Delta Green: Strange Authorities

by John Scott Tynes

  Cell T ran from door to door. Neither Shasta nor Susan were among the prisoners, but there was the empty cell to consider.

  Archie Sanders hurried over to Stephanie. “This must be their organ bank! Forget Mexico, they’re harvesting ’em right here! Jesus!”

  Stephanie stared at him blankly for a moment, then remembered the cover story. “Yeah, that must be it,” she responded coolly. “Look, this place is on fire. You’ve got to get these people out of here. Check the desk for keys, or maybe the locks are computer-controlled. Send someone up and get ambulances out here. These people may be injured. You don’t have much time and there’s a lot of people to evacuate.” Archie nodded and got busy.

  Abe and Vic joined Stephanie and the three exchanged looks. “All right, let’s go,” Stephanie said. They turned and ran into the smoky corridor, Stephanie yelling “Help them!” to the three marshals.

  Jean entered the large room and saw the desk and the doors. The terror-smells were coming from those doors. But the marshals had headed down the corridor to the left—their scent was fresh and strong. She could hear the footsteps of the second handful of marshals as they ran.

  She followed at a sprint. The corridor was hazy and the lights were off and on, flourescent tubes buzzing in her ears. She reached a corner. There was a door directly ahead—lying on the floor. The open doorway past it was belching smoke, and debris partially blocked the entrance. Somewhere beyond, a fire was raging. Whatever the explosion had been, it had happened through there. The marshals, though, had continued down the hall to the right. She ran.

  The hall opened up onto a wide ramp leading down into a huge sunken chamber, two stories tall. The ceiling was gridded with metal struts and dotted with black metal cylinders Jean recognized as theatrical lights. The floor was bare cement. Within the chamber were the makings of a Hollywood soundstage: portable walls, backdrops, furniture, props, big speakers, and on and on. In one corner was some sort of control area with electronic equipment, presumably to operate the lights and sound. A huge horizontal mirror—two-way, Jean guessed—was set into the opposite wall next to another ramp that led up to a hallway beyond.

  This room was a container of fear. The cement, the props, everything was permeated—drenched—with the human odor of stark terror. The power of that fear was almost animate. The hairs on the back of Jean’s neck stood up and she shivered, wondering just what the hell went on here. There were a few old smells of blood, but this was no abattoir, unless it could be considered a slaughterhouse of the soul. People came in here and were shattered, leaving shards of fear of every conceivable origin.

  The marshals were not here. They’d moved on, down the hall. Jean shivered again, fighting off a panic impulse to drop her human guise, and bolted, wicked fast. There was a fresh odor wafting out of the hallway up ahead. Something was going on.

  She moved up the ramp, down the hall, past several doors, then around a corner where she skidded to a stop by a pile of MP5s and Rugers. Three marshals were standing watch on six security guards, all in a knot. The speed of Jean’s approach startled them.

  Just beyond, six marshals were standing in a rough line, M-16s pointed down the hall. At the end of the hall, maybe thirty feet away, there was a single door before which stood a seventh guard with his MP5 pointed at the marshals. She shot a questioning look at one of the men standing by the Wackenhut guards. “Standoff,” he whispered.

  “Damnit, I’m not gonna ask you again, son!” the marshal on point was saying. “Now the rest of your boys have done the sensible thing. Just stand down so we can get this business over with!”

  “No, sir,” the guard replied in a voice like a dead man’s. “You and your men must withdraw.”

  The marshal looked over his shoulder at the guards who had surrendered. “Can’t you talk some sense into this fool?”

  One of the guards straightened up. “Shane!” he called out. “Stand down, man. These assholes are gonna take it in the shorts soon enough. Let’s keep this simple.”

  “I can’t do that, sir,” the guard called back.

  “I mean it, Shane, it’s not worth it! You know as well as I do that this bullshit’s gonna be over any minute now.”

  “Sir—” the guard said, then stopped.

  “What?”

  The guard paused before answering. “We’ve got Visitors, sir.”

  The hallway got quiet. It was the calm before the storm.

