Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (23 page)

Arnold hung his hat and sat down in a plush leather seat.

“Tom,” Cook said in way of greeting and looked out the window.

“Commander,” Arnold replied, and glanced at the scattered contents of his desk. Two manila files lay open amidst a sea of disordered papers and photos along with a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels, a .45 automatic, and an assortment of loose cartridges.

“So...fill me in,” the old man said and slowly sank into his chair with a grunt.

“Me and Barnsby followed up some leads here about Peaslee...it’s in the report. You read it? Well, Barnsby tried some of his voodoo on one of the doc’s books and, well...you know I guess...he’s still in the hospital. Oh, and we found the book. The
Observations on the Several Parts of Africa
in the Peaslee’s kid’s study.”

“Yeah, I read the report about it...by...what’s his name. The guy we got from Miskatonic?”

“The Africa guy? Smith. Dr. Smith.”

“Yeah, him. It looks pretty grim. It’s almost certainly true. All of it. Though thankfully only the Nazis and us know anything about it.”

“Listen, are you guys going to bring Wingate Peaslee in on this? He could probably help us out.”

“Already done. He’s on his way to Australia along with Mark Steuben.” Cook looked up at Arnold through heavy-lidded, dog-brown eyes. Mark Steuben, another OSS/DELTA GREEN man, had been with Arnold on the beach at the Cap de la Hague, raining shells down on the innocent and the damned. For some reason it was hard for Arnold to imagine Mark and Peaslee together. It was even harder to imagine Australia, far away and serene and perfect. As the days passed, everything beyond Arnold’s direct knowledge and observation seemed to grow more and more hazy and indistinct. What once seemed assured as fact was fading slowly to fantasy.

“Why Australia?” Arnold fiddled with his lighter and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it in a swift movement.

“Peaslee and his dad went on an expedition there in ‘35. We just got through reading the father’s journals from that period. They...found something out there in the desert. Some type of written record from...before.”

“Before what?”

Cook looked down at his hands on the table, which he had pressed flat to its surface like he was trying to stop them from trembling.

“Before everything.” Cook replied, and when their eyes met, Arnold could see it was eating him up inside.

“I think Barnsby mentioned something like that. A library or something.”

“At first when I read the PISCES stuff on their ‘Talents,’ I wanted to laugh. Now I don’t know what I want to do. Cry, maybe. It seems they can actually do what they say they can do.”

“I believe in Barnsby. Don’t know about the others,” Arnold stated matter-of-factly, looking at the tip of his cigarette. A haze of smoke hovered in the room, coalescing in a cloud amidst the lights in the ceiling.

“The doctors say he’ll be up and around in no time. We’re trying to assemble a new team of DELTA GREEN-briefed OSS men, but our people are few and far between. We’re sending Dr. Smith with you. He’s fluent in the languages and culture of the area. He checks out.” Cook shuffled through some of the papers as he spoke, searching, it seemed, for something specific.

“What about the other men on the team that went into France?”

“They’re gone. All except Steuben, who stayed behind, and Stillman. But Stillman is in no shape to go.”

Arnold and Cook sat in silence for a long time.

“How?” It was all Arnold could say.

“I’ll get you the report. It’s not pretty. PISCES lost two men as well.”

“So what’s the play from here?” Arnold asked and rubbed his cigarette out on the sole of his shoe.

“You’re going to lead a small DG team into the Congo. You’re going to find this Grey city—this Thule, as the Krauts call it, and you’re going to blow it, and everything in it, to hell. That’s the play. Denied to the enemy. Everything we can’t contain, denied to the enemy. Anyone with one of Cornwall’s ‘Talents’ who won’t work for us—denied to the enemy. That’s the policy from now on. Steuben and Peaslee will do the same in Australia.”

Cook pointed at the bottle of Jack Daniels with his eyebrows raised. When Arnold did not reply, the fat man poured himself a large tumbler full of the last of the amber liquid. He downed a third of it at a go, finishing the whole thing in less than a minute. Arnold watched him, thinking about the problems ahead of him like a dancer reviewing an unfamiliar series of steps.

“We’re going to need some jungle specialists.”

“We’re already working on it. I’ll have him debriefed by Steuben in Australia on the way over,” Cook coughed back, wheezing. His bloodshot eyes stared forward into space as if drawn there by some breathtaking sight. He leaned back in his chair and sat transfixed. Arnold wondered what it was the man was seeing in his mind’s eye. The ruins in the Congo ablaze? The Third Reich a fading memory? The war over? Arnold somehow didn’t think that was it.

“That’s all we need for now, Tom. We’ll contact you.”

In his own mind’s eye Arnold beheld the edges of something to which all these events were nothing more than the most insignificant occurrence. Cook, he thought, perhaps, saw the same thing.

Arnold left without saying goodbye. The word somehow didn’t do the meeting justice.

Joe Camp was pretty sure he had malaria, although it was hard to tell if it was just the heat. Buried in the midst of rhododendron bushes beneath the humungous vaulted ceiling of evergreen hardwoods and coated in the all-pervading, ever-present Burmese humidity, it was difficult to gauge whether the droplets on his body were sweat or just water vapor. He decided to believe it was just the humidity and shifted his pack further back so he could glance over a mold-wrapped tree stump at what passed for a road in the interior highlands. Anyway, at 115 degrees in the midst of the hot season, what did it really matter if he had a fever?

