askets as if they were Nip pillboxes, and
Lieutenant Ethridge seems mollified. Bobby Shaftoe, having scored massive
points, leads Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Branph out into the street
before Lieutenant Ethridge figures out that he was just guessing. They head
for the meat locker up on the ridge, double time.
These Marines are all lethal combat veterans or else they never would
have gotten into a mess this bad trapped on a gratuitously dangerous
continent (Africa) surrounded by the enemy (United States Army troops).
Still, when they get into that locker and take their first gander at PFC
Hott, a hush comes over them.
Private Branph clasps his hands, rubbing them together surreptitiously.
"Dear Lord "
"Shut up, Private!" Shaftoe says, "I already did that."
"Okay, Sarge."
"Go find a meat saw!" Shaftoe says to Private Nathan.
The privates all gasp.
"For the fucking pig!" Shaftoe clarifies. Then he turns to Private
Daniels, who is carrying a featureless bundle, and says, "Open it up!"
The bundle (which was issued by Ethridge to Shaftoe) turns out to
contain a black wetsuit. Nothing GI; some kind of European model. Shaftoe
unfolds it and examines its various parts while Privates Nathan and Branph
dismember Frosty the Pig with vigorous strokes of an enormous bucksaw.
They are all working away silently when a new voice interrupts. "Dear
Lord," the voice begins, as they all look up to see a man standing nearby,
hands clasped prayerfully. His words, sacramentally condensed into an
outward and visible cloud of steam, veil his face. His uniform and rank are
obscured by an Army blanket thrown over his shoulders. He'd look like a
camel riding Holy Land prophet if he were not clean shaven and wearing Rape
Prevention Glasses.
"Goddamn it!" Shaftoe says. "I already said a fucking prayer."
"But are we praying for Private Hott, or for ourselves?" the man says.
This is a poser. Everything becomes quiet as the meat saw stops moving.
Shaftoe drops the wetsuit and stands up. Blanket Man's got very short
grizzly hair, or maybe that's frost coalescing on his scalp. His ice colored
eyes meet Shaftoe's through the mile thick lenses of his RPGs, as if he's
really expecting an answer. Shaftoe takes a step closer and realizes that
the man is wearing a clerical collar.
"You tell me, Rev," Shaftoe says.
Then he recognizes Blanket Man. He's about to let fly with a lusty What
in the fuck are you doing here, but something makes him hold back. The
chaplain's eyes make a sideways dart so small and so fast that only Shaftoe,
who's practically rubbing noses with him, could possibly see it.
The message being: Shut up, Bobby, we'll talk later.
"Private Hott is with God now or wherever people go after they die,"
says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root.
"What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ!
'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?"
"I guess I'm a Detachment 2702 kind of chaplain," the chaplain says.
Lieutenant Enoch Root finally breaks eye contact with Shaftoe and turns his
gaze to where the action is. "As you were, fellows," he says. "Looks like
bacon tonight, huh?"
The men chuckle nervously and resume sawing.
Once they get the pig's carcass disentangled from Hott's, each of the
Marines grabs a limb. They carry Hott out into the butcher shop, which has
been temporarily evacuated for purposes of this operation, so that Hott's
former comrades in shanks will not spread rumors.
Hasty evacuation of a butcher shop after one of its workers has been
found dead on the floor could spawn a few rumors in and of itself. So the
cover story du jour, freshly spun by Lieutenant Ethridge, is that Detachment
2702 is (contrary to all outward appearances) an elite, crack medical team
concerned that Hott had been struck down by a rare new form of North African
food poisoning. Maybe even something deliberately left behind by the French,
who are, by accounts, a little irritable about having their battleship sunk.
Anyway, the whole shop (the story goes) has to be shut down for the day and
gone over with a nit comb. Hott's corpse will be cremated before being sent
back to the family, just to make sure that the dreaded affliction does not
spread into Chicago the planetary abbatoir capital where its incalculable
consequences could alter the outcome of the war.
There is a GI coffin laid out on the floor, just to preserve the
fiction. Shaftoe and his men ignore it completely and begin dressing the
body, first in an appalling pair of swim trunks, then various components of
the wetsuit.
"Hey!" Ethridge says. "I thought you were going to do the gloves last."
"Sir, we're doing them first, by your leave, sir!" Bobby Shaftoe says.
"On account of his fingers will thaw out first and once that happens we
are screwed, sir!"
"Well, slap this on him first," Ethridge says, and hands over a wrist
watch. Shaftoe hefts it and whistles. It's a beaut: a Swiss chronometer in
solid uranium, its jewel laden movement throbbing away like the heart beat
of a small mammal. He swings it on the end of its wristband, made in
cunningly joined armor plates. It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.
"Nice," Shaftoe says, "but it doesn't tell time too good."
"In the time zone where we are going," Ethridge says, "it does."
The chastened Shaftoe sets about his work. Meanwhile, Lieutenants
Ethridge and Root are making themselves useful. They carry the crudely sawed
remains of Frosty the Pig into the butcher shop and throw them on a gigantic
scale. They add up to some thirty kilograms, whatever the fuck that means.
Enoch Root, showing an appetite for physical labor that is duly and silently
noted by the men, hauls in another pig carcass, stiff as a Radio Flyer, and
dumps it onto the scale, bringing the total up to seventy. Ethridge does the
breaststroke through clouds of flies to gather up all the cuts of meat that
were on the chopping blocks when the place was evacuated. He throws them on
the scale and the needle swings up to near the one hundred mark. From that
point they are able to bring it up to one thirty by ferrying hams and roasts
in from the freezer one at a time. Enoch Root who seems to be conversant
with exotic systems of measurement has made a calculation, and checked it
twice, establishing that the weight of Gerald Hott, converted into
kilograms, is one hundred and thirty.
All the meat goes into the coffin. Ethridge slams the lid shut,
trapping some flies who have no idea what they are in for. Root goes around
with a clawhammer, driving in sixteen penny nails with sure, powerful,
Carpenter of Nazareth like strokes. Meanwhile, Ethridge has taken a GI
manual out of his briefcase. Shaftoe is close enough to read the title,
printed in block letters on its olive drab cover:
COFFIN SEALING PROCEDURES
PART III: TROPICAL ENVIRONMENTS
VOL. II: HIGH DISEASE RISK SITUATIONS (BUBONIC PLAGUE, ETC.)
The two lieutenants devote a good hour to following the instructions in
that manual. The instructions are not that complicated, but Enoch Root keeps
noticing syntactical ambiguities and wants to explore their ramifications.
First this rattles Ethridge, then his emotions tend towards impatience and,
finally, extreme pragmatism. To make the chaplain shut up, Ethridge
confiscates the manual and starts Root on stenciling Hott's name on the
coffin and pasting it up with red stickers printed with medical warnings so
appalling that the topic headings alone induce faint nausea. By the time
Root is finished, the only person who can legally open this coffin is
General George C. Marshall himself, and even he would have to first get
special permission from the Surgeon General and evacuate all living things
within a hundred mile radius.
"Chaplain talks kind of funny," says Private Nathan at one point,
listening, slackjawed, to one of these Root/Ethridge debates.
"Yeah!" exclaims Private Branph, as if the accent took a really keen
listener to notice. "What kind of an accent is that anyway?"
All eyes turn to Bobby Shaftoe, who pretends to listen for a bit and
then says, "Well, fellas, I would guess that this Enoch Root is the
offspring of a long line of Dutch and possibly German missionaries in the
South Sea Islands, interbred with Aussies. And furthermore, I would guess
that being as how he grew up in territories controlled by the British that
he carries a British passport and was drafted into their military when the
war started and is now part of ANZAC."
"Haw!" roars Private Daniels, "if you got all of that right, I'll give
you five bucks ."
"Deal," Shaftoe says.
Ethridge and Root finish sealing the coffin at about the same time
Shaftoe and his Marines are wrestling the last bits of the wetsuit into
place. It takes a shitload of talcum powder, but they get it done. Ethridge
supplies them with the talcum powder, which is not GI talc; it is from
somewhere in Europe. Some of the letters on the label have pairs of dots
over them, which Shaftoe knows to be a characteristic of the German
language.
A truck backs up to the loading dock, smelling the fresh paint (it is a
Detachment 2702 truck). In go the sealed coffin and the now vulcanized dead
butcher.
"I'm going to stay behind and check the wastebaskets," Lieutenant
Ethridge tells Shaftoe. "I'll meet you at the airfield in one hour."
Shaftoe imagines one hour in the back of a hot truck with this cargo.
"You want me to keep him on ice, sir?" he asks.
Ethridge has to think about this one for a while. He sucks his teeth,
checks his watch, hems and haws. But when he finally answers, he sounds
definite. "Negative. It is imperative, for purposes of this mission, that we
now get him into a thawed mode."
PFC General Hott and his meat laden coffin occupy the center of the
truck's bed. The Marines sit to the sides, arranged like pallbearers.
Shaftoe finds himself staring across the carnage into the face of Enoch
Root, which is wearing an expression of forced nonchalance.
Shaftoe knows he ought to wait, but he just can't stand it. "What are
you doing here?" he finally says.
"The detachment is relocating," the Rev says. "Closer to the front."
"We just got off the fucking boat," Shaftoe says. "Of course we're
going closer to the goddamn front we can't go any farther unless we swim ."
"As long as we're pulling up stakes," Root says coolly, "I'll be coming
along for the ride."
"I don't mean that," Bobby Shaftoe says. "I mean, why should the
detachment have a chaplain?"
"You know the military," Root says. "Every unit has to have one."
"It's bad luck."
"It's bad luck to have a chaplain? Why?"
"It means the waffle butts are expecting a lot of funerals, is why."
"So you are taking the position that the only thing a cleric can do is
to preside over funerals? Interesting."
"And weddings and baptisms," Shaftoe says. All of the other Marines
chortle.
"Could it be you're feeling a little anxious about the unusual nature
of Detachment 2702's first mission?" Root inquires, casting a significant
glance at the late Hott, then staring directly into Shaftoe's eyes.
"Anxious? Listen, Rev, I done some things on Guadalcanal that make this
look like Emily Fucking Post."
All of the other Marines think this is a great line, but Root is
undeterred.
"Did you know why you were doing those things on Guadalcanal?"
"Sure! To stay alive."
"Do you know why you're doing this?"
"Fuck no."
