Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy

by Detwiller, Dennis

  In retrospect, he had known they would be trouble when he rented the unit to them three months before. But hey, the two men had paid in cash for the first year. In fuckin’ full. What was he going to do? Turn them down? There was a war on, after all.

  He didn’t care if they were nancy boys or wetbacks, as long as they had money and were quiet. But what were they up to up there? You had to be careful these days. The man next door could be a spy for the Axis. Tony had seen a Republic serial not three days ago uptown, where Nazi agents had constructed a death beam using radio parts to disintegrate Manhattan. Hell, if it hadn’t been for Captain Midnight, they would have done it too. He knew it wasn’t anything like that, though. Probably only some type of wetback radio, but what for? To pick up transmissions from Cuba or wherever it was they came from?

  Or to broadcast, maybe?

  Suddenly, shattering his reverie, a strange noise drifted down from above. An intertwining conglomeration of muffled voices raised in a sing-song chanting which he had never heard before filtered through the other sounds of the New York night. Their remote voices recited something over and over again, which put Tony in mind of Mass at St. Patrick’s on Christmas Eve. But it wasn’t the “Our Father” they were repeating.

  “Cocksucking heathens,” he whispered to himself, and tip-toed to the front closet, where he carefully removed an ancient, time-worn baseball bat. Tony was a big guy and he easily outweighed the two wetbacks put together, but hey, he was older, and anyway—two on one? Not his style. He had been involved in too many street fights as a kid not to know that things can go very wrong very quickly in any brawl. Where he came from—Long Island City—the baseball bat was the great equalizer. With its reassuring weight gripped tightly in his left hand, Tony skulked to the hall table, searching through a bundle of marked passkeys until he found the one he was looking for. Goddamn it, it was going to end tonight, he thought, and savored the feeling of power the thought brought to him. He slipped out into the darkened hallway to dish out some two-fisted justice, with a little help from his bat.

  The hall was black as pitch, but he didn’t risk a flashlight. Instead, by memory, he rapidly made his way to the stairs and rushed up them, hoping the noise would not carry up to four and alert the wetbacks. He paused at the door to the fourth-floor hallway and considered his options, but something suddenly struck him as wrong. The light was wrong...

  A greenish, spectral radiance was spilling from beneath the crack of the door.

  In the darkness of the staircase, the light from the beneath the doorframe looked bizarre, eerie almost, like the stories of ball lightning his dad had told him in childhood. Tony slipped open the door slowly and marveled at the ghostly beams which danced about the walls of the hallway. The bat hung forgotten in his hand as he stepped through. Flashing in intervals, the ghastly aurora which seeped from beneath the door of apartment Four-B illuminated every square inch of the hall somehow, even areas that should have been concealed in shadow. Something about the shadows of the hall looked...unnatural almost.

  When the chant came up again, much closer now, Tony raised the bat and his heart picked up a sudden frantic pace. Somehow this didn’t seem like too much fun now, stalking up a hallway in a blacked-out apartment with that strange light coming from beneath the door. Especially with that door his final destination. All the joy of his quest for justice had fled the moment he had touched the doorknob and felt the bizarre vibration again. Even now, he watched the darkened light fixture above Four-B rattle so swiftly that the small glass chips which hung from it tinkled like a wind chime.

  Something in his head ached. As he reached the apartment door he switched the bat from hand to hand, stalling, not really sure of his next action. Shadows backlit from inside the apartment overflowed from beneath the door jamb on to the far wall, casting strange squat forms on the blue-white wallpaper.

  “To those who came before, to those who will come after...”

  “Everything is in motion, even what is still.” The voices murmured in unison from inside Four-B and Tony felt all the spit instantly disappear from his mouth. His heart, already hammering away rapidly, tripped over double-time, racing faster than he ever thought it could. He didn’t precisely know why, but he was scared, more scared than he had ever been before. Even when he had been in combat way back in dim old 1918, with those damn Kraut bullets flying through the air as thick as August mosquitoes, he hadn’t felt nearly as afraid as he did now. But why?

  “Something’s wrong,” he mumbled to himself, and carefully pressed his head to the door. It thrummed with an unnatural vibration. Inside, a agglomeration of voices babbled away, and it was difficult for Tony to pick out individual strands of conversation from the morass of noise. He heard, or thought he heard, laughter and crying buried somewhere in there among a humming, high-pitched whine, and a dozen or more voices talking of odd things he did not understand.

  “...soon, a charge is almost there...”

