h farther to the east. All of these islands,
collectively, were called the Mandates because Japan controlled them under a
League of Nations Mandate. During the Second World War the Japanese used
Kinakuta as a base for attacks on the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines.
They retained a naval base and airfield there. After the war, Kinakuta
became independent, as it had been before the Germans. The population is
Muslim or ethnic Chinese around the edges, animist in the center, and it's
always been ruled by a sultan even while occupied by the Germans and the
Japanese, who both co opted the sultans but kept them in place as
figureheads. Kinakuta had oil reserves, but they were unreachable until the
technology got better and prices went up, around the time of the Arab oil
embargo, which was also when the current sultan came into power. That sultan
is now a very rich man not as rich as the Sultan of Brunei, who happens to
be his second cousin, but rich."
"The sultan is backing your company?" Beryl asks.
"Not in the way you mean," Avi says.
"What way do you mean?" Tom Howard asks, impatient.
"Let me put it this way," Avi says. "Kinakuta is a member of the United
Nations. It is every bit as much an independent country and member of the
community of nations as France or England. As a matter of fact, it is
exceptionally independent because of its oil wealth. It is basically a
monarchy the sultan makes the laws, but only after extensive consultation
with his ministers, who set policy and draft legislation. And I've been
spending a lot of time, recently, with the Minister of Posts and
Telecommunications. I have been helping the minister draft a new law that
will govern all telecommunications passing through Kinakutan territory."
"Oh, my god!" John Cantrell says. He is awestruck.
"One free share of stock to the man in the black hat!" Avi says. "John
has figured out Avi's secret plan. John, would you like to explain to the
other contestants?"
John takes his hat off and runs his hand back through his long hair. He
puts his hat back on and heaves a sigh. "Avi is proposing to start a data
haven," he says.
A little murmur of admiration runs through the room. Avi waits for it
to subside and says, "Slight correction: the sultan's starting the data
haven. I'm proposing to make money off it."
Chapter 19 ULTRA
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse goes into battle armed with one third of
a sheet of British typing paper on which has been typed some words that
identify it as a pass to Bletchley Park. His name and some other things have
been scribbled on it in some upper class officer's Mont Blanc blue black,
the words ALL SECTIONS circled, and a stamp smashed across it, blurred into
a red whore's kiss, with sheer carelessness conveying greater Authority and
Power than the specious clarity of a forger.
He finds his way round the mansion to the narrow lane that runs between
it and its row of red brick garages (or stables, as his grandparents would
be likely to peg them). He finds it a very pleasant place for a cigarette.
The lane is lined with trees, a densely planted hedge of them. The sun is
just setting now. It is still high enough to snipe through any small defects
that it finds in the defensive perimeter of the horizon, so narrow red beams
strike him surprisingly in the eye as he ambles back and forth. He knows one
is shining invisibly through the clear air several feet above him, because
it is betraying an aerial: a strand of copper wire stretched from the wall
of the mansion to a nearby cypress. It catches the light in precisely the
same way as the strand of the spiderweb that Waterhouse was playing with
earlier.
The sun will be down soon; it is already down in Berlin, as in most of
the hellish empire that Hitler has built from Calais to the Volga. Time for
the radio operators to begin their work. Radio does not, in general, go
around corners. This can be a real pain when you are conquering the world,
which is inconveniently round, placing all of your most active military
units over the horizon. But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the
information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun
is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio
telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the
Y Service) are, alike, nocturnal beings.
As Waterhouse has just observed, the mansion has an aerial or two. But
Bletchley Park is a huge and ravenous spider that requires a web the size of
a nation to feed it. He has seen enough evidence, from the black cables
climbing the mansion's walls and the smell and hiss of the massed teletypes,
to know that the web is at least partly made of copper wires. Another piece
of the web is made of rude stuff like concrete and asphalt.
The gate swings open and a man on a green motorcycle banks steeply into
the lane, the two cylinders of his machine blatting away, the noise stinging
Waterhouse's nose as he rides by. Waterhouse strides after him for some
distance, but loses his trail after a hundred yards or so. That is
acceptable; more of them will be along soon, as the Wehrmacht's nervous
system awakens and its signals are picked up by the Y Service.
The motorcyclist went through a quaint little gate that joins two old
buildings. The gate is topped by a tiny cupola with a weathervane and a
clock. Waterhouse goes through it and finds himself in a little square that
evidently dates back to when Bletchley Park was a precious Buckinghamshire
farmstead. To the left, the line of stables continues. Small gables have
been set into the roof, which is stained with bird shit. The building is
quivering with pigeons. Directly in front of him is a nice little red brick
Tudor farmhouse, the only thing he has seen so far that is not
architecturally offensive. Off to his right is a one story building. Strange
information is coming out of this building: the hot oil smell of teletypes,
but no typing noises, just a high mechanical whine.
A door opens on the stable building and a man emerges carrying a large
but evidently lightweight box with a handle on the top. Cooing noises come
from the box and Waterhouse realizes that it contains pigeons. Those birds
living up in the gables are not feral; they are homing pigeons. Carriers of
information, strands of Bletchley Park's web.
He homes in on the building that smells of hot oil and gazes into a
window. As evening falls, light has begun to leak out of it, betraying
information to black German reconnaissance planes, so a porter is strutting
about the courtyard slamming the black shutters closed.
Some information comes into Waterhouse's eyes at least: on the other
side of that window, men are gathered around a machine. Most of them are
wearing civilian clothes, and they have been too busy, for too long, to
trifle much with combs and razors and shoe polish. The men are intensely
focused upon their work, which all has to do with this large machine. The
machine consists of a large framework of square steel tubing, like a
bedstead set up on one end. Metal drums with the diameter of dinner plates,
an inch or so thick, are mounted at several locations on this framework.
Paper tape has been threaded in a bewilderingly loopy trajectory from drum
to drum. It looks as if a dozen yards of tape are required to thread the
machine.
One of the men has been working on a rubber drive belt that goes around
one of the drums. He steps back from it and makes a gesture with his hand.
Another man flips a switch and the drums all begin to spin at once. The tape
begins to fly through the system. Holes punched in the tape carry data; it
all blurs into a grey streak now, the speed creating an illusion in which
the tape appears to dissolve into a ribbon of smoke.
No, it is not an illusion. Real smoke is curling up from the spinning
drums. The tape is running through the machine so fast that it is catching
fire before the eyes of Waterhouse and the men inside, who watch it calmly,
as if it were smoking in an entirely new and interesting way.
If there is a machine in the world capable of reading data from a tape
that fast, Waterhouse has never heard of it.
The black shutter slams home. Just as it does, Waterhouse gets one
fragmentary glimpse of another object standing in the corner of the room: a
steel rack in which a large number of grey cylindrical objects are stored in
neat rows.
Two motorcyclists come through the courtyard at once, running in the
darkness with their headlights off. Waterhouse jogs after them for a bit,
leaving the picturesque old courtyard behind and entering into the world of
the huts, the new structures thrown up in the last year or two. "Hut" makes
him think of a tiny thing, but these huts, taken together, are more like
that new Pentagon thing that the War Department has been putting up across
the river from D.C. They embody a blunt need for space unfiltered through
any aesthetic or even human considerations.
Waterhouse walks to an intersection of roads where he thought he heard
the motorcycles making a turn, and stops, hemmed in by blast walls. On an
impulse, he clambers to the top of a wall and takes a seat. The view from
here is no better. He knows that thousands of people are at work all around
him in these huts, but he sees none of them, there are no signposts.
He is still trying to work out that business that he saw through the
window.
The tape was running so fast that it smoked. There is no point of
driving it that fast unless the machine can read the information that fast
transforming the pattern of holes in the tape into electrical impulses.
But why bother, if those impulses had nowhere to go? No human mind
could deal with a stream of characters coming in at that speed. No teletype
that Waterhouse knew of could even print them out.
It only makes sense if they are constructing a machine. A mechanical
calculator of some sort that can absorb the data and then do something with
it perform some calculation presumably a cipher breaking type of
calculation.
Then he remembers the rack he glimpsed in the corner, its many rows of
identical grey cylinders. Viewed end on, they looked like some kind of
ammunition. But they are too smooth and glossy for that. Those cylinders,
Waterhouse realizes, are made of blown glass.
They are vacuum tubes. Hundreds of them. More tubes in one place than
Waterhouse has ever seen.
Those men in that room are building a Turing machine!
***
It is no wonder, then, that the men in the room accept the burning of
the tape so calmly. That strip of paper, a technology as old as the
pyramids, is merely a vessel for a stream of information. When it passes
through the machine, the information is abstracted from it, transfigured
into a pattern of pure binary data. That the mere vessel burns is of no
consequence. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust the data has passed out of the
physical plane and into the mathematical, a higher and purer universe where
different laws apply. Laws, a few of which are dimly and imperfectly known
to Dr. Alan Mathison Turing and Dr. John von Neumann and Dr. Rudolf von
Hacklheber and a few other people Waterhouse used to hang around with in
Princeton. Laws about which Waterhouse himself knows a thing or two.
Once you have transfigured the data into the realm of pure information,
all that is required is a tool. Carpenters work with wood and carry a box of
technology for measuring it, cutting it, smoothing it, joining it.
Mathematicians work with information and need a tool of their own.
They have been building these tools, one at a time, for years. There
is, just to name one example, a cash register and typewriter company called
the Electrical Till Corporation that makes a dandy punched card machine for
tabulating large quantities of data. Waterhouse's professor in Iowa was
tired of solving differential equations one at a time and invented a machine
to solve them automatically by storing the information on a capacitor
covered drum and cranking through a certain algorithm. Given enough time and
enough vacuum tubes, a tool might be invented to sum a column of numbers,
and another one to keep track of inventories, and another one to alphabetize
lists of words. A well equipped business would have one of each: gleaming
cast iron monsters with heat waves rising out of their grilles, emblazoned
with logos like ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying out its own
specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and
a clawhammer in his box.
