbulb and tried to envision the way things would continue from this point onward. There was no past. The future was on the table. He was a zero sum. This was the beginning.

After a while, his mind drifted.

Soon General Donovan would return to London and things could begin for real. It seemed like forever since Arnold began his work for William “Wild Bill” Donovan, as if the world was a completely different place than when he started out in the service. In truth, the world had changed very little, but Arnold had changed a whole hell of a lot. He was hardly the same man he had been that bright day in 1940 when he showed up for his first day of work at the Research and Analysis Department in New York. He had killed God knows how many people in France, and he was now short one brother. Life throws some curves, huh?

When Donovan had been appointed the Coordinator of Information for President Roosevelt, Arnold had been there, just out of officers’ school at Camp Abbot and on his way to boogie woogie through his father’s footsteps. Fresh with his degree in political science from the University of Los Angeles, and his Bronze Medal in the breast stroke from the ‘36 games (which looked more and more like the last Olympics that would ever be held), he showed up for his first assignment bright eyed and eager with a suitcase full of gear, a few photos, a commission and not a lot else. When his father died in January ‘39, Arnold had stepped in to fill the void, taking the burden of his large family on his rather young and inexperienced shoulders without a second thought.

Colonel Roger Arnold was a bit of a legend in Washington. Thomas Arnold could still see the way older military personnel perked up when they recognized his name and searched his face for his father’s stern sense of command. The Colonel had a checkered past. He possessed an indomitable spirit and an unimpeachable love for America; even his enemies grumbled grudging acknowledgment of his nationalistic fervor. After spending his youth fighting revolutionary Mexicans and imperialistic Germans for Uncle Sam, the Colonel moved on to serve President Wilson as a military advisor in the turbulent early Thirties. In more recent years Colonel Arnold commanded Camp Talbot in Northern California, where he railed on and on about the evils of the New Deal and its architect, Roosevelt, always ending his tirades with the required “but he is our commander-in-chief, after all....” Thomas Arnold did not actually miss the man, but he missed the concept of such a man existing in a hard-headed world. It was somehow reassuring. To Thomas his father still seemed too mythical a figure ever to be cut down by a simple heart attack, but that was the sad truth. There was nothing anyone could do except offer their condolences.

At the Colonel’s funeral a rather squat and homely man in expensive civilian clothes sidled over to Thomas and introduced himself as “Billy” Donovan, a good friend and former colleague of his father, and by the way, aren’t you off to officer’s school? If you ever need a job...

And he did, it turned out. The family house in Dunsmuir wasn’t paid up, his mother tearfully told him after the funeral. All the family’s savings had been squandered in the Crash and in trying to recover from the Crash, and on top of that Lucas would be heading to Berkeley in 1941. So Thomas Arnold got on with it and joined the army. He sent almost everything he earned back home every three weeks. It made him feel good to give something back.

His commission took him to New York to brush up on the economies of the war powers for General Donovan in April 1940. During that fine New York summer headlining Project GEORGE, Arnold read books on European economies, wrote profiles on industrialists, studied French and German and spent a lot of time in Central Park, admiring the skirts and eating hot dogs. Occasionally he caught a skirt or a Dodgers game (sometimes both at the same time) to break up the monotony. He was young, bored, and yearning for something to give his life meaning. It would not be long coming.

There was a time in his life when he thought that the meaning of life would be found in the love of a girl. Now, in London, such a simple wish seemed completely alien. It was like a bad taste in his mouth. Since Pearl Harbor, everything good about his life had been tossed out the window to make room for the necessary evils of war.

Ever since that Sunday last December, Thomas’s life had tripped over into some alternate world where everything worked in fast forward. Months shuffled by like stations passing an express train, shooting through his life at breakneck speeds, disappearing into the past before he could take a good look at them. In Maryland at Area A he trained for covert operations, putting his athlete’s body to the test, becoming a skilled troublemaker and sneak who could blow up a bridge and then lie his way out of harm’s way in three languages. In Maryland he learned “Billy” Donovan had special plans for him, plans that involved a psychological warfare division of the newborn OSS code-named DELTA GREEN, and in Maryland his mom’s letter informed him that his little brother Lucas had run off to join up for army service.

After that, it was all madness.

Before the war he was not a violent man, but he found a reservoir of will inside him to make himself a killer, a portion of himself he put to the test in France for the first time. He discovered what he believed about himself was essentially true—there was a thin shell of civility wrapped around a heartless machine that would do what had to be done, no matter the cost. A shell that was like the illusion he now knew the world to be.

Then came that cold day in February in 1942, the briefing by Lt. Commander Cook. He could not remember how it started or when it ended, or if it really even ended at all. Sometimes it felt like it was still going on. That was the first day he read of intelligent creatures from beneath the sea, of a Massachusetts town called Innsmouth, of things man could not explain away with slide-rules or special relativity, typed up in the earnest tones of a report that had been written by a Marine major general and initialed by General William H. Donovan himself.

Arnold had sat in the office in Washington and considered the black and white photos of inhuman creatures that even now still lived in military custody. With a dull sense of wonder he felt his mind desperately trying to find and hold on to new and terrible facts—he could feel those new facts slip away from his mental grasp, crashing about his mind like a bull in a china shop, leaving a trail of wrecked thoughts, wishes and dreams in their path. Even back then, when he had not truly believed the reports, not deep down, it still hurt to think about them. Back then he could still shrug it off as an unpleasant sham, a test, despite the photos and films, the medical files, the recordings, and the men beyond reproach who told him these things were real while wearing expressionless faces.

But now he knew it was all real. He had seen those sea-things in the flesh himself.

He opened the folder on the desk and considered it for a while, a crease of concentration riding his brow. A man had died trying to do the right thing that night on the Nez-de-Jobourg cliffs, and now Arnold paged through the dead man’s translated documents. It was amazing. They had been typed in France by a German, captured by an American, and translated by a Brit. The papers had lived a fuller life than most men. Everything that Cook and Donovan feared most was revealed in fifty-three pages of type, sprinkled with raised e’s, along with forty-three swastika-emblazoned files. The secrets of the Third Reich unfolded in the notes of a dead man like some cheap magic trick. Somewhere Cook was reading a copy of the report Arnold had in front of him, cursing his luck and plotting. Donovan would be ready to pledge anything to the effort now. Once Donovan got President Roosevelt alone to bend his ear, forget it. DELTA GREEN had shifted from an obscure concern to the most important division in the American war effort in Europe.