s walking back towards the barn.
Chapter 25 THE CASTLE
Just as Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse detrains, some rakehell hits him
full in the face with a turn of brackish ice water. The barrage continues as
he walks a gauntlet of bucket slinging ne'er do wells. But then he realizes
no one's there. This is just an intrinsic quality of the local atmosphere,
like fog in London.
The staircase that leads over the tracks to Utter Maurby Terminal is
enclosed with roof and walls, forming a gigantic organ pipe that resonates
with an infrasonic throb as it is pummeled by wind and water. As he walks
into the lower end of the staircase, the storm is suddenly peeled away from
his face and he is able to stand there for a moment and give this phenom the
full appreciation it deserves.
Wind and water have been whipped into an essentially random froth by
the storm. A microphone held up in the air would register only white noise a
complete absence of information. But when that noise strikes the long tube
of the staircase, it drives a physical resonance that manifests itself in
Waterhouse's brain as a low hum. The physics of the tube extract a coherent
pattern from meaningless noise! If only Alan were here!
Waterhouse experiments by singing the harmonics of this low fundamental
tone: octave, fifth, fourth, major third, and so on. Each one resonates in
the staircase to a greater or lesser degree. It is the same series of notes
made by a brass instrument. By hopping from one note to another, Waterhouse
is able to play some passable bugle calls on the staircase. He does a pretty
decent reveille.
"How lovely!"
He spins around. A woman is standing behind him, lugging a portmanteau
the size of a hay bale. She is perhaps fifty years old, with the physique of
a stove, and she had a nice new big city permanent until a few seconds ago
when she stepped out of the train. Salt water is running down her face and
neck and disappearing beneath her sturdy frock of grey Qwghlm wool.
"Ma'am," Waterhouse says. Then he busies himself with hauling her
portmanteau up to the top of the stairs. This puts the two of them, and all
of their luggage, on a narrow covered bridge that leads across the tracks
and into the terminal building. The bridge has windows in it, and Waterhouse
suffers a nauseating attack of vertigo as he looks through them, and through
the half inch of rain and saltwater that is streaming down them at any given
moment, towards the North Atlantic Ocean. This major body of water is only a
stone's throw away and is trying vigorously to get much closer. This must be
an optical illusion, but the tops of the waves appear to be level with the
plane on which they're standing despite the fact that it's at least twenty
feet off the ground. Each one of those waves must weigh as much as all of
the freight trains in Great Britain combined, and they are rolling towards
them relentlessly, simply hammering the living daylights out of the rocks.
It all makes Waterhouse want to pitch a fit, fall down, and throw up. He
plugs his ears.
"Are you a bandsman, then, I take it?" the lady enquires.
Waterhouse turns to look at her. Her gaze is darting back and forth
around the front of his uniform, checking the insignia. Then she looks up
into his face and gives him a grandmotherly smile.
Waterhouse realizes, in that instant, that this woman is a German spy.
Holy cow!
"Only in peacetime, ma'am," he says. "The Navy has other uses, now, for
men with good ears."
"Oh!" she exclaims, "you listen to things, do you?"
Waterhouse smiles. "Ping! Ping!" he says, mimicking sonar.
"Ah!" she says. "I am Harriett Qrtt." She holds out her hand.
"Hugh Hughes," Waterhouse says, and shakes.
"Pleasure.
"All mine.
"You'll be needing a place to stay, I suppose." She blushes
ostentatiously. "Forgive me. I just assume you are bound for Outer." That's
Outer, as in Outer Qwghlm. Right now, they are on Inner Qwghlm.
"Quite right, actually," Waterhouse says.
Like every other place name in the British Isles, Inner and Outer
Qwghlm represent a gross misnomer with ancient and probably comical origins.
Inner Qwghlm is hardly even an island; it is joined to the main land by a
sandbar that used to come and go with the tides, but that has been beefed up
with a causeway that carries a road and the railway line. Outer Qwghlm is
twenty miles away.
"My husband and I operate a small bed and breakfast," Mrs. Qrtt says.
"We should be honored to have an Asdic man stay with us." Asdic is simply
the British acronym for what Yanks refer to as sonar, but every time the
word is mentioned in the presence of Alan, he gets a naughty look on his
face and goes on an unstoppable punning tear.
So he ends up at the Qrtt residence. Waterhouse and Mr. and Mrs. Qrtt
spend the evening huddled round the only source of heat: a coal burning
toaster that has been bricked into the socket of an old fireplace. Every so
often Mr. Qrtt opens the door and pelts the ashes with a mote of coal. Mrs.
Qrtt ferries out the chow and spies on Waterhouse. She notices his slightly
asymmetrical walk and manages to ferret out that he had a spot of polio at
one point. He plays the organ they have a pedal powered harmonium in the
parlor and she remarks on that.
***
Waterhouse first sees Outer Qwghlm through a scupper. He doesn't even
know what a scupper is, except a modality of vomiting. The ferry crew gave
him and the other half dozen passengers detailed vomiting instructions
before they fought past the Utter Maurby breakwater, the salient point being
that if you leaned over the rail, you would almost certainly be swept
overboard. Much better to get down on all fours and aim at a scupper. But
half the time when Waterhouse peers down one of these, he sees not water but
some distant point on the horizon, or seagulls chasing the ferry, or the
distinctive three pronged silhouette of Outer Qwghlm.
