Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (35 page)

Manbahadur Rai, the Gurkha, was not alone in the jungle. Three months in Burma had taught him what being hunted felt like. How to notice that particular nuance which circumvented the common senses but which, in the darkness of the jungle, seemed much more trustworthy than something as basic as sight. His kukri, purposely dirtied with mud, sat on his lap, clutched in the loose grip of his left hand. The strap of his Sten gun was looped in his other hand, ready to be brought to bear at any second. The tingling in Manbahadur’s spine told him soon the kukri would be dirty with something other than mud.

His name was, if one were to be specific, Manbahadur Talum, and he was far, far from his home. Rai was the name of his tribe in Nepal, a clan which could count back forty-three generations of names on both sides of the Dhankuta River. It was a place so serene and alien to the filth he found himself squatting in that Manbahadur had to continuously remind himself of his location, and his mission, or the solitude he felt would carry him away in memories to Ilam and eastern Nepal, a place of green-stepped valleys and crooked hanging trees which seemed to hold the sky in place with delicate, thin branches.

Why had he ever left? The reasons seemed as unreal as the jungle which now comprised his world.

What did duty or honor mean in this mud and filth?

Even now, as the endless, humid jungle moved around him in the dark, nothing more than a sheer sheet of black, full of stealthy, suggestive sounds, he found it difficult to concentrate on particulars. His mission had somehow evaporated before his eyes, lost in a series of untoward events which had partially relieved him of the guilt that rode his shoulders like a pack so heavy even he could not heft it. Relief was what he felt for these disasters, the release of a burden worse than he had ever carried before. The Americans were his allies and had selflessly laid down their lives and safety to come to the aid of the world, unmindful of the human cost to crush tyranny. The trust between Britain and America was implicit, something unquestioned and basic. Manbahadur knew that trust alone would give him the edge he needed to complete his
mission; to locate
the grey city and then kill all the American agents in the group. Major Cornwall had calmly ordered their deaths like a man ordering from a menu, as if the Americans were nothing more than Axis agents, like they were nothing but animals. Now there was only one American left, and in his current condition, Manbahadur was not sure he would last the night. Fate had spared him the crimes he was ordered to commit, or so it seemed. Everyone else involved in their little excursion was dead, including his fellow PISCES agents. The explosion had been spectacular; nothing had escaped.

Nothing except Manbahadur and the American, Arnold.

But the blast had called more of their attackers from the jungle. The Gurkha had ditched his pack and hefted the unconscious American on his back, easily supporting the dead weight at a run, and headed to ground south of the blast before they were discovered by the groups of natives combing the jungle around them. He had no clear idea why he was saving the man he would have to kill later (orders, orders)—perhaps it was just his training, an unconscious reaction; the man was wounded but not dead; the automatic response was to save him at all costs so he could fight the enemy another day. On the other hand, Manbahadur figured that Arnold had pushed him down the hill for a reason, that somehow the American had one of those flashes of intuition men often have in combat and knew the composition B was in danger of detonation. Arnold had not hesitated. He’d thought of Rai before himself. Rai knew he owed the American as much again, even if they only survived to face another fate too terrible to contemplate.

As the sun fell in the sky, hidden by the canopy, Manbahadur struggled four miles through the jungle over deadfalls and through neck-high razor weeds in what seemed slow motion, a dying man on his back. Soon enough he was spent, despite his Nepalese advantages. His lungs burned and his knees shrieked as he lowered Arnold to the muddy ground. It had been a long time since he had felt such fatigue.

Darkness crept through the jungle on spider’s legs, slowly consuming the world in shadow.

Now, as the growing silences of the jungle told him something was moving towards him in the black, Manbahadur looped the strap of his Sten gun around his forearm and fixed it in the crook of his elbow. Lt. Arnold hitched a strained breath in the dark that sounded thick with mucus or blood, and Manbahadur tried vainly to pierce the veil of darkness around him with more than his eyes.

Something was in the clearing with him. He had the sense of a presence, of a thing which moved through forms like fish moved through water. A spirit.

A spirit.

Manbahadur stood suddenly, sure of something he could not possibly know. The L-shaped Sten gun let out a double belch of flame, illuminating the scene in stark flare-like light for a brief moment. Four dark-skinned natives had entered the clearing invisibly, silently. Two clutched their chests in flashing stop motion afterimages, felled by the bursts. A third seemed to sprout a hooked, foot-long prong from his chest in the light of submachine gun fire before he fell. Manbahadur’s Sten had misfired on the second burst, so he had thrown the kukri more than fifteen feet and it had found its mark, flying through the air with a deadly accuracy.

Silence drifted in as the jungle held its breath.

Manbahadur dropped the submachine gun to the ground and retreated into the jungle, fishing his Webley revolver and Arnold’s .45 from his belt with trembling hands. He dropped in the dark past a deadfall and brought the guns around and up, ears trained to find any sound of pursuit.

Instead, a light from the clearing illuminated the leaves and the feeling of pursuit died away.

The greenish ghost light spilled over the leaves, trailing huge, slat-like shadows behind them. Manbahadur heard the first native voice from the jungle then, but what was said he could not understand. It was a swift, organic language, mumbling and without pause. Soon, others joined the voice.

The Gurkha crept forward towards the ghost light, a gun in each hand, eyes wide with fear and desperation.

