Delta Green: Strange Authorities

by John Scott Tynes

  It was several minutes before the smells began to reach him. Burning cardboard, and then flesh. The sounds he began to pick out were almost worse than the smells—sizzling, and the gust of gasses leaving a body. For a moment he thought of Vietnam.

  Realization dawned. He was in a crematorium. These men thought he was dead. They were going to burn him alive.

  Dr. Baker yawned and leaned back in his office chair. “You think he’s figured it out yet?”

  Dr. Strysik was staring at a bank of monitors. “Heart rate’s increasing . . . yeah, must be. Yeah. He’s racing now. Panic attack at 1846 and twenty seconds.”

  “What was up with that vaya con dios shit? That wasn’t in the script.”

  Strysik shrugged. “Derek must think he’s an actor.”

  “Hah. Everybody thinks they’re a goddamned actor.”

  “That guy who played the lawyer was pretty good.”

  “Which one?”

  “The second one. The one that exploded.”

  “Oh, right. He was pretty good. You know, if he hadn’t been such a good actor it might not have worked. Poor bastard might still be alive.” Baker chuckled.

  “Wait a second. Heart rate’s dropping.”

  Baker sat up. “Dropping?”

  “Yeah. He’s back to normal. 1847 and fifteen seconds.”

  “That’s weird. Hey, is he negating the paralytic?”

  “No, the readings are normal. It’s like he just calmed down all of a sudden.”

  “Hmm. You think he’s figured it out?”

  “This guy? Anything’s possible.”

  Andrew Nells stood in the mock-crematorium, dressed in his pilot’s uniform, and took his son’s hand. David stared up at him, heart racing, a terrified thirteen-year-old boy.

  “Dad?”

  “Hello, son.”

  “I’m scared, dad. I’m gonna die.”

  Andrew smiled. “No you’re not, son. You’re not going to die. Not today. Not ever.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  David relaxed. His dad had never told him anything but truth.

  “I saw mom. She was crying.”

  “She missed you, David. She misses both of us.”

  “I want to see her again, dad.”

  “You can’t do that, David. I’m sorry.”

  “But why?”

  “You’ve seen her and you’ve told her what you needed to say. You were a brave boy and I’m proud of you. But you’ve got to move on now.”

  “Move on? Where am I going?”

  “China clouds, son. Hold onto my hand and make a wish.”

  They were flying, flying in the clouds. Andrew sat in the pilot’s chair, young David in the co-pilot’s. The twin-prop C-46A Commando transport lumbered in the sky.

  The plane had left Taipei, Taiwan, almost six hours ago. It was a covert charter flight on Civil Air Transport, the CIA front company that provided commercial flights between Taiwan and the rest of Asia. The flight had been booked by a wealthy international businessman with CIA connections who had a private vacation home west of Tsingtao, and evidently didn’t want some of its contents to fall into the hands of the Communists. They were traveling to a secret airstrip run by some Nationalist rebels; CAT used it on occasion to move spies and supplies back and forth. From there they’d take a truck up to the businessman’s home and empty it out, then return to the plane, refuel, and fly back to Taiwan.

  “Isn’t this your plane, dad?” David asked.

  “Sure is, son. The Bathing Beauty! Besides your mom, she’s the only sweetheart I’ve ever had.”

  David looked out the windows of the cockpit, catching glimpses of the waves below. “Where are we?”

  “We’re off the coast of China right now, near Shantung province. That’s the Yellow Sea, son.”

  They flew without speaking for a few minutes. Outside, the two Pratt & Whitney engines thrummed powerfully.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “Isn’t this where you died?”

  “Yep. This very flight, in fact.”

  “But I wasn’t here.”

  “No, but I thought you should be. Don’t worry, son. You’ll be fine. It’s like television.”

  Just then a Chinese woman in a CAT uniform stepped into the cockpit. “Captain Nells? It’s time.”

  Andrew’s face darkened. “All right, Li. We’re ready, aren’t we David?”

  “Sure, dad.”

  The woman smiled at Andrew and left.

