Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (5 page)

The bolt slid home. It made him feel a vague and artificial safety.

The mirror on the door threw a reflection back at him which his mind registered as that of a stranger. Black uniform, empty features, gaunt cheeks. He no longer thought of himself as a person, as a thing capable of projecting a reflection. It seemed now that he was more simply a figment in other people’s imaginations. He was here because they needed to believe someone like him would be here. They read what they wanted into him.

He followed his routine, removing and hanging his jacket over the mirror and placing his boots in the hallway for shining. Outside the window the upper limbs of a swaying oak tree played in the wind while the rain fell, heavier than before. Bruning turned up the heat in the rooms and sat on the bed, which offered up a muffled shriek of springs in protest.

Directly in front of him, where he had placed it moments ago without a thought, was his holstered pistol, hanging casually off the back of an old wooden chair less than two feet away from his head. It hung there, silent and heavy with fate.

Trying to empty his mind of the images he found behind his eyes, Bruning sat for a long time.

After a while, something in the room changed. Slowly Bruning leaned forward on the bed as the wind shrieked outside. As if of its own volition, his hand found its way to the reassuring butt of the pistol. With a slow, dull hiss, the Walther slid from its holster like a snake shedding its skin.

Bruning held the gun in his hand for a long time, considering it as one would examine an interesting artifact, turning it over to mark all the defects and imperfections, the scratch marks which set it apart from others of its kind. When he had first practiced with the pistol at officer school in Bad Tolz, an unreasoning fear of the gun had risen in him that the device in his hand had been designed simply to kill. It haunted his progress through the program. The gun seemed to have a life of its own. Sometimes when it jumped in his hand and threw a smoking shell to the ground he found himself watching it and not the target.

But now the pistol was nothing. It was just a machine designed to kill human beings, just as he himself was a machine designed to kill human beings. They were finally equal. After all this time and hardship they had found their peace.

Something else seemed to move the events in the room, and his arm curled slowly, bringing the gun up to his head gracefully, until the barrel pressed into his forehead. The cool metal at his temple talked to him of undreamt freedom and rest. It was good there, he thought, it felt something like coming home after a long day.

When he closed his eyes and slipped his finger past the trigger guard on to the trigger, Bruning saw the blackboard at Bad Tolz. The instructor counted through the diagram of the mechanical elements of the Walther P38 performing their intricate dance. Each component useless in and of itself, together they offered a way out for so many, a doorway through this pain and misery—they were beautiful, really. He could never forget their reverent sequence: trigger, sear spring, hammer release—

The knock on his door rattled it in its frame.

Bruning held the gun to his temple one moment more, feeling its reassuring weight, before placing it carefully back in his holster. A sick thrill ran through him as he stood and walked slowly to the door.

“Who is it?” Bruning was startled by the calmness of his voice.

“Oberscharführer Weber, sir.”

“A moment.” Bruning recovered his jacket and buttoned it up quickly with practiced ease, opening the door slightly first to check the identity of his caller. Weber’s face was pale and his eyes weary with too little sleep. He smiled while Bruning looked him over, a rickety, uneven grin which looked manufactured through sheer force of will, as if it had no real reflection on his inner workings at all. He had seen such smiles before, many times. Bruning opened the door wide for the man and buckled his belt on, making sure his holster remained open—just in case.

“Sit, please.” Bruning indicated the chair with a gesture, and walked to the cupboard.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Would you like something to drink? Wine?”

“Oh, no thank you, sir. I have been having a bit too much of it as is. ...”

“I understand.” Bruning pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat near the window facing Weber. The wind outside shrieked, the rain fell. Seconds and then minutes ticked away on the hall clock. Weber’s hand traced the rim of his cap in a nervous gesture of habit, flattening the felt on the lip between gloved fingers. Back and forth. Back and forth.

“Well.” Bruning coughed, waking Weber from his reverie.

“Oh. Excuse me. Hm. Well. I suppose...So, you...you worked on the translation project for Andries?”

“Yes.”

“I recall a lecture on it. Here, was it? Or Berlin? It was...about cryptography in the later Gutenberg period. Imperial seals and such. Code-wheels. Fascinating. I was quite impressed.” Weber suddenly placed his hat on the bed, as if to keep it from his treacherous, nervous hands. He offered a guilty smile and a half-hearted shrug to Bruning as penance.

“It was hell.” Bruning said simply and stood, stretching. “I will have a glass after all, I think.” Pouring himself a large cup of fortified wine from the cupboard, Bruning held his hand to the window and peered into the dark. Outside a knot of men rushed across the campus in the rain. Bruning watched them run out of view.

Weber looked at him, searching for something, some meaning in Bruning’s manner of speech or the choice of his words. Bruning sat back down and drained half his cup in a gulp. He offered the rest to Weber who shook his head.

“You see. It is all like this. We think...they think...“ Weber’s voice drifted off into silence.

“Yes?” Bruning looked up, suddenly interested.

“They think we have it easy here. We do not. We...”

“Yes.” Bruning swiftly drank down the rest, placing the cup on the bureau, already bored.

“They think they understand. But this is why I am here. I am here to talk of my project, my hell.”

“I’m afraid I have not had a chance to look through your file.”

