Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (26 page)

Who was up there in the dark running the film?

The music swelled, drawing Arnold’s attention back to the screen, just as the hero pulled aside a plastic frond to reveal a huge stone block cut into a perfect grey cube. As the music reached its crescendo the black and white hero turned to the camera, his face filled with dread. Although he could not be sure, Thomas Arnold thought the face might be his own.

Then, pulled from the false freedom of sleep at three in the morning—a knock at the door...

Joe Camp, sunburned and tired, crawled from the hatch of the PBM-3R flying boat, feeling something akin to relief, or at least delivery from the hands of blind fate, and smiled up into the sun. The plane was one of only four of its type to survive the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, and was called the “Ya Missed Me!” That bright green epigraph was emblazoned on the nose along with Bugs Bunny sunnily raspberrying the world, ducking a barrage of cartoon bullet holes. Despite its former luck, he didn’t care to test the aircraft’s fortune any further than he had to. Joe Camp believed luck was at best a dwindling commodity. Something about the plane’s upbeat name implied eventual disaster to him.

While airborne in the comfortable cabin of the Navy Transport Service flying boat, Camp could not shake the sensation that any moment the craft would come under Japanese aerial assault, a circumstance in which he could offer the crew no assistance. Being in terrible danger didn’t frighten him; it was the helplessness that got to him and ate at his nerves. The flight was the longest twenty hours he had ever spent. Despite the relative luxury of the aircraft—they even served him a Coca Cola with ice in it, for God’s sake!—it felt like he was flying about in his own, immense coffin. He found, with some wry amusement as he suffered through the luxuries of the Navy Transport, that he missed the reassuring sounds of the Burmese highlands.

The plane had landed twice in the midst of the endless ocean to refuel with the assistance of American Navy vessels, a process which left the crew as stricken by helplessness and frustration as Camp felt when they were airborne, feelings he could see stamped across faces that usually held the omniscient and limitless gaze known only to pilots. The crew of seven, all naval aviators, had treated Camp well, despite his Army credentials, and had even invited him up front to the radio room to play some cards to pass the time, an invitation he accepted more to please the Navy men than to distract himself.

Now on the far side of his journey, and at the beginning of a new one, Joe Camp stepped out into the sweltering heat and the fresh salt air of the docks as the crew debarked from the huge aircraft to Port Hedland. Out in the bay, spread out before him, lay a serene image of dozens of huge naval vessels, anchored and still on the crystal blue waves. Behind him was Port Hedland itself, a conglomeration of British-style houses smack in the middle of an exotic locale rich with native vegetation. The contrast looked somehow fantastic, although he had spent the last few months of his life in a jungle even more fantastic.

The knot of people at the end of the docks sorted gear and headed up to the shore, Camp lost among them. Past a series of wrought iron gates, Camp found himself in the midst of hundreds of Australian, British, and American soldiers moving and stacking boxes of supplies in various, apparently meaningful piles, each box stamped with its final destination in red ink. Camp found himself constantly jumping out of the way of the overburdened troops, to shouts of “Make way!” and”All right!” The Navy pilots, their mission done, rapidly disappeared into the crowd, leaving Camp in all the confusion and noise to fend for himself.

Camp, standing in his recently acquired civilian clothes, looked out of place among the enlisted men. The only thing that marked him as a military man was the drab green rucksack slung over his bony shoulder. He flipped his thick, black glasses out of a small case and placed them on his broad face, glancing around for his contact, an OSS lieutenant named Mark Steuben. His orders at Nazira informed him he would finally be briefed here by Steuben on the reasons he was recruited for the OSS in the first place—some psychological warfare unit called DELTA GREEN, which he never got the chance to investigate before he shipped out to the 101 in Burma. Joe knew the group, DELTA GREEN, had something to do with anthropology—that and his affinity for languages were the reasons he was recruited. After training at Camp X in Canada, instead of riding a desk for DELTA GREEN Camp was off to fill some holes in the line-up of the 101.

Camp shifted the pack to his right shoulder and his .45 dug uncomfortably into his back. When he looked up from readjusting his weapon in his belt, Joe saw the man coming towards him from the street which ran adjacent to the docks.

Tall and thin, he looked like some sort of religious type to Camp. Despite the scorching heat, the man wore a full suit, tie and all. It was the clothes mostly that identified him as an OSS man to Camp; the group’s propensity for often very expensive civilian garb had gained them the nickname “Oh So Social” from the other branches of the armed forces.

As he approached, Camp made out the stern set of his gaunt face, and the deep-socketed green eyes which stared back at him serenely. It was obvious now that the man was heading directly for him.

“What’s the time in Tokyo?” the man uttered in a flat voice, looking over Camp’s shoulder. His accent was cultured, vaguely British, like a Yaley.

“No time like the present,” Joe replied, finishing the code.

“Mark Steuben,” the thin man muttered.

“Joe Camp.”

“This way.” No niceties, no small talk. The man turned and hurried towards a run-down looking 1930s Packard parked up on the curb near the entrances to the docks. Camp had to double time it to catch up.

“Get in.” Steuben climbed laboriously into the car, which was covered in a fine, seemingly permanent layer of reddish dust, and started it with a roar of the engine. Camp threw his pack in and jumped in after it, shutting the door as they sped away.

“So what’s the news? You’re going to brief me here? When do I leave?” Camp shouted over the engine.

Steuben never looked up but shouted: “Change of plans. You’re staying here.”