The prongs, called Sghrs, are basaltic columns. This being the middle
of the Second World War, and Outer Qwghlm being the part of the British
Isles closest to the action of the Battle of the Atlantic, they are now
flecked with little white radio shacks and hairy with antennas. There is a
fourth sghr, much lower than the others and easily mistaken for a mere
hillock, that rises above Outer Qwghlm's only harbor (and, indeed, only
settlement, not counting the naval base on the other side). On top of this
fourth sghr is the castle that is the nominal home of Nigel St. John
Gloamthorpby Woadmire and that is to be the new headquarters of Detachment
2702.
Five minutes' walk encompasses the whole town. A furious rooster chases
a feeble sheep down the main street. There is snow at the higher elevations,
but just grey slush down here, which is indistinguishable from the grey
cobblestones until you step on it and fall down on your ass. The
Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana had made much use of the definite article the Town,
the Castle, the Hotel, the Pub, the Pier. Waterhouse stops in at the
Shithouse to deal with some aftershocks of the sea voyage, and then walks up
the Street. The Automobile pulls up alongside and offers him a ride; it
turns out to be the Taxi, too. It takes him round the Park where he notices
the Statue (ancient Qwghlmians thrashing hapless Vikings); this gesture that
does not go unnoted by the Taxi Driver, who veers into the Park to give him
a better look.
The Statue is the sort that has a great deal to say and covers a
correspondingly large expanse of real estate. Its pedestal is a slab of
native basalt, covered on at least one side with what Waterhouse recognizes,
from the Encyclopedia, as Qwghlmian runes. To an ignorant philistine, these
might look like an endless, random series of sans serif Xs, Is, Vs, hyphens,
asterisks, and upside down Vs. But it is an enduring source of pride to
"We didn't care for those Romans and that Julius Caesar fellow,"
observes the taxi driver, "and we weren't too taken with their alphabet
either."
Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana features a lengthy article about the
local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his
shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read. The Qwghlmian
practice of eschewing the use of curves and loops, forming all glyphs out of
straight lines, far from being crude as some English scholars have asserted
gives the script a limpid austerity. It is an admirably functional style of
writing in a place where (after all the trees were cut down by the English)
most of the literate intellectual class suffered from chronic bilateral
frostbite.
Waterhouse has rolled down the window so that he can get a clearer
view; apparently someone has lost the Squeegee. The chill breeze washing
over his face finally begins to clear away his seasickness, to the point
where he begins to wonder how he should go about making contact with the
Whore.
Then he realizes, with some disappointment, that if the Whore has half
a brain in her head, she's across the island at the naval base.
"Who's the wretch?" Waterhouse asks. He points to a corner of the
statue, where a scrawny, downtrodden loser, with an iron collar welded
around his neck and a chain dangling from that, quivers and quails at the
carnage being meted out by the strapping Qwghlmian he men. Waterhouse
already knows the answer, but he can't resist asking.
"Hakh!" blurts the taxi driver, as if he is working up a loogie. "He is
from Inner Qwghlm, I can only suppose."
"Of course."
This exchange seems to have put the driver into a foul and vengeful
mood that can only be assuaged with some fast driving. There are a dozen or
more switchbacks in the road up to the Castle, each one glazed with black
ice and fraught with mortal danger. Waterhouse is glad he's not walking it,
but the switchbacks and the skating motion of the taxi revive his motion
sickness.
"Hakh!" the driver says, when they are about three quarters of the way
up, and nothing has been said for several minutes. "They practically laid
out the welcome mat for the Romans. They spread their legs for the Vikings.
There are probably Germans over there now!"
"Speaking of bile," Waterhouse says, "I need you to pull over. I'll
walk from here."
The driver is startled and miffed, but he relents when Waterhouse
explains that the alternative is a lengthy cleanup job. He even drives
Duffel up to the top of the sghr and drops it off.
Detachment 2702 arrives at the Castle some fifteen minutes later in the
person of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse USN, who is serving as the advance
party. The walk gives him time to get his story straight, to get himself
into character. Chattan has warned him that there will be servants, and that
they will notice things, and that they will gossip. It would be much more
convenient if the servants could simply be packed off to the mainland for
the duration, but this would be a discourtesy to the duke. "You will,"
Chattan said, "have to work out a modus vivendi." Once Waterhouse had looked
this term up, he agreed heartily.
The castle is a mound of rubble about the size of the Pentagon. The lee
corner has been fitted out with a functional roof, electrical wiring, and a
few other frills such as doors and windows. In this area, which is all
Waterhouse gets to see for that first afternoon and evening, you can forget
you are on Outer Qwghlm and pretend that you are in some greener and balmier
place such as the Scottish Highlands.
The next morning, accompanied by the butler, Ghnxh, he strikes out into
other parts of the building and is delighted to find that you can't even
reach them without going outside; the internal connecting passages have been
mortared shut to stanch the seasonal migrations of skrrghs (pronounced
something like "skerries"), the frisky, bright eyed, long tailed mammals
that are the mascot of the islands. This compartmentalization, while
inconvenient, will be good for security.
Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine
Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries the GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick
Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can
only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S. Navy flashlight. In the
sotto voce tones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he
explains that the galvanick lucipher is of such a superior design as to make
any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone
concerned. He leads Waterhouse back to a special room behind the room behind
the room behind the room behind the pantry, a room that exists solely for
maintenance of the galvanick lucipher and the storage of its parts and
supplies. The heart of the device is a hand blown spherical glass jar
comparable in volume to a gallon jug. Ghnxh, who suffers from a pretty
advanced case of either hypothermia or Parkinson's, maneuvers a glass funnel
into the neck of the jar. Then he wrestles a glass carboy from a shelf. The
carboy, labeled AQUA REGIA, is filled with a fulminant orange liquid. He
removes its glass stopper, hugs it, and heaves it over so that the orange
fluid begins to glug out into the funnel and thence into the jar. Where it
splashes out onto the tabletop, something very much like smoke curls up as
it eats holes just like the thousands of other holes already there. The
fumes get into Waterhouse's lungs; they are astoundingly corrosive. He
staggers out of the room for a while.