"Doesn't that irritate you a little bit? Or are you too much of a
stupid jarhead to care?"
"Well, you kind of backed me into a corner there, Rev," Shaftoe says.
After a pause he goes on, "I'll admit to being a little curious.
"If there were someone in Detachment 2702 who could help answer your
questions about why, would that be useful?"
"I guess so," Shaftoe grumbles. "It just seems weird to have a
chaplain."
"Why does it seem weird?"
"Because of what kind of unit this is."
"What kind of unit is it?" Root asks. He asks it with a certain
sadistic pleasure.
"We're not supposed to talk about it," Shaftoe says. "And anyway, we
don't know."
Down the hill, immense zigzagging ramps descend pompously over rows of
tiger striped arches to the strand of ramifying railway lines that feed the
port from the south. "It's like standing in the drain of a fucking pinball
machine," says B. Shaftoe, looking up at the way they have just come,
thinking about what might come rolling down out of the Casbah. They head
south along those railway lines and come into a zone of ore dumps and coal
heaps and smokestacks, clearly recognizable to Great Lakes Eagle Scout
Shaftoe, but here operated through some kind of cross cultured gear train
about a million meshings deep. They pull up in front of the Société
Algérienne d'Éclairage et de Force, a double smokestacked behemoth with the
biggest coal pile of all. They're in the middle of nowhere, but it's obvious
that they are expected. Here as everywhere else that Detachment 2702 goes a
strange Rank Inflation Effect is taking place. The coffin is carried into
the SAEF by two lieutenants, a captain, and a major, overseen by a colonel!
There is not a single enlisted man in sight, and Bobby Shaftoe, a mere
sergeant, worries about what sort of work they'll find for him. There is
also a Paperwork Negation Effect going on here; whenever Shaftoe expects to
be stalled by the usual half an hour's worth of red tape, an anxious officer
runs up and waves his hands furiously and he is allowed to proceed.
An Arab, wearing what appears to be a red coffee can on his head, hauls
an iron door open; flames lunge at him and he beats them back with a
blackened iron stick. The pallbearers center the head of the coffin in the
opening and then shove it through, like ramming a big shell home into a
sixteen inch gun, and the man with the can on his head clangs the door shut,
a tassel on the top of his can whipping around crazily. Before he's even got
it latched he's yodeling just like those guys up in the Casbah. The officers
all stand around agreeing with each other and signing their names on
clipboards.
So with a dearth of complications that can only strike combat veteran
Bobby Shaftoe as eerie, the truck leaves the Société Algérienne d'Éclairage
et de Force behind and heads back up those damn ramps into Algiers. The
climb's steep a first gear project all the way. Vendors with push carts
loaded with boiling oil are not only keeping up with them but cooking
fritters along the way. Three legged dogs run and fight underneath the
actual drive train of the truck. Detachment 2702 is also dogged by coffee
can wearing natives threatening to play guitars made of jerry cans, and by
orange vendors and snake charmers, and a few blue eyed burnoose wearers
holding up lumps of unwrapped and unlabelled dark stuff. Like hailstones,
these may be classified by analogy to fruits and sporting goods. Typically
they range from grape to baseball. At one point, the chaplain impulsively
trades a Hershey bar for a golf ball of the stuff.
"What is that? Chocolate?" Bobby Shaftoe asks.
"If it was chocolate," Root says, "that guy wouldn't have taken a
Hershey bar for it."
Shaftoe shrugs. "Unless it's shitty chocolate."
"Or shit!" blurts Private Nathan, provoking incredible hilarity.
"You heard of Mary Jane?" Root asks.
Shaftoe role model, leader of men stifles the impulse to say, Heard of
her? I've fucked her!
"This is the concentrated essence," says Enoch Root.
"How would you know, Rev?" says Private Daniels.
The Rev is not rattled. "I'm the God guy here, right? I know the
religious angle?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Well, at one time, there was a group of Muslims called the hashishin
who would eat this stuff and then go out and kill people. They were so good
at it, they became famous or infamous. Over time the pronunciation of the
name has changed we know them as assassins."
There is an appropriately respectful silence. Finally, Sergeant Shaftoe
says, "What the hell are we waiting for?"
They eat some. Shaftoe, being the highest ranking enlisted man present,
eats more than the others. Nothing happens. "Only person I feel like
assassinating is that guy who sold it to us," he says.
***
The airfield, eleven miles out of town, is busier than it was ever
intended to be. This is nice grape– and olive growing land, but stony
mountains are visible farther inland, and beyond 'em is a patch of sand the
size of the United States most of which seems to be airborne and headed
their way. Countless airplanes predominantly Dakota transports, a.k.a.
Gooney Birds stir up vast, tongue coating, booger nucleating dust clouds. It
doesn't occur to Shaftoe for quite some time that his dry eyes and mouth may
not be entirely the result of dust in the air. His saliva has the
consistency of tile adhesive.
The detachment is so damn secret that no one at the airfield even knows
that they exist. There are a lot of Brits here, and in the desert, Brits
wear shorts, which makes Shaftoe want to punch them in the nose. He controls
the urge. But his obvious hostility towards men in short pants, combined
with the fact that he is demanding to be pointed in the direction of a unit
that is so secret that he cannot specify it by name or even vaguely describe
it, leads to a lot of bafflement, a lot of incredulity, and generally gets
the Anglo American alliance off on the wrong foot.
Sergeant Shaftoe, however, now understands that anything to do with
this detachment is liable to be way off to one side, shrouded in black tarps
and awnings. Like any other military unit, Detachment 2702 is rich in some
supplies and poor in others, but they do appear to control about fifty
percent of last year's total U.S. tarpage production. When Shaftoe mentions
this fact, and goes on about it to his comrades at great length, some of the
men look at him a little funny. It's left to Enoch Root to say, "Between the
giant lizards and the black tarps some people might think you were acting a
little paranoid."
"Let me tell you about paranoid," Shaftoe says, and he does, not
forgetting to mention Lieutenant Ethridge and his wastebaskets. By the time
he's had his say, the whole detachment has assembled on the far side of
those tarps, and everyone is nice and tense except for their newest recruit,
who, as Shaftoe notes approvingly, is beginning to relax. Lying on the bed
of the truck in his wetsuit, he adjusts, rather than bounces, when they go
over bumps.
Even so, he is still stiff enough to simplify the problem of getting
him out of the truck and into their assigned Gooney Bird: a bare knuckled
variant of the DC 3, militarized and (to Shaftoe's skeptical eye) rendered
somewhat less than airworthy by a pair of immense cargo doors gouged into
one side, nearly cutting the airframe in half. This particular Dakota has
been flying around in the fucking desert so long that all the paint's been
sand blasted off its propeller blades, the engine cowling, and the leading
edges of the wings, leaving burnished metal that will make an inviting
silver gleam for any Luftwaffe pilots within three hundred miles. Worse:
diverse antennas sprout from the skin of the fuselage, mostly around the
cockpit. Not just whip antennas but great big damn barbecue grills that make
Shaftoe wish he had a hacksaw. They are eerily like the ones that Shaftoe
humped down the stairway from Station Alpha in Shanghai a memory that has
somehow gotten all mangled together, now, with the other images in his head.
When he tries to recollect it, all he can see is a bloodied Jesus carrying a
high frequency dual band dipole down a stone staircase in Manila, and he
knows that can't be right.
Though they are on the precincts of a busy airfield, Ethridge refuses
to let this operation go forward when there is as much as a single airplane
in the sky. Finally he says, "Okay, NOW!" In the truck, they lift the body
up, just in time to hear Ethridge shout, "No, WAIT!" at which point they put
him down again. Long after it has stopped being grimly amusing, they put a
tarp on Gerald Hott and get him carried on board, and shortly thereafter are
airborne. Detachment 2072 is headed for a rendezvous with Rommel.
Chapter 16 CYCLES
It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of
shit is going on, all at once, everywhere. Zeus himself would not be able to
sort it all out, not even if he mobilized the caryatids tell them never mind
what we told you, just drop those loads. Temples collapsing everywhere, like
spyglasses, he'd send those caryatids and any naiads and dryads he could
scare up to library school, issue them green visors, dress them in the prim
asexual uniforms of the OPAMS, the Olympian Perspective Archive Management
Service, put them to work filling out three by five cards round the clock.
Get them to use some of that vaunted caryatid steadfastness to tend
Hollerith machines and ETC card readers. Even then, Zeus would probably
still lack a handle on the situation. He'd be so pissed off he would hardly
know which hubristical mortals to fling his thunderbolts at, nor which pinup
girls and buck privates to molest.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is as Olympian as anyone right now.
Roosevelt and Churchill and the few others on the Ultra Mega list have the
same access, but they have other cares and distractions. They can't wander
around the data flow capital of the planet, snooping over translators'
shoulders and reading the decrypts as they come, chunkity chunkity whirr,
out of the Typex machines. They cannot trace individual threads of the
global narrative at their whim, running from hut to hut patching connections
together, even as the WRENs in Hut 11 string patch cables from one bombe
socket to another, fashioning a web to catch Hitler's messages as they speed
through the ether.
Here are some of the things Waterhouse knows: the Battle of El Alamein
is won, and Montgomery is chasing Rommel westwards across Cyrenaica at what
looks like a breakneck pace, driving him back toward the distant Axis
stronghold of Tunis. But it's not the rout it appears to be. If Monty would
only grasp the significance of the intelligence coming through the Ultra
channel, he would be able to move decisively, to surround and capture large
pockets of Germans and Italians. But he never does, and so Rommel stages an
orderly retreat, preparing to fight another day, and plodding Monty is
roundly cursed in the watch rooms of Bletchley Park for his failure to
exploit their priceless but perishable gems of intelligence.
The largest sealift in history just piled into Northwest Africa. It is
called Operation Torch, and it's going to take Rommel from behind, serving
as anvil to Montgomery's hammer, or, if Monty doesn't pick up the pace a
bit, maybe the other way around. It looks brilliantly organized but it's not
really; this is the first time America has punched across the Atlantic in
any serious way and so a whole grab bag of stuff is included on those ships
including any number of signals intelligence geeks who are storming
theatrically onto the beaches as if they were Marines. Also included in the
landing is the American contingent of Detachment 2702 a hand picked wrecking
crew of combat hardened leathernecks.