Camp imagined what would happen if his mother could see him now, if somehow he found himself back in the real world. Chances were, she would just walk right by him without the slightest hint of recognition. He knew what he looked like from his shaving mirror. As time had passed in the highlands, it had become more and more like some magic device. In the magic mirror he had slowly transformed from the short, muscular, well-groomed football player he once was, to a tiny, gaunt skeleton in sweat-stained, muddied fatigues, with wild, sunken, ice-blue eyes and skin the color of red clay, sprinkled with dozens of bug bites. Joe had begun to think of it as his transformation from American into a Burmese local. Soon enough, he guessed, it would be difficult to pick him out of the lineup of his men—at least without looking at his eyes.

Force 101, team 4a—fourteen men, his men, squatted, invisible in the underbrush around him, waiting for the enemy. Joe Camp had spent months in the jungle now for the OSS. The time frame seemed incredible to him whenever he had access to modern amenities. Luckily, his temptations since showing up for duty in Burma were few. The last time he bathed in a tub was in India during a brief layover, before riding into the jungle on a plane which was literally little more than a bundle of well-placed sticks propelled by an engine that belonged on the back of a rowboat. Since then he had been lucky to eat, much less bathe.

Group 4a had stalked the interior highlands with skill, ambushing Japanese patrols and destroying their handiwork in northern Burma with heavy explosives. Camp, unlike the other western officers, enjoyed the company of the native Burmese Kachins, who comprised the majority of his force. The little men fought with a determination and fervor that westerners could not believe (much less match), and their dispositions were almost always sunny. Few understood why. The Kachins had been made an example by the Japanese. Killing the Japanese therefore made them happy, and it interfered little with their religious beliefs.

Camp recalled a story told with utter sincerity by a boy named Aung, who had collected in his brief time as a guerrilla over thirty pairs of Japanese ears; it was the only thing that Kachin culture considered something of a sport. The boy recalled that when the Japanese had entered the village of Langtau near the Chaukan pass to India, they had nailed every man over twenty to a tree to prevent them from fleeing to join the British forces. The Japanese had made a dreadful mistake. Few besides the Kachins knew the highlands to the northwest so well, and few besides the Kachins in Burma had the courage to fight. If left to their own devices, the Kachins would not have fought at all.

Camp liked the Kachins, but he was secretly happy that the Japanese had crossed the line. The Allies needed all the help they could get in the thinly guarded corridor.

Technically Burma was now a member of the Japanese puppet states which comprised the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In reality, the jungles were overrun with small groups of British, American and Burmese troops, and few places in the north were heavily defended by the Japanese.

In just over six weeks, Camp had picked up the language of the little, happy people who took Japanese ears for sport. Joe spoke eight languages—mostly those of the Far East and a smattering of Romance tongues. It was what his mother had called his “gift.” A natural propensity for language brought him to Harvard and then to the OSS, and from there it was just a brief jump to the middle of a jungle in Burma.

If mother could only see what his “gift” had gotten him, and where.

The Kachins called him “Father” in their tongue now, and followed him around like he was Christ off the cross. Not only because he was the only white man to speak their language in Force 101, but because he had secured them a shipment of pump action shotguns from Remington (at his family’s expense). Joe preferred his Thompson submachine gun, but the little Kachins would have nothing to do with such technology. Joe once asked why and found the answer as eccentric and insightful as the Kachins were themselves:

“A shotgun is like a machine gun, but all the bullets fire at once. The machine gun is too slow.”

Now Joe Camp sat his rapidly numbing ass on the wet ground, leaning against his pack, watching the path for enemy movement. A report had bled out of Myitkyina that troops burdened with supplies would be heading towards a small Japanese camp on the western slopes of a mountain the Kachins called Loi Leng. From this camp, routine patrols would circulate around the Chaukan Pass intercepting commando groups sneaking over the border from India.

4a had been in place for more than eleven hours and Joe Camp’s fevered mind was working the problems of the ambush over in his head again and again, not really to solve them (they had already been solved) but as a way to kill time. Camp scratched his face and suddenly removed a small, red-brown snake from his bootstraps, throwing it away into the underbrush with a disgusted look. Usually, only the bigger snakes tended to be poisonous, but he really had very little knowledge about the local wildlife. Looking up at the dim light which filtered through the canopy, he was distinctly aware that he was a long way from Harvard. If his fraternity brothers could only see him now. Kappa Nu, tried and true...

At that moment Keta, a lead sentry to the northeast, emitted a shrill cry, imitating a local bird. Camp heard the stealthy clicks of safeties being switched off from shotguns, and two tiny sounds across from him told him that Pagou had armed the mines which were placed along the path well clear of their position. Then, suddenly, as Camp cocked his submachine gun, a low whistle sounded from Keta, a signal Camp had not expected. It meant that whoever was coming up the path, they were not Japanese. The Kachins, ever mindful of his commands, stayed still. Joe Camp wiped the sweat out of his eyes and waited for what seemed like a long time.

The first man to come over the rise was even smaller than the Kachins, not more than four feet tall. His skin was painted with a black, crumbly paint in odd patterns, including two lines beneath his glinty eyes which put Joe in mind of football season. The little man’s skin was a deep, rich red-brown and his black hair was shaved at his temples and elaborately tied in strands at the top, with knotted ponytails hanging at his back. Other than a loincloth made of gaur skin he wore nothing except his smile. The smile, though, was quite disturbing. Glinty, bright white sharpened teeth shone from the darkness of his face as he moved briskly up the path, humming some repetitive tune to himself. If he saw any of the men of 4a, he made no indication. Then he was gone. Camp sprang up on numb legs and shot across the path to Pagou, who he found clutching a detonator in one hand and his shotgun in the other. They conversed briefly in Kachin whispers.