When he ventures back, he finds Ghnxh whittling an electrode from an
ingot of pure carbon. The jar of aqua regia has been capped off now, and a
variety of anodes, cathodes, and other working substances are suspended in
it, held in place by clamps of hammered gold. Thick wires, in insulating
sheathes of hand knit asbestos, twist out of the jar and into the business
end of the galvanick lucipher: a copper salad bowl whose mouth is closed off
by a Fresnel lens like the ones on a lighthouse. When Ghnxh gets his carbon
whittled to just the right size and shape, he fits it into a little hatch in
the side of this bowl, and casually throws a Frankensteinian blade switch. A
spark pops across the contacts like a firecracker.
For a moment, Waterhouse thinks that one wall of the building has
collapsed, exposing them to the direct light of the sun. But Ghnxh has
simply turned on the galvanick lucipher, which soon becomes about ten times
brighter, as Ghnxh adjusts a bronze thumbscrew. Crushed with shame,
Waterhouse puts his Navy flashlight back into its prissy little belt
holster, and precedes Ghnxh out of the room, the galvanick lucipher casting
palpable warmth on the back of his neck. "We've got about two hours before
she goes dead on us," Ghnxh says significantly.
They work out a modus vivendi, all right: Waterhouse kicks an old door
open and then Ghnxh strides into the room that is on the other side and
sweeps the beam of the lantern around as if it were a flame thrower, driving
back dozens or hundreds of squealing skerries. Waterhouse clambers
cautiously into the room, typically making his way over the collapsed
remnants of whatever roof or story used to be overhead. He gives the place a
quick inspection, trying to gauge how much effort would be required to make
it liveable for any more advanced organism.
Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a
combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in
bed. The Barbary corsairs did the best job of it (probably just trying to
stay warm), or maybe it's just that the elements have had longer to
decompose what little was left behind by the flames. In any case, in that
section of the castle, Waterhouse finds a place where there's not too much
rubble to shovel out, and where they can quickly enclose an adequate space
with a combination of tarps and planks. It is diametrically opposed to the
part of the castle that is still inhabited, which exposes it to winter
storms but protects it from the prying eyes of the staff. Waterhouse paces
off some rough measurements, then goes to his room, leaving Ghnxh to see to
the decommissioning of the galvanick lucipher.
Waterhouse sketches out some plans for the upcoming work, at long last
putting his hitherto misspent engineering skills to some use. He draws up a
bill of required materials, naturally involving a good many numbers:
100 8' 2 x 4s is a typical entry. He writes out the list a second time,
in words not numbers: ONE HUNDRED EIGHT FOOT TWO BY FOURS. This wording is
potentially confusing, so he changes it to TWO BY FOUR BOARDS ONE HUNDRED
COUNT LENGTH EIGHT FEET.
Next he pulls a sheet of what looks like ledger paper, divided
vertically into groups of five columns. Into these columns he transcribes
the message, ignoring spaces:
TWOBY FOURB OARDS ONEHU NDRED
COUNT LENGT HEIGH TFEET
and so on. Wherever he encounters a letter J he writes I in its stead,
so that JOIST comes out as IOIST. He only uses every third line of the page.
Ever since he left Bletchley Park, he has been carrying several sheets
of onionskin paper around in his breast pocket; when he sleeps, he puts them
under his pillow. Now he takes them out and selects one page, which has a
serial number typed across the top and is otherwise covered with neatly
typed letters like this:
ATHOP COGNQ DLTUI CAPRH MULEP
and so on, all the way down to the bottom of the page.
These sheets were typed up by a Mrs. Tenney, an aged vicar's wife who
works at Bletchley Park. Mrs. Tenney has a peculiar job which consists of
the following: she takes two sheets of onionskin paper and puts a sheet of
carbon paper between them and rolls them into a typewriter. She types a
serial number at the top. Then she turns the crank on a device used in bingo
parlors, consisting of a spherical cage containing twenty five wooden balls,
each with a letter printed on it (the letter J is not used). After spinning
the cage the exact number of times specified in the procedure manual, she
closes her eyes, reaches through a hatch in the cage, and removes a ball at
random. She reads the letter off the ball and types it, then replaces the
ball, closes the hatch, and repeats the process. From time to time, serious
looking men come into the room, exchange pleasantries with her, and take
away the sheets that she has produced. These sheets end up in the possession
of men like Waterhouse, and men in infinitely more desperate and dangerous
circumstances, all over the world. They are called one time pads.
He copies the letters from the one time pad into the empty lines
beneath his message:
TWOBY FOURB OARDS ONEHU NDRED ATHOP COGNQ DLTUI CAPRH MULEP
When he is finished, two out of every three lines are occupied.
Finally, he returns to the top of the page one last time and begins to
consider the letters two at a time. The first letter in the message is T.
The first letter from the one time pad, directly below it in the same
column, is A.
A is the first letter in the alphabet and so Waterhouse, who has been
doing this cipher stuff for much too long, thinks of it as being synonymous
with the number 1. In the same way, T is equivalent to 19 if you are working
in a J less alphabet. Add 1 to 19 and you get 20, which is the letter U. So,
in the first column beneath T and A, Waterhouse writes a U.