Some of these Marines learned what they know on Guadalcanal, a
basically useless island in the Southwest Pacific where the Empire of Nippon
and the United States of America are disputing with rifles each other's
right to build a military airbase. Early returns suggest that the Nipponese
Army, during its extended tour of East Asia, has lost its edge. It would
appear that raping the entire female population of Nanjing, and bayoneting
helpless Filipino villagers, does not translate into actual military
competence. The Nipponese Army is still trying to work out some way to kill,
say, a hundred American Marines without losing, say, five hundred of its own
soldiers.
The Japanese Navy is a different story they know what they are doing.
They have Yamamoto. They have torpedoes that actually explode when they
strike their targets, in stark contrast to the American models which do
nothing but scratch the paint of the Japanese ships and then sink
apologetically. Yamamoto just made another attempt to wipe out the American
fleet off the Santa Cruz Islands, sank Hornet and blew a nice hole in
Enterprise. But he lost a third of his planes. Watching the Japanese rack up
losses, Waterhouse wonders if anyone in Tokyo has bothered to break out the
abacus and run the numbers on this Second World War thing.
The Allies are doing some math of their own, and they are scared
shitless. There are 100 German U boats in the Atlantic now, operating mostly
from Lorient and Bordeaux, and they are slaughtering convoys in the North
Atlantic with such efficiency that it's not even combat, just a Lusitanian
level murder spree. They are on a pace to sink something like a million tons
of shipping this month, which Waterhouse cannot really comprehend. He tries
to think of a ton as being roughly equivalent to a car, and then tries to
imagine America and Canada going out into the middle of the Atlantic and
simply dropping a million cars into the ocean just in November. Sheesh!
The problem is Shark.
The Germans call it Triton. It is a new cypher system, used exclusively
by their Navy. It is an Enigma machine, but not the usual three wheel
Enigma. The Poles learned how to break that old thing a couple of years ago,
and Bletchley Park industrialized the process. But more than a year ago, a
German U boat was beached intact on the south coast of Iceland and gone over
pretty thoroughly by men from Bletchley. They discovered an Enigma box with
niches for four not three wheels.
When the four wheel Enigma had gone into service on February 1st, the
entire Atlantic had gone black. Alan and the others have been going after
the problem very hard ever since. The problem is that they don't know how
the fourth wheel is wired up.
But a few days ago, another U boat was captured, more or less intact,
in the Eastern Mediterranean. Colonel Chattan, who happened to be in the
neighborhood, went there with sickening haste, along with some other
Bletchleyites. They recovered a four wheel Enigma machine, and though this
doesn't break the code, it gives them the data they need to break it.
Hitler must be feeling cocky, anyway, because he's on tour at the
moment, preparatory to a working vacation at his alpine retreat. That didn't
prevent him from taking over what was left of France apparently something
about Operation Torch really got his goat, so he occupied Vichy France in
its entirety, and then dispatched upwards of a hundred thousand fresh
troops, and a correspondingly stupendous amount of supplies, across the
Mediterranean to Tunisia. Waterhouse imagines that you must be able to cross
from Sicily to Tunisia these days simply by hopping from the deck of one
German transport ship to another.
Of course, if that were true, Waterhouse's job would be a lot easier.
The Allies could sink as many of those ships as they wanted to without
raising a single blond Teutonic eyebrow on the information theory front. But
the fact is that the convoys are few and far between. Just exactly how few
and how far between are parameters that go into the equations that he and
Alan Mathison Turing spend all night scribbling on chalkboards.
After a good eight or twelve hours of that, when the sun has finally
come up again, there's nothing like a brisk bicycle ride in the
Buckinghamshire countryside.
***
Spread out before them as they pump over the crest of the rise is a
woods that has turned all of the colors of flame. The hemispherical crowns
of the maples even contribute a realistic billowing effect. Lawrence feels a
funny compulsion to take his hands off the handlebars and clamp them over
his ears. As they coast into the trees, however, the air remains
delightfully cool, the blue sky above unsmudged by pillars of black smoke,
and the calm and quiet of the place could not be more different from what
Lawrence is remembering.
"Talk, talk, talk!" says Alan Turing, imitating the squawk of furious
hens. The strange noise is made stranger by the fact that he is wearing a
gas mask, until he becomes impatient and pulls it up onto his forehead.
"They love to hear themselves talk." He is referring to Winston Churchill
and Franklin Roosevelt. "And they don't mind hearing each other talk up to a
point, at least. But voice is a terribly redundant channel of information,
compared to printed text. If you take text and run it through an Enigma
which is really not all that complicated the familiar patterns in the text,
such as the preponderance of the letter E, become nearly undetectable." Then
he pulls the gas mask back over his face in order to emphasize the following
point: "But you can warp and permute voice in the most fiendish ways
imaginable and it will still be perfectly intelligible to a listener." Alan
then suffers a sneezing fit that threatens to burst the khaki straps around
his head.
"Our ears know how to find the familiar patterns," Lawrence suggests.
He is not wearing a gas mask because (a) there is no Nazi gas attack in
progress, and (b) unlike Alan, he does not suffer from hay fever.
"Excuse me." Alan suddenly brakes and jumps off his bicycle. He lifts
the rear wheel from the pavement, gives it a spin with his free hand, then
reaches down and gives the chain a momentary sideways tug. He is watching
the mechanism intently, interrupted by a few aftersneezes.
The chain of Turing's bicycle has one weak link. The rear wheel has one
bent spoke. When the link and the spoke come into contact with each other,
the chain will part and fall onto the road. This does not happen at every
revolution of the wheel otherwise the bicycle would be completely useless.
It only happens when the chain and the wheel are in a certain position with
respect to each other.
Based upon reasonable assumptions about the velocity that can be
maintained by Dr. Turing, an energetic bicyclist (let us say 25 km/hr) and
the radius of his bicycle's rear wheel (a third of a meter), if the chain's
weak link hit the bent spoke on every revolution, the chain would fall off
every one third of a second.
In fact, the chain doesn't fall off unless the bent spoke and the weak
link happen to coincide. Now, suppose that you describe the position of the
rear wheel by the traditional [theta]. Just for the sake of simplicity, say
that when the wheel starts in the position where the bent spoke is capable
of hitting the weak link (albeit only if the weak link happens to be there
to be hit) then [theta] = 0. If you're using degrees as your unit, then,
during a single revolution of the wheel, [theta] will climb all the way up
to 359 degrees before cycling back around to 0, at which point the bent
spoke will be back in position to knock the chain off And now suppose that
you describe the position of the chain with the variable C, in the following
very simple way: you assign a number to each link on the chain. The weak
link is numbered 0, the next is 1, and so on, up to l – 1 where l is
the total number of links in the chain. And again, for simplicity's sake,
say that when the chain is in the position where its weak link is capable of
being hit by the bent spoke (albeit only if the bent spoke happens to be
there to hit it) then C = 0.
For purposes of figuring out when the chain is going to fall off of Dr.
Turing's bicycle, then, everything we need to know about the bicycle is
contained in the values of [theta] and of C. That pair of numbers defines
the bicycle's state. The bicycle has as many possible states as there can be
different values of ([theta], C) but only one of those states, namely (0,
0), is the one that will cause the chain to fall off onto the road.
Suppose we start off in that state; i.e., with ([theta] = 0, C = 0),
but that the chain has not fallen off because Dr. Turing (knowing full well
his bicycle's state at any given time) has paused in the middle of road
(nearly precipitating a collision with his friend and colleague Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse, because his gas mask blocks his peripheral vision).
Dr. Turing has tugged sideways on the chain while moving it forward
slightly, preventing it from being hit by the bent spoke. Now he gets on the
bicycle again and begins to pedal forward. The circumference of his rear
wheel is about two meters, and so when he has moved a distance of two meters
down the road, the wheel has performed a complete revolution and reached the
position [theta] = 0 again that being the position, remember, when its bent
spoke is in position to hit the weak link.
What of the chain? Its position, defined by C, begins at 0 and reaches
1 when its next link moves forward to the fatal position, then 2 and so on.
The chain must move in synch with the teeth on the sprocket at the center of
the rear wheel, and that sprocket has n teeth, and so after a complete
revolution of the rear wheel, when [theta] = 0 again, C = n. After a second
complete revolution of the rear wheel, once again [theta] = 0 but now C =
2n. The next time it's C = 3n and so on. But remember that the chain is not
an infinite linear thing, but a loop having only l positions; at C = l it
loops back around to C = 0 and repeats the cycle. So when calculating the
value of C it is necessary to do modular arithmetic that is, if the chain
has a hundred links (l = 100) and the total number of links that have moved
by is 135, then the value of C is not 135 but 35. Whenever you get a number
greater than or equal to l you just repeatedly subtract l until you get a
number less than 1. This operation is written, by mathematicians, as mod I.
So the successive values of C, each time the rear wheel spins around to
[theta] = 0, are
[C sub i] = n mod l, 2n mod l, 3n mod l,...,in mod l
where i = (1, 2, 3, ... [infinity]) more or less, depending on how
close to infinitely long Turing wants to keep riding his bicycle. After a
while, it seems infinitely long to Waterhouse.
Turing's chain will fall off when his bicycle reaches the state
([theta] = 0, C = 0) and in light of what is written above, this will happen
when (which is just a counter telling how many times the rear wheel has
revolved) reaches some hypothetical value such that in mod l = 0, or, to put
it in plain language, it will happen if there is some multiple of n (such
as, oh, 2n, 3n, 395n or 109,948,368,443n) that just happens to be an exact
multiple of l too. Actually there might be several of these so called common
multiples, but from a practical standpoint the only one that matters is the
first one the least common multiple, or LCM because that's the one that will
be reached first and that will cause the chain to fall off.
If, say, the sprocket has twenty teeth (n 20) and the chain has a
hundred teeth (l 100) then after one turn of the wheel we'll have C 20,
after two turns C = 40, then 60, then 80, then 100. But since we are doing
the arithmetic modulo 100, that value has to be changed to zero. So after
five revolutions of the rear wheel, we have reached the state ([theta] = 0,
C = 0) and Turing's chain falls off. Five revolutions of the rear wheel only
gets him ten meters down the road, and so with these values of l and n the
bicycle is very nearly worthless. Of course, this is only true if Turing is
stupid enough to begin pedaling with his bicycle in the chain falling off
state. If, at the time he begins pedaling, it is in the state ([theta] = 0,
C = 1) instead, then the successive values will be C 21, 41, 61, 81, 1, 21,
. . . and so on forever the chain will never fall off. But this is a
degenerate case, where "degenerate," to a mathematician, means "annoyingly
boring." In theory, as long as Turing put his bicycle into the right state
before parking it outside a building, no one would be able to steal it the
chain would fall off after they had ridden for no more than ten meters.