  “Now David, I want you to get unbuckled and follow Li. You need to see what happens back there.”

  “But I want to stay up here with you, dad.”

  “You’ll come back here in a minute, okay? But right now you need to be in the cabin. It’s important.”

  David grumbled as he took off the belts and stood up. “When do I get to come back?”

  “I’ll give you a shout. Get going, son.”

  The cabin held a couple dozen plush seats. David stepped in and immediately ducked into the front row, where no one was sitting. He crawled up into the seats and peeked over the top.

  There were nine people in the cabin, including Li, who was now serving drinks to two burly caucasian men in Army uniforms. Each carried a book in his lap. Several rows behind them was an olive-skinned man with dark hair, slim and dignified in a new white suit. He was surrounded by five Chinese women in matching saffron robes. They were whispering among themselves. The man caught David’s eye and smiled briefly, then returned his attention to his companions.

  Li walked to the back of the plane and entered the cargo compartment.

  The two Army men looked at each other and nodded. They put the drinks down and opened their books, which were hollow, and removed identical handguns. David’s eyes widened. He recognized them as Colt .45s, a weapon his father also owned. The men stood up and spun around, bringing the weapons to bear.

  In a fluid motion, the five women stood up as a unit just as the men fired. The shots were deafening in the cramped cabin. The women staggered, blood splashing across their robes. One of the men stepped into the aisle and advanced, not firing, while his companion continued to take measured shots at the women, who were collapsing into their seats around the man in the white suit.

  The Army man hurried down the aisle and reached the carnage in moments. His companion squeezed off one last shot, and the back of a woman’s head burst open, spraying blood and brains across the man’s white suit. The man looked up at the soldier in the aisle with a bored expression. “Vaya con dios,” he said. David shivered.

  The soldier fired six times, the impact jerking the man around in his seat. He began gasping and coughing up blood.

  The gasping turned to laughter. The man raised his arms out level, and blood dripped from his palms. He gazed at the ceiling of the cabin. “My father, my father, why hast thou forsaken me?” he said in a mock-pleading voice.

  The soldier took a step back, frightened now. His companion worked a fresh magazine into his gun and raised it to fire.

  Suddenly the man shot him a look. He spun left like a marionette and fired three times into his partner’s back, then whipped the gun back under his chin and blew his brains across the ceiling.

  Blood dripped onto the seats. Some of the women were still moaning in pain. The man in the white suit stepped unsteadily over the corpses and into the aisle. He looked down at the dead soldier at his feet, then up at David.

  “Causality bullshit,” the man said.

  “David!” Andrew Nells called from the cockpit. “Come back, son! It’s time!”

  David stared into the man’s abyssian eyes.

  “David!” his father called again.

  This time it worked. David broke the man’s gaze and climbed down off the seats, then raced into the cockpit.

  They were still in the clouds, but the clouds were dark, like they were in the midst of a thunderhead. Yet the plane was flying as smooth as silk.


  “About time!” Andrew said. “Get buckled in, son.”

  “What’s going on, dad?” David’s voice was quaking and tears were running down his face as he sat down in the co-pilot’s chair. “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be scared, son, you’re safe. I just wanted you to see this. It’s important.”

  The plane lurched for a moment. David’s stomach did flip-flops.

  “Dad?”

  “It’s okay, son, it’s just the cargo door. Li’s bailing out. They’ll get her in ’69.”

  A few minutes went by, and then the clouds parted. All around them was the night sky.

  All around them. There was no ocean beneath. They were flying in space, in a limitless field of stars.

  “Dad? What’s going on?”

  Andrew Nells was gone. The man in the bloody white suit was seated in the pilot’s seat.

  “Where’s my father?” David demanded, middle-aged again. “What have you done?”

  “Relax,” the man said. “We’re going to see your father now.”

  The cockpit filled with light. Ahead of them, the star field opened in folds, like a vulva. Light was spilling out. Through the opening were hundreds of terrible creatures, moving in strange patterns, bisected by black geometric shapes that flickered in and out of view at different angles. The dancers parted and the light burned David’s eyes, the light of a seething chaos, a thousand stars compacted into something that looked like truth.

