Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (25 page)

Pagou, as if reading Joe Camp’s thoughts shook his head sadly and repeated, almost to himself:

“Very bad, bad people.”

The L-1 Vigilant hooked the air like a gull, bouncing forward on the grass of the landing strip as the wind lifted its fragile frame twice before finally letting it go. The tiny, olive drab two-seater’s engine sputtered to a halt as it taxied to one side. The smell of gasoline and cooking meat hung in the air of the airfield, which had been hacked from the side of a low rise in the jungle by men toiling for hours with machetes and shovels just the week before. In another two weeks, Camp knew, no evidence of this airfield would remain. The jungle was just that fast.

Camp watched from his meal of assorted B-ration cans, which he had set up in front of him on the grass in some dim approximation of a civilized dinner. As he ate a slice of canned apple, two white men exited the L-1, both in non-descript khakis with little or no insignia (not surprising; it was a guerrilla war after all), talking to one another as they walked towards Camp’s men. There were about forty men in the clearing, only fifteen of whom were under Camp’s command. The rest were freedom fighters who had gathered here for supplies or news.

One huddled group of native Karens, guns never far from reach, continued to eat their meal of Gaur meat, unmindful of the racket the landing plane had made. Not one man of that group even looked up. Camp’s group of Kachins happily chattered away, splitting a meal of cooked gibbon and canned pineapple. Two Chinese soldiers from Chang Kai Shek’s non-existent Chinese Expeditionary Force morosely picked at their tin plates full of brown rice, looking lost and out of their league.

Camp stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and walked forward. The larger of the two men waved at Camp and walked over as if he knew him, and Camp puzzled for a moment before retrieving his glasses from his front pocket. It was not until he was within fifteen feet that Camp realized that the man was not only someone from OSS command, he
was
OSS command. As far as Burma went, Major Carl Eifler was as high up on the OSS totem pole as you were likely to get before having to leave the country. With a pug face and the build of a linebacker, the two hundred and fifty pound man dwarfed Joe Camp; together they looked like a before and after advertisement for a Charles Atlas Body Building kit. Camp snapped a startled salute, almost knocking his glasses off his head. Eifler cackled.

“You trying to get me shot, lieutenant?”

“No, sir,” Joe replied, wide eyed.

“Donovan’s got some plans for you. You’re outta here.”

“But sir—“ Camp began.

“Don’t give me any lip, Joe. They need you. You’ll get your orders when we get to Nazira.”

“But 4a—“ Joe glanced over at his men, who were watching the exchange quietly.

“You’ll be back shortly. Until then, Captain Wilkinson will be taking over your spot.” Eifler pointed back at the other man who had ridden in the plane, a clean shaven, intelligent-looking man with a fine thin build. Ivy League. With his luck, the guy was probably a Yaley, Joe thought.

“Give me a minute with 4a,” Camp asked, and seeing the assent in Eifler’s eyes gathered his group around him. They all huddled down in front of him like kids at a Boy Scout meeting.

“See that guy?” Camp asked, pointing back at Captain Wilkinson, who was unloading his gear from the tiny cargo space on the Vigilant. The men from 4a nodded in unison, eyes carefully attending the man.

“That’s my brother. You must keep him safe. I have to leave for awhile.” The Kachins smiled and nodded, happy to know that their leader had a brother.

“You will return?” Pagou asked quietly.

“Yes. Pagou, Keta... I’m counting on you. Don’t let him out of your sight. I’ll be back.”

As Camp loaded his gear on the plane, the Kachins warmly welcomed a rather confused Captain Wilkinson to their ranks.

Camp heard Keta, smiling, quietly tell the rest of the group in Burmese, “We will call him Uncle.”

Lieutenant Barnsby was released from St. Francis Hospital in the morning, and was met by a car bearing Commander Cook and Lieutenant Thomas Arnold. He haunted the front steps of the hospital, dressed in a black overcoat, jacket and trousers with a black tie, black gloves and black hat. His thin, drawn face hung over his collar, almost blending with the white of his shirt. To Arnold he looked like a corpse come to life to attend its own funeral, but Arnold shook the thought away. The little Brit entered the car unsteadily and sat without saying a word as they drove away toward the docks. Arnold and Cook seemed in a similar mood. They rode in silence.

Barnsby had suffered what the doctors at St. Francis referred to rather guardedly as an “episode.” After grasping the notebook of the late Nathaniel Peaslee in his naked hand, Barnsby had remained unconscious for more than twenty hours, then woke suddenly, screaming incoherently about bizarre things. He was moved to St. Francis at the quiet request of the Department of the Army. Nothing was mentioned of his “abilities” or his affiliation with the military. He was sedated for a week and slowly recovered some semblance of his former self. Finally, as his condition improved, he was pronounced sane by the medical staff of St. Francis and was released. After a brief exchange of coded messages using one-time pads, orders from Major Cornwall called Barnsby home. Today he was to board a transport which would take him to England.