But if Turing's chain has a hundred and one links (l = 101) then after
five revolutions we have C = 100, and after six we have C = 19, then
C = 39, 59, 79, 99, 18, 38, 58, 78, 98, 17, 37, 57, 77, 97, 16, 36, 56,
76, 96, 15, 35, 55, 75, 95, 14, 34, 54, 74, 94, 13, 33, 53, 73, 93, 12, 32,
52, 72, 92, 11, 31, 51, 71, 91, 10, 30, 50, 70, 90, 9, 29, 49, 69, 89, 8,
28, 48, 68, 88, 7, 27, 47, 67, 87, 6, 26, 46, 66, 86, 5, 25, 45, 65, 85, 4,
24, 44, 64, 84, 3, 23, 43, 63, 83, 2, 22, 42, 62, 82, 1, 21, 41, 61, 81, 0
So not until the 101st revolution of the rear wheel does the bicycle
return to the state ([theta] = 0, C = 0) where the chain falls off. During
these hundred and one revolutions, Turing's bicycle has proceeded for a
distance of a fifth of a kilometer down the road, which is not too bad. So
the bicycle is usable. However, unlike in the degenerate case, it is not
possible for this bicycle to be placed in a state where the chain never
falls off at all. This can be proved by going through the above list of
values of C, and noticing that every possible value of C every single number
from 0 to 100 is on the list. What this means is that no matter what value C
has when Turing begins to pedal, sooner or later it will work its way round
to the fatal C = 0 and the chain will fall off. So Turing can leave his
bicycle anywhere and be confident that, if stolen, it won't go more than a
fifth of a kilometer before the chain falls off.
The difference between the degenerate and nondegenerate cases has to do
with the properties of the numbers involved. The combination of (n = 20, I =
100) has radically different properties from (n = 20, l = 101). The key
difference is that 20 and 101 are "relatively prime" meaning that they have
no factors in common. This means that their least common multiple, their
LCM, is a large number it is, in fact, equal to l x n = 20 x 101 = 2020.
Whereas the LCM of 20 and 100 is only 100. The 101 bicycle has a long period
– it passes through many different states before returning back to the
beginning whereas the l = 100 bicycle has a period of only a few states.
Suppose that Turing's bicycle were a cipher machine that worked by
alphabetic substitution, which is to say that it would replace each of the
26 letters of the alphabet with some other letter. An A in the plaintext
might become a T in the ciphertext, B might become F, C might be come M, and
so on all the way through to Z. In and of itself this would be an absurdly
easy cipher to break kids in treehouses stuff. But suppose that the
substitution scheme changed from one letter to the next. That is, suppose
that after the first letter of the plaintext was enciphered using one
particular substitution alphabet, the second letter of plaintext was
enciphered using a completely different substitution alphabet, and the third
letter a different one yet, and so on. This is called a polyalphabetic
cipher.
Suppose that Turing's bicycle were capable of generating a different
alphabet for each one of its different states. So the state ([theta] = 0, C
= 0) would correspond to, say, this substitution alphabet:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Q G U W B I Y T F K V N D O H E P X L Z R C A S J M
but the state ([theta] = 180, C = 15) would correspond to this
(different) one:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
B O R I X V G Y P F J M T C Q N H A Z U K L D S E W
No two letters would be enciphered using the same substitution alphabet
until, that is, the bicycle worked its way back around to the initial state
([theta] = 0, C = 0) and began to repeat the cycle. This means that it is a
periodic polyalphabetic system. Now, if this machine had a short period, it
would repeat itself frequently, and would therefore be useful, as an
encryption system, only against kids in treehouses. The longer its period
(the more relative primeness is built into it) the less frequently it cycles
back to the same substitution alphabet, and the more secure it is.
The three wheel Enigma is just that type of system (i.e., periodic
polyalphabetic). Its wheels, like the drive train of Turing's bicycle,
embody cycles within cycles. Its period is 17,576, which means that the
substitution alphabet that enciphers the first letter of a message will not
be used again until the 17,577th letter is reached. But with Shark the
Germans have added a fourth wheel, bumping the period up to 456,976. The
wheels are set in a different, randomly chosen starting position at the
beginning of each message. Since the Germans' messages are never as long as
450,000 characters, the Enigma never reuses the same substitution alphabet
in the course of a given message, which is why the Germans think it's so
good.
A flight of transport planes goes over them, probably headed for the
aerodrome at Bedford. The planes make a weirdly musical diatonic hum, like
bagpipes playing two drones at once. This reminds Lawrence of yet another
phenomenon related to the bicycle wheel and the Enigma machine. "Do you know
why airplanes sound the way they do?" he says.
"No, come to think of it." Turing pulls his gas mask off again. His jaw
has gone a bit slack and his eyes are darting from side to side. Lawrence
has caught him out.
"I noticed it at Pearl. Airplane engines are rotary," Lawrence says.
"Consequently they must have an odd number of cylinders."
"How does that follow?"
"If the number were even, the cylinders would be directly opposed, a
hundred and eighty degrees apart, and it wouldn't work out mechanically."
"Why not?"
"I forgot. It just wouldn't work out."
Alan raises his eyebrows, clearly not convinced.
"Something to do with cranks," Waterhouse ventures, feeling a little
defensive.
"I don't know that I agree," Alan says.
"Just stipulate it think of it as a boundary condition," Waterhouse
says. But Alan is already hard at work, he suspects, mentally designing a
rotary aircraft engine with an even number of cylinders.
"Anyway, if you look at them, they all have an odd number of
cylinders," Lawrence continues. "So the exhaust noise combines with the
propeller noise to produce that two tone sound."
Alan climbs back onto his bicycle and they ride into the woods for some
distance without any more talking. Actually, they have not been talking so
much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through
the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate; it
eliminates much of the redundancy that Alan was complaining about in the
case of FDR and Churchill.
Waterhouse is thinking about cycles within cycles. He's already made up
his mind that human society is one of these cycles within cycles things
(1) and now he's trying to figure out whether it is like Turing's
bicycle (works fine for a while, then suddenly the chain falls off, hence
the occasional world war) or like an Enigma machine (grinds away
incomprehensibly for a long time, then suddenly the wheels line up like a
slot machine and everything is made plain in some sort of global epiphany
or, if you prefer, apocalypse) or just like a rotary airplane engine (runs
and runs and runs; nothing special happens; it just makes a lot of noise).
"It's somewhere around . . . here!" Alan says, and violently brakes to
a stop, just to chaff Lawrence, who has to turn his bicycle around, a chancy
trick on such a narrow lane, and loop back.
They lean their bicycles against trees and remove pieces of equipment
from the baskets: dry cells, electronic breadboards, poles, a trenching
tool, loops of wire. Alan looks about somewhat uncertainly and then strikes
off into the woods.
"I'm off to America soon, to work on this voice encryption problem at
Bell Labs," Alan says.
Lawrence laughs ruefully. "We're ships passing in the night, you and
I."
"We are passengers on ships passing in the night," Alan corrects him.
"It is no accident. They need you precisely because I am leaving. I've been
doing all of the 2701 work to this point."
"It's Detachment 2702 now," Lawrence says.
"Oh," Alan says, crestfallen. "You noticed."
"It was reckless of you, Alan."
"On the contrary!" Alan says. "What will Rudy think if he notices that,
of all the units and divisions and detachments in the Allied order of
battle, there is not a single one whose number happens to be the product of
two primes?"
"Well, that depends upon how common such numbers are compared to all of
the other numbers, and on how many other numbers in the range are going
unused . . ." Lawrence says, and begins to work out the first half of the
problem. "Riemann Zeta function again. That thing pops up everywhere."
"That's the spirit!" Alan says. "Simply take a rational and common
sense approach. They are really quite pathetic."
"Who?"
"Here," Alan says, slowing to a stop and looking around at the trees,
which to Lawrence look like all the other trees. "This looks familiar." He
sits down on the bole of a windfall and begins to unpack electrical gear
from his bag. Lawrence squats nearby and does the same. Lawrence does not
know how the device works it is Alan's invention and so he acts in the role
of surgical assistant, handing tools and supplies to the doctor as he puts
the device together. The doctor is talking the entire time, and so he
requests tools by staring at them fixedly and furrowing his brow.
"They are well, who do you suppose? The fools who use all of the
information that comes from Bletchley Park!"
"Alan!"
"Well, it is foolish! Like this Midway thing. That's a perfect example,
isn't it?"
"Well, I was happy that we won the battle," Lawrence says guardedly.
"Don't you think it's a bit odd, a bit striking, a bit noticeable, that
after all of Yamamoto's brilliant feints and deceptions and ruses, this
Nimitz fellow knew exactly where to go looking for him? Out of the entire
Pacific Ocean?"
"All right," Lawrence says, "I was appalled. I wrote a paper about it.
Probably the paper that got me into this mess with you."
"Well, it's no better with us Brits," Alan says.
"Really?"
"You would be horrified at what we've been up to in the Mediterranean.
It is a scandal. A crime.
"What have we been up to?" Lawrence asks. "I say 'we' rather than 'you'
because we are allies now."
"Yes, yes," Alan says impatiently. "So they claim." He paused for a
moment, tracing an electrical circuit with his finger, calculating
inductances in his head. Finally, he continues: "Well, we've been sinking
convoys, that's what. German convoys. We've been sinking them right and
left."
"Rommel's?"
"Yes, exactly. The Germans put fuel and tanks and ammunition on ships
in Naples and send them south. We go out and sink them. We sink nearly all
of them, because we have broken the Italian C38m cipher and we know when
they are leaving Naples. And lately we've been sinking just the very ones
that are most crucial to Rommel's efforts, because we have also broken his
Chaffinch cipher and we know which ones he is complaining loudest about not
having."
Turing snaps a toggle switch on his invention and a weird, looping
squeal comes from a dusty black paper cone lashed onto the breadboard with
twine. The cone is a speaker, apparently scavenged from a radio. There is a
broomstick with a loop of stiff wire dangling from the end, and a wire
running from that loop up the stick to the breadboard. He swings the
broomstick around until the loop is dangling, like a lasso, in front of
Lawrence's midsection. The speaker yelps.