  For much of its history, the National Reconnaissance Office didn’t exist—officially. Founded in 1960, the NRO took the role of operating the network of American spy satellites orbiting the Earth. The government did not publicly acknowledge its existence until a number of leaks finally outed it, after three decades of secrecy. Its staff is recruited primarily from the Air Force, the CIA, and the Navy. Officially, NRO staff are on the payroll of the Air Force Intelligence Agency, which provides them with a layer of cover against exposure.

  Being a very secret, very “black” project, details of the NRO’s budget are not available to the public. Given these circumstances, the NRO is a very handy place to hide other, even more secret operations, even those that have no real connection to the NRO’s purpose or operations.

  Like SECTION DELTA. Since the mid-1960s, NRO DELTA has gathered together a unique group of people, all of whom have an important unifying trait: they are among the finest, most ruthless, resourceful, and remorseless trained killers in the world—efficient, finely tuned products of the American military and intelligence culture. They provide physical security and wetworks capability to their superiors in the United States government. Although NRO DELTA agents are already hidden behind multiple layers of deniability, sometimes it’s necessary for them to use yet another layer, that of the private sector.

  Such as Wackenhut Corporation.

  —six arms snap six knives slip into palms and they are moving these blurs of tan and steel the three marshals next to them turn to respond raise weapons a startled cry then plunge and again and straight through blood arcs spilling onto the tile staining the walls the uniforms the kevlar and these men are hard they are diamond-hard ghosts of motion and fury the other marshals spin and their guns rattle but the ghost at the door erases the old marshal’s face with a burst so pure and clean it’s like a thought and the five spin back to respond confused another erasure then two gutted from behind and they’re in the ghost dance now calling up the spirits of all their secret dead Vietnam Guatemala Chilé Sudan Iraq a mantra of things that will never be known and bodies are hitting the floor and this is their time the dream time of blood lust that they train for that they live for and they are nothing but bespoke death and from their midst then something—something wrong—something wrong ROARS—

  Cell T came down the ramp into the huge soundstage, guns drawn.

  “What the hell is this?” Abe asked.

  “Some kind of studio,” Vic replied. “I guess. Jesus.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “It’s a funhouse. Let’s go.”

  They started forward, and then halted as the sounds came from somewhere up ahead. Cries, and the chuk-chuk-chuk of M-16 fire, mixed with the sleek German working of an MP5. The gunfire stopped almost immediately and then the screaming started, men wailing and the inhuman roar of some enraged animal.

  “Shit!” Abe shouted, but Vic and Stephanie were already running to beat the band.

  By the time they reached the turn, all was quiet. Bodies of guards and marshals were strewn about the hallway, and the floor was thick with blood and the fluid of human beings ripped wide. Agent Nancy was crouched in the midst of the dead, drenched in blood from head to toe, her blond hair matted and thick. She held a severed human head in her hands, skull cracked open, her face buried in the man’s brain as she wolfed down the meat.

  Cell T stopped short, stared, uncomprehending. Vic fired and shot Nancy in the shoulder before she knew she’d pulled the trigger. Nancy fell on her back, dropping the half-eaten head, and came up in a menacing crouch. H
er features seemed to ripple for a moment, loosely blended with some terrible monstrosity, but then they stabilized. She put one gore-streaked hand over her shoulder.

  “Chill out,” she said thickly. “It’s under control.”

  Vic, Abe, and Stephanie just stood there in shock. All three lowered their weapons slightly.

  “Nancy?” Stephanie asked in a trembling voice.

  Nancy nodded towards the door at the end of the hall. “In there,” she said. “Something’s in there.” She picked up the head she’d dropped and resumed eating.

  “Wh—what are you doing?” Vic stammered.

  Nancy swallowed another chunk of brain and licked her lips. “Debriefing.”

  The three agents moved slowly over the corpses and past Nancy, who now ignored them. They backed down the hall towards the far door, their faces pale.

  “What do we do?” Abe whispered.

  “Let’s just leave her the fuck alone,” Vic replied shakily. “Check out the door.”

