Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (29 page)

“Where to now?” was all that Joe Camp said, and the aborigine who had given him the ultimatum smiled.

“They got them a right powerful munkumbole out there in the desert, those’re the ones that got yer’ friends.” The leader of the group of Aborigines, Maljarna, spoke plainly, without any attempt at beguilement, as Joe Camp sat in the back of their rotted-out Packard. It sped to the west, out of town, pushing its engine to the limit by the sound of it. The sun was a bloated, orange sphere nearing the horizon, and the sky was aflame with a million warm colors. Joe Camp was very aware of being very far from home. Even Burma felt more like home than Australia. Everything somehow looked foreign; even the colors seemed slightly wrong.

“What’s a mukumo—” Camp began.

“Munkumbole. A wizard.”

“How do you know all this?” Somehow Camp didn’t doubt what the man had to say—the honesty of his words shone through his bright, calm face—but he wanted to know everything he could about it. Despite his questionable circumstances, Joe Camp felt safe for the first time since he had stepped from the plane at Port Hedland. The aborigines reminded him of the Kachins, and the comfort, love, and respect he felt among the 4a seemed also to radiate from the natives of the Australian continent naturally, like they knew of no other way to be. Maljarna turned to face Joe in the back seat.

“We been watching them, the ones in league with the Nulla. My people have been at them for a long time. It gathers people from time to time, out in the Talbot Ranges. Bad people. Mostly whites though—no offense.” Maljarna shook his head sadly, and Joe Camp was reminded of Keta’s words in the jungle about the Tachoans. Very bad people. The similarities gave him the creeps. Although he had read extensively on the aborigine culture at Harvard, Joe Camp could not put his finger to the term Nulla, even though he could swear he had heard it before.

“Why did they take them? How did you know about me?”

“Got lots of questions, don’tcha?” Maljarna smiled again and laughed, a short harsh sound, like the cry of a huge bird. “Yeah. We saw it all go on. We trail ‘em when they come into the city from out the Gibson Desert, which ain’t all that often—so we knew this was somethin’ special. They snatched the whole group of your guys one by one as they came in. Before that they took some Brits, I think. I assume you’re one of ‘em, yeah? The Americans that came in after? Course you are. First it was messy, but then they learned something which got the other two to go with them easy. We thought they got all they wanted, but then they went out for you.”

“Yeah, I’m an American.” Camp didn’t think he could hide it anyway; he just looked American, naturally, like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. He imagined himself as the foolish-looking lovesick boy with the drooping flowers calling on a girl for the first time, all knobby edges and gangly limbs, with thick, black-rimmed glasses to hide his blue eyes.

“So why did they take them, yeah? I don’t know. They took ‘em, though, we know that. We know it ‘cause we were there. But there were too many of ‘em before to try to stop ‘em. This last one was a poor showing for them, you was lucky there, son. Don’t know why they took you to the building there. They never did nothin’ like that before, but usually they are in numbers.”

“Prolly to kill ‘em, Mal,” the squat aborigine who sat in the back seat next to Joe offered, helpfully.

“Yeah, ah’suppose.” Maljarna turned back to consider the road and directed the driver to turn at an intersection away from the hillside streets and the hundreds of peaked rooftops and brightly painted houses which led down to the ocean. The car’s tires spun in the dirt as they turned, kicking up a huge cloud of red dust, as they began to head south away from the city. The ocean soon disappeared and the land became more rugged, with sparse, sun-dead grasses and gnarled trees broken only by old abandoned homesteads. The sky had become a luminous uniform yellow, rich with highlights of orange and red.

“I, uh...appreciate...uh...all your help. All of you. Call me Joe.” He felt foolish as he said it, but the men in the car seemed genuinely pleased with his casualness.

“Yeah, sure Joe. What else?” Maljarna replied over his shoulder distracted, directing the driver to take another fork. The dirt path ahead seemed to be an endless series of forks.

Camp pushed himself back in the seat and looked at the frayed leather ceiling. Through pin-sized holes in the leather he could see the sky and feel tiny lines of wind as they blew through the roof. He sighed and looked at Maljarna, but his mind was working too quickly for anything of use to come out. Caught somewhere between Harvard and the dead man in the hallway, it seemed he could not focus on the now.

“What are we going to do now?” Camp choked out, his mind suddenly blank.

“We’re headin’ out to our camp at the range. When I say ‘our,’ I mean us, all of us, the Ngaanyatjarra. Old Muluwari is holdin’ his own Boora ceremony out there. We’re goin’ to have a good old Corroboree. We’re goin’ to stop ‘em. The lot of ‘em, like we done before. Like all our dads done before.”

“These...whites? Are they German or...?”

“Nah. Nothing like that, mate. It’s got nothing to do with yer little spat. It’s somethin’ else. Somethin’ older. Anythin’ else there, Joe?” Maljarna almost seemed annoyed with the last question, like the facts were on the table and already obvious to anyone with half a brain. Almost like Camp’s question was something a child would ask.

“No. Just give me a minute to think.” Camp opened the dead man’s billfold again: Robert F. Mackensie, prospector, now beneath dried, bloody fingerprints. What did it all mean?

They drove on.

“How did you know the others were American?” Joe’s voice sounded strained; his mind raced around the problem and found no obvious solutions. What the hell was all this? Tribes. Nulla. Australians with American accents. Aborigines with Sten guns. Once again, Joe Camp found himself longing for the security of the Burmese highlands. The jungle, the Kachins, hell, even the Japanese, at least all of those were known quantities. Here he was swimming in unknowns.