Turing figured out something entirely different, something unspeakably
strange and radical.
He figured out that mathematicians, unlike carpenters, only needed to
have one tool in their toolbox, if it were the right sort of tool. Turing
realized that it should be possible to build a meta machine that could be
reconfigured in such a way that it would do any task you could conceivably
do with information. It would be a protean device that could turn into any
tool you could ever need. Like a pipe organ changing into a different
instrument every time you hit a preset button.
The details were a bit hazy. This was not a blueprint for an actual
machine, rather a thought experiment that Turing had dreamed up in order to
resolve an abstract riddle from the completely impractical world of pure
logic. Waterhouse knows this perfectly well. But he cannot get one thing out
of his mind as he sits there atop the blast walls at the dark intersection
in Bletchley Park: the Turing machine, if one really existed, would rely
upon having a tape. The tape would pass through the machine. It would carry
the information that the machine needed to do its work.
Waterhouse sits there staring off into the darkness and reconstructs
Turing's machine in his mind. More of the details are coming back to him.
The tape, he now recollects, would not move through the Turing machine in
one direction; it would change direction frequently. And the Turing machine
would not just read the tape; it would be able to erase marks or make new
ones.
Clearly you cannot erase holes in a paper tape. And just as clearly the
tape only moves through this Bletchley Park machine in one direction. So,
much as Waterhouse hates to admit this fact to himself, the rack of tubes he
just spied is not a Turing machine. It is some lesser device a special
purpose tool like a punched card reader or Atanasoffs differential equation
solver.
It is still bigger and more fiendishly terrific than anything
Waterhouse has ever seen.
A night train from Birmingham blows through, carrying bullets to the
sea. As its sound dies away to the south, a motorcycle approaches the park's
main gate. Its engine idles as the rider's papers are checked, then
Waterhouse hears a Bronx cheer as it surges forward and cuts the sharp turn
into the lane. Waterhouse climbs to his feet at the intersection of the
walls, and watches carefully as the bike sputters past him and homes in on a
"hut" a couple of blocks away. Light suddenly leaks from an open door as the
cargo changes hands. Then the light is snuffed and the bike stretches a long
loud raspberry down the road to the park's exit.
Waterhouse lets himself down to earth and gropes his way down the road
through the moonless night. He stops before the entrance to the hut and
listens to it teem for a minute. Then, working up his courage, he steps
forward and pushes the wooden door open.
It is unpleasantly hot in here, and the atmosphere is a nauseating
distillation of human and machine odors, held in and concentrated by the
coffin doors slabbed down over all the windows. Many people are in here,
mostly women working at gargantuan electrically powered typewriters. He can
see even through his squint that the place is a running sluice for scraps of
paper, maybe four by six inches each, evidently brought in by the
motorcyclists. Near the door, they have been sorted and stacked up in wire
baskets. Thence they go to the women at their giant typewriters.
One of the few men in the place has risen to his feet and is homing in
on Waterhouse. He is about Waterhouse's age, that is, in his early twenties.
He is wearing a British Army uniform. He has the air of a host at a wedding
reception who wants to make sure that even the most long lost, far flung
members of the family are properly greeted. Obviously he is no more a real
military man than is Waterhouse himself. No wonder this place is surrounded
by so much barbed wire and RAF men with machine guns.
"Good evening, sir. Can I help you?"
"Evening. Lawrence Waterhouse."
"Harry Packard. Pleased to meet you." But he has no idea who Waterhouse
is; he is privy to Ultra, but not to Ultra Mega.
"Pleasure's mine. I imagine you'll want to have a look at this."
Waterhouse hands him the magic pass. Packard's pale eyes travel over it
carefully, then jump around to focus on a few sites of particular interest:
the signature at the bottom, the smeared stamp. The war has turned Harry
Packard into a machine for scanning and processing slips of paper and he
goes about his work calmly and without fuss in this case. He excuses
himself, works the crank on a telephone, and speaks to someone; his posture
and facial expression suggest it is someone important. Waterhouse cannot
hear the words above the clicking and thrumming of the massed typewriters,
but he sees interest and bemusement on Packard's young, open, pink face.
Packard gives Waterhouse a sidelong glance or two while he is listening to
the person at the other end of the line. Then he says something respectful
and reassuring into the phone and rings off.
"Right. Well, what would you like to see?"
"I'm trying to get an overall sense of how the information flows."
"Well, we are close to the beginning of it here these are the
headwaters. Our wellsprings are the Y Service military and amateur radio
operators who listen in on Jerry's radio transmissions, and provide us with
these." Packard takes a slip from a motorcyclist's pannier and hands it to
Waterhouse.
It is a form with various boxes at the top in which someone has written
in a date (today's) and time (a couple of hours ago) and a few other data
such as a radio frequency. The body of the form is mostly occupied by a
large open space in which the following has been printed in hasty block
letters:
A Y W B P R O J H K D H A O B Q T M D L T U S H I
Y P I J S L L E N J O P S K Y V Z P D L E M A O U
T A MO G T M O A H E C
the whole thing preceded by two groups of three letters each:
Y U H A B G
"This one came in from one of our stations in Kent," Packard says. "It
is a Chaffinch message."
"So one of Rommel's?"
"Yes. This intercept came in from Cairo. Chaffinch gets top priority,
which is why this message is on the top of the pile."
Packard leads Waterhouse down the central aisle of the hut, between the
rows of typists. He picks out one girl who is just finishing up with a
message, and hands her the slip. She sets it up next to her machine and
commences typing it in.
At first glance, Waterhouse had thought that the machines represented
some British concept of how to build an electric typewriter as big as a
dinner table, wrapped up in two hundred pounds of cast iron, a ten horse
motor turning over under the hood, surrounded by tall fences and armed
guards. But now that he is closer he sees that it is something much more
complicated. Instead of a platen, it has a large flat reel on it carrying a
roll of narrow paper tape. This is not the same kind of tape he saw earlier,
smoking through the big machine. This is narrower, and when it emerges from
the machine, it does not have holes punched through it for a machine to
read. Instead, every time the girl slams down one of the keys on the
keyboard copying the text printed on the slip a new letter is printed on the
tape. But not the same letter that she typed.
It does not take her long to type in all of the letters. Then she tears
the tape from her machine. It has a sticky backing which she uses to paste
it directly onto the original intercept slip. She hands it to Packard,
giving him a demure smile. He responds with something between a nod and a
smart little bow, the kind of thing no American male could ever get away
with. He glances at it and hands it to Waterhouse.
The letters on the tape say
EINUNDZWANZIGSTPANZERDIVISIONBERICHTET
KEINEBESONDEREEREIGNISSE
"In order to obtain those settings, you have to break the code which
changes every day?"
Packard smiles in agreement. "At midnight. If you stay here " he checks
his watch " for another four hours, you will see fresh intercepts coming in
from the Y Service that will produce utter gibberish when we run them
through the Typex, because the Jerries will have changed all their codes on
the stroke of midnight. Rather like Cinderella's magic carriage turning back
into a pumpkin. We must then analyze the new intercepts using the bombes,
and figure out the day's new codes."
"How long does that take?"
"Sometimes we are lucky and have broken the day's codes by two or three
o'clock in the morning. Typically it does not happen until after noon or
evening. Sometimes we do not succeed at all."
"Okay, this is a stupid question, but I want to be clear. These Typex
machines which merely do a mechanical deciphering operation are a completely
different thing from the bombes, which actually break the codes."
"The bombes, compared to these, are of a completely different,
enormously higher order of sophistication," Packard agrees. "They are almost
like mechanical thinking machines."
"Where are they located?"
"Hut 11. But they won't be running just now."
"Right," Waterhouse says, "not until after midnight when the carriage
turns back into a pumpkin, and you need to break tomorrow's Enigma
settings."
"Precisely."
Packard steps over to a small wooden hatch set low into one of the
hut's exterior walls. Next to it sits an office tray with a cup hook screwed
into each end, and a string tied to each cup hook. One of the strings is
piled up loose on the floor. The wall hatch has been slid shut on the other
string. Packard puts the message slip on top of a pile of similar ones that
has accumulated in the tray, then slides the hatch open, revealing a narrow
tunnel leading away from the hut.
"Okay, your pull!" he shouts.
"Okay, my pull!" comes an answering voice a moment later. The string
goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.
"On its way to Hut 3," Packard explains.
"Then so am I," Waterhouse says.
***
Hut 3 is only a few yards away, on the other side of the inevitable
blast wall. GERMAN MILITARY SECTION has been scrawled on the door in
cursive; Waterhouse presumes that this is as opposed to "NAVAL" which is in
Hut 4. The ratio of men to women seems higher here. During wartime it is
startling to see so many hale young men in one room together. Some are in
Army or RAF uniforms, some in civvies, and there is even one Naval officer.
A large horseshoe shaped table dominates the center of the building,
with a rectangular table off to the side. Each chair at each table is
occupied by intent workers. The intercept slips are pulled into the hut on
the wooden tray and then move from chair to chair according to some highly
organized scheme that Waterhouse can only vaguely grasp at this point.
Someone explains to him that the bombes just broke the day's codes around
sundown, and so the entire day's load of intercepts has just come down the
tunnel from Hut 6 during the last couple of hours.
He decides to think of the hut as a mathematical black box for the time
being that is, he'll concentrate only on its inputs and outputs of
information and ignore the internal details. Bletchley Park, taken in its
entirety, is a black box of sorts: random letters stream into it, strategic
intelligence streams out, and the internal particulars are of no interest to
most of the people on the Ultra distribution list. The question that
Waterhouse is here to figure out is: is there another vector of information
coming out of this place, hidden subliminally in the teletype signals and
the behaviors of the Allied commanders? And does it point to Rudolf von
Hacklheber, Ph.D.?