  Reluctantly turning their back on the carnage—and the feasting—behind them, Cell T opened the door.

  Inside was an operating room. A procedure was under way.

  Abe immediately flashed on that grainy “Alien Autopsy” video that had been on TV a few years back. This looked like an alien autopsy, all right. But the scalpels were in the wrong hands.

  Three short, spindly humanoids with pale skin and huge eyes were gathered around an operating table, oblivious to the commotion outside and the nervous trio who had just entered. Agent Susan was spread out on a gurney. Her body cavity was open, but to their horror the agents realized she was still breathing. The creatures wielded strange instruments expertly, poking and prodding among her living organs. A plethora of state-of-the-art medical equipment was nearby, but it was not in use. These things had everything they needed in their slender, skeletal fingers.

  The agents were never sure who fired first.

  The blaze of gunfire was deafening, and all they could smell was cordite. The three creatures staggered and spun awkwardly, metal slugs punching through their little childlike bodies. Multicolored fluids spattered the floor. Abe, Vic, and Stephanie kept firing until they were clicking on empty and the three things were sprawled at their feet. Then they just stood there, gasping.

  Stephanie recovered first. She holstered her weapon. “Come on. We’ve got to get Susan out of here.” She strode forward, taking a hard step on the face of one of the creatures. She got to the far side of the gurney and wheeled it around. Vic stepped forward and grabbed the other end, then they lifted it roughly over the bodies and rolled it out the door.

  Abe stood staring for a few moments as Vic and Stephanie passed by him with Susan on the gurney. Then he recovered and looked around the room. Among the medical equipment was a small video camera bolted to a cart. A little red light above the lens was glowing. Wires ran to a DVD-RAM unit lower on the cart, beneath a television set that was turned off. Abe ran over and ejected the disk, then stuck it in his jacket and hurried out into the hallway.

  His partners were negotiating the gurney over and through the sundered dead. Nancy was on her third severed head, and glanced at them only briefly. “Check these rooms!” Stephanie called out. “Look for Shasta!”

  Abe hurried from door to door, looking briefly into each. All were unoccupied. They were additional medical rooms: surgical theaters, pharmacies, storerooms, and so on. He moved as if in a dream, splashing in the congealing fluids as Nancy continued to devour the mind-meat of the security guards.

  Finally he was done. Vic and Stephanie were way off down the hallway, racing with the gurney as fast as they dared through the sound-stage. Abe was alone with Nancy, who promptly finished off the last guard’s head. She rose and wiped her mouth with her sleeve, which did no good at all. She looks like that movie Carrie was all Abe could manage to think coherently, and later he would look back at this moment and feel that that was really doing pretty good. Considering.

  “Come on,” Nancy said. “We better get out of here.” She turned and ran down the hall, Abe following because he didn’t know what the hell else to do.

  Chapter Five: The White Road

  Sunday, March 14, 1999

  Joseph Camp rose at dawn on Sunday morning. He took a shower, got dressed, and made a simple breakfast of English muffins and marmalade with a pot of coffee to wash it down. The morning sun was bright and clear outside on this cool March day. His little house felt stuffy and smelled of cigarettes and old man. He resolved to get the maid service to pay a call sometime this week, get the place freshened up a little.

  Breakfast finished, Joe plodded to the front door and opened it, blinking in the light. The Washington Post was on his doorstep. He brought it in and spent a few minutes reading and remembering.

  Yesterday’s incident in Bountin was national news. A joint DEA–Sheriff’s Department investigation had uncovered a large methamphetamine manufacturing and distribution facility hidden in an office building. Deputy U.S. Marshals led the raid and the lab had exploded, killing nine marshals and all seven suspects. Troops from Fort Detrick were called in to seal off the area, allowing hazardous-materials specialists from the Army’s nearby USAMRIID institute to process and detox those exposed to the large quantity of dangerous chemicals released in the blast. Buildings in the vicinity were evacuated and their occupants treated, as well. President Clinton would hold a brief ceremony in the Rose Garden this afternoon to honor the nine fallen deputy marshals—the largest single loss in the organiz-ation’s 120-year history. “It is a time of mourning,” the President said in a statement late Saturday evening, “but also a time of warning: we have zero tolerance for those who would push drugs on our youth and place the brave men and women of law-enforcement at risk. Illegal methamphetamines are a plague on our nation and we will fight their makers to the bitter end.” Flags in the capitol flew at half-mast.