The next vertical pair is W and T, or 22 and 19, which in normal
arithmetic add up to 41, which has no letter equivalent; it's too large. But
it has been many years since Waterhouse did normal arithmetic. He has
retrained his mind to work in modular arithmetic specifically, modulo 25,
which means that you divide everything by 25 and consider only the
remainder. 41 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 16. Throw away the 1
and the 16 translates into the letter Q, which is what Waterhouse writes in
the second column. In the third column, O and H give 14 + 8 = 22 which is W.
In the fourth, B and O give 2 + 14 = 16 which is Q. And in the fifth, Y and
P give 24 + 15 which is 39. 39 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 14.
Or, as Waterhouse would phrase it, 39 modulo 25 equals 14. The letter for 14
is O. So the first code group looks like
T W O B Y
A T H O P
U Q W Q O
By adding the random sequence ATHOP onto the meaningful sequence TWOBY,
Waterhouse has produced undecipherable gibberish. When he has enciphered the
entire message in this way, he takes out a new page and copies out only the
ciphertext UQWQO and so on.
The duke has a cast iron telephone which he has put at Waterhouse's
disposal. Waterhouse heaves it out of its cradle, rings the operator, places
a call across the island to the naval station, and gets through to a radio
man. He reads the ciphertext message to him letter by letter. The radio man
copies it down and informs Waterhouse that it will be transmitted forthwith.
Very soon, Colonel Chattan, down in Bletchley Park, will receive a
message that begins with UQWQO and goes on in that vein. Chattan possesses
the other copy of Mrs. Tenney's one time pad. He will write out the
ciphertext first, using every third line. Beneath the ciphertext he will
copy in the text from the one time pad:
U Q W Q O
A T H O P
He will then perform a subtraction where Waterhouse performed an
addition. U minus A means 20 minus 1 which equals 19 which gives the letter
T. Q minus T means 16 minus 19 which equals 3, giving us 22 which is W. And
so on. Having deciphered the whole message, he'll get to work, and
eventually two by fours one hundred count will show up at the Pier.
Chapter 26 WHY
Epiphyte Corp.'s business plan is about an inch thick, neither fat nor
skinny as these things go. The interior pages are slickly and groovily
desktop published out of Avi's laptop. The covers are rugged hand laid paper
of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free range hemp, and crystalline glacial
meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist shrouded temple
hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically
gifted, Spandex sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of
the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly
reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn
mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind
stylite monks from hand charred fragments of the True Cross.
The actual content of the business plan hews to a logical structure
straight out of the Principia Mathematica. Lesser entrepreneurs purchase
business plan writing software: packages of boilerplate text and spread
sheets, craftily linked together so that you need only go through and fill
in a few blanks. Avi and Beryl have written enough business plans between
the two of them that they can smash them out from brute memory. Avi's
business plans tend to go something like this:
MISSION: At [name of company] it is our conviction that [to do the
stuff we want to do] and to increase shareholder value are not merely
complementary activities they are inextricably linked.
PURPOSE: To increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]
EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed on a separate page, in red letters
on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich
Gauss, savvy as a half blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William
Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a
Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average
nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near
this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high level
radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your
arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is
necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky
put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly up and only
returned her ninety nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on
our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril you are dead
certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades
beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's
get down to business.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We will raise [some money], then [do some stuff] and
increase shareholder value. Want details? Read on.
INTRODUCTION: [This trend], which everyone knows about, and [that
trend], which is so incredibly arcane that you probably didn't know about it
until just now, and [this other trend over here] which might seem, at first
blush, to be completely unrelated, when all taken together, lead us to the
(proprietary, secret, heavily patented, trademarked, and NDAed) insight that
we could increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]. We will need $ [a
large number] and after [not too long] we will be able to realize an
increase in value to $ [an even larger number], unless [hell freezes over in
midsummer].
DETAILS:
Phase 1: After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and forgoing all
of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz, appended resumes)
will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the
central Gobi Desert, where real estate is so cheap that we are actually
being paid to occupy it, thereby enhancing shareholder value even before we
have actually done anything. On a daily ration consisting of a handful of
uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].
Phase 2, 3, 4, . . . , n 1: We will [do more stuff, steadily enhancing
shareholder value in the process] unless [the earth is struck by an asteroid
a thousand miles in diameter, in which case certain assumptions will have to
be readjusted; refer to Spreadsheets 397 413].
Phase n: before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry, we will
confiscate the property of our competitors, including anyone foolish enough
to have invested in their pathetic companies. We will sell all of these
people into slavery. All proceeds will be redistributed among our
shareholders, who will hardly notice, since Spreadsheet 265 demonstrates
that, by this time, the company will be larger than the British Empire at
its zenith.
SPREADSHEETS: [Pages and pages of numbers in tiny print, conveniently
summarized by graphs that all seem to be exponential curves screaming
heavenward, albeit with enough pseudo random noise in them to lend
plausibility].
RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of The Magnificent Seven and you
won't have to bother with this part; you should crawl to us on hands and
knees and beg us for the privilege of paying our salaries.