Chapter 20 KINAKUTA
Whoever laid out the flight paths into the sultan's new airport must
have been in cahoots with the Kinakuta Chamber of Commerce. If you're lucky
enough to be in a window seat on the left side of the plane, as Randy
Waterhouse is, the view during the final approach looks like a propaganda
flyby.
Kinakuta's matted green slopes surge out of a mostly calm blue sea, and
eventually soar high enough to be dusted with snow at the summits, even
though the island is only seven degrees north of the equator. Randy sees
right away what Avi meant when he said that the place was Muslim around the
edges and animist in the middle. The only places you could hope to build
anything like a modern city are along the coast, where there's an
intermittent fringe of nearly flat land a beige rind clinging to a giant
emerald. The biggest and best flat place is on the northeastern corner of
the island, where the main river, several miles inland, bottoms out into a
flood plain that broadens to an alluvial delta that reaches out into the
Sulu Sea for a mile or two.
Randy gives up counting the oil rigs ten minutes before Kinakuta City
even comes into sight. From high above they look like flaming tank traps
scattered in the surf to deter incoming Marines. As the plane sheds altitude
they begin to look more like factories on stilts, topped with high stacks
where troublesome natural gas is flamed off. This gets more alarming as the
plane gets closer to the water, and it begins to seem as if the pilot is
threading his way between pillars of fire that would roast the 777 like a
pigeon on the wing.
Kinakuta City looks more modern than anything in the States. He has
been trying to read about the place but has found precious little: a couple
of encyclopedia entries, a few fleeting mentions in World War II histories,
some puckish but basically glowing articles in the Economist. Putting his
rusty interlibrary loan skills to work, he paid the Library of Congress to
make him a photocopy of the one book he could find specifically about
Kinakuta: one of about a million out of print World War II memoirs that must
have been penned by G.I.s during the late forties and fifties. So far, he
hasn't had time to read it, and so the two inch stack of pages is just dead
weight in his luggage.
In any case, none of the maps he has seen tallies with the reality of
the modem Kinakuta City. Anything that was there during the war has been
torn down and replaced with new. The river has been dredged into a new
channel. An inconvenient mountain called Eliza Peak has been dynamited, and
the rubble shoved into the ocean to make several new square miles of real
estate, most of which has been gobbled by the new airport. The dynamitings
were so loud that they prompted complaints from the governments of the
Philippines and of Borneo, hundreds of miles away. They also brought down
the wrath of Greenpeace, which was afraid that the sultan was scaring whales
in the central Pacific. So Randy expects half of Kinakuta City to be a
smoking crater, but of course it's not. The stump of Eliza Peak has been
neatly paved over and used as the foundation of the sultan's new Technology
City. All of the glass walled skyscrapers there, and in the rest of the
city, have pointy tops, recalling a traditional architecture that has long
since been bulldozed and used to fill in the harbor. The only building Randy
can see that looks to be more than ten years old is the sultan's palace,
which is ancient. Surrounded by miles of blue glass skyscrapers, it's like a
reddish beige mote frozen in a tray of ice.
Once Randy fixes on that, everything snaps into its proper orientation.
He bends forward, risks the censure of the cabin crew by pulling his bag out
from under the seat ahead of him, and pulls out his photocopied G.I. memoir.
One of its first pages is a map of Kinakuta City as it appeared in 1945, and
dead center is the Sultan's Palace. Randy rotates it before his face in the
way of a panicky driver with a steering wheel, and gets it to line up with
his view. There's the river. There's Eliza Peak, where the Nipponese used to
have a signals intelligence detachment and a radar station, all built with
slave labor. There's the former site of the Japanese Naval Air Force field,
which became the Kinakuta Airport until the new one was built. Now it is a
flock of yellow cranes above a blue nebula of rebar, lit from within by a
constellation of flickering white stars arc welders at work.
Next to it is something that doesn't belong: a patch of emerald green,
maybe a couple of city blocks, surrounded by a stone wall. Inside, there's a
placid pond toward one end the 777 is now so low that Randy can count the
lily pads a tiny Shinto temple hewn from black stone, and a little bamboo
teahouse. Randy presses his face to the window and keeps turning his head to
follow it, until suddenly his view is blocked by a high rise apartment
building just off the wingtip. Through an open kitchen window, he gets a
microsecond's glimpse of a slender lady swinging a hatchet towards a
coconut.
That garden looked like it belonged a thousand miles farther north in
Nippon. When Randy finally realizes what it was, the hairs stand up on the
back of his neck.
Randy got on this plane a couple of hours ago at Ninoy Aquino
International Airport in Manila. The flight was delayed and so he had plenty
of time to look at the other passengers: three Westerners including himself,
a couple of dozen Malay types (either Kinakutan or Filipino), and everyone
else Nipponese. Some of the latter looked like businessmen, traveling on
their own or in twos and threes, but most belonged to some kind of an
organized tour group that marched into the boarding lounge precisely forty
five minutes before scheduled takeoff, queued behind a young woman in a navy
blue skirt suit holding up a neat little logo on a stick. Retirees.
Their destination is not the Technology City, or any of the peculiar
pointy topped skyscrapers in the financial district. They are all going to
that walled Nipponese garden, which is built on top of a mass grave
containing the bodies of three and a half thousand Nipponese soldiers, who
all died on August 23, 1945.
Chapter 21 QWGHLM HOUSE
Waterhouse eddies up and down the quiet side street, squinting at brass
plaques on sturdy white row houses:
SOCIETY FOR THE UNIFICATION OF HINDUISM AND ISLAM
ANGLO LAPP SOLIDARITY SOCIETY
FULMINANTS ASSOCIATION
CHIANG TZSE MUTUAL BENEVOLENT SOCIETY
ROYAL COMMITTEE ON MITIGATION OF MARINE CRANKSHAFT WEAR
BOLGER DAMSELFLY PROPAGATION FOUNDATION
ANTI WELCH LEAGUE
COMITY FOR [theta]E REFORMASHUN OF ENGLISH OR[theta]OGRAFY
SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO VERMIN
CHURCH OF VEDANTIC ETHICAL QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS
IMPERIAL MICA BOARD
At first he mistakes Qwghlm House for the world's tiniest and most
poorly located department store. It has a bow window that looms over the
sidewalk like the thrusting ram of a trireme, embarnacled with Victorian
foofawfery, and housing a humble display: a headless mannequin dressed in
something that appears to have been spun from steel wool (perhaps a tribute
to wartime austerity?); a heap of sallow dirt with a shovel in it; and
another mannequin (a recent addition shoehorned into one corner) dressed in
a Royal Navy uniform and holding a wooden cutout of a rifle.
Waterhouse found a worm eaten copy of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana in a
bookshop near the British Museum a week ago and has been carrying it around
in his attache case since then, imbibing a page or two at a time, like doses
of strong medicine. The overriding Themes of the Encyclopedia are three, and
they dominate its every paragraph as totally as the Three Sgrhs dominate the
landscape of Outer Qwghlm. Two of these themes are wool and guano, though
the Qwghlmians have other names for them, in their ancient, sui generis
tongue. In fact, the same linguistic hyperspecialization occurs here that
supposedly does with the Eskimos and snow or Arabs and sand, and the
Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana never uses the English words "wool" and "guano"
except to slander the inferior versions of these products that are exported
by places like Scotland in a perfidious effort to confuse the naive buyers
who apparently dominate the world's commodity markets. Waterhouse had to
read the encyclopedia almost cover to cover and use all his cryptanalytic
skills to figure out, by inference, what these products actually were.
Having learned so much about them, he is fascinated to find them
proudly displayed in the heart of the cosmopolitan city: a mound of guano
and a woman dressed in wool (1). The woman's outfit is entirely
grey, in keeping with Qwghlmian tradition, which scorns pigmentation as a
loathsome and whorish innovation of the Scots. The top part of the ensemble
is a sweater which appears, at a glance, to be made of felt. A closer look
reveals that it is knit like any other sweater. Qwghlmian sheep are the
evolutionary product of thousands of years' massive weather related die off.
Their wool is famous for its density, its corkscrewlike fibers, and its
immunity to all known chemical straightening processes. It creates a matted
effect which the Encyclopedia describes as being supremely desirable and for
which there is an extensive descriptive vocabulary.
The third theme of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana is hinted at by the
mannequin with the gun.
Propped up against the stonework next to the building's entrance is a
gaffer dressed in an antique variant of the Home Guard uniform, involving
knickerbockers. His lower legs are encased in formidable socks made of one
of the variants of Qwghlmian wool, and lashed in place, just below the knee,
with tourniquets fashioned from thick cords woven together in a vaguely
Celtic interlace pattern (on almost every page, the Encyclopedia restates
that the Qwghlmians are not Celts, but that they did invent the best
features of Celtic culture). These garters are the traditional ornament of
true Qwghlmians; gentlemen wear them hidden underneath the trousers of their
suits. They were traditionally made from the long, slender tails of the
Skrrgh, which is the predominant mammal native to the islands, and which the
Encyclopedia defines as "a small mammal of the order Rodentia and the order
Muridae, common in the islands, subsisting primarily on the eggs of sea
birds, capable of multiplying with great rapidity when that or any other
food is made available to it, admired and even emulated by Qwghlmians for
its hardiness and adaptability."
After Waterhouse has been standing there for a few moments, enjoying a
cigarette and examining those garters, this mannequin moves slightly.
Waterhouse thinks that it is falling over in a gust of wind, but then he
realizes that it is alive, and not exactly falling over, but just shifting
its weight from foot to foot.
The gaffer takes note of him, smiles blackly, and utters some word of
greeting in his language, which, as has already become plain, is even less
suited than English to transcription into the Roman alphabet.
"Howdy," Waterhouse says.