"Good. It's picking up your belt buckle," Alan says.
He sets the contraption down in the leaves, gropes in several pockets,
and finally pulls out a scrap of paper on which several lines of text have
been written in block letters. Lawrence would recognize it anywhere: it is a
decrypt worksheet. "What's that, Alan?"
"I wrote out complete instructions and enciphered them, then hid them
under a bridge in a benzedrine container," Alan says. "Last week I went and
recovered the container and decyphered the instructions." He waves the paper
in the air.
"What encryption scheme did you use?"
"One of my own devising. You are welcome to take a crack at it, if you
like."
"What made you decide it was time to dig this stuff up?"
"It was nothing more than a hedge against invasion," Alan says.
"Clearly, we're not going to be invaded now, not with you chaps in the war."
"How much did you bury?"
"Two silver bars, Lawrence, each with a value of some hundred and
twenty five pounds. One of them should be very close to us." Alan stands up,
pulls a compass out of his pocket, turns to face magnetic north, and squares
his shoulders. Then he rotates a few degrees. "Can't remember whether I
allowed for declination," he mumbles. "Right! In any case. One hundred paces
north." And he strides off into the woods, followed by Lawrence, who has
been given the job of carrying the metal detector.
Just as Dr. Alan Turing can ride a bicycle and carry on a conversation
while mentally counting the revolutions of the pedals, he can count paces
and talk at the same time too. Unless he has lost count entirely, which
seems just as possible.
"If what you are saying is true," Lawrence says, "the jig must be up
already. Rudy must have figured out that we've broken their codes."
"An informal system has been in place, which might be thought of as a
precursor to Detachment 2701, or 2702 or whatever we are calling it," Alan
says. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane
first. It is ostensibly an observation plane. Of course, to observe is not
its real duty we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is
to be observed that is, to fly close enough to the convoy that it will be
noticed by the lookouts on the ships. The ships will then send out a radio
message to the effect that they have been sighted by an Allied observation
plane. Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it
suspicious at least, not quite so monstrously suspicious that we knew
exactly where to go.
Alan stops, consults his compass, turns ninety degrees, and begins
pacing westwards.
"That strikes me as being a very ad hoc arrangement," Lawrence says.
"What is the likelihood that Allied observation planes, sent out purportedly
at random, will just happen to notice every single Axis convoy?"
"I've already calculated that probability, and I'll bet you one of my
silver bars that Rudy has done it too," Turing says. "It is a very small
probability."
"So I was right," Lawrence says, "we have to assume that the jig is
up."
"Perhaps not just yet," Alan says. "It has been touch and go. Last
week, we sank a convoy in the fog."
"In the fog?"
"It was foggy the whole way. The convoy could not possibly have been
observed. The imbeciles sank it anyway. Kesselring became suspicious, as
would anyone. So we ginned up a fake message in a cypher that we know the
Nazis have broken addressed to a fictitious agent in Naples. It
congratulated him on betraying that convoy to us. Ever since, the Gestapo
have been running rampant on the Naples waterfront, looking for the fellow."
"We dodged a bullet there, I'd say."
"Indeed." Alan stops abruptly, takes the metal detector from Lawrence,
and turns it on. He begins to walk slowly across a clearing, sweeping the
wire loop back and forth just above the ground. It keeps snagging on
branches and getting bent out of shape, necessitating frequent repairs, but
remains stubbornly silent the whole time, except when Alan, concerned that
it is no longer working, tests it on Lawrence's belt buckle.
"The whole business is delicate," Alan muses. "Some of our SLUs in
North Africa "
"SLUs?"
"Special Liaison Units. The intelligence officers who receive the Ultra
information from us, pass it on to field officers, and then make sure it is
destroyed. Some of them learned, from Ultra, that there was to be a German
air raid during lunch, so they took their helmets to the mess hall. When the
air raid came off as scheduled, everyone wanted to know why those SLUs had
known to bring their helmets."
"The entire business seems hopeless," Lawrence says. "How can the
Germans not realize?"
"It seems that way to us because we know everything and our channels of
communication are free from noise," Alan says. "The Germans have fewer, and
much noisier, channels. Unless we continue to do stunningly idiotic things
like sinking convoys in the fog, they will never receive any clear and
unmistakable indications that we have broken Enigma."
"It's funny you should mention Enigma," Lawrence says, "since that is
an extremely noisy channel from which we manage to extract vast amounts of
useful information."
"Precisely. Precisely why I am worried."
"Well, I'll do my best to spoof Rudy," Waterhouse says.
"You'll do fine. I'm worried about the men who are carrying out the
operations."
"Colonel Chattan seems pretty dependable," Waterhouse says, though
there's probably no point in continuing to reassure Alan. He's just in a
fretting mood. Once every two or three years, Waterhouse does something that
is socially deft, and now's the time: he changes the subject: "And
meanwhile, you'll be working it out so that Churchill and Roosevelt can have
secret telephone conversations?"
"In theory. I rather doubt that it's practical. Bell Labs has a system
that works by breaking the waveform down into several bands..." and then
Alan is off on the subject of telephone companies. He delivers a complete
dissertation on the subject of information theory as applied to the human
voice, and how that governs the way telephone systems work. It is a good
thing that Turing has such a large subject on which to expound, for the
woods are large, and it has become increasingly obvious to Lawrence that his
friend has no idea where the silver bars are buried.
Unburdened by any silver, the two friends ride home in darkness, which
comes surprisingly early this far north. They do not talk very much, for
Lawrence is still absorbing and digesting everything that Alan has disgorged
to him about Detachment 2702 and the convoys and Bell Labs and voice signal
redundancy. Every few minutes, a motorcycle whips past them, saddlebags
stuffed with encrypted message slips.
Chapter 17 ALOFT
Any way that livestock can travel, Bobby Shaftoe has too, boxcars, open
trucks, forced cross country marches. Military has now invented the airborne
equivalent of these in the form of the Plane of a Thousand Names: DC 3,
Skytrain, C 47, Dakota Transport, Gooney Bird. He'll survive. The exposed
aluminum ribs of the fuselage are trying to beat him to death, but as long
as he stays awake, he can fend them off.
The enlisted men are jammed into the other plane. Lieutenants Ethridge
and Root are in this one, along with PFC Gerald Hott and Sergeant Bobby
Shaftoe. Lieutenant Ethridge got dibs on all of the soft objects in the
plane and arranged them into a nest, up forward near the cockpit, and
strapped himself down. For a while he pretended to do paperwork. Then he
tried looking out the windows. Now he has fallen asleep and is snoring so
loudly that he is, no fooling, drowning out the engines.
Enoch Root has wedged himself into the back of the fuselage, where it
gets narrow, and is perusing two books at once. It strikes Shaftoe as
typical he supposes that the books say completely different things and that
the chaplain is deriving great pleasure from pitting them against each
other, like those guys who have a chessboard on a turntable so that they can
play against themselves. He supposes that when you live in a shack on a
mountain with a bunch of natives who don't speak any of your half dozen or
so languages, you have to learn to have arguments with yourself.
There's a row of small square windows on each side of the plane.
Shaftoe looks out to the right and sees mountains covered with snow and gets
scared shitless for a moment thinking maybe they've strayed into the Alps.
But off to the left, it still looks like the Mediterranean, and eventually
it gives way to Devil's Tower type outcroppings rising up out of stony
scrubland, and then after that it is just rocks and sand, or sand without
the rocks. Sand puckered here and there, for no particular reason, by
clutches of dunes. Damn it, they are still in Africa! You ought to be able
to see lions and giraffes and rhinos! Shaftoe goes forward to lodge a
complaint with the pilot and copilot. Maybe he can get a card game together.
Maybe the view out the front of the plane is something to write home about.
He is, on all counts, thrown back in stinging defeat. He sees
immediately that the project of finding a better view is doomed. There are
only three things in the whole universe: sand, sea, and sky. As a Marine, he
knows how boring the sea is. The other two are little better. There is a
line of clouds far ahead of them a front of some description. That's all
there is.
He gets a general notion of their flight plan before the chart is
snatched away and stashed out of his view. They seem to be attempting to fly
across Tunisia, which is kind of funny, because last time Shaftoe checked,
Tunisia was Nazi territory the anchor, in fact, of the Axis presence on the
African continent. Today's general flight plan seems to be that they'll cut
across the straits between Bizerta and Sicily, then head east to Malta.
All of Rommel's supplies and reinforcements come across those very
straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can
strike out east towards Egypt or west towards Morocco. In the several weeks
since the British Eighth Army kicked the crap out of him at El Alamein
(which is way, way over there in Egypt) he has been retreating westwards
back towards Tunis. In the few weeks since the Americans landed in Northwest
Africa, he's been fighting on a second front to his west. And Rommel has
been doing a damn good job of it, as far as Shaftoe can tell from listening
between the stentorian lines of the Movietone newsreels, so laden with
sinister cheer, whence the above facts were gleaned.
All this means that down below them, vast forces ought to be spread out
across the Sahara in readiness for combat. Perhaps there is even a battle
going on right now. But Shaftoe sees nothing. Just the occasional line of
yellow dust thrown up by a convoy, a dynamite fuse sputtering across the
desert.
So he talks to those flyboys. It's not until he notices them giving
each other looks that he realizes he's going on at great length. Those
Assassins must've killed their victims by talking them to death.
The card game, he realizes, is completely out of the question. These
flyboys don't want to talk. He practically has to dive in and grab the
control yoke to get them to say anything. And when they do, they sound
funny, and he realizes that these guys are not guys nor fellas. They are
blokes. Chaps. Mates. They are Brits.
The only other thing he notices about them, before he gives up and
slinks back into the cargo hold, is that they are fucking armed to the
teeth. Like they were expecting to have to kill twenty or thirty people on
their way from the airplane to the latrine and back. Bobby Shaftoe has met a
few of these paranoid types during his tour, and he doesn't like them very
much. That whole mindset reminds him too much of Guadalcanal.