At the docks Cook waited in the car as Arnold helped Barnsby load his luggage onto a cart, which sailors would later move onboard the merchant marine ship. The grey sky hung low over the bay and icy water crashed against the pylons, kicking up the rich smell of the sea. As the two men looked out on the ocean, a huge transport ship heading out to sea let out a long, low sonorous hum. As the sound faded, Arnold could see unreasoning fear in Barnsby’s eyes. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone.

Somber and pale, Barnsby looked up at Arnold and said very quietly:

“Tom, this is all far more complicated than it seems. Peaslee’s vision and this Thule are connected. I just don’t know how. Be very careful.”

“How could they be connected, Al?”

“Something about the Library. When I touched the book, it was something Peaslee saw in the Library. He knew about the city in the Congo, or the name... I...“

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not very clear. Peaslee read a great deal about the future. I don’t know how. He read about Thule or heard about it or some such thing. He knew about it, and the creature that was in Peaslee knew about it, too. It went to the Jermyn estate to find more about it. It doesn’t make any sense. But it means something.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“I’ll try and get reassigned back to your group, Tom. Trust me, you’ll need me.”

“It’ll be too late then, Al. I’m leaving for Africa tomorrow.”

“Dammit, Tom—“

“Shut up, you. Get on the ship, go home, get married, have some kids.” Arnold tried to sound lighthearted, but the docks and the chill in the air bled all the merriment from his words. He looked around for comfort but all he could see were the boarding crewmen with faces clenched like fists, the drab posters asking people to buy war bonds, and a million different inanimate things which screamed of conflict.

Why can’t death be like this, Arnold thought. A place you go when it is time, with civility and comfort and a feeling of completion, like a trip from which you never come back. Instead life ended in the rending of flesh, in the consumption of every bit of effort contained within a form. Arnold’s men, the men who had raided the Cap de la Hague camp, were gone now, all but Steuben, and that seemed unreal to him. They had not said goodbye. They had not known they were heading to their deaths. If they had left when he was there, if they had known—maybe he would have felt different. And now Barnsby was gone, too.

“Goodbye, Tom,” Barnsby said, expression empty.

“ Bye, Al,” Thomas Arnold replied.

Alan Barnsby smiled briefly, a smirk really, turned and headed up the gangplank. Arnold watched him disappear into the crowd of men on deck, a black suit among blue uniforms. His hat was the last thing to go, slipping behind a group of men gathered in front of a lifeboat. It rose and fell one last time and then Barnsby was gone.

Arnold jumped into the army staff car. As it began to slide away from the curb, Cook glanced up from his endless paperwork with a questioning look in his eyes.

“That takes care of Barnsby,” Arnold said, and didn’t care for the feeling of finality the words gave him.

Arnold retired to his hotel, a dilapidated wreck near Needham on the outskirts of Boston, content to read through the paperwork he hadn’t yet covered. He left for the Belgian Congo in the morning. Things were rapidly spiraling out of control. Who knew what the Nazis were up to? Were they even up to anything?

In the fleabag room by the light of a single naked bulb, Arnold read of the catastrophe in France, the second mission, the one he had not been on, the one that had cost the lives of the men he had learned to call his friends. Arnold smoked and drank and read, trying to pull the bits of information together, to restore the separate filaments of thought that had been rent and split by time into a thousand different things. Arnold tried to see the absolute form of what they were chasing, just by considering a few of the fragments.

He read the report on Nathaniel Peaslee’s dream journals of another time and place, a report on the 1935 Miskatonic expedition to the Gibson in Australia, an antiseptic examination of the book
Observations on the Several Parts of Africa,
but nothing became clear. Instead his mind began to flounder in the face of the ever-growing wall of information. Soon he could not clearly assemble a chain of facts, and instead found his mind wandering, considering pointless, fanciful things. The way the rug lay upon the floor, the lumps in the yellowed plastered ceiling, the hum and click of the radiator.

Thomas Arnold fell asleep in a filthy easy chair and dreamt.

His brother Lucas worked summers at the Aladdin, the tiny movie theater in his home town of Dunsmuir, California, and it seemed in his dream that he was there now, in the back row on a Monday evening after swim practice, the rest of the theater empty. Was Lucas working up there in the booth? Arnold turned, but nothing could be seen past the scalding white eye of the projector. The rest was lost in darkness except for the window of the screen.

On the screen, with their backs to the camera, a black and white hero and his fearless companion trudged through a prop jungle on some Hollywood sound stage. What serial was he watching?
Tarzan the King?
Darkest Africa?
Arnold could not recall.
We regret to inform you that your son, Lucas Michael Arnold, was killed on 14 January 42 due to enemy action off the coast of North Africa.
Lucas was dead, the Aladdin was demolished years ago and the war was raging. He was supposed to be in Africa, he was supposed to—