The gaffer says something longer and more complicated. After a while,
Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptanalyst hat, searching for meaning midst
apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies in the
signal) realizes that the man is speaking heavily accented English. He
concludes that his interlocutor was saying, "What part of the States are you
from, then?"
"My family's done a lot of traveling around," Waterhouse says. "Let's
say South Dakota."
"Ahh," the gaffer says ambiguously whilst flinging himself against the
slab of door. After a while it begins to move inwards, hand hammered iron
hinges grinding ominously as they pivot round inch thick tholes. Finally the
door collides with some kind of formidable Stop. The gaffer remains leaning
against it, his entire body at a forty five degree angle to prevent its
swinging back and crushing Waterhouse, who scurries past. Inside, a tiny
anteroom is dominated by a sculpture: two nymphets in diaphanous veils
kicking the crap out of a scurrying hag, entitled Fortitude and Adaptability
Driving Out Adversity .
This operation is repeated a few times with doors that are successively
lighter but more richly decorated. The first room, it becomes clear, was
actually a preäntepenultimate room, so it is a while before they can be said
to be definitely inside Qwghlm House. By that time they seem to be deep in
the center of the block, and Waterhouse half expects to see an underground
train screech by. Instead he finds himself in a windowless paneled room with
a crystal chandelier that is painfully bright but does not seem to actually
illuminate anything. His feet sink so deeply into the gaudy carpet that he
nearly blows out a ligament. The far end of the room is guarded by a staunch
Desk with a stout Lady behind it. Here and there are large ebony Windsor
chairs, with the spindly but dangerous look of aboriginal game snares.
On the walls, diverse oil paintings. At a first glance Waterhouse sorts
them into ones that are higher than they are wide, and others. The former
category is portraits of gentlemen, all of whom seem to share a grievous
genetic flaw that informs the geometry of the skull. The latter category is
landscapes or, just as often, seascapes, all in the bleak and rugged
category. These Qwghlmian painters are so fond of the locally produced blue
green grey paint (1) that they apply it as if with the back of a
shovel.
Waterhouse fights through the miring shag of the Carpet until he nears
the Desk, where he is greeted by the Lady, who shakes his hand and pinches
her face together in a sort of allusion to a smile. There is a long exchange
of polite, perfunctory speech of which all Waterhouse remembers is: "Lord
Woadmire will see you shortly," and: "Tea?"
Waterhouse says yes to the tea because he suspects that this lady (he
has forgotten her name) is not really earning her keep. Clearly disgruntled,
she ejects herself from her chair and loses herself in deeper and narrower
parts of the building. The gaffer has already gone back to his post out
front.
A photograph of the king hangs on the wall behind the desk. Waterhouse
hadn't known, until Colonel Chattan discreetly reminded him, that His
Majesty's full title was not simply By the Grace Of God of England King, but
B.T.G.O.G. of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the
Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, Outer Qwghlm, and Inner Qwghlm King.
Next to it is a smaller photograph of the man he is about to meet. This
fellow and his family are covered rather sketchily by the Encyclopedia ,
which is decades old, and so Waterhouse has had to do some additional
background research. The man is related to the Windsors in a way so
convoluted that it can only be expressed using advanced genealogical
vocabulary.
He was born Graf Heinrich Karl Wilhelm Otto Friedrich von Überset
Zenseehafenstadt, but changed his name to Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby,
a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, in 1914. In his photograph, he looks every inch a von
Übersetzenseehafenstadt, and he is entirely free of the cranial geometry
problem so evident in the older portraits. Lord Woadmire is not related to
the original ducal line of Qwghlm, the Moore family (Anglicized from the
Qwghlmian clan name Mnyhrrgh) which had been terminated in 1888 by a
spectacularly improbable combination of schistosomiasis, suicide, long
festering Crimean war wounds, ball lightning, flawed cannon, falls from
horses, improperly canned oysters, and rogue waves.
The tea takes some time in coming and Lord Woadmire does not seem to be
in any particular hurry to win the war either, so Waterhouse makes a circuit
of the room, pretending to care about the paintings. The biggest one depicts
a number of bruised and lacerated Romans dragging their sorry asses up onto
a rocky and unwelcoming shore as splinters of their invasion fleet wash up
around them. Front and center is a particular Roman who looks no less noble
for wear and tear. He is seated wearily on a high rock, a broken sword
dangling from one enervated hand, gazing longingly across several miles of
rough water towards a shining, paradisiacal island. This isle is richly
endowed with tall trees and flowering meadows and green pastures, but even
so it can be identified as Outer Qwghlin by the Three Sghrs towering above
it. The isle is guarded by a forbidding castle or two; its pale, almost
Caribbean beaches are lined with the colorful banners of a defending host
which (one can only assume) has just given the Roman invaders a bit of rough
handling which they will not soon forget. Waterhouse does not bother to bend
down and squint at the plaque; he knows that the subject of the painting is
Julius Cæsar's failed and probably apocryphal attempt to add the
Qwghlm Archipelago to the Roman Empire, the farthest from Rome he ever got
and the least good idea he ever had. To say that the Qwghlmians have not
forgotten the event is like saying that Germans can sometimes be a little
prickly.
"Where Caesar failed, what hope has Hitler?"
Waterhouse turns towards the voice and discovers Nigel St. John
Gloamthorpby a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, a.k.a. the Duke of Qwghlm. He is not a
tall man. Waterhouse goose steps through the carpet to shake his hand.
Though Colonel Chattan briefed him on proper forms of address when meeting a
duke, Waterhouse can no more remember this than he can diagram the duke's
family tree, so he decides to structure all of his utterances so as to avoid
referring to the duke by name or pronoun. This will be a fun game and make
the time go faster.
"It is quite a painting," Waterhouse says, "a heck of a deal."
"You will find the islands themselves no less extraordinary, and for
the same reasons," the duke says obliquely.
The next time Waterhouse is really aware of what's going on, he is
sitting in the duke's office. He thinks that there has been some routine
polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually
monitoring that kind of thing. Tea is offered to him, and is accepted, for
the second or third time, but fails to materialize.
"Colonel Chattan is in the Mediterranean, and I have been sent in his
place," Waterhouse explains, "not to waste time covering logistical details,
but to convey our enormous gratitude for the most generous offer made in
regards to the castle." There! No pronouns, no gaffe.
"Not at all!" The duke is taking the whole thing as an affront to his
generosity. He speaks in the unhurried, dignified cadences of a man who is
mentally thumbing through a German English dictionary. "Even setting aside
my own... patriotic obligations... cheerfully accepted, of course..., it has
almost become almost... terribly fashionable to have a whole... crew...
of... uniformed fellows and whatnot running around in one's... pantry.
"Many of the great houses of Britain are doing their bit for the War,"
Waterhouse agrees.
"Well... by all means, then... use it!" the duke says. "Don't be...
reticent! Use it... thoroughly! Give it a good... working over! It has...
survived... a thousand Qwghlm winters and it will... survive your worst."
"We hope to have a small detachment in place very soon," Waterhouse
says agreeably.
"May I... know..., to satisfy my own... curiosity..., what sort of...
?" the duke says, and trails off.
Waterhouse is ready for this. He is so ready that he has to hold back
for a moment and try to make a show of discretion. "Huffduff."
"Huffduff?"
"HFDF. High Frequency Direction Finding. A technique for locating
distant radio transmitters by triangulating from several points."
"I should have... thought you knew where all the... German...
transmitters were."
"We do, except for the ones that move."
"Move!?" The duke furrows his brow tremendously, imagining a giant
radio transmitter building, tower and all mounted on four parallel rail road
tracks like Big Bertha, creeping across a steppe, drawn by harnessed
Ukrainians.
"Think U boats," Waterhouse says delicately.
"Ah!" the duke says explosively. "Ah!" He leans back in his creaky
leather chair, examining a whole new picture with his mind's eye. "They...
pop up, do they, and send out... wireless?"
"They do."
"And you... eavesdrop."
"If only we could!" Waterhouse says. "No, the Germans have used all of
that world famous mathematical brilliance of theirs to invent ciphers that
are totally unbreakable. We don't have the first idea what they are saying.
But, by using huffduff, we can figure out where they are saying it from, and
route our convoys accordingly."
"Ah."
"So what we propose to do is mount big rotating antennas, or aerials as
you call them here, on the castle, and staff the place with huffduff
boffins."
The duke frowns. "There will be proper... safeguards for lightning?"
"Naturally."
"And you are aware that you may... anticipate... ice storms as late in
the year as August?"
"The Royal Qwghlm Meteorological Station's reports, as a body of work,
don't leave a heck of a lot to the imagination."
"Fine, then!" the duke blusters, warming to the concept. "Use the
castle, then! And give them... give them hell!"
Chapter 22 ELECTRICAL TILL CORPORATION
As evidence of the allies' slowly developing plan to kill the Axis by
smothering them under a mountain of manufactured goods, there's this one
pier in Sydney Harbor that is piled high with wooden crates and steel
barrels: stuff that has been disgorged from the holds of ships from America,
Britain, India and just left to sit there because Australia doesn't know how
to digest it yet. It is not the only pier in Sydney that is choked with
stuff. But because this pier isn't good for much else, it is mounded higher
and the stuff is older, rustier, more infested with rats, more rimed with
salt, more thickly frosted and flagrantly streaked with gull shit.
A man is picking his way over the pile, trying not to get any more of
that gull shit on his khakis. He is wearing the uniform of a major in the
United States Army and is badly encumbered by a briefcase. His name is
Comstock.
Inside the briefcase are various identity papers, credentials, and an
impressive letter from the office of The General in Brisbane. Comstock has
had occasion to show all of the above to the doddering and yet queerly
formidable Australian guards who, with their doughboy helmets and rifles,
infest the waterfront. These men do not speak any dialect of the English
language that the major can recognize and vice versa, but they can all read
what is on those papers.