  “See?” the man said. “There He is.”

  The mock-crematorium was collapsing. The false walls, the gurneys, the corpses made of latex. It was all pulling together, condensing.

  “Shit!” Dr. Baker yelled. “What the hell!”

  Dr. Strysik was talking frantically into a microphone. “1847 and thirty seconds subject is exhibiting drastic telekinetic activity heart rate normal brain activity spiking.”

  On the other side of the large two-way mirror, everything in the huge soundstage was moving. The three-sided crematorium set had imploded, leaving David Nells behind on the gurney, still motionless. Now objects all over the cavernous chamber were sliding forward across the floor, collapsing and bending as they went. Other sets, furniture, speakers, props of every description, all the components of the terrible fantasies OUTLOOK constructed to break and mold the human mind, all were being pulled into the center of the room.

  “What’s going on?” Baker demanded.

  Strysik watched the tumbling detritus as it coalesced in the center of the room. His eyes grew wide. “He’s building something.”

  All the raw material of the room, all the matter at hand, all of it came together, grinding and crackling and snapping. It was gathering into an oblong shape half the length of the soundstage.

  Baker was sweating. “What the hell is it?”

  Strysik just kept his attention focused. When the long flat shafts began to extrude from the tumbling mass, he knew.

  “It’s a plane,” he said. “He’s building a plane.”

  In moments it was over. Every scrap of material in the sound-stage had been gathered, smashed, and restructured. A patchwork replica of Andrew Nells’ c-46a “Bathing Beauty” stood in silence.

  David still lay on the gurney near the plane’s cargo door, like a patient awaiting transport to a hospital in some far-off land.

  Strysik picked up a phone. “Dr. Yrjo? You better come see this.”

  Interlude: Thirty Three Thirteen and a Wake-Up

  Monday, March 15, 1999

  The Hollywood actress Meg Ryan was riding a bike along a wooded rural road. Music swelled. She raised her arms, joyous, letting go of the handles and closing her eyes, living in a moment of perfect happiness. A truck hit her.

  “Fuck!” an inmate yelled. “What a crocka shit!”

  Forty-five prisoners were clustered in chairs in front of a television set that was bolted to the wall. It was movie time. A fire had broken out in the woodshop on Friday, and the work detail on shift had put it out before any serious damage was done. As a reward, they got Monday off.

  Each of the four cell wings had four cable televisions. Guards set the channels as they felt prudent, avoiding the likes of World’s Scariest Police Videos. Home-improvement shows and sitcoms were frequent choices. A regular schedule of movies on videotape was offered, controlled by the guards. This afternoon, the woodshop detail was getting City of Angels.

  Ex-Captain Forrest James shifted in his seat. The inmates had to bring their own chairs from their cells to watch television, and they weren’t very comfortable for lengthy sessions.

  “Goddamn chick flicks,” another con groused. There was a murmur of assent, modulated by the latest debate over who was foxier, Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts. James fell in the Ryan camp, but he kept his mouth shut.

  Within a few more minutes the movie was over. A flurry of conversation bubbled up, convict movie critics weighing in with their opinions. Then the movie cut off and The Simpsons came on in mid-episode to general acclaim, despite the fact that it was a syndicated rerun.

  James got up and lifted his chair. He’d had enough TV. These sessions reminded him of his days at Annapolis, guys clustered in dorm rooms around a television having the same conversations and arguments he was hearing now. Sometimes life itself felt like a rerun.

  Back in his cell, he put the chair by the desk and dropped onto the cot. He picked up the book he’d been reading, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty, but then put it down again. He didn’t feel like reading, though as a rule he liked westerns. He’d gotten on a Louis L’Amour kick the last few months, checking out book after book from the prison library. All were well-thumbed; L’Amour was popular here. Danny Sun, a former Army major two cells down, had been pushing the McMurty book lately and so far, James was liking it. It was shorter on action and longer on introspection than the L’Amour stuff, but then again, that about summed up the change in his life since coming to the Castle: short on action, long on introspection.