  “...thirty-five seconds...”

  “...hold the child...”

  “...turn it off...”

  The lights in the hall snapped to life, causing Tony to leap back from the door with a hoarse shout. From within the apartment, the terrible, bone-shaking thrumming continued to climb, masking his cry in its terrible bass pounding. Tony’s head throbbed out of time with the whine like a drum.

  They had a kid in there.

  Something was damn wrong. His trembling hand slipped the passkey into the rattling lock, and the action brought to mind memories of crawling to the edge of the trench, bayonet at the ready, preparing to rush the German lines. Something in the act of turning the key in the lock spoke of terrible finality.

  He had been scared there on the Marne, fixing his bayonet to bury in the guts one of the Kaiser’s boys, but now as he swung the door open in to the unknown, he almost ached for that long-ago time. Something told him he had been safer rushing a field sprayed with machine gun rounds than he would be if he entered the room.

  The door swung wide slowly, and Tony Lanois gained the first glimpse of Four-B he’d had in three months.

  Hundreds—no, thousands—of wires traced looping routes over the sparse furniture, tracking up walls, on windowsills, under rugs to a central table which occupied the exact middle of the living room. On it, a device the size of a large typewriter sat adorned with spinning metal rods and pistons in bizarre configurations. On these pistons, small mirrors were fixed, etched in odd geometric forms, reflecting back a rapidly fading ghostly light produced from somewhere within the slowing machine. A small child, a boy or a girl (Tony could not tell from the back), sat on a small piano bench. Its head was placed carefully in front of the machine on a chin brace, like one of those headrests for the hand-crank penny Nickelodeons. What the device was, Tony had no idea, but is sure as hell didn’t look like a radio.

  Other bizarre contraptions dotted the room, each connected by huge masses of wires to the central device. These peripheral machines looked like the cannibalized remains of more than a hundred radios, stapled and glued and flattened onto boards which held dimly glowing tubes, rotating fans and snapping electrodes by the dozens.

  It was then that the men in the room noticed him. Tony only recognized two of the five men in the room, the wetbacks he had rented the place to. Besides the two known quantities, three other olive-skinned men, who wore disheveled clothes and bland expressions, stood near the machine. They all turned to face Tony as he stepped into the room. With a click, suddenly the gadget on the table stopped. The terrible thrumming in the air stopped just as suddenly and the moment seemed to hang suspended in the air like time itself had ceased to exist. No one moved for a long time.

  “The kid’s coming with me,” Tony said, and raised the bat menacingly. He struck one of the boards of glass tubes nearest him to demonstrate his willingness to inflict mindless violence, and it made a satisfying crash as the bulbs on it blew. Not one man in the room flinched. The child did not even move from its chair
. The usual tell-tale signs of fear were not to be found on any of the strangely emotionless faces of the group.

  “Uh...“ Tony said in a small voice.

  The child abruptly rose from the chair and turned to face him in stuttering, automaton-like movements. It was a small boy wearing knickers and old, worn shoes. He looked like a million other kids Tony saw every day in his walks to Washington Square; his face was filthy, covered in dirt and scratches, but his eyes were a luminous and beautiful green. The nails were bitten ragged, his knees scuffed and dirty, his hair tousled and a little wet. But something about the child was wrong. The little boy’s face was fixed and relaxed at the same time, like it held a purposely mild expression by sheer willpower alone.

  “C’mere, kid,” Tony said in an unsteady voice, and reached out his right hand.

  The look on the child’s face held nothing human in it.

  “Kill it,” the child said in a monotone voice, studying Tony like he was a captured insect waiting to be pinned and mounted. The last thing Tony Lanois ever saw was one of the men in the room produce a shiny silver object from a nearby windowsill. It looked absurdly like a vacuum cleaner with a flat cleaning head. The thin, gleaming object settled into the shoulder of the man with a practiced ease, held so that the flat end pointed at Tony like the muzzle of a rifle.

  What? Tony thought, as the bright, white light exploded and the smell of burning flesh filled the room.

  Then he was gone.

  The child shut the apartment door carefully, but in a strange manner, as if the act was alien but the concept itself was understood. As it shut, the ashes and slagged fillings that were once the building superintendent swept back into the hallway. Outside, New York continued apace, unmindful of such an insignificant and personal inconvenience.

  PART TWO:

  Judging Distances

  CHAPTER 7:

  And my brother is part of the ocean

  December 26, 1942: London, United Kingdom

  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.