The sun is going down and the rats are waking up. The major has been
clambering over docks all day long. He has seen enough of war and the
military to know that what he is looking for will be found on the last pier
that he searches, which happens to be this one. If he begins searching that
pier at the near end, what he is looking for will be at the far end, and
vice versa. All the more reason to stay sharp as he works his way along.
After casting an eye around to make sure there are no leaking stacks of
drums of aviation fuel nearby, he lights up a cigarette. War is hell, but
smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
Sydney Harbor is beautiful at sunset, but he's been looking at it all
day and can't really see it anymore. For lack of anything better to do, he
opens up his briefcase. There's a paperback novel in there, which he's
already read. And there is a clipboard which contains, in yellowed,
crackling, sedimentary layers, a fossil record that only an archaeologist
could unravel. It is the story of how The General, just after he got out of
Corregidor and reached Australia in April, sent out a request for some
stuff. How that request got forwarded to America and bounced pinball like
through the cluttered infinitude of America's military and civilian
bureaucracies; how the stuff in question was duly manufactured, procured,
trucked hither and yon, and caused to be placed on a ship; and finally, some
evidence to the effect that said ship was in Sydney Harbor several months
ago. There's no evidence that this ship ever unloaded the stuff in question,
but unloading stuff is what ships always do when they reach port and so
Comstock is going with that assumption for a while.
After Major Comstock finishes his cigarette, he resumes his search.
Some of the papers on his clipboard specify certain magic numbers that ought
to be stenciled on the outside of the crates in question; at least, that's
what he's been assuming since he started this search at daybreak, and if
he's wrong, he'll have to go back and search every crate in Sydney Harbor
again. Actually getting a look at each crates' numbers means squeezing his
body through narrow channels between crate piles and rubbing away the grease
and grime that obscures the crucial data. The major is now as filthy as any
combat grunt.
When he gets close to the end of the pier, his eye picks out one
cluster of crates that appear to be all of the same vintage insofar as their
salt encrustations are of similar thickness. Down low where the rain pools,
their rough sawn wood has rotted. Up where it is roasted by the sun, it has
warped and split. Somewhere these crates must have numbers stenciled onto
them, but something else has caught his eye, something that stirs Comstock's
heart, just as the sight of the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the morning
sun might do for a beleaguered infantryman. Those crates are proudly marked
with the initials of the company that Major Comstock (and most of his
comrades in arms up in Brisbane) worked for, before they were shunted, en
masse, into the Army's Signal Intelligence Service. The letters are faded
and grimy, but he would recognize them anywhere in the world: they form the
logo, the corporate identity, the masthead, of ETC the Electrical Till
Corporation.
Chapter 23 CRYPT
The terminal is supposed to echo the lines of a row of Malay longhouses
jammed together side by side. A freshly painted jetway gropes out like a
giant lamprey and slaps its neoprene lips onto the side of the plane. The
elderly Nipponese tour group makes no effort to leave the plane,
respectfully leaving the aisles clear for the businessmen: You go ahead, the
people we're going to visit won't mind waiting.
On his march up the jetway, humidity and jet fuel condense onto Randy's
skin in equal measure, and he begins to sweat. Then he's in the terminal,
which notwithstanding the Malay longhouses allusion has been engineered
specifically to look like any other brand new airport terminal in the world.
The air conditioning hits like a spike through the head. He puts his bags
down on the floor and stands there for a moment, collecting his wits beneath
a Leroy Neiman painting the dimensions of a volleyball court, depicting the
sultan in action on a polo pony. Trapped in a window seat during a short and
choppy flight, he had never made it out to the lavatory, so he goes to one
now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.
As he steps back, perfectly satisfied, he becomes conscious of a man
backing away from an adjacent urinal one of the Nipponese businessmen who
just got off the plane. A couple of months ago, the presence of this man
would have ruled out Randy's taking a leak at all. Today, he didn't even
notice that the guy was there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy
is delighted to have stumbled upon the magic remedy: not to convince
yourself that you are a dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in
your thoughts to notice other people around you. Bashful kidney is your
body's way of telling you that you're thinking too hard, that you need to
get off the campus and go get a fucking job.
"You were looking at the Ministry of Information site?" the businessman
says. He is in a perfect charcoal grey pinstripe suit, which he wears just
as easily and comfortably as Randy does his souvenir t shirt from the fifth
Hackers Conference, surfer's jams, and Teva sandals.
"Oh!" Randy blurts, annoyed with himself. "I completely forgot to look
for it." Both men laugh. The Nipponese man produces a business card with
some deft sleight of hand. Randy has to rip open his nylon and velcro wallet
and delve for his. They exchange cards in the traditional Asian two handed
style, which Avi has forced Randy to practice until he gets it nearly right.
They bow at each other, triggering howls from the nearest couple of
computerized self flushing urinals. The bath room door swings open and an
aged Nip wanders in, a precursor of the silver horde.
Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired,
to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy
of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist
slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees
Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same
thing, isn't it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink?
During the hundreds of hours of meetings, and megabytes of encrypted e mail
messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard Föhr, and
Beryl have exchanged, getting Epiphyte(2) off the ground, each of them has
occasionally, inadvertently, used the word Jap as shorthand for Japanese in
the same way as they used RAM to mean Random Access Memory. But of course
Jap is a horrible racist slur too. Randy figures it all has to do with your
state of mind at the time you utter the word. If you're just trying to
abbreviate, it's not a slur. But if you are fomenting racist hatreds, as
Sean Daniel McGee occasionally seems to be not above doing, that's
different.
This particular Nipponese individual is identified, on his card, as
GOTO Furudenendu ("Ferdinand Goto"). Randy, who has spent a lot of time
recently puzzling over organizational charts of certain important Nipponese
corporations, knows already that he is a vice president for special projects
(whatever that means) at Goto Engineering. He also knows that organizational
charts of Nipponese companies are horseshit and that job titles mean
absolutely nothing. That he has the same surname as the guy who founded the
company is presumably worth taking note of.
Randy's card says that he is Randall L. WATERHOUSE ("Randy") and that
he is vice president for network technology development at Epiphyte
Corporation.
Goto and Waterhouse stroll out of the washroom and start to follow the
baggage claim icons that are strung across the terminal like bread crumbs.
"You have jet lag now?" Goto asks brightly following (Randy assumes) a
script from an English textbook. He's a handsome guy with a winning smile.
He's probably in his forties, though Nipponese people seem to have a whole
different aging algorithm so this might be way off.
"No," Randy answers. Being a nerd, he answers such questions badly,
succinctly, and truthfully. He knows that Goto essentially does not care
whether Randy has jet lag or not. He is vaguely conscious that Avi, if he
were here, would use Goto's question as it was intended as an opening for
cheery social batter. Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact
that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll
probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the
common enterprise, he tries his best. "I've actually been in Manila for
several days, so I've had plenty of time to adjust."
"Ah! Did your activities in Manila go well?" Goto fires back.
"Yes, very well, thank you," Randy lies, now that his social skills,
such as they are, have had a moment to get unlimbered. "Did you come
directly from Tokyo?"
Goto's smile freezes in place for a moment, and he hesitates before
saying, "Yes.''
This is, at root, a patronizing reply. Goto Engineering is
headquartered in Kobe and they would not fly out of the Tokyo airport. Goto
said yes anyway, because, during that moment of hesitation, he realized that
he was just dealing with a Yank, who, when he said "Tokyo," really meant
"the Nipponese home islands" or "wherever the hell you come from."
"Excuse me," Randy says, "I meant to say Osaka."
Goto grins brilliantly and seems to execute a tiny suggestion of a bow.
"Yes! I came from Osaka today."
Goto and Waterhouse drift apart from each other at the luggage claim,
exchange grins as they breeze through immigration, and run into each other
at the ground transportation section. Kinakutan men in brilliant white
quasinaval uniforms with gold braid and white gloves are buttonholing
passengers, proffering transportation to the local hotels.
"You are staying at the Foote Mansion also?" Goto says. That being the
luxury hotel in Kinakuta. But he knows the answer already tomorrow's meeting
has been planned as exhaustively as a space shuttle launch.
Randy hesitates. The largest Mercedes Benz he's ever seen has just
pulled up to the curb, condensed moisture not merely fogging its windows but
running down them in literal streamlines. A driver in Foote Mansion livery
has erupted from it to divest Mr. Goto of his luggage, Randy knows that he
need only make a subtle move toward that car and he will be whisked to a
luxury hotel where he can take a shower, watch TV naked while drinking a
hundred dollar bottle of French wine, go swimming, get a massage.
Which is precisely the problem. He can already feel himself wilting in
the equatorial heat. It's too early to go soft. He's only been awake for six
or seven hours. There's work to be done. He forces himself to stand up at
attention, and the effort makes him break a sweat so palpably that he almost
expects to moisten everything within a radius of several meters. "I would
enjoy sharing a ride to the hotel with you," he says, "but I have one or two
errands to run first."
Goto understands. "Perhaps drinks this evening."
"Leave me a message," Randy says. Then Goto's waving at him through the
smoked glass of the Mercedes as it pulls seven gees away from the curb.
Randy does a one eighty, goes back inside to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, which
accepts eight currencies, and sates himself. Then he reemerges and turns
imperceptibly toward a line of taxis. A driver hurls himself bodily towards
Randy and tears his garment bag loose from his shoulder. "Ministry of
Information," Randy says.
In the long run, it may, or may not, be a good idea for the Sultanate
of Kinakuta to have a gigantic earthquake , volcano , tsunami , and
thermonuclear weapon proof Ministry of Information with a cavernous sub sub
basement crammed with high powered computers and data switches. But the
sultan has decided that it would be sort of cool. He has hired some alarming
Germans to design it, and Goto Engineering to build it. No one, of course,
is more familiar with staggering natural disasters than the Nipponese, with
the possible exception of some peoples who are now extinct and therefore
unable to bid on jobs like this. They also know a thing or two about having
the shit bombed out of them, as do the Germans.
