Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (9 page)

The inside of Weber’s office looked foreign and artificial in the flickering light of the fluorescence. As Bruning sat and gained his composure, Weber brewed a pot of boiling water for tea. Somehow it seemed absurd and unimportant that they had been conversing with an intelligent creature from the lightless depths of the sea less than ten minutes before. But as his body and mind thawed, Bruning realized that all he had seen on the beach was a reality. His mind, braced as it was for the shock, found instead that the understanding of these facts slipped in gently, filtering down to the bottomless regions of his mind like water seeping into fissures in the ground. The knowledge was somehow already there, deep in his bones, and rose up from the black depths of his mind to coalesce with all he had seen.

It was all true.

“This will change all the world,” Weber blurted out, brimming with anticipation. Busying himself with pouring and sorting, Weber finally placed a steaming cup of tea in front of Bruning.

“Yes,” Bruning dully heard himself say. When he reached for the cup, it seemed to take his fingers forever to find the hot porcelain. Weber clapped his hands and rubbed them together vigorously.

“We have much to do before the eighth. I have to get moving equipment in here, for the stones. We can move in some of the Todt construction crews...And then there are the prisoners to consider, with the three trucks due tonight...” Weber spoke to the room, his back to Bruning, sipping at his tea. He turned suddenly. On the wall directly behind him the white skull of an SS banner grinned over his shoulder, mocking Bruning.

“Oh. Would you like honey?” Weber’s face found a mask of concern.

“What?” Bruning stuttered, placing his trembling cup back on the table.

“Honey, Bruning. Honey for your tea?”

“No. Oh. No.”

Weber fished out four files from a half foot stack of grey folders and rapidly sorted a small pile of papers from those four folders. “Personnel. Personnel.” He mumbled to himself over and over again as he leafed through the reports.

“It is time to discuss our deal, Weber.” Bruning’s voice did not sound like his own, and the forcefulness of his words felt strange coming from his mouth. It had been some days since they discussed what Weber would exchange for his silence in the apartments in Offenburg, but it was clear Weber recalled their deal.

“Perhaps tomorrow.” Weber waved a dismissing hand.

“Now.”

The clock on the wall ticked away seconds.

“Very well.” Weber looked up at him and sighed. It was obvious that the deal was the furthest thing from his mind at the moment. Even now Weber’s eyes stole glances at the sheets of paper before him as he impatiently waited for Bruning’s request.

“I want the files on the Thule investigation. I want to make sure they are doing my discovery justice. You can get copies of them if you wish, I believe.”

“I do not know, Bruning. This will be difficult.” Weber grabbed another folder from his desk and rifled through it, eyes downcast.

“No, it will not. You have faked dozens of files to Offenburg in your little sham. You must have someone on the inside or the mistakes would have been noticed by now by command. Someone must make up the fake field assessment reports, someone must alter the visiting schedule so you can prepare for other members of the group. Use that person now. Do not push me. Kitt will want to hear from me soon.”

“Yes.” Weber laughed. “I underestimated you, Bruning. I must admit it, I thought the favor would have something to do with more mundane things. They are very serious about this Thule investigation. Many of the resources of the group are being shunted to the project. It could raise suspicions. My source, well...he is... “

“Do it, and then it will be done.” Bruning said simply, using his dead father’s favorite folk saying.

“Yes. Of course.”

Bruning exited into the freezing night air, leaving Weber behind to his petty intrigues. If he was foolish enough to believe the Deep Ones would commit themselves to such a deal, even when faced with the fact of the race’s natural inclination towards obscurity, Weber deserved his fate. Whatever the beasts had in store for Weber and his men was fine with Bruning. He planned to be long gone before the new moon.

Sentries stood at attention as he passed, clicking their polished boots together in the stark white lights of the compound. Out past the fence and the razor wire in the klieg lights, SS men skittered about in the dark, knee high surf, placing colored flags out in the water, marking the location of the objects the Deep Ones had left behind in the water for the ritual.

The small shacks which housed the officers stood off to the north end of the facility, away from the sea, and Bruning made his way slowly up the steps to his door in the northernmost shack, feeling old and hopelessly out of his league. Somehow he continued to portray himself as ruthlessly efficient and effective while still remaining human on the inside. Everyone believed his façade no matter how often it seemed to slip in front of their eyes, but only his thoughts of the world outside the Reich, the real world as it must continue to exist past the wire and mines and death, kept him going at all.

He sat quietly in his shack beneath a small desk lamp and shuffled through the files he had stolen from Offenburg, like an embezzler adding up pilfered sums. He would gather all the documents he could, all that he was responsible for, and make his way to Cherbourg the day before the ritual to find a way out. Already he had more than forty highly-classified documents which contained many of the most terrible secrets of the Karotechia. Soon, through his deal with Weber, he would have the last file he required to escape with a clean conscience. The one which was his sole responsibility—Thule, the one case which haunted his dreams more than any other. With these files perhaps someone would believe him: the Maquis, British, or American agents, it didn’t matter who. If they did not believe him, he would make them believe.