Thomas Arnold lay unconscious on the ground, surrounded on four sides by natives, who had placed some sort of box lamp on his chest. The tiny, square box flooded the area with a rich, viscous green light. The natives sang a mumbling, sing-song chant in unison, arms grasped to one another in a loose circle around the downed man.

Arnold’s head lifted slowly from the ground. Arnold’s eyes were wide and conscious and full of fear, searching the bizarre tableau before him for comprehension. As his shoulders began to rise off the ground, the natives roughly pinned him back down and held his arms in place with their knees. Arnold let out a muffled cry which may have contained speech. His head bobbed up and down from the ground, eerily illuminated by the green box.

Manbahadur Talum Rai cocked both pistols and took a deep breath. A hush fell over his mind. Thoughts as straightforward and clean as mathematics scrolled through his brain. Betrayal of an ally called for the ultimate penitence, he knew. And even if Arnold did not survive the situation, Manbahadur would die with a clean conscience. The American had trusted him, and Manbahadur had plotted to do his “duty.” There was no excuse for such cowardice.

The Gurkha motto played over and over in his head as he rushed silently through the leaves, following the ghost light to its source. In his mind, the motto matched the sing-song chant of the natives as they performed their bizarre ritual.

It is better to die than to be a coward...It is better to die than to be a coward...It is better to die than to be a coward...

He thought of the way the river would freeze when he was a boy. The way the dogs would bark when the moon was full. His bed of straw and the winding streets of Ilam. He saw his home in shorthand, everything which made his world before all this. He saw what would make him choose to die instead of run, like a perfect clean symbol in his mind.

His gunfire ripped through the jungle like a crashing wave.

Joe Camp was sure he was losing what little of his mind he had left. The sights of the last day alone were more than enough to send any man over the edge, and what little he could remember of it—there seemed to be strange gaps of memory—was filled with images and feelings which would never wholly leave his mind again. The time between Maljarna’s and his entry to the cave and the present had drifted away in a haze of muttering and shouting, of incoherent responses to unreal occurrences, of Maljarna pleading with him to right himself before it all fell to pieces. Hours bled past like seconds as his mind shunted what it saw to some inner chasm, allowing stuttering bits of reality through to be confusedly considered, seemingly at random.

Joe felt the light fingers of insanity toy with the edges of his mind like a ghostly caress in the night. He felt the impossible try to fit itself in with the rest of his world-view; felt those new facts shred whatever was formerly held as reality to indistinguishable pieces with brute force; felt the pain of real knowledge as it awoke something terrible and ancient within him. This feeling within, this knowledge of real truth was as fundamental and unwavering as life itself. It was there, it had always been there, and now awakened it could not be denied—ever.

It was the truth that all beliefs besides this new and perfect terror were folly.

Joe stood and wiped his eyes again. His thin, bearded face was red with exertion and swollen from weeping. In the light of the ghostly crystal lamp he considered his blunt fingers. Scarred, callused, bruised and cut, the fingers were plain enough except for one pinky which had set badly after a football injury.

Eight years ago, his mind quietly told him, you broke your left pinky in a scrimmage at Harvard. When Danny LeVant threw you a short pass. You thought you just jammed it, but then it began to really swell. You sat out for a week. During that week your father died. During that week—

Startled, Joe Camp suddenly, for the first time in over a day, focused on the ancient cave, his vision blurry with tears. He found himself lying against the wall kitty-corner from the alien machine he had seen Maljarna examining. The device was silent and the thin sliver of light it had emitted was gone. Joe’s hands hung before his head like an exhibit, like they were not attached to his body at all, but were placed there on display by some unseen force; like Joe could walk away and the hands would remain behind. Distant neurons fired and the hands obediently spun themselves so his palms were turned away from him. The huge knuckles were wrinkled and knobby. The fingernails were thick with red dirt.

Camp realized his mouth was hanging open, and slowly shut it. He was in western Australia. Lives were at stake. The madness receded like the tide and training filled the void.

A hand fell on his shoulder.

Struggling away, Camp pushed himself roughly away from the hand, stumbling up on his numb legs; they felt as rickety as stilts until he met the unyielding surface of the cave wall with a flat palm, out of breath. Reluctantly, he turned to face his attacker. The man who had grabbed him, not unkindly, considered him with small black eyes and a careful expression on his plump face. It took seconds for Camp to realize that the man was Wingate Peaslee, one of the men he had seen encased in...

...in the bubble of slow time.

The other man, Steuben, was gone. The thought felt like a rough bump in a car with a bad suspension. It took his brain several seconds to refocus.

“Camp, can you hear me?” Peaslee spoke in a quiet, nasal voice.

“Yes.”

“Good. Good.” Peaslee shot a nervous glance over his shoulder at the mouth of the cave, which Joe suddenly realized was glowing with the light of mid-day. Heat, unnoticed before, hung heavy in the dark.
How long was I out?
Camp thought to himself, and struggled to regain his composure.

“What...where’s Maljarna and...Steuben?” Camp sputtered, glancing around the empty cave.

“How much do you know about all this?” Peaslee replied, eyes wide and probing. The man was built like a fireplug, snugly encased in his Army uniform, filthy with Australian red dust.

“Not...much,” Camp replied, stooping to retrieve his Sten gun from the floor where it had been carefully placed along with his pack and gear. Peaslee made no move to stop him. He had no recollection of anyone removing it from his person.