He finds a place on the floor next to the body of PFC Gerald Hott and
stretches out. The teeny revolver in his waistband makes it impossible for
him to lie on his back, so he takes it out and pockets it. This only
transfers the center of discomfort to the Marine Raider stiletto holstered
invisibly between his shoulder blades. He realizes that he is going to have
to curl up on his side, which doesn't work because on one side he has a
standard issue Colt semiautomatic, which he doesn't trust, and on the other,
his own six shooter from home, which he does. So he has to find places to
stash those, along with the various ammo clips, speed loaders, and
maintenance supplies that go with them. The V 44 "Gung Ho" jungle clearing,
coconut splitting, and Nip decapitating knife, strapped to the outside of
his lower leg, also has to be removed, as does the derringer that he keeps
on the other leg for balance. The only thing that stays with him are the
grenades in his front pockets, since he doesn't plan to lie down on his
stomach.
They make their way around the headland just in time to avoid being
washed out to sea by the implacable tide. In front of them is a muddy tidal
flat, forming the floor of a box shaped cove. The walls of the box are
formed by the headland they've just gone round, another, depressingly
similar headland a few hundred yards along the shore, and a cliff rising
straight up out of the mudflats. Even if it were not covered with
relentlessly hostile tropical jungle, this cliff would seal off access to
the interior of Guadalcanal just because of its steepness. The Marines are
trapped in this little cove until the tide goes back out.
Which is more than enough time for the Nip machine gunner to kill them
all.
They all know the sound of the weapon by now and so they throw
themselves down to the mud instantly. Shaftoe takes a quick look around.
Marines lying on their backs or sides are probably dead, those on their
stomachs are probably alive. Most of them are on their stomachs. The
sergeant is conspicuously dead; the gunner aimed for him first.
The Nip or Nips have only one gun, but they seem to have all the
ammunition in the world the fruits of the Tokyo Express, which has been
coming down the Slot with impunity ever since Shaftoe and the rest of the
Marines landed early in August. The gunner rakes the mudflats leisurely,
zeroing in quickly on any Marine who tries to move.
Shaftoe gets up and runs towards the base of the cliff.
Finally, he can see the muzzle flashes from the Nip gun. This tells him
which way it's pointed. When the flashes are elongated it's pointed at
someone else, and it's safe to get up and run. When they become
foreshortened, it is swinging around to bear on Bobby Shaftoe He cuts it too
close. There is very bad pain in his lower right abdomen. His scream is
muffled by mud and silt as the weight of his web and helmet drive him face
first into the ground.
He loses consciousness for a while, perhaps. But it can't have been
that long. The firing continues, implying that the Marines are not all dead
yet. Shaftoe raises his head with difficulty, fighting the weight of the
helmet, and sees a log between him and the machine gun a piece of wave
burnished driftwood flung far up the beach by a storm.
He can run for it or not. He decides to run. It's only a few steps. He
realizes, halfway there, that he's going to make it. The adrenaline is
finally flowing; he lunges forward mightily and collapses in the shelter of
the big log. Half a dozen bullets thunk into the other side of it, and wet,
fibrous splinters shower down over him. The log is rotten.
Shaftoe has gotten himself into a bit of a hole, and cannot see forward
or back without exposing himself. He cannot see his fellow Marines, only
hear some of them screaming.
He risks a peek at the machine gun nest. It is well concealed by jungle
vegetation, but it is evidently built into a cave a good twenty feet above
the mudflat. He's not that far from the base of the cliff he might just
reach it with another sprint. But climbing up there is going to be murder.
The machine gun probably can't depress far enough to shoot down at him, but
they can roll grenades at him until the cows come home, or just pick him off
with small arms as he gropes for handholds.
It is, in other words, grenade launcher time. Shaftoe rolls onto his
back, extracts a flanged metal tube from his web gear, fits it onto the
muzzle of his ought three. He tries to clamp it down, but his fingers slip
on the bloody wing nut. Who's the pencil neck that decided to use a fucking
wing nut in this context? No point griping about it here and now. There is
actually blood all over the place, but he is not in pain. He drags his
fingers through the sand, gets them all gritty, tightens that wing nut down.
Out of its handy pouch comes one Mark II fragmentation grenade, a.k.a.
pineapple, and with a bit more groping he's got the Grenade Projection
Adapter, M1. He engages the former into the latter, yanks out the safety
pin, drops it, then slips the fully prepped and armed Grenade Projection
Adapter, Ml, with its fruity payload, over the tube of the grenade launcher.
Finally: he opens up one specially marked cartridge case, fumbles through
bent and ruptured Lucky Strikes, finds one brass cylinder, a round of
ammunition sans payload, crimped at the end but not endowed with an actual
bullet. Loads same into the Springfield's firing chamber.
He creeps along the log so that he can pop up and fire from an
unexpected location and perhaps not get his head chewed off by the machine
gun. Finally raises this Rube Goldberg device that his Springfield has
become, jams the butt into the sand (in grenade launcher mode the recoil
will break your collarbone), points it toward the foe, pulls the trigger.
Grenade Projection Adapter, M1 is gone with a terrible pow, trailing a damn
hardware store of now superfluous parts, like a soul discarding its corpse.
The pineapple is now soaring heavenward, even its pin and safety lever gone,
its chemical fuse aflame so that it even has a, whattayoucallit, an inner
light. Shaftoe's aim is true, and the grenade is heading where intended. He
thinks he's pretty damn smart until the grenade bounces back, tumbles down
the cliff, and blows up another rotten log. The Nips have anticipated Bobby
Shaftoe's little plan, and put up nets or chicken wire or something.
He lies on his back in the mud, looking up at the sky, saying the word
"fuck" over and over. The entire log throbs, and something akin to peat moss
showers down into his face as the bullets chew up the rotten wood. Bobby
Shaftoe says a prayer to the Almighty and prepares to mount a banzai charge.
Then the maddening sound of the machine gun stops, and is replaced by
the sound of a man screaming. His voice sounds unfamiliar. Shaftoe levers
himself up on his elbow and realizes that the screaming is coming from the
direction of the cave.
He looks up into the big, sky blue eyes of Enoch Root.
The chaplain has moved from his nook at the back of the plane and is
squatting next to one of the little windows, holding onto whatever he can.
Bobby Shaftoe, who has rolled uncomfortably onto his stomach, looks out a
window on the opposite side of the plane. He ought to see the sky, but
instead he sees a sand dune wheeling past. The sight makes him instantly
nauseated. He does not even consider sitting up.
Brilliant spots of light are streaking wildly around the inside of the
plane, like ball lightning, but and this is far from obvious at first they
are actually projected against the wall of the plane, like flashlight beams.
He back traces the beams, taking advantage of a light haze of vaporized
hydraulic fluid that has begun to accumulate in the air; and finds that they
originate in a series of small circular holes that some asshole has punched
through the skin of the plane while he was sleeping. The sun is shining
through these holes, always in the same direction of course; but the plane
is going every which way.
He realizes that he has actually been lying on the ceiling of the
airplane ever since he woke up, which explains why he was on his stomach.
When this dawns on him, he vomits.
The bright spots all vanish. Very, very reluctantly, Shaftoe risks a
glance out the window and sees only greyness.
He thinks he is on the floor now. He is next to the corpse, at any
rate, and the corpse was strapped down.
He lies there for several minutes, just breathing and thinking. Air
whistles through the holes in the fuselage, loud enough to split his head.
Someone some madman is up on his feet, moving about the plane. It is
not Root, who is in his little nook dealing with a number of facial
lacerations that he picked up during the aerobatics. Shaftoe looks up and
sees that the moving man is one of the British flyboys.
The Brit has yanked off his headgear to expose black hair and green
eyes. He's in his mid thirties, an old man. He has a knobby, utilitarian
face in which all of the various lumps, knobs and orifices seem to be there
for a reason, a face engineered by the same fellows who design grenade
launchers. It is a simple and reliable face, by no means handsome. He is
kneeling next to the corpse of Gerald Hott and is examining it minutely with
a flashlight. He is the very picture of concern; his bedside manner is
flawless.
Finally he slumps back against the ribbed wall of the fuselage. "Thank
god," he says, "he wasn't hit."
"Who wasn't?" Shaftoe says.
"This chap," the flyboy says, slapping the corpse.
"Aren't you going to check me?"
"No need to."
"Why not? I'm still alive. "
"You weren't hit," the flyboy says confidently. "If you'd been hit,
you'd look like Lieutenant Ethridge."
For the first time, Shaftoe hazards movement. He props himself up on
one elbow, and finds that the floor of the plane is slick and wet with red
fluid.
He had noticed a pink mist in the cabin, and supposed that it was
produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky
dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product. It
is the same red fluid that figured so prominently in Shaftoe's nightmare. It
is streaming downhill from the direction of Lieutenant Ethridge's cozy nest,
and the Lieutenant is no longer snoring.
Shaftoe looks at what is left of Ethridge, which bears a striking
resemblance to what was lying around that butcher shop earlier today. He
does not wish to lose his composure in the presence of the British pilot,
and indeed, feels strangely calm. Maybe it's the clouds; cloudy days have
always had a calming effect on him.
"Holy cow," he finally says, "that Kraut twenty millimeter is some
thing else."
"Right," the flyboy says, "we've got to get spotted by a convoy and
then we'll proceed with the delivery."
Cryptic as it is, this is the most informative statement Bobby's ever
heard about the intentions of Detachment 2702. He gets up and follows the
pilot back to the cockpit, both of them stepping delicately around several
quivering giblets that were presumably flung out of Ethridge.
"You mean, by an allied convoy, right?" Shaftoe asks.
"An allied convoy?" the pilot asks mockingly. "Where the hell are we
going to find an allied convoy? This is Tunisia ."
"Well, then, what do you mean, we've got to get spotted by a convoy?
You mean we have to spot a convoy, right?"
"Very sorry," the flyboy says, "I'm busy."
When he turns back, he finds Lieutenant Enoch Root kneeling by a
relatively large piece of Ethridge, going through Ethridge's attache case.
Shaftoe cops a look of exaggerated moral outrage and points the finger of
blame.
"Look, Shaftoe," Root shouts, "I'm just following orders. Taking over
for him."
He pulls out a small bundle, all wrapped in thick, yellowish plastic
sheeting. He checks it over, then glances up reprovingly, one more time, at
Shaftoe.
"It was a fucking joke!" Shaftoe says. "Remember? When I thought those
guys were looting the corpses? On the beach?"