He would make a difference.

A commotion at the gates drew his attention, and through the smoke-stained window of his shack Bruning could make out two large trucks entering amidst a marching group of SS guards. Turning off his light and placing the files back in his valise, Bruning opened the window and leaned out to get a better look at the convoy. The trucks rolled past and the white faces of prisoners of war stared out from the flatbeds of the monstrous vehicles as they rocked and swayed up the muddy path. When one of the trucks came to a squeaking halt near the internment center, the engine backfired loudly, drawing nervous smiles from the guards at the gate and flinches from the pinched faces of the POWs.

Drawn from a dozen different countries and a hundred different battles, the faces of the thin stick-men who were unloaded from the trucks at machine gun point all looked the same. The gaunt cheeks and protruding brows, the scruff beards and yellowed teeth—it was hard to imagine them at any other time or place, with children or mothers or wives, in any role beside that which fate had decided they would play.

Bruning knew they would all die here in the waves. He searched himself for a feeling to connect with the living scarecrows that shuffled into the barracks like phantoms, and found he had none to spare. Perhaps he was not as human as he liked to believe.

Bruning shut the window on the scene of misery. From somewhere nearby in the children’s section, a French girl cried in vain for her mother.

Bruning had kept to himself the last four days, avoiding any action which would take him out into the awful activity of the camp. All day and night the tractors could be heard, along with hoarse shouts from the SS men as they beat and bullied the Todt slave crews into completing a difficult task in an impossible amount of time. Cement bastions were laid rapidly, sections of sand were pushed free to allow a central depression on the Cap de la Hague beach which ran to the high ground like a walkway, and the standing stones that the Deep Ones had left behind were raised in a line parallel to the water with such rapidity that they seemed to grow from the ground overnight, like monstrous trees. Two cement bunkers were laid on the stone breakers which enclosed the beach to garner a better view of the water.

From his north window Bruning watched as the last of the eight sea-smoothed stones was raised by exhausted, stick-thin men with gold stars or double Ns on their filthy shirts. The black silhouettes of SS men on raised bastions stood nearby, backlit by the rising sun, armed with submachine guns, wary of any troublesome activity in the large slave labor group. Around them a sea of the starving men rapidly trundled about, working hard to complete the tasks set before them, struggling in the face of the bleak alternative to success—and its terrible, unspoken consequences, which hovered over their heads like a curse. Lower-rank SS men carrying batons circulated through the grey-clad crowds, beating and prodding those who were unproductive or slow.

Twice in the last few days the chattering reports of a machine gun had woken Bruning from his self absorption as he worked on his “debriefing.” Every significant fact and memory of his time in the service of the SS that he could unearth, he typed up on the old, rickety machine with the raised “e” key, in the hopes that the document alone would convince the Allies that he was valuable enough to risk extraction. He had plodded through the last few days, typing, eating, and sleeping in turns, trying his best to ignore the cacophony from the camp. The days were going fast now, and every night above the camp the moon grew fatter, more pregnant. When that cycle renewed itself on the new moon, the Deep Ones would come, and their terrible leader Dagon would bring its tidings to man, perhaps for the first time in recorded human history.

Looking out towards the rolling grey surf, Bruning remembered a section of Paradise Lost, which he thought he should not be able to recall with such clarity. Although he was not a particular scholar of Milton, the snippet appeared without difficulty in his mind:

There Leviathan
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep,
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land, and at his gills
Draws in, and at his trunk spouts the sea—

There was a knock at the door.

Bruning rapidly collected his papers into a messy stack and shoveled them in to his valise with both hands. He pulled the last sheet of paper from his typewriter and crumpled it. Bruning glanced back once as he prepared to open the door, to make sure no signs of his treachery were laying about overlooked. He pulled his Walther from the belt holster which hung upon a hook on the back of the door, and cocked it slowly and as silently as possible. When he was certain nothing was visible, he pulled the door open a crack, keeping the pistol in his hand out of sight.

An SS man unknown to him who wore the insignia of the Karotechia on his collar stood on the steps carrying a sealed folder. His face was blank as a mask.

“Hauptscharführer Karl Bruning,” he stated expressionlessly.

“Yes.”

“Files from Offenburg, sir.” The man rapidly consulted a photograph, presumably of Bruning to verify his identity, and then held out a sealed folder which was emblazoned with a huge, blood-red Sonnerad rune—a curved swastika, the symbol of occult power and the Karotechia. Thankfully the SS man held no security forms for Bruning to sign. Unlike other clandestine organizations within the Reich, the Karotechia did not keep a running record of their files outside of Offenburg. Those in the group with approved access simply requested the file from the archives. When finished with it, the file was returned or destroyed. This ensured that, if need be, all records of the group (which existed in only three places in Germany) could be eliminated at a moment’s notice, doing away with the common paper trails which existed in other organizations.