***
To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master
calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living
document. Its spreadsheets are palimpsests, linked to the company's bank
accounts and financial records so that they automatically adjust whenever
money flows in or out. Beryl handles that stuff. Avi handles the words the
underlying, abstract plan, and the concrete details, that inform those
spreadsheets interpreting the numbers. Avi's part of the plan mutates too,
from week to week, as he gets new input from articles in the Asian Wall
Street Journal, conversations with government officials in flyblown Shenzhen
karaoke bars, remote sensing data pouring in from satellites, and obscure
technical journals analyzing the latest advances in optical fiber
technology. Avi's brain also digests the ideas of Randy and the other
members of the group and incorporates them into the plan. Every quarter,
they take a snapshot of the business plan in its current state, trowel some
Maybelline onto it, and ship out new copies to investors.
Plan Number Five is about to be mailed simultaneous with the company's
first anniversary. An early draft had been sent to each of them a couple of
weeks ago in an encrypted e mail message, which Randy hadn't bothered to
read, assuming he knew its contents. But little cues that he's picked up in
the last few days tell him that he'd better find out what the damn thing
actually says.
He fires up his laptop, plugs it into a telephone jack, opens up his
communications software, and dials a number in California. This last turns
out to be easy, because this is a modern hotel and Kinakuta has a modern
phone system. If it hadn't been easy, it probably would have been
impossible.
In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot plastic scented wiring
closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems
Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel
agent in the most banal imaginable disco era office building in Los Altos,
California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise
eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a
filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of
the same stuff, you'd be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the
information reaches Randy's computer, which spews noise back. The modem in
Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the
same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand,
which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They
turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting
electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum
Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company's closet)
borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest
upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the
keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be
fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off white obelisk with
no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark
landscape of empty pizza boxes.
But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet.
Randy's computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a
Point to Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy's little laptop
is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely
computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general
direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.
Tombstone, or tombstone.epiphyte.com as it is known to the Internet,
has an inglorious existence as a mail drop and a cache for files. It does
nothing that a thousand online services couldn't do for them more easily and
cheaply. But Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific
conceivable worst case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine,
and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time
to verify that there were no security holes. In every book store window in
the Bay Area, piled in heaps, were thousands of copies of three different
books about how a famous cracker had established total control over a couple
of well known online services. Consequently, Epiphyte Corp. could not
possibly use such an online service for its secret files while with a
straight face saying that it was exerting due diligence on its shareholders'
behalf. Thus tombstone.epiphyte.com.
Randy logs on and checks his mail: forty seven messages, including one
that came two days ago from Avi (avi@epiphyte.com) that is labeled:
epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo. Epiphyte Business Plan, 5th edition, 4th
draft, in a file format that can only be read by [Novus] Ordo [Seclorum],
which is wholly owned by the company of the same name, but whose hard parts
were written, as it happens, by John Cantrell.
He tells the computer to begin downloading that file it's going to take
a while. In the meantime, he scrolls through the list of other messages,
checking the names of their senders, subject headings, and sizes, trying to
figure out, first of all, how many of these can simply be thrown away
unread.
Two messages jump out because they are from an address that ends with
aol.com, the cyberspace neighborhood of parents and children but never of
students, hackers, or people who actually work in high tech. Both of these
are from Randy's lawyer, who is trying to get Randy's financial affairs
disentangled from Charlene's with as little rancor as possible. Randy feels
his blood pressure spiking, millions of capillaries in the brain bulging
ominously. But they are very short files, and the subject headings seem
innocuous, so he calms down and decides not to worry about them now.
Five messages originate from computers with extremely familiar names
systems that are part of the campus computer network he used to run. The
messages come from system administrators who took over the reins when Randy
left, guys who long ago asked him all the easy questions, such as What's the
best place to order pizza? and Where did you hide the staples? and have now
gotten to the point of e mailing him chunks of arcane code that he wrote
years ago with questions like, Was this an error, or something incredibly
clever I haven't figured out yet? Randy declines to answer those messages
just now.
There are about a dozen messages from friends, some of them just
passing along Net humor that he's already seen a hundred times. Another
dozen from other members of Epiphyte Corp., mostly concerning the details of
their itineraries as they all converge on Kinakuta for tomorrow's meeting.
That leaves a dozen or so other messages which belong in a special
category that did not exist until a week ago, when a new issue of TURING
Magazine came out, containing an article about the Kinakuta data haven
project, and a cover photo of Randy on a boat in the Philippines. Avi had
gone to some lengths to plant this article so that he would have something
to wave in the faces of the other participants in tomorrow's meeting. TURING
is such a visual magazine that it cannot be viewed without the protection of
welding goggles, and so they insisted on a picture. A photographer was
dispatched to the Crypt, which was found visually wanting. A tizzy ensued.
The photographer was diverted to Manila Bay where he captured Randy standing
on a boat deck next to a big reel of orange cable, a volcano rising from the
smog in the back ground. The magazine won't even be on newsstands for
another month, but the article is on the Web as of a week ago, where it
instantly became a subject of discussion on the Secret Admirers mailing
list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to
discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo random number
generators. Because Randy happened to be in the picture, they have
mistakenly fastened upon him as being more of a prime mover than he really
is. This has spawned a new category of messages in Randy's mailbox:
unsolicited advice and criticism from crypto freaks worldwide. At the moment
there are fourteen such messages in his in box, eight of them from a person,
or persons, identifying himself, or themselves, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
It would be tempting to ignore these, but the problem is that a solid
majority of people on the Secret Admirers mailing list are about ten times
as smart as Randy. You can check the list anytime you want and find a
mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics
professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane
detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen year old, tube fed math
prodigy in Cambridge jumps in every few days with an even more stupefying
explanation of why they are both wrong.