There are subcontractors, of course, and a plethora of consultants.
Through some miraculous feat of fast talking, Avi managed to land one of the
biggest consulting contracts: Epiphyte(2) Corporation is doing "systems
integration" work, which means plugging together a bunch of junk made by
other people, and overseeing the installation of all the computers,
switches, and data lines.
The drive to the site is surprisingly short. Kinakuta City isn't that
big, hemmed in as it is by steep mountain ranges, and the sultan has endowed
it with plenty of eight lane superhighways. The taxi blasts across the plain
of reclaimed land on which the airport is built, swings wide around the
stump of Eliza Peak, ignoring two exits for Technology City, then turns off
at an unmarked exit. Suddenly they are stuck in a queue of empty dump trucks
Nipponese behemoths emblazoned with the word GOTO in fat macho block
letters. Coming towards them is a stream of other trucks that are identical
except that these are fully laden with stony rubble. The taxi driver pulls
onto the right shoulder and zooms past trucks for about half a mile. They're
heading up Randy's ears pop once. This road is built on the floor of a
ravine that climbs up into one of the mountain ranges. Soon they are hemmed
in by vertiginous walls of green, which act like a sponge, trapping an
eternal cloud of mist, through which sparks of brilliant color are sometimes
visible. Randy can't tell whether they are birds or flowers. The contrast
between the cloud forest's lush vegetation and the dirt road, battered by
the house sized tires of the heavy trucks, is disorienting.
The taxi stops. The driver turns and looks at him expectantly. Randy
thinks for a moment that the driver has gotten lost and is looking to Randy
for instructions. The road terminates here, in a parking lot mysteriously
placed in the middle of the cloud forest. Randy sees half a dozen big air
conditioned trailers bearing the logos of various Nipponese, German, and
American firms; a couple of dozen cars; as many buses. All the accoutrements
of a major construction site are here, plus a few extras, like two monkeys
with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there
is no construction site. Just a wall of green at the end of the road, green
so dark it's almost black.
The empty trucks are disappearing into that darkness. Full ones come
out, their headlights emerging from the mist and gloom first, followed by
the colorful displays that the drivers have built onto the radiator grilles,
followed by the highlights on their chrome and glass, and finally the trucks
themselves. Randy's eyes adjust, and he can see now that he is staring into
a cavern, lit up by mercury vapor lamps.
"You want me to wait?" the driver asks.
Randy glances at the meter, does a quick conversion, and figures out
that the ride to this point has cost him a dime. "Yes," he says, and gets
out of the taxi. Satisfied, the driver kicks back and lights up a cigarette.
Randy stands there and gapes into the cavern for a minute, partly
because it's a hell of a thing to look at and partly because a river of cool
air is draining out of it, which feels good. Then he trudges across the lot
and goes to the trailer marked "Epiphyte."
It is staffed by three tiny Kinakutan women who know exactly who he is,
though they've never met him before, and who give every indication of being
delighted to see him. They wear long, loose wraps of brilliantly colored
fabric on top of Eddie Bauer turtlenecks to ward off the nordic chill of the
air conditioners. They are all fearsomely efficient and poised. Everywhere
Randy goes in Southeast Asia he runs into women who ought to be running
General Motors or something. Before long they have sent out word of his
arrival via walkie talkie and cell phone, and presented him with a pair of
thick knee high boots, a hard hat, and a cellular phone, all carefully
labeled with his name. After a couple of minutes, a young Kinakutan man in
hard hat and muddy boots opens the trailer's door, introduces himself as
"Steve," and leads Randy into the entrance of the cavern. They follow a
narrow pedestrian board walk illuminated by a string of caged lightbulbs.
For the first hundred meters or so, the cave is just a straight passage
barely wide enough to admit two Goto trucks and the pedestrian lane. Randy
trails his hand along the wall. The stone is rough and dusty, not smooth
like the surface of a natural cavern, and he can see fresh gouges wrought by
jackhammers and drills.
He can tell by the echo that something's about to change. Steve leads
him out into the cavern proper. It is, well, cavernous. Big enough for a
dozen of the huge trucks to pull around in a circle to be laden with rock
and muck. Randy looks up, trying to find the ceiling, but all he sees is a
pattern of bluish white high intensity lights, like the ones in gymnasiums,
perhaps ten meters above. Beyond that it's darkness and mist.
Steve goes off in search of something and leaves Randy alone for a few
minutes, which is useful since it takes a long time for him to get his
bearings.
Some of the cavern wall is smooth and natural; the rest of it is rough,
marking the enlargements conceived by the engineers and executed by the
contractor. Likewise, some of the floor is smooth, and not quite level. Some
places it has been drilled and blasted to bring it down, others it has been
filled in to bring it up.
This, the main chamber, looks to be about finished. The offices of the
Ministry of Information will be here. There are two other, smaller chambers,
deeper inside the mountain, still being enlarged. One will contain the
engineering plant (power generators and so forth) and the other will be the
systems unit.
A burly blond man in a white hard hat emerges from a hole in the
chamber wall: Tom Howard, Epiphyte Corporation's vice president for systems
technology. He takes his hard hat off and waves to Randy, then beckons him
over.
The passageway that leads to the systems chamber is big enough that you
could drive a delivery van down it, but it's not as straight or as level as
the main entryway. It is mostly occupied by a conveyor system of terrifying
power and speed, which is carrying tons of dripping grey muck out towards
the main chamber to be dumped into the Goto trucks. In terms of apparent
cost and sophistication, it beats the same relationship to a normal conveyor
belt as an F 15 does to a Sopwith Camel. It is possible to speak but
impossible to be heard when you are near it, and so Tom and Randy and the
Kinakutan who calls himself Steve trudge silently down the passage for
another hundred or so meters until they reach the next cavern.
This one is only large enough to contain a modest one story house. The
conveyor passes right through the middle of it and disappears down another
hole; the muck is coming from deeper yet in the mountain. It's still too
loud in here to talk. The floor has been leveled by pouring in concrete, and
conduits rise from it every few meters with orange cables dangling from
their open tops: optical fiber lines.
Tom walks towards another opening in the wall. It appears that several
subsidiary caverns branch away from this one. Tom leads Randy through the
opening, then turns to put a hand on his arm and steady him: they are at the
top of a steep wooden staircase that has been built down a nearly vertical
shaft that descends a good five meters or so.
"What you just saw is the main switch room," Tom says. "That'll be the
largest router in the world when it's finished. We're using some of these
other chambers to install computers and mass storage systems. The world's
largest RAID, basically, buffered with a big, big RAM cache."
RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; it is a way to store
vast quantities of information cheaply and reliably, and exactly the kind of
thing you would want to have in a data haven.
"So we're still cleaning out some of these other chambers," Tom
continues. "We discovered something, down here, that I thought you'd find
interesting." He turns around and begins to descend the staircase. "Did you
know that these caves were used as an air raid shelter by the Japanese,
during the war?"
Randy has been carrying the map page from his photocopied book around
in his pocket. He unfolds it and holds it up near a lightbulb. Sure enough,
it includes a site, up in the mountains, labeled ENTRANCE TO AIR RAID
SHELTER & COMMAND POST.
"And a command post?" Randy says.
"Yeah. How'd you know that?"
"Interlibrary loan," Randy says.
"We didn't know it until we got here and found all of these old cables
and electrical shit strung around the place. We had to tear it out so we
could string in our own."
Randy begins to descend the steps.
"This shaft was full of rocks," Tom says, "but we could see wires going
down into it, so we knew something had to be down here."
Randy looks nervously at the ceiling. "Why was it full of rocks? Was
there a cave in?"
"No," Tom says, "the Japanese soldiers did it. They threw rocks down
the shaft until it was full. It took a dozen of our laborers two weeks to
pull all the rocks out by hand."
"So, what did the wires lead to?"
"Lightbulbs," Tom says, "they were just electrical wires no
communications."
"Then what was it they were trying to hide down here?" Randy asks. He
has almost reached the bottom of the staircase, and he can see that there is
a room sized cavity.
"See for yourself" Tom says, and flicks a light switch.
The cavity is about the size of a one car garage, with a nice level
floor. There is a wooden desk, chair, and filing cabinet, fuzzy with fifty
years' growth of grey green fungus. And there is a metal footlocker, painted
olive drab, stenciled with Nipponese characters.
"I forced the lock on this thing," Tom says. He steps over to the
footlocker and flips the lid open. It is filled with books.
"You were expecting maybe gold bars?" Tom says, laughing at the
expression on Randy's face.
Randy sits down on the floor and grabs his ankles. He's staring open
mouthed at the books in the chest.
"You okay?" Tom asks. "Heavy, heavy deja vu," Randy says. "From this?"
"Yeah," Randy says, "I've seen this before."
"Where?"
"In my grandmother's attic."
***
Randy finds his way up out of the network of caverns and into the
parking lot. The warm air feels good on his skin, but by the time he has
reached the Epiphyte Corp. trailer to turn in his hard hat and boots, he has
begun to sweat again. He bids good bye to the three women who work there,
and once again is struck by their attentiveness, their solicitousness. Then
he remembers that he is not just some interloper. He is a shareholder, and
an important officer, in the corporation that employs them he is paying them
or oppressing them, take your pick.
He trudges across the parking lot, moving very slowly, trying not to
get that metabolic furnace het up. A second taxi has pulled alongside the
one that is waiting for Randy, and the drivers are leaning out of their
windows shooting the breeze.
As Randy approaches his taxi, he happens to glance back towards the
entrance of the cavern. Framed in its dark maw, and dwarfed by the
mountainous shapes of the Goto dump trucks, is a solitary man, silver
haired, stooped, but trim and almost athletic looking in a warmup suit and
sneakers. He is standing with his back to Randy, facing the cavern, holding
a long spray of flowers. He seems rooted in the mud, perfectly motionless.