Root doesn't laugh. Either he's pissed off that Shaftoe successfully
bullshitted him, or he doesn't enjoy corpse looting humor. Root carries the
wrapped bundle back to that other body, the one in the wetsuit. He stuffs
the bundle inside the suit.
Then he squats by the body and ponders. He ponders for a long time.
Shaftoe kind of gets a kick out of watching Enoch ponder, which is like
watching an exotic dancer shake her tits.
The light changes again as they descend from the clouds. The sun is
setting, shining redly through the Saharan haze. Shaftoe looks out a window
and is startled to see that they are over the sea now. Below them is a
convoy of ships each making a neat white V in the dark water, each lit up on
one side by the red sun.
The airplane banks and makes a slow loop around the convoy. Shaftoe
hears distant pocking noises. Black flowers bloom and fade in the sky around
them. He realizes that the ships are trying to hit them with ack ack. Then
the plane ascends once more into the shelter of the clouds, and it gets
nearly dark.
He looks at Enoch Root for the first time in a while. Root is sitting
back in his little nook, reading by flashlight. A bundle of papers is open
on his lap. It is the plastic wrapped bundle that Root took out of
Ethridge's attache case and shoved into Gerald Hott's wetsuit. Shaftoe
figures that the encounter with convoy and ack ack finally pushed Root over
the edge, and that he yanked the bundle right back out again to have a look
at it.
Root glances up and locks eyes with Shaftoe. He does not seem nervous
or guilty. It is a strikingly calm and cool look.
Shaftoe holds his gaze for a long moment. If there were the slightest
trace of guilt or nervousness there, he would turn the chaplain in as a
German spy. But there isn't Enoch Root ain't working for the Germans. He
ain't working for the Allies either. He's working for a Higher Power.
Shaftoe nods imperceptibly, and Root's gaze softens.
"They're all dead, Bobby," he shouts. "Those islanders. The ones you
saw on the beach on Guadalcanal."
So that explains why Root is so touchy about corpse looting jokes.
"Sorry," Shaftoe says, moving aft so they don't have to scream at each
other. "How'd it happen?"
"After we got you back to my cabin, I transmitted a message to my
handlers in Brisbane," Root says. "Enciphered it using a special code. Told
them I'd picked up one Marine Raider, who looked like he might actually
live, and would someone please come round and collect him."
Shaftoe nods. He remembers that he'd heard lots of dots and dashes, but
he had been out of whack with fevers and morphine and whatever home remedies
Root had pulled out of his cigar box.
"Well, they responded," Root went on, "and said 'We can't go there, but
would you please take him to such and such place and rendezvous with some
other Marine Raiders.' Which, as you'll recall, is what we did."
"Yeah," Shaftoe says.
"So far so good. But when I got back to the cabin after handing you
over, the Nipponese had been through. Killed every islander they could find.
Burned the cabin. Burned everything. Set booby traps around the place that
nearly killed me. I just barely got out of the damn place alive."
Shaftoe nods, as only a guy who's seen the Nips in action can nod.
"Well they evacuated me to Brisbane where I started making a stink
about codes. That's the only way they could have found me obviously our
codes had been broken. And after I'd made enough of a stink, someone
apparently said, 'You're British, you're a priest, you're a medical doctor,
you can handle a rifle, you know Morse code, and most importantly of all,
you're a fucking pain in the ass so off you go!" And next thing I know, I'm
in that meat locker in Algiers."
Shaftoe glances away and nods. Root seems to get the message, which is
that Shaftoe doesn't know anything more than he does.
Eventually, Enoch Root wraps the bundle up again, just like it was
before. But he doesn't put it back in the attache case. He stuffs it into
Gerald Hott's wetsuit.
Later they emerge from the clouds again, close to a moonlit port, and
dip down very close to the ocean, going so slow that even Shaftoe, who knows
nothing about planes, senses they are about to stall. They open the side
door of the Dakota and, one two three NOW, throw the body of PFC Gerald Hott
out into the ocean. He makes what would be a big splash in the Oconomowoc
town pool, but in the ocean it doesn't come to much.
An hour or so later they land the same Gooney Bird on an airstrip in
the midst of a stunning aerial bombardment. They abandon the Skytrain at the
end of the airstrip, next to the other C 47, and run through darkness,
following the lead of the British pilots. Then they go down a stairway and
are underground in a bomb shelter, to be precise. They can feel the bombs
now but can't hear them.
"Welcome to Malta," someone says. Shaftoe looks around and sees that he
is surrounded by men in British and American uniforms. The Americans are
familiar it's the Marine Raider squad from Algiers, flown in on that other
Dakota. The Brits are unfamiliar, and Shaftoe pegs them as the SAS men that
those fellows in Washington were telling him about. The only thing they all
have in common is that each man, somewhere on his uniform, is wearing the
number 2702.
Chapter 18 NON DISCLOSURE
Avi shows up on time, idling his fairly good, but not disgustingly
ostentatious, Nipponese sports car gingerly up the steep road, which has
crazed into a loose mosaic of asphalt flagstones.
Randy watches from the second floor deck, staring fifty feet almost
straight down through the sunroof. Avi is clad in the trousers of a good
tropical weight business suit, a tailored white Sea Island cotton shirt,
dark ski goggles, and a wide brimmed canvas hat.
The house is a tall, isolated structure rising out of the middle of a
California grassland that slopes up from the Pacific, a few kilometers away.
Chilly air climbs up the slope, rising and falling in slow surges, like surf
on a beach. When Avi gets out of his car the first thing he does is pull on
his suit jacket.
He hauls two oversized laptop cases out of the tiny luggage compartment
in the car's nose, walks into the house without knocking (he has not been to
this particular house before, but he has been to others run along similar
principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting in one of its many rooms, and hauls
about fifteen thousand dollars worth of portable computer gear out of the
bags. He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two laptops
and, as they crawl through the boot process, plugs them into the wall so
that the batteries won't drain. A power conduit, with grounded three prong
outlets spaced every eighteen inches, has been screwed down remorselessly
along every inch of every wall, spanning drywall; holes in the drywall;
primeval op art contact paper; fake wood grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead
posters; and even the odd doorway.
One of the laptops is connected to a tiny portable printer, which Avi
loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up a few lines of
text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy ambles over and
looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:
FILO.
Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you
to choose which operating system you want to run.
"Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.
Randy types "Finux" and hits the return key. "How many operating
systems you have on this thing?"
"Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my
computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for
hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial strength
typesetting."
"Which one do you want now?"
"BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead
projector in this place?"
Randy looks over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives
here. Eb seems bigger than he is, and maybe it's because of his detonating
hair: two feet long, blond with a faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and
tending to congeal into ropy strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so
when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on
one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on
the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb (or rather, one of
Eb's defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a
lot of them lying around. He seems to be absorbed in whatever he's doing,
but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses
it, and looks up. He has pale green eyes and wears a luxuriant red beard,
except when he's in one of his shaving phases, which usually coincide with
serious romantic involvements. Right now his beard is about half an inch
long, indicating a recent breakup, and implying a willingness to take new
risks.
"Overhead projector?" Randy says.
Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, then
gets up and walks out of the room.
The tiny printer begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered
at the top of the page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines follow.
Randy has seen them, or ones like them, so many times that his eyes glaze
over and he turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the
company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.
"Nice goggles."
"If you think these are weird, you should see what I'm going to put on
when the sun goes down," Avi says. He rummages in a bag and pulls out a
contraption that looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, with a
dollhouse scale light fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a
battery pack with belt loops. He slides a tiny switch on the battery pack
and the lights come on: expensive looking blue white halogen.
Randy raises his eyebrows.
"It's all jet lag avoidance," Avi explains. "I'm adjusted to Asian
time. I'm going back there in two days. I don't want my body to get back on
Left Coast time while I'm here."
"So the hat and goggles "
"Simulate night. This thing simulates daylight. See, your body takes
its cues from the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which,
would you mind closing the blinds?"
The room has west facing windows, affording a view down the grassy
slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through.
Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.
Eb stalks back into the room with an overhead projector dangling from
one hand, looking for a moment like Beowulf brandishing a monster's severed
arm. He puts it on the table and aims it at the wall. There is no need for a
screen, because above the ubiquitous power strips, every wall in the house
is covered with whiteboards. Many of the whiteboards are, in turn, covered
with cryptical incantations, written in primary colors. Some of them are
enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO!
In front of where Eb has put the overhead projector, there is a grocery
list, a half erased fragment of a flowchart, a fax number in Russia, a
couple of dotted quads Internet addresses and a few words in German, which
were presumably written by Eb himself. Dr. Eberhard Föhr scans all of this,
finds that none of it is enclosed in a DNE border, and wipes it away with an
eraser.
Two more men come into the room, deeply involved in a conversation
about some exasperating company in Burlingame. One of them is dark and lean
and looks like a gunfighter; he even wears a black cowboy hat. The other is
tubby and blond and looks like he just got out of a Rotary Club meeting.
They have one detail in common: each is wearing a bright silver bracelet on
his wrist.
Randy takes the NDAs out of the printers and passes them out, two
copies each, each pair preprinted with a name: Randy Waterhouse, Eberhard
Föhr, John Cantrell (the guy in the black cowboy hat) and Tom Howard (the
fair haired Middle American). As John and Tom reach for the pages, the
silver bracelets intercept stray beams of light sneaking through the blinds.
Each is printed with a red caduceus and several lines of text.
"Those look new," Randy says. "Did they change the wording again?"
"Yeah!" John Cantrell says. "This is version 6.0 just out last week."
Anywhere else, the bracelets would mean that John and Tom were
suffering from some sort of life threatening condition, such as an allergy
to common antibiotics. A medic hauling them out of a wrecked car would see
the bracelet and follow the instructions. But this is Silicon Valley and
different rules apply. The bracelets say, on one side:
IN CASE OF DEATH SEE REVERSE FOR BIOSTASIS PROTOCOL FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS
COLLECT REWARD $100,000
and on the other:
CALL NOW FOR INSTRUCTIONS I 800 NNN NNNN
PUSH 50,000 U HEPARIN IV AND DO CPR WHILE COOLING WITH ICE TO 10C.KEEP
PH 7.5
NO AUTOPSY OR EMBALMING
It is a recipe for freezing a dead, or nearly dead, person. People who
wear this bracelet believe that, if this recipe is followed, the brain and
other delicate tissues can be iced without destroying them. A few decades
down the line, when nanotechnology has made it possible to be immortal, they
hope to be thawed out. John Cantrell and Tom Howard believe that there is a
reasonable chance that they will still be having conversations with each
other a million years from now.