So when people like this send him mail, Randy tries to at least skim
it. He is a little leery of the ones who identify themselves as Admiral
Isoroku Yamamoto, or with the number 56 (which is a code meaning Yamamoto).
But just because they are political verging on flaky doesn't mean they don't
know their math.
To: randy@tombstone.epiphyte.com
From: 56@laundry.org
Subject: data haven
Do you have public key somewhere posted? I would like to exchange mail
with you but I don't want Paul Comstock to read it:) My public key if you
care to respond is
– BEGIN ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK – (lines and lines of
gibberish)
– END ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK
Your concept of data haven is good but has important limits. What if
Philippine government shuts down your cable? Or if the good Sultan changes
his mind, decides to nationalize your computers, read all the disks? What is
needed is not ONE data haven but a NETWORK of data havens more robust, just
like Internet is more robust than single machine.
Signed,
The Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto who signs his messages thus:
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (lines and lines of
gibberish)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
Randy closes that one without responding. Avi doesn't want them talking
to Secret Admirers for fear that they will later be accused of stealing
someone's ideas, so the reply to all of these e mails is a form letter that
Avi paid some intellectual property lawyer about ten thousand dollars to
draft.
He reads another message simply because of the return address:
From: root@pallas.eruditorum.org
On a UNIX machine, "root" is the name of the most godlike of all users,
the one who can read, erase, or edit any file, who can run any program, who
can sign up new users and terminate existing ones. So receiving a message
from someone who has the account name "root" is like getting a letter from
someone who has the title "President" or "General" on his letterhead.
Randy's been root on a few different systems, some of which were worth tens
of millions of dollars, and professional courtesy demands he at least read
this message.
I read about your project.
Why are you doing it?
followed by an Ordo signature block.
One has to assume this is an attempt to launch some sort of
philosophical debate. Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a
sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be or to be
indistinguishable from self righteous sixteen year olds possessing infinite
amounts of free time. And yet the "root" address either means that this
person is in charge of a large computer installation, or (much more likely)
has a Finux box on his desk at home. Even a home Finux user has got to be
several cuts above your average Internet surfing dilettante. Randy opens up
a terminal window and types
whois eruditorum.org
and a second later gets back a block of text from the InterNIC:
eruditorum.org (Societas Eruditorum)
followed by a mailing address: a P.O. Box in Leipzig, Germany.
After that a few contact numbers are listed. All of them have the
Seattle area code. But the three digit exchanges, after the area code, look
familiar to Randy, and he recognizes them as gateways into a forwarding
service, popular among the highly mobile, that will bounce your voice mail,
faxes, etc. to wherever you happen to be at the moment. Avi, for example,
uses it all the time.
Scrolling down, Randy finds:
Record last updated on 18 Nov 98.
Record created on 1 Mar 90.
The "90" jumps out. That's a prehistoric date by Internet standards. It
means that Societas Eruditorum was way ahead of the game. Especially for a
group based in Leipzig, which was part of East Germany until about then.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS.SF.LAUNDRY.ORG
followed by the dotted quad for laundry.org, which is a packet
anonymizer used by many Secret Admirers to render their communications
untraceable.
It all adds up to nothing, yet Randy can't get away with assuming that
this message came from a bored sixteen year old. He should probably make
some token response. But he's afraid that it'll turn out to be a come on for
some kind of business proposition: probably some mangy high tech company
that's looking for capital.
In the latest version of the business plan, there is probably some
explanation of why Epiphyte(2) is building the Crypt. Randy can simply cut
and paste it into an e mail reply to root@pallas.eruditorum.org. It'll be
something vaporous and shareholder pleasing, and therefore kind of
alienating. With any luck it will discourage this person from pestering him
anymore. Randy double clicks on Ordo's eyeball/pyramid icon, and it opens up
a little text window on the screen, where he is invited to type commands.
Ordo's also got a lovely graphical user interface, but Randy scorns it. No
menus or buttons for him. He types
>decrypt epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo
The computer responds
verify your identity: enter the pass phrase or 'bio' to opt for
biometric verification.
Before Ordo will decrypt the file, it needs to have the private key:
all 4096 bits of it. The key is stored on Randy's hard disk. But bad guys
can break into hotel rooms and read the contents of hard disks, so the key
itself has been encrypted. In order to decrypt it, Ordo needs the key to the
key, which (in Cantrell's one concession to user friendliness) is a pass
phrase: a string of words, easier to remember than 4096 binary digits. But
it has to be a long phrase or else it's too easy to break.
The last time Randy changed his pass phrase, he was reading another
World War II memoir. He types:
>with hoarse shouts of "banzai!" the drunken Nips swarmed out of
their trenches, their swords and bayonets flashing in the beams of our
searchlights
and hits the "return" key. Ordo responds:
incorrect pass phrase
reenter the pass phrase or "bio" to use biometric verification.
Randy curses and tries it a few more times, with slight changes in
punctuation. Nothing works.
In desperation and out of curiosity, he tries:
bio
and the software responds:
unable to locate biometric configuration file. Talk to Cantrell : /
Which is of course not a normal part of the software. Ordo does not
come with biometric verification, nor do its error messages refer to John
Cantrell, or anyone else, by name. Cantrell has apparently written a plug in
module, a little add on, and distributed it to his friends in Epiphyte(2).
"Fine," Randy says, picks up his phone, and dials John Cantrell's room
number. This being a brand new, modern hotel, he gets a voice mail box in
which John has actually bothered to record an informative greeting.