  He was feeling old, and he was feeling lonely. His two-year anniversary was coming up in a couple months. Not long after he’d turn forty-eight. Like the old Navy saying about battleships went, he was gray and underway. Hitting the stride of middle age behind bars was not a pleasant experience. That mark of a man’s life was stormy enough without having all the time in the world to dwell on it, too.

  As a young man in Annapolis, he’d seen a bright future ahead of him. He’d come back from the Olympics with a medal and the respect of his peers and instructors alike. A promising career with the Navy was unfolding, coupled with the looming cloud of the Vietnam conflict waiting for him on graduation day. It seemed like a damn stupid war to be fighting, but for a young serviceman wartime meant opportunity, a chance to prove something, to distinguish oneself, to test one’s mettle, to advance in the ranks. He’d had a long conversation with his father about the war during a Christmas break. His dad was a retired Navy man who had friends—and had lost friends—in that strange and troubled land. They had argued over the merits of the conflict, groused about how the brass were handling this or that initiative, but in the end his father’s words had stuck with him: “If a house is burning and there are people you care about inside, it don’t matter whose house it is or how the fire started, you gotta go in there and get them folks out.” That was how his dad saw Vietnam, a burning house with good men inside who deserved a shot at getting back home alive, and the politics be damned. You went and you helped out and you prayed some other guy would do the same for you.

  The same analogy applied well to Delta Green, James reflected. He didn’t know the big picture, didn’t understand the source of the strange darkness that stole out of secret spaces to lay claim to the innocent. But he had resolved to fight it all the same.

  Of course, he couldn’t fight jack all here in the Castle. Out there, he sensed, the whole world was burning down, and everyone out there deserved a shot at living to see another sunrise. But in here—in here there was nothing. He was trapped in a fire depart
ment where the alarm never rang, and the trucks sat rusting.

  Turning gray.

  James thumped his fist against the wall. He’d had the itch the last few days, the itch to get out and do something, make some kind of recompense for what he’d done to that woman in San Francisco. She’d written him a couple weeks back, out of the blue. When he saw the name on the envelope, he thought it was a prank. But it was her.

  Her name was Carly Lisle. She wrote because she’d been in therapy for the last year, and was trying to reach some sort of peace with the hell she’d gone through at his hands. She told him how she’d suffered, about the nightmares, about how she hadn’t been able to get close to another man since that night, how she’d cursed him a thousand times, how she’d hoped he’d suffer in prison the way she had in the free world. But finally, she was ready to move on. She just wanted to say that she forgave him, that she hoped he would find peace, too, and that he would never hurt anyone ever again. She didn’t supply a return address. It was signed, “Yours in Christ.”

  Jesus, James had thought. The letter was about the last thing he had ever expected to happen.

  Then this weekend he’d seen the news, about that raid on the meth lab near D.C. that had gone so wrong. He watched the story carefully, studying the footage of Army troops, the USAMRIID geeks, and he had a feeling. The raid smelled like Delta Green to him. Something was up, out there in the free world. It felt like it was time to get busy, to move on, to do something.

  Of course, he couldn’t do a damn thing.

  He wondered about Stephanie Park. He didn’t think about her much because when he did, he felt worse about his life than he usually did. She’d pulled him out of jail just after his arrest and dragged him north to Roscoe for a Delta Green op that was, perhaps, even more hideous than usual. It was especially so because there had been an instant sort of attraction between them, some spark of chemistry that had put them both on edge. He’d been in a terrible state of mind, grimly determined to exact some final vengeance against the shadows before the Navy threw him overboard. But the price of that vengeance was the dashing of any faint hopes he’d had that the two of them might find each other, fumbling in the dark. They’d embraced at the airport, and he’d slipped a note into her hand. It was a piece of poetry, sort of, a few ragged words that had come to him once while swimming alone in a tropical bay at night, many years ago. A woman he’d been seeing stateside had sent him a Dear John letter, and he’d gone out to drown his sorrows in the warm waters. Emerging from the water, he saw the waves crashing against the shore, and he’d cried a little, something he wouldn’t do again until Roscoe.