“What I will tell you is not in the file. But you will be there soon enough, and I want you ready for what you will see...” Weber smiled nervously and looked over his shoulder at the door, the look a child reserves for the opened bedroom closet at night. Like a sudden convulsion, Weber laughed, a horrible sound like a man drowning, and Bruning found himself interested again. Something about Weber, about his predicament, whatever it was, resonated in him. There was an air of conspiracy in the room, suddenly, like a lingering smell.

“May I smoke? You do not mind?” Weber lit a French cigarette without waiting for Bruning to answer. “We have been having difficulties covering this up, my research team and I, but it goes against the Racial Doctrine of the Reich and the project is so important...I shall be frank, it is the only thing which can save us now. Any good soldier knows the war is already over...” Weber glanced furtively around again, as if some divine force would strike him down for simply mentioning the possibility of defeat.

“Go on.”

“The creatures—they call themselves the Deep Ones—they wish to...inter-breed with humans. We thought simply that they...fed on...humans. You see? And so we sent many lower breeds, Russians, Jews, and others out into the waves, but our first meeting indicated they wanted something more...” Weber’s face contorted into a grin for a split second, as if some inward amusement had played across his mind for a moment. He looked up at Bruning.

“They set up colonies on the surface to breed, you see? They wish to mate with humans, and the damned Totenkopf SS keep sending me men from the camps. They want women. We must...give them what they want. Yes? So I did. I did. God help me, I sent them women...” Weber took his hat off and ran his hands through his thinning grayed hair.

“Where did you get the women, Weber?” Bruning’s voice sounded far away and dreamy—calm, like he already knew the answer and was asking simply to be polite.

“We have taken a town. A whole fishing village. Marise. We made it look like an Einsatzgruppen action, partisans. We closed it off. We killed the men. We have the children. We have to keep them you see? To make the women do what we want.” Weber grinned again, looking up through bloodshot eyes, as if all he said made sense.

“But I had to do it! Soon the invasion will come! Have you ever been to America? It is so vast it is hard to conceive, and nothing will stop them now. Nothing but Black Water. We must give these Deep Ones what they want, and then we will stop this war. We will...” Weber let his head sink down into his hands. He wept for a time like a child, cigarette burning away the minutes in his hand, forgotten, while Bruning sat and considered the situation.

He should report Weber’s confession, but such a fact could be advantageous later, and Weber had many useful contacts, inside and outside the group. He would have to think carefully before deciding his next move.

Weber’s body rocked back and forth as he sobbed. He cried without concern, as the feeling finally coursed through his body like a rod conducting lightning. Bruning watched him and tried to feel something other than eagerness and greed, but it would not come.

The man in front of him was a human being, he thought to himself, a person.

But something in Bruning’s mind snapped shut like a trap and he knew this was not true.

Bruning took the cigarette from Weber and stubbed it out on the plaster of his windowbox fastidiously. Outside, on the grounds, a brutal rainstorm rocked the trees and threw the shadows of leaves around on the chilling wet wind. In that same night off the coast at Normandy, Bruning was sure, something moved in the water with a terrible purpose.

“You need to give the project a chance, sir. We are so very close.” Weber’s voice was thick with mucus, and he did not raise his head. Bruning handed him a freshly-laundered handkerchief from the cupboard, which Weber took and rigorously wiped his entire face, twice dabbing his eyes in a curiously delicate gesture.

“I shall give you your chance,” Bruning said, and wondered at the certainty in his own voice.

What Weber had neglected to disclose about Project Black Water was collected in an unmarked, neatly typed report which he handed over to Bruning the moment they boarded the “Storch” transport for France. On the flight from Stuttgart, Bruning familiarized himself with the horrors that his comrades had been up to on the French coast. It was only fitting, his lack of action against the pursuits of the Karotechia, especially those he was involved in only added to the miseries of the world. It was best to know every detail of your crimes, he believed, even if they were performed vicariously by people nothing like yourself. Bruning was shocked that he had made it this far in to the deadly maze of the Karotechia, that his name had not become one of the missing after some late-night drive. It was this fact which led to much of his inaction. Bewildered at all turns by his colleagues’ inability to judge his character, he found himself in a constant and pervasive daze of disbelief. He had fooled everyone, it seemed, except himself.

And that was the most important person to fool of all.

With Weber as his “confidant,” Bruning had played up their comradeship, their responsibility to the Reich. Nothing would stop them; they would save the world together... They shared wine and plans—both of which were blindly sanguine, and did nothing to better their position but let them pretend together that they had, while time and circumstance marched around them like the armies of the world.

Such optimism during all this death and madness was ridiculous, really.

Although the group had long been on the trail of the mysterious Deep Ones, the horrors of Project Black Water truly began during the Karotechia’s study of a book known as
Cthaat Aquadingen
, or
The Book of Black Water
. These researches were led by the young and studious Oberscharführer Hermann Weber. Weber had spent almost seven years abroad in the United States and England during his college years, studying archaeology and anthropology, valuable tools which he placed at the disposal of the Reich with his return in 1936. He was added to the ranks of the Karotechia by Himmler in 1938. What could be a safer way to serve in the army while war loomed on the horizon than by researching racial doctrine?