The front door of the Goto Engineering trailer flies open. A young
Nipponese man in a white shirt, striped tie, and orange hard hat descends
the stairs and moves briskly towards the old man with the flowers. When he
is still some distance away, he stops, puts his feet together, and executes
a bow. Randy hasn't spent enough time around Nipponese to understand the
minutiae, but this looks to him like an extraordinarily major bow. He
approaches the old man with a bright smile and holds one beckoning hand out
towards the Goto trailer. The old man seems disoriented maybe the cavern
doesn't look like it used to but after a few moments he returns a
perfunctory bow and allows the young engineer to lead him out of the stream
of traffic.
Randy gets in his taxi and says, "Foote Mansion," to the driver.
He has been harboring an illusion that he will read Sean Daniel McGee's
war memoir slowly and thoroughly, from beginning to end, but this has now
gone the way of all illusions. He hauls the photocopied stack out of his bag
during the drive to the hotel and begins ruthless triage. Most of it has
nothing to do with Kinakuta at all it's about McGee's experiences fighting
in New Guinea and the Philippines. McGee is no Churchill, but he does have a
distant blarney tinged narrative talent, which makes even banal anecdotes
readable. His skills as raconteur must have made him a big hit around the
bar at the NCOs' Club; a hundred tipsy sergeants must have urged him to
write some of this shit down if he ever made it back to South Boston alive.
He did make it back, but unlike most of the other GIs who were in the
Philippines on V J day, he didn't go straight back home. He took a little
detour to the Sultanate of Kinakuta, which was still home to almost four
thousand Nipponese troops. This explains an oddity about his book. In most
war memoirs, V E Day or V J Day happens on the last page, or at least in the
last chapter, and then our narrator goes home and buys a Buick. But V J day
happens about two thirds of the way through Sean Daniel McGee's book. When
Randy sets aside the pre August 1945 material, an ominously thick stack of
pages remains. Clearly, Sergeant McGee has something to get off his chest.
The Nipponese garrison on Kinakuta had long since been bypassed by the
war, and like the other bypassed garrisons, had turned what energies they
had left to vegetable farming, and waiting for the extremely sporadic
arrivals of submarines, which, towards the close of the war, the Nipponese
used to haul the most extremely vital cargo and to ferry certain desperately
needed specialists, like airplane mechanics, from one place to another. When
they got Hirohito's broadcast from Tokyo, ordering them to lay down their
arms, they did so dutifully but (one has to suspect) gladly.
The only hard part was finding someone to surrender to. The Allies had
concentrated on planning the invasion of the Nipponese home islands, and it
took them a while to get troops out to the bypassed garrisons like Kinakuta.
McGee's account of the confusion in Manila is mordant at this point in the
book McGee starts to lose his patience, and his charm. He starts to rail.
Twenty pages later, he's sloshing ashore at Kinakuta City. He stands at
attention while his company captain accepts the surrender of the Nipponese
garrison. He posts a guard around the entrance to the cavern, where a few
diehard Nips have refused to surrender. He organizes the systematic
disarming of the Nipponese soldiers, who are terribly emaciated, and sees to
it that their rifles and ammunition are dumped into the ocean even as food
and medical supplies are brought ashore. He helps a small contingent of
engineers string barbed wire around the airfield, turning it into an
internment camp.
Randy flips through all of this during the drive to the hotel. Then,
words like "impaled" and "screams" and "hideous" catch his eye, so he flips
back a few pages and begins to read more carefully.
***
The upshot is that the Nipponese had, since 1940, marched thousands of
tribesmen out of the cool, clean interior of the island to its hot,
pestilential edge, and put them to work. These slaves had enlarged the big
cavern where the Nipponese built their air raid shelter and command post;
improved the road to the top of Eliza Peak, where the radar and direction
finding stations were perched; built another runway at the air field; filled
in more of the harbor; and died by thousands of malaria, scrub typhus,
dysentery, starvation, and overwork. These same tribesmen, or their bereaved
brothers, had then watched, from their redoubts high in the mountains, as
Sean Daniel McGee and his comrades came and stripped the Nipponese of their
armaments and concentrated them all in the airfield, guarded by a few dozen
exhausted GIs who were frequently drunk or asleep. Those tribesmen worked
around the clock, up there in the jungle, making spears, until the next full
moon illuminated the sleeping Nipponese like a searchlight. Then they poured
out of the forest in what Sean Daniel McGee describes as "a horde," "a
plague of wasps," "a howling army," "a black legion unleashed from the gates
of Hell," "a screaming mass," and in other ways he could never get away with
now. They flattened and disarmed the GI's, but did not hurt them. They flung
tree limbs over the barbed wire until the fence had become a highway, and
then swarmed into the airfield with their spears at the ready. McGee's
account goes on for about twenty pages, and, as much as anything else, is
the story of the night that one affable sergeant from South Boston became
permanently unhinged.
"Sir?"
Randy is startled to realize that the taxi's door is open. He looks
around and finds that he's under the awning of the Hotel Foote Mansion. The
door is being held open for him by a wiry young bellhop with a different
look than most of the Kinakutans Randy has encountered so far. This kid
perfectly matches Sean Daniel McGee's description of a tribesman from the
interior.
"Thank you," Randy says, and makes a point of tipping the fellow
generously.
His room is all done up in furniture designed in Scandinavia but
assembled locally from various endangered hardwoods. The view is towards the
interior mountains, but if he goes onto his tiny balcony he can see a bit of
water, a containership being unloaded, and most of the memorial garden built
by the Nipponese on the site of the massacre.
Several messages and faxes await him: mostly the other members of
Epiphyte Corp., notifying him that they have arrived, and letting him know
in which room they can be found. Randy unpacks his bags, takes a shower, and
sends his shirts down to the laundry for tomorrow. Then he makes himself
comfortable at his little table, boots his laptop, and pulls up the Epiphyte
(2) Corporation Business Plan.
Chapter 24 LIZARD
Bobby Shaftoe and his buddies are just out for a nice little morning
drive through the countryside.
In Italy.
Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?
Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It
has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.
In the good old days, back on Guadalcanal, his commanding officer would
say something like "Shaftoe, eradicate that pillbox!" and from there on out,
Bobby Shaftoe was a free agent. He could walk, run, swim or crawl. He could
sneak up and lob in a satchel charge, or he could stand off at a distance
and hose the objective down with a flame thrower. Didn't matter as long as
he accomplished the goal.
The goal of this little mission is completely beyond Shaftoe's
comprehension. They awaken him; Lieutenant Enoch Root; three of the other
Marines, including the radio man; and several of the SAS blokes in the
middle of the night, and hustle them down to one of the few docks in Malta
that hasn't been blasted away by the Luftwaffe. A submarine waits. They
climb aboard and play cards for about twenty four hours. Most of the time
they are on the surface, where submarines can go a hell of a lot faster, but
from time to time they dive, evidently for the best of reasons.
When next they are allowed up on the flat top of the submarine, it is
the middle of the night again. They are in a little cove in a parched,
rugged coastline; Shaftoe can see that much by the moonlight. Two trucks are
waiting for them. They open hatches in the sub's deck and begin to take
stuff out: into one of the trucks, the U.S. Marines load a bunch of cloth
sacks bulging with what appears to be all kinds of trash. Meanwhile, the
British Special Air Service are at work with wrenches, rags, grease and much
profanity in the back of the other truck, assembling something from crates
that they have brought up from another part of the submarine. This is
covered up by a tarp before Shaftoe can get a good look, but he recognizes
it as something you'd rather have pointed away from you.
There are a couple of dark men with mustachioes hanging around the dock
smoking and arguing with the skipper of the submarine. After all of the
stuff is unloaded, the skipper appears to pay them with more crates from the
submarine. The men pry a couple of them open for inspection, and appear to
be satisfied.
At this point Shaftoe still doesn't even know what continent they are
on. When he first saw the landscape he figured Northern Africa. When he saw
the men, he figured Turkey or something.
It is not until the sun comes up on their little convoy, and (lying in
the back of the truck on top of the sacks of trash, peeking out from under
the tarp) he is able to see road signs and Christian churches, that he
realizes it has to be Italy or Spain. Finally he sees a sign pointing the
way to ROMA and figures it's Italy. The sign points away from the midmorning
sun, so they must be somewhere south or southeast of Rome. They are also
south of some burg called Napoli.
But he doesn't spend a lot of time looking. It is not encouraged. The
truck is being driven by some fellow who speaks the language, and who stops
from time to time to converse with the natives. Some of the time this sounds
like friendly banter. Sometimes it sounds like arguments over highway
etiquette. Sometimes it is quieter, more guarded. Shaftoe figures out,
slowly, that during these exchanges the truck driver is bribing someone to
let them go through.
He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle
of the greatest war in history in a country run by belligerent Fascists for
God's sake two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive
around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five dollar tarps.
Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this? He feels like leaping to
his feet, casting the tarp aside, and giving these Eyties a good dressing
down. The whole place needs a good scrubbing with toothbrushes anyway. It's
like these people aren't even trying. Now, the Nips, think of them what you
will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.
He resists the temptation to upbraid the Italians. He thinks it goes
against the orders he had thoroughly memorized before the shock of figuring
out that he was driving around in an Axis country jangled everything loose
from his brain. And if they hadn't come from the lips of Colonel Chattan
himself the chap or bloke who's the commanding officer of Detachment 2702 he
wouldn't have believed them anyway.
They are going to be putting in some bivouac time. They are going to
play a lot of cards for a while. During this time, the radio man is going to
be very busy. This phase of the operation might last as long as a week. At
some point, it is likely that strenuous, concerted efforts to kill them will
be made by a whole lot of Germans and, if they happen to be feeling
impetuous that day, Italians. When this happens, they are to send out a
radio message, torch the joint, drive to a certain field that passes for an
airstrip, and be picked up by those jaunty SAS flyboys.