"This is John Cantrell of Novus Ordo Seclorum and Epiphyte
Corporations. For those of you who have reached me using my universal phone
number and consequently have no idea where I am: I am in the Hotel Foote
Mansion in the Sultanate of Kinakuta please consult a quality atlas. It is
four o'clock in the afternoon, Thursday March twenty first. I'm probably
down in the Bomb and Grapnel."
***
The Bomb and Grapnel is the pirate themed hotel bar, which is not as
cheesy as it sounds. It is decorated with (among other museum grade
memorabilia) several brass cannons that seem authentic. John Cantrell is
seated at a corner table, looking as at home here as a man in a black cowboy
hat possibly can. His laptop is open on the table next to a rum drink that
has been served up in a soup tureen. A two foot long straw connects it to
Cantrell's mouth. He sucks and types. Watching incredulously is a cadre of
tough looking Chinese businessmen sitting at the bar; when they see Randy
coming in, carrying his own laptop, they buzz up. Now there's two of them!
Cantrell looks up and grins something he cannot do without looking
fiendish. He and Randy shake hands triumphantly. Even though they've only
been riding around on 747s, they feel like Stanley and Livingstone.
"Nice tan," Cantrell says puckishly, all but twirling his mustache.
Randy's caught off guard, starts and stops talking twice, finally shakes his
head in defeat. Both men laugh.
"I got the tan on boats," Randy says, "not by the hotel pool. The last
couple of weeks, I've been putting out fires all over the place."
"Nothing that'll impact shareholder value, I hope," Cantrell deadpans.
Randy says, "You're looking encouragingly pale."
"Everything's fine on my end," Cantrell says. "It's like I predicted
lots of Secret Admirers want to work on a real data haven."
Randy orders a Guinness and says, "You also predicted that a lot of
those people would turn out to be squirrelly and undisciplined."
"Didn't hire those," Cantrell says. "And with Eb to handle the weird
stuff, we've been able to roll right over the few speed bumps we've
encountered."
"Have you seen the Crypt?"
Cantrell raises an eyebrow and shoots him a flawless imitation of a
paranoid glance. "It's like that NORAD command bunker in Colorado Springs,"
he says.
"Yeah!" Randy laughs. "Cheyenne Mountain."
"It's too big," Cantrell announces. He knows Randy is thinking the same
thing.
So Randy decides to play devil's advocate. "But the sultan does
everything big. There are big paintings of him in the big airport."
Cantrell shakes his head. "The Information Ministry is a serious
project. The sultan didn't just make it up. His technocrats conceived it."
"I'm told Avi did a little bit of deft turkey baster work ..."
"Whatever. But the people behind it, like Mohammed Pragasu, are all
Stanford B School types. Oxford and Sorbonne graduates. It's been engineered
to the doorstops by Germans. That cave is not a monument to the sultan."
"No, it's not a vanity project," Randy agrees, thinking of the chilly
machine room that Tom Howard is building a thousand feet below the cloud
forest.
"So there must be some rational explanation for how big it is."
"Maybe it's in the business plan?" ventures Randy.
Cantrell shrugs; he hasn't read it either. "The last one I read cover
to cover was Plan One. A year ago," admits Randy.
"That was a good business plan," Cantrell says. (1)
Randy changes the subject. "I forgot my pass phrase. Need to do that
biometric thing with you."
"It's too noisy here," Cantrell says, "it works by listening to your
voice, doing Fourier shit, remembering a few key numbers. We'll do it in my
room later."
Feeling some need to explain why he hasn't been keeping up with his e
mail, Randy says, "I have been totally obsessed, interfacing with these
AVCLA people in Manila."
"Yup. How's that going?"
"Look. My job's pretty simple," Randy says. "There's that big Nipponese
cable from Taiwan down to Luzon. A router at each end. Then there's the
network of short run, interisland cables that the AVCLA people are laying in
the Philippines. Each cable segment begins and ends at a router, as you
know. My job is to program the routers, make sure the data will always have
a clear path from Taiwan to Kinakuta."
Cantrell glances away, worried that he's about to get bored. Randy
practically lunges across the table, because he knows it's not boring.
"John! You are a major credit card company!"
"Okay." Cantrell meets his gaze, slightly unnerved.
"You are storing your data in the Kinakuta data haven. You need to
download a terabyte of crucial data. You begin the process your encrypted
bytes are screaming up through the Philippines at a gigabyte per second, to
Taiwan, from there across to the States." Randy pauses and swigs Guinness,
building the drama. "Then a ferry capsizes off Cebu."
"So?"
"So, in the space of ten minutes, a hundred thousand Filipinos all pick
up their telephones simultaneously."
Cantrell actually whacks his forehead. "Oh, my god!"
"Now you understand! I've been configuring this network so that no
matter what happens, the data continues to flow to that credit card company.
Maybe at a reduced speed but it flows."
"Well, I can see how that would keep you busy."
"And that's why all I'm really up to speed on is these routers. And
incidentally they're good routers, but they just don't have enough capacity
to feed a Crypt of that size, or justify it economically."
"The gist of Avi and Beryl's explanation," Cantrell says, "is that
Epiphyte is no longer the sole carrier into the Crypt."
"But we're laying the cable here from Palawan "
"The sultan's minions have been out drumming up business," Cantrell
says. "Avi and Beryl are being vague, but from comparing notes with Tom, and
reading tea leaves, methinks there's one, maybe two other cables coming into
Kinakuta."
"Wow!" Randy says. It's all he can think of. "Wow!" He drinks about
half of his Guinness. "It makes sense. If they're doing it once with us,
they can do it again, with other carriers.