The room gets quiet as all of the men scan the forms, their eyes
picking out certain familiar clauses. They have probably signed a hundred
NDA forms between them. Around here, it is like offering someone a cup of
coffee.
A woman comes into the room, burdened with tote bags, and beams an
apology for being late. Beryl Hagen looks like a Norman Rockwell aunt, an
apron wearing, apple pie toting type. In twenty years, she's been the chief
financial officer of twelve different small high tech companies. Ten of them
have gone out of business. Except in the case of the second one, this was
through no fault of Beryl's. The sixth was Randy's Second Business Foray.
One was absorbed by Microsoft, one became a successful, independent company
in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She
consults and writes while she looks for something interesting enough to draw
her back into action, and her presence in this room suggests that
Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not be completely bogus. Or maybe she's just being
polite to Avi. Randy gives her a bearhug, lifting her off the floor, and
then hands her two copies of the NDA with her name on them.
Avi has detached the screen from his big laptop and laid it flat on the
surface of the overhead projector, which shines light through the liquid
crystal display and projects a color image on the whiteboard. It is a
typical desktop: a couple of terminal windows and some icons. Avi goes
around and picks up the signed NDAs, scans them all, hands one copy back to
each person, files the rest in the outer pocket of a laptop bag. He begins
to type on the laptop's keyboard, and letters spill across one of the
windows. "Just so you know," Avi mumbles, "Epiphyte Corp., which I'll call
Epiphyte(1) for clarity, is a Delaware corporation, one and one half years
old. The shareholders are myself, Randy, and Springboard Capital. We're in
the telecoms business in the Philippines. I can give you details later if
you want. Our work there has positioned us to be aware of some new
opportunities in that part of the world. Epiphyte(2) is a California
corporation, three weeks old. If things go the way we are hoping they will
go, Epiphyte(1) will be folded into it according to some kind of stock
transfer scheme the details of which are too boring to talk about now.
Avi hits the return key. A new window opens on the desktop. It is a
color map scanned in from an atlas, tall and narrow. Most of it is oceanic
blue. A rugged coastline juts in through the top border, with a few cities
labeled: Nagasaki, Tokyo. Shanghai is in the upper left corner. The
Philippine archipelago is dead center. Taiwan is directly north of it, and
to the south is a chain of islands forming a porous barrier between Asia and
a big land mass labeled with English words like Darwin and Great Sandy
Desert.
"This probably looks weird to most of you," Avi says. "Usually these
presentations begin with a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or
something. We don't normally deal with maps. We're all so used to working in
a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real
world and physically do something.
"But I like maps. I've got maps all over my house. I'm going to suggest
to you that the skills and knowledge we have all been developing in our work
especially pertaining to the Internet have applications out here." He taps
the whiteboard. "In the real world. You know, the big round wet ball where
billions of people live."
There is a bit of polite snickering as Avi skims his hand over his
computer's trackball, whacks a button with his thumb. A new image appears:
the same map, with bright color lines running across the ocean, looping from
one city to the next, roughly following the coastlines.
"Existing undersea cables. The fatter the line, the bigger the pipe,"
Avi says. "Now, what is wrong with this picture?"
There are several fat lines running east from places like Tokyo, Hong
Kong, and Australia, presumably connecting them with the United States.
Across the South China Sea, which lies between the Philippines and Vietnam,
another fat line angles roughly north south, but it doesn't connect either
of those two countries: it goes straight to Hong Kong, then continues up the
China coast to Shanghai, Korea, and Tokyo.
"Since the Philippines are in the center of the map," John Cantrell
says, "I predict that you are going to point out that hardly any fat lines
go to the Philippines."
"Hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines!" Avi announces briskly. He
points out the one exception, which runs from Taiwan south to northern
Luzon, then skips down the coast to Corregidor. "Except for this one, which
Epiphyte(l) is involved with. But it's not just that. There is a general
paucity of fat lines in a north south direction, connecting Australia with
Asia. A lot of data packets going from Sydney to Tokyo have to be routed
through California. There's a market opportunity."
Beryl breaks in. "Avi, before you get started on this," she says,
sounding cautious and regretful, "I have to say that laying long distance,
deep sea cables is a difficult business to break into."
"Beryl is right!" Avi says. "The only people who have the wherewithal
to lay those cables are AT&T, Cable & Wireless, and Kokusai Denshin
Denwa. It's tricky. It's expensive. It requires massive NRE."
The abbreviation stands for "non recoverable expenses," meaning
engineering work to complete a feasibility study that would be money down
the toilet if the idea didn't fly.
"So what are you thinking?" Beryl says.
Avi clicks up another map. This one is the same as the previous, except
that new lines have been drawn in: a whole series of short island to island
links. A bewilderingly numerous chain of short hops down the length of the
Philippine archipelago.
"You want to wire the Philippines and patch them into the Net via your
existing link to Taiwan," says Tom Howard, in a heroic bid to short circuit
what he senses will be a lengthy part of Avi's presentation.
"The Philippines are going to be hot shit informationally speaking,"
Avi says. "The government has its flaws, but basically it's a democracy
modeled after Western institutions. Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most
of them speak English. Longstanding ties to the United States. These guys
are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy."
Randy breaks in. "We've already established a foothold there. We know
the local business environment. And we have cash flow."
Avi clicks up another map. This one's harder to make out. It looks like
a relief map of a vast region of high mountains interrupted by occasional
plateaus. Its appearance in the middle of this presentation without any
labels or explanation from Avi makes it an implicit challenge to the mental
acumen of the other people in the room. None of them is going to ask for
help anytime soon. Randy watches them squint and tilt their heads from side
to side. Eberhard Föhr, who is good at odd puzzles, gets it first.
"Southeast Asia with the oceans drained," he says. "That high ridge on
the right is New Guinea. Those bumps are the volcanoes of Borneo."
"Pretty cool, huh?" Avi says. "It's a radar map. U.S. military
satellites gathered all this data. You can get it for next to nothing."
On this map the Philippines can be understood, not as a chain of
separate islands, but as the highest regions of a huge oblong plateau
surrounded by deep gashes in the earth's crust. To get from Luzon up to
Taiwan by going across the ocean floor you would have to plunge into a deep
trench, flanked by parallel mountain ranges, and follow it northwards for
about three hundred miles. But south of Luzon, in the region where Avi is
proposing to lay a network of inter island cables, it's all shallow and
flat.
Avi clicks again, superimposing transparent blue over the parts that
are below sea level, green on the islands. Then he zooms in on an area in
the center of the map, where the Philippine plateau extends two arms
southwest toward northern Borneo, embracing, and nearly enclosing, a diamond
shaped body of water, three hundred and fifty miles across. "The Sulu Sea,"
he announces. "No relation to the token Asian on Star Trek ."
No one laughs. They are not really here to be entertained they are
concentrating on the map. All of the different archipelagos and seas are
confusing, even for smart people with good spatial relations. The
Philippines form the upper right boundary of the Sulu Sea, north Borneo
(part of Malaysia) the lower left, the Sulu Archipelago (part of the
Philippines) the lower right, and the upper left boundary is one extremely
long skinny Philippine island called Palawan.
"This reminds us that national boundaries are artificial and silly,"
Avi says. "The Sulu Sea is a basin in the middle of a larger plateau shared
by the Philippines and Borneo. So if you're wiring up the Philippines, you
can just as easily wire Borneo up to that network at the same time, just by
outlining the Sulu Sea with shallow, short hop cables. Like this."
Avi clicks again and the computer draws in more colored lines.
"Avi, why are we here?" Eberhard asks.
"That is a very profound question," Avi says.
"We know the economics of these startups," Eb says. "We begin with
nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for to protect your idea. We
work on the idea together put our brainpower into it and get stock in
return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable,
trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth
some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some
more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it
into a product, to market it, and so on. That's how the system works, but
I'm beginning to think you don't understand it."
"Why do you say that?"
Eb looks confused. "How can we contribute to this? How can we turn our
brainpower into equity that an investor will want to own a part of?"
Everyone looks at Beryl. Beryl's nodding agreement with Eb. Tom Howard
says, "Avi. Look. I can engineer big computer installations. John wrote Ordo
he knows everything about crypto. Randy does Internet, Eb does weird stuff,
Beryl does money. But as far as I know, none of us knows diddly about
undersea cable engineering. What good will our resumes do you when you go up
in front of some venture capitalists?"
Avi's nodding. "Everything you say is true," he concedes smoothly.
"We would have to be crazy to get involved in running cables through
the Philippines. That is a job for FiliTel, with whom Epiphyte(1) has been
joint venturing."
"Even if we were crazy, Beryl says, "we wouldn't have the opportunity,
because no one would give us the money."
"Fortunately we don't need to worry about that," Avi says, "because
it's being done for us." He turns to the whiteboard, picks up a red magic
marker, and draws a fat line between Taiwan and Luzon, his hands picking up
a leprous, mottled look from the shaded relief of the ocean floor that is
being projected against his skin. "KDD, which is anticipating major growth
in the Philippines, is already laying another big cable here." He moves down
and begins to draw smaller, shorter links between islands in the
archipelago. "And FiliTel, which is funded by AVCLA Asia Venture Capital Los
Angeles is wiring the Philippines."
"What does Epiphyte(l) have to do with that?" Tom Howard asks.
"To the extent they want to use that network for Internet Protocol
traffic, they need routers and network savvy," Randy explains.
"So, to repeat my question: why are we here?" Eberhard says, patiently
but firmly.
Avi works with his pen for a while. He circles an island at one corner
of the Sulu Sea, centered in the gap between North Borneo and the long
skinny Philippine island called Palawan. He labels it in block letters:
SULTANATE OF KINAKUTA.
"Kinakuta was run by white sultans for a while. It's a long story. Then
it was a German colony," Avi says. "Back then, Borneo was part of the Dutch
East Indies, and Palawan like the rest of the Philippines was first Spanish
and then American. So this was the Germans' foothold in the area."
"Germans always ended up holding the shittiest colonies," Eb says
ruefully.
"After the First World War, they handed it over to the Japanese, along
with a lot of other islands muc