“Oh?” Camp raised his eyebrows in surprise. Beautiful, perfectly painted houses zipped by on either side of the road, flashing past too quickly to be appreciated. Camp glanced into the rear-view mirror. His eyes settled on a second, similar car, which puttered along at the same pace, matching their turns. Something cold crept down Camp’s back and he found his eyes drawn to Steuben’s face, which was rigid with intensity. A rivulet of sweat dripped down the man’s cheek and over his thin, trembling lips. Camp could not be sure if the trembling was from the engine of the car or something more, some unspoken fear.

The road widened out into a cobblestone avenue, and the spacing of the houses grew until each building was isolated by great gaps of grass-covered hills. This was all wrong.

“So,” Camp stated, trying to break the tension by hiding his own.

“So,” Steuben repeated back, “...we’re here.” The car came to a rough stop with a screech of brakes. The apartment building was finely constructed but was in disrepair, and the street in front of it was empty of foot traffic. The building’s only sign of habitation were fly-covered piles of garbage stacked in the gutter. Camp could see no curtains in any of the numerous broken windows. Anything or anybody at all could be stashed in there.

As Steuben stepped out of the car and out of view, Camp rapidly shifted his .45 around to his front left hip in his beltline. Suddenly, just a second after his adjustment was done, Steuben’s head appeared in the window. Camp froze.

“Coming?” Steuben asked, confused, and then walked away towards the tenement without looking back.

Joe Camp got out of the car. He left his bag in it. Something told him he would need all the maneuverability that he had to make it through what was coming. Steuben waited at the double doors of the tenement, which hung open, unlit like a cave. Joe trotted across the street to meet him.

“Okay,” Camp said to himself as he climbed the steps, preparing for—what? He didn’t know. When he met Steuben’s empty gaze, he forced himself to smile. Camp cast one last glance back as they entered the building and saw the other car, the one that had followed them, parked across the street forty feet behind Steuben’s. A dark-skinned man sat behind the wheel of the still idling vehicle, staring at Camp and Steuben with glinty, white eyes. Joe could not be sure, but he thought he saw others in the back seat of the second Packard.

Then he was inside the dark, cool building, following Steuben up a flight of squeaky wood stairs. Behind Steuben on the stairs, out of view, Camp practiced a reach for his pistol to make sure it would come free of his belt easily, and then slid it back in place, pulling his jacket in front of it. Somehow Joe’s senses were in overdrive, and every nook and cranny jumped out at him as they climbed, every nuance of the rotting wood. Every shadow leapt out at him, insisting itself upon his consciousness, like it was the last time he would ever see anything like it. Like it was the last time he would see anything at all.

Sadly, like a man heading towards the gallows, Joe Camp climbed the stairs, wondering vainly if he would ever leave the building alive.

At three in the morning, outside a dilapidated hotel on the outskirts of Boston, in the midst of a snow storm, a small boy stood solemnly outside Thomas Arnold’s door. Arnold’s first instinct after opening the door was to look beyond the child for his parents or something which would indicate the boy’s origin, but all he saw past the semi-circle of the parking lights was a copse of naked, dead trees pelted by a sheet of falling snow. Behind the child the lot was empty, and the night was cold. Arnold looked down at the kid, then down at the .45 in his own hand. Something told him to keep it out anyway. The child showed no fear, nor any other emotion for that matter. The kid considered Arnold and the gun with equal and wholly alien indifference.

The kid’s pale face was framed by perfectly combed, greased-down hair that was parted with an antiseptic precision which made Arnold flinch. The boy wore a complete set of black clothing, finely tailored for his tiny frame—so perfectly that Arnold thought for a moment he had opened the door to a well-dressed midget; but no, the kid’s face was blemishless and wrinkle-free. Arnold guessed he couldn’t be much older than eight, but something about his eyes (which never seemed to blink) and the stern set of his features told Arnold something was not right. In fact, something about the child was terribly wrong. The feeling he had gotten on the beach at the Cap de la Hague poured over him again, leaving him numb and lost. Somehow, his mind was telling him that he was in the presence of something greater than human experience.

The kid stood as still as a statue, pale, emotionless, clutching a small box-camera at the threshold of the door while the heat rapidly bled out of the room.

Seconds ticked by and snow gathered.

“Come in,” Arnold finally said, thinking of deals with the devil. Things like this did not happen to normal people, he was thinking. Normal lives did not involve meetings like this, he was thinking, but the kid and the circumstances remained, defying reason and order without explanation.

The boy entered, walking with almost comical efficiency to the exact center of the room. Turning on his tiny heel, the kid considered Arnold like a player would consider a chess piece, then placed his small box-camera down on the dresser and simply waited. Now, in the light, Arnold saw that the camera was not quite a camera, but an odd assortment of parts in a camera case, with a green filigreed lens like the bottom of a cola bottle. The device looked more utilitarian that a bunch of junk. It looked like it had been fashioned carefully and with great purpose.

Arnold shut the door to the winter wind, turned up the heat on the old radiator and put his jacket back on, slowly, while considering the kid. He looked like shit, he supposed, sweat stains and ragged red beard, but he didn’t think that mattered to his guest. Arnold sat carefully back down in the filthy easy chair and propped his feet up on the bed. The gun never left his hand and his eyes never left the child. All the while the kid stared back like a still life, his eyes empty and flat like a painting.

“What do you want?” Arnold asked. Something terrible flickered in the child’s eyes. It was a look of intense concentration barely hidden behind a wall of bland passivity.

“I have come to explain things to you,” the child said. His sprightly voice sounded like a series of recorded statements strung together to form a whole sentence. Something about the cadence, the way the sentence did not rise and fall naturally, put Arnold in mind of animals trained to speak for human amusement. This is the way the dead would sound if they could talk, Arnold thought to himself and shuddered.