“He wants to know how we knew they was Americans...“ Maljarna reflected quietly.

For a single heart-pounding moment, as all the aborigines in the car burst out laughing, Joe imagined he was being driven off into the desert to be eliminated. This had all been a ruse. This...But it didn’t make any sense. They hadn’t taken his gun, they had saved him. And what of the others he was to meet? Mark Steuben? Wingate Peaslee? His orders at Nazira had sent him here to meet with Steuben to be briefed, before moving on to—where? The orders didn’t say. They just mentioned he was being extracted due to his deep jungle experience. Where, then? Africa? South America? Was the man posing as Mark Steuben, the corpse named Robert Mackensie, a German agent? How did he know their meeting code? Joe knew no other OSS contacts in Australia. But he could turn himself into the American embassy here without difficulty. Something told him the aborigines would simply let him go, even drive him back to town to the embassy, even after all this trouble. The feeling surprised him for some reason. Even though he felt safe, almost like he was among family, in the stuffy, overheated car. It still surprised him.

“D’you really want to know about all the things us black fellas know? How we know? D’ya really, Joe? If ya come with us, if ya come to see the Nulla, you going ta have ta.” Maljarna turned back to consider him, his face, for the first time since Joe Camp had met him, completely serious.

“How did you know, Mal?”

“Magic.” Maljarna whispered, winking at Joe Camp, the aborigine’s lips breaking into a thin, cheshire grin.

They flashed past a decrepit homestead. Two people on a hill, a half mile from the road, little more than silhouettes in the gathering dusk, watched as their car chose the right fork. The Packard tore south along the dirt road towards a town which a beaten, bullet-eaten, tin sign claimed was called Marble Bar. Things were rapidly spiraling out of control, but Joe Camp could see no way to slow his descent.

Fifteen hours on a wheezing, overcrowded train which had seen service since the turn of the century had left Thomas Arnold nearly spent. He unloaded his gear and sat down on it amidst the filth and squalor of Leopoldville, sweaty, bug-bitten and exhausted. King Leopold of Belgium had “civilized” the Congo by enslaving the native populace in the later half of the last century, ripping into the heart of the jungle to tear out whatever there was to take. To Arnold, the filth of Leopoldville seemed a fitting epitaph to a country, and a king, now under the boot of Nazi oppression. Now this was Belgium. All that remained of a once proud-country was its most foreign and hellish holding, a place which stunk of starvation, crime and a thinly veiled servility. This Conrad-esque landscape was all the Belgians who had escaped the Nazi blitzkrieg in Europe could call their own.

The “station,” which was little more than a place where the tracks were crossed by a rapidly decaying paved road, and where the jungle broke on one side revealing a shanty town, was overrun with foot traffic, most of it native. After the wave of people piled off the train on which Arnold and his group had been for the better part of a day, thousands more piled onto it behind him, riding the same route back to Boma, on the coast. Arnold wished dearly he could go with them. Wailing children, shouts of indignation in a dozen different languages, the squeal of hogs and the screech of the wheels of the train as it slid forward, each insisted itself upon him, interrupting his vain attempt at rest, at respite. Arnold clutched his head and stared down into the dust. The four other members of the DELTA GREEN team stood nearby, guarding a crate of explosives and the rest of their gear, along with a companion who was not human. It was funny how normal the thought seemed to him now.

The foot traffic in the “station” died off as suddenly as it had formed, the people either disappearing onto the train or off into the lopsided, decaying shacks of Leopoldville. Arnold could not take it anymore; the circumstances had become too strange. “Dr. Smith”—it—stood with the rest of the group, undetected, ignored. Smith was watching him. Always watching him.

Even now, he could feel alien eyes on the back of his neck, trying to find a way into his mind like a thief fiddling with a difficult lock. Smith had haunted him on their journey half-way across the world, always hovering on the edge of speech, observing his every move with a detachment which made him seem at times to be ethereal, so unreal that Arnold had to remind himself that others could see him as well.

A young Bantu child rushed up to Arnold and began chattering in French, grabbing at his packs with tiny hands.

“I carry them, sir. I carry.”

Huge, jaundiced eyes, swollen stomach, random swatches of rotting cloth used as clothes. The boy was too small to move the gear but he tried anyway, even though they were pinned down by Arnold’s weight as he sat on them. Arnold, unmoved, looked up at the boy, whose face was fixed somewhere between frustration and desperate need, and found he felt nothing. Even now he could see the child on the side of one of the filth-covered roads of Leopoldville lying in refuse, his body pregnant with gas and flies, eyes empty of everything. There was no reason to help the child, Arnold thought; soon enough the world would have its way. He would finally be at peace, the boy. No more struggle or want. A coin would do no good against time and circumstance.

The child’s eyes fixed on the cloth-covered box on Arnold’s lap with a look indicating he was going to grab for the only thing he seemed capable of carrying. Before he could, Arnold placed a huge hand on the boy’s sparrow-like chest and gave him a rough shove. The child spilled to the ground in the dirt, kicking up a cloud of white dust. Arnold carefully checked the contents of the cloth sack. The alien device lay inside, untouched. The boy stood again despite cuts on his knees, eyes defiant and mad, and spit curses at Arnold.