Shaftoe didn't believe a word of it at first. He pegged it as some kind
of British humor thing, some kind of practical joke/hazing ritual. In
general he doesn't know what to make of the Brits because they appear (in
his personal observation) to be the only other people on the face of the
earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of humor. He has heard rumors
that some Eastern Europeans can do it, but he hasn't met any of them, and
they don't have much to yuk it up about at the moment. In any case, he can
never quite make out when these Brits are joking.
Any thought that this was just a joke evaporated when he saw the
quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an
organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the
military is infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And most of
the weapons they do pass out are for shit. It is for this reason that
Marines have long found it necessary to buy their own tommy guns from home:
the Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won't give them the stuff
they need!
But this Detachment 2702 thing is a whole different outfit. Even the
grunts are carrying trench brooms! And if that didn't get their attention,
the cyanide capsules sure did. And the lecture from Chattan on the correct
way to blow your own head off ("you would be astonished at how many
otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure").
Now, Shaftoe realizes that there is an unspoken codicil to Chattan's
orders: oh, yeah, and if any of the Italians, who actually live in Italy,
and who run the place, and who are Fascists and who are at war with us if
any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan,
whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn't
work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you'll probably do a
neater job of it than the Fascists will. Don't forget suntan lotion!
Actually, Shaftoe doesn't mind this mission. It is certainly no worse
than Guadalcanal. What bothers him (he decides, making himself comfortable
on the sacks of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not
understanding the purpose of it all.
The rest of the platoon may or may not be dead; he thinks he can still
hear some of them crying out, but it's hard to tell between the pounding of
the incoming surf and the relentless patter of the machine gun. Then he
realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue
to fire their gun.
Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies. He
is the only one who has a chance.
It is at this point that Shaftoe makes his Big Decision. It is
surprisingly easy but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.
He crawls along the log to the point that is closest to the machine
gun. Then he draws a few deep breaths in a row, rises to a crouch, and
vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet
shaped muzzle flash of the machine gun tesselated by the black grid of the
net that they put up to reject incoming grenades. It is all remarkably
clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.
Suddenly he realizes they are still firing the gun, not because any of
his buddies are alive, but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that
they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.
Then the muzzle swings abruptly towards him he has been sighted. He is
in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they
will sweep it with fire until he is dead. Bobby Shaftoe plants his feet,
aims his .45 into the cave, and begins pulling the trigger. The barrel of
the machine gun is pointing at him now.
But it does not fire.
His .45 clicks. It's empty. Everything is silent except for the surf,
and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.
The voice that is doing the screaming is unfamiliar. It's not one of
Shaftoe's buddies.
A Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above
the level of Shaftoe's head. The pupil of Shaftoe's right eye, the sights of
his revolver, and this Nip are all arranged briefly along the same line for
a moment, during which Shaftoe pulls the trigger a couple of times and
almost certainly scores a hit.
The Imperial Marine gets caught in the netting and plunges to the
ground in front of him.
A second Nip dives out of the cave a moment later, grunting
incoherently, apparently speechless with horror. He lands wrong and breaks
one of his leg bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He begins running towards
the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on the bad leg. He completely ignores
Shaftoe. There is terrible bleeding from his neck and shoulder, and loose
chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.
Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and
plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.
Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way
and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise
of the jungle.
Then he sees the flash of red again, and it disappears again. It was
shaped like a sharpened Y. It was shaped like the forked tongue of a
reptile.
Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave
and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake and topple
as it moves.
It is out, free and clear, on the beach. It is low to the ground,
moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards
the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty
feet distant.
Sand erupts into the air, like smoke from the burning tires of a drag
racer, and the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance
to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of
the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then the lizard is dragging
the dead Nip back up onto the land. It stretches him out there among the
dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and
finally starts to eat him.
"Sarge! We're here!" says Private Flanagan. Before he even wakes up,
Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking in a normal voice and does
not sound scared or excited. Wherever "here" is, it's not someplace
dangerous. They are not under attack.
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the
open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn
around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he
says.
"What's wrong, Sarge?"
"I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.
***
Their new home turns out to be an old stone farm building in an olive
farm, plantation, orchard or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives
are grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by
would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly
collapsed into the building under the killing weight of its red clay tiles,
and the windows and doorways yawn, open to the elements. It's a big
structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are
able to drive one of the trucks inside and conceal it from airborne snoops.
They unload the sacks of trash from the other truck. Then the Italian guy
drives it away and never comes back.
Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy clambering up olive trees
and stringing copper wires around the place. The blokes of the SAS go out
and reconnoiter while the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash
and start spreading them around. There are several months' worth of Italian
newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly refolded.
Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in pencil.
Chattan's orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe's brain; he heaps
these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest ones first, newer ones
on top.
There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully smoked to
the nub. They are of a Continental brand unfamiliar to Shaftoe. Like a
farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries this sack around the premises tossing
handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where people will
actually work: Corporal Benjamin's table and another makeshift table they
have set up for eating and playing poker. Likewise with a salad of wine
corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one
by one, into a dark and unused corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe can see
that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over,
and flings those bottles like a Green Bay Packer quarterback firing spiral
passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.
The blokes come back from reconnoitering and there is a swappage of
roles; the Marines now go out to familiarize themselves with the territory
while the SAS continue unloading garbage. In an hour's worth of wandering
around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this
olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north south.
To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks
suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after a few miles, down
towards the sea. To the north, the plateau dead ends in some nasty,
impassable scrubland, and to the south it opens up on more farming
territory.
Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as
possible to the barn. Toward sunset, Shaftoe finds it: a rocky outcropping
on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour's walk northeast of the barn and
maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.
He and his Marines almost don't find their way back to the barn because
it has been so well hidden by this point. The SAS have put up blackout
shades over every opening, even the small chinks in the collapsed roof. On
the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space.
With all of the litter (now enhanced with chicken feathers and bones,
tonsorial trimmings and orange peels) it looks like they've been living
there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.
Corporal Benjamin has about a third of the place to himself. The SAS
blokes keep calling him a lucky sod. He has his transmitter set up now, the
tubes glowing warmly, and he has an unbelievable amount of paperwork. Most
of it's old and fake, just like the cigarette butts. But after dinner, when
the sun is down not only here but in London, he begins tapping out the Morse
code.
Shaftoe knows Morse code, like everyone else in the place. As the guys
and the blokes sit around the table, anteing up for what promises to be an
all night Hearts marathon, they keep one ear cocked towards Corporal
Benjamin's keying. What they hear is gibberish. Shaftoe goes and looks over
Benjamin's shoulder at one point, just to verify that he isn't crazy, and
sees he's right:
XYHEL ANAOG GFQPL TWPKI AOEUT
and so on and so forth, for pages and pages.
The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway
with a couple of barrels of genuine U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure
certified Shit. As per Chattan's instructions, they pour the shit in a
dollop at a time, throwing in handfuls of crumpled Italian newspapers after
each dollop to make it look like it got there naturally. With the possible
exception of being interviewed by Lieutenant Reagan, this is the worst
nonviolent job Shaftoe has ever had to do in the service of his country. He
gives everyone the rest of the day off, except for Corporal Benjamin, who
stays up until two in the morning banging out random gibberish.
The next day they make the observation post look good. They take turns
marching up there and back, up and back, up and back, wearing a trail into
the ground, and they scatter some cigarette butts and beverage containers up
there along with some general issue shit and general issue piss. Flanagan
and Kuehl hump a footlocker up there and hide it in the lee of a volcanic
rock. The locker contains books of silhouettes of various Italian and German
naval and merchant ships, and similar spotter's guides for airplanes, as
well as some binoculars, telescopes, and camera equipment, empty notepads,
and pencils.
Even though Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe is for the most part running this
show, he finds it uncannily difficult to arrange a moment alone with
Lieutenant Enoch Root. Root has been avoiding him ever since their eventful
flight on the Dakota. Finally, on about the fifth day, Shaftoe tricks him;
he and a small contingent leave Root alone at the observation point, then
Shaftoe doubles back and traps him there.
Root is startled to see Shaftoe come back, but he doesn't get
particularly upset. He lights up an Italian cigarette and offers Shaftoe
one. Shaftoe finds, irritatingly enough, that he is the nervous one. Root's
as cool as always.
"Okay," Shaftoe says, "what did you see? When you looked through the
papers we planted on the dead butcher what did you see?"
"They were all written in German," Root says.
"Shit!"
"Fortunately," Root continues, "I am somewhat familiar with the
language."
"Oh, yeah your mom was a Kraut, right?"
"Yes, a medical missionary," Root says, "in case that helps dispel any
of your preconceptions about Germans."
"And your Dad was Dutch."
"That is correct."
"And they both ended up on Guadalcanal why?"
"To help those who were in need."
"Oh, yeah."
"I also learned some Italian along the way. There's a lot of it going
around in the Church."
"Fuck me," Shaftoe exclaims.
"But my Italian is heavily informed by the Latin that my father
insisted that I learn. So I would probably sound rather old fashioned to the
locals. In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth century alchemist
or something."
"Could you sound like a priest? They'd eat that up."
"If worse comes to worst," Root allows, "I will try hitting them with
some God talk and we'll see what happens."
They both puff on their cigarettes and look out across the large body
of water before them, which Shaftoe has learned is called the Bay of Naples.
"Well anyway," Shaftoe says, "what did it say on those papers?"
"A lot of detailed information about military convoys between Palermo
and Tunis. Evidently stolen from classified German sources," Root says.
"Old convoys, or..."
"Convoys that were still in the future," Root says calmly. Shaftoe
finishes his cigarette, and does not speak for a while. Finally he says,
"Fuckin' weird." He stands up and begin