  Joe shook his head. “What a crock of shit,” he muttered.

  On the surface, much of the story was true. Three truckloads of Army troops had, indeed, shown up as the raid was winding down and local emergency crews were fighting the blaze that quickly consumed the OUTLOOK Group building. The troops did seal off the area and USAMRIID was trotted out to show off their Racal suits for the media. There was little or no danger other than the fire, however. No meth lab existed. No dangerous chemicals were released. The show of force had two purposes: to lock down the scene from civilian personnel and to explain why the Army had hauled off everyone who’d been involved in the raid.

  It was a shitstorm, but Joe had really expected no less. The good news was that Cell T had gotten away, with Agents Nancy and Susan in tow. They’d stolen one of the dozen ambulances that showed up in response to the explosion and were gone before the Army moved in. It had been a tight escape.

  It was true, also, that nine innocent Deputy U.S. Marshals had died, slain by NRO DELTA to protect OUTLOOK’s greatest secret: collusion with inhuman creatures, presumably for scientific gain. Their lesser secrets had gone up in flames. The thermite blast set off by the guards destroyed OUTLOOK’s paper files and their network database servers, and of course the patients they’d rescued had fallen into USAMRIID’s hands, which meant the people who ran OUTLOOK would get them back soon enough. None of the computers and documents seized in the raid had escaped the Army cordon. The surviving non-DG raid personnel would be debriefed and counseled on what to say about the incident in the future. Those who complied would be fine. Those who resisted or leaked information would probably be killed, victims of suicide or car wrecks or a bad case of the flu.

  Delta Green had little to show for the disaster they’d unleashed, but it would have to be enough. For starters, Agent Susan was alive—for now. Cell T had rushed her to a small clinic run by a retired Delta Green agent. The incisions made by the inhuman surgeons had closed up by themselves en route, to Cell T’s considerable distress. At the clinic, they secured her and kept her under with sedatives. She was sti
ll there, still unconscious, guarded by Agents Nick and Nolan; they were waiting for the arrival of a DG-friendly medical team from North Carolina. Tonight they’d try the experimental therapy to see if they could purge her body of the neo-tissue. Joe wasn’t looking forward to that.

  They had Susan, but they didn’t have Shasta. Cell T was pretty positive that he hadn’t been in the facility at all, though Joe thought it was conceivable that he was simply dead, buried in the smoldering and collapsed basements beneath OUTLOOK.

  They also had the videodisc that Agent Thomas had recovered from the operating room. Joe had brought it home and reviewed its contents yesterday afternoon and evening. He then made a videotape dub of selected portions of the disc, digitally blurring out the faces of Agent Susan and Cell T in the process, and took the video to the airport in a small shipping container. It would arrive in Los Angeles this morning, destined for Phenomen-X; in exchange, they would drop the charge against Agent Thomas and leave him alone.

  Finally, they had Agent Nancy.

  That had taken some explaining. Cell T was more than a little paranoid about her. Joe had given them the short version of her story, leaving out details of identity. Agent Terry had ranted at him for sending them into OUTLOOK without knowing Nancy’s situation, and Joe’s answer hadn’t really satisfied her: “Compartmentalization, Agent Terry. Compartmentalization.” “But what if we’d killed her?” Terry demanded. Joe laughed. “Not likely.”

  It was almost seven o’clock now. Time to go. Joe tossed the newspaper on the floor and rose from his armchair. He put the little videodisc in a pocket of his overcoat and headed outside to drive to the D.C. airport. He had a meeting to attend.

  Cell T rose around ten, groggy and fitful. They’d gone through most of two bottles of bourbon last night after leaving the clinic, staying in yet another new motel, this time in Seabrook near the Goddard Space Flight Center.