"They used us as leverage to bring in others," Cantrell says.
"Well . . . the question is, then, is the cable through the Philippines
still needed? Or wanted?"
"Yup," Cantrell says.
"It is?"
"No. I mean, yup, that's the question, all right."
Randy considers it. "Actually, this could be good news for your phase
of the operation. More pipes into the Crypt means more business in the long
run.
Cantrell raises his eyebrows, a little worried about Randy's feelings.
Randy leans back in his chair and says, "We've had debates before about
whether it makes sense for Epiphyte to be screwing around with cables and
routers in the Philippines."
Cantrell says, "The business plan has always maintained that it would
make economic sense to be running a cable through the Philippines even if
there weren't a Crypt at the end of it."
"The business plan has to say the Intra Philippines network could be
spun off as an independent business, and still survive," Randy says, "to
justify our doing it."
Neither one of them needs to say any more. They've been concentrating
on each other pretty intensely for a while, shutting out the rest of the bar
with their postures, and now, spontaneously, both of them lean back,
stretch, and begin looking around. The timing's fortuitous, because Goto
Furudenendu has just come in with a posse of what Randy guesses are civil
engineers: healthy looking, clean cut Nipponese men in their thirties. Randy
invites him over with a smile, then flags down their waiter and orders a few
of those great big bottles of bitterly cold Nipponese beer.
"This reminds me the Secret Admirers are really on my case," Randy
says.
Cantrell grins, showing some affection for those crazy Secret Admirers.
"Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology," he says,
"but they don't always understand business."
"Maybe they understand it too well," Randy says. He is left with some
residual annoyance that he came down to the Bomb and Grapnel party in order
to answer the question posed by root@eruditorum.org ("Why are you doing
it?") and he still doesn't know. As a matter of fact, he knows less now than
he did before.
Then the men from Goto join them, and it just happens that Eberhard
Föhr and Tom Howard show up at just the same time. There is a combinatorial
explosion of name card exchanges and introductions. It seems like protocol
demands a lot of serious social drinking now Randy's inadvertently
challenged these guys' politeness by ordering them beer, and they have to
demonstrate that they will not be bested in any such contest. Tables get
pushed together and everything gets just unbelievably jovial. Eb has to
order some beer for everyone too. Pretty soon things have degenerated into
karaoke. Randy gets up and sings "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo." It's a
good choice because it's a mellow, laid back song that doesn't demand lots
of emoting. Or singing ability, for that matter.
At some point Tom Howard puts his beefy arm up on the back of
Cantrell's chair, the better to shout into his ear. Their matched Eutropian
bracelets, engraved with "Hello Doctor, please freeze me as follows"
messages, are glittery and conspicuous, and Randy's nervous that the
Nipponese guys are going to notice this and ask questions that will be
exceedingly difficult to answer. Tom is reminding Cantrell of something (for
some reason they always refer to Cantrell in this way; some people are just
made to be called by last names). Cantrell nods and shoots Randy a quick and
somewhat furtive look. When Randy looks back at him, Cantrell glances down
apologetically and takes to chivvying his beer bottle nervously between his
hands. Tom just keeps looking at Randy kind of interestedly. All of this
motivated glancing finally brings Randy and Tom and Cantrell together at the
farthest end of the bar from the karaoke speakers.
"So, you know Andrew Loeb," Cantrell says. It's clear he's basically
dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he'd just learned that
Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never
bothered to mention it.
"It's true," Randy says. "As well as anyone can know a guy like that."
Cantrell is paying undue diligence to the project of picking the label
off of his beer bottle and so Tom picks up the thread now. "You were in
business together?"
"Not really. Can I ask how you guys are aware of this? I mean, how do
you even know that Andrew Loeb exists in the first place? Because of the
Digibomber thing?"
"Oh, no it was after that. Andy became a figure of note in some of the
circles where Tom and I both hang out," Cantrell says.
"The only circles I can imagine that Andy'd be a part of would be
primitive survivalists, and people who believe they've been Satanically
ritually abused."
Randy says this mindlessly, as if his mouth is a mechanical teletype
hammering out a weather forecast. It kind of hangs there.
"That helps fill in a few gaps," Tom finally says.
"What did you think when the FBI searched his cabin?" Cantrell asks,
his grin returned.
"I didn't know what to think," Randy says. "I remember watching the
videotape on the news the agents coming out of that shack with boxes of
evidence, and thinking my name must be on papers in them. That somehow I'd
get mixed up in the case as a result."
"Did the FBI ever contact you?" Tom asks.
"No. I think that once they searched through all of his stuff, they
figured out pretty quickly that he wasn't the Digibomber, and crossed him
off the list."
"Well, not long after that happened, Andy Loeb showed up on the Net,"
Cantrell says.
"I find that impossible to believe."
"So did we. I mean, we'd all received copies of his manifestoes printed
on this grey recycled paper that was like the sheets of fuzz that you peel
off a clothes dryer's lint trap."
"He used some kind of organic, water based ink that flaked off like
black dandruff," Tom says.
"We used to joke about having Andy grit all over our desks," Cantrell
says. "So when this guy called Andy Loeb showed up on the Secret Admirers
mailing list, and the Eutropia newsgroup, posting all of these long rants,
we refused to believe it was him."
"We thought that someone had just written really brilliant parodies of
his prose style," Cantrell says.
"But when they kept coming, day after day, and he started getting into
these long dialogs with people, it became obvious that it really was him,"
Tom grumbles.
"How did he square that with being a Luddite?"
Cantrell: "He said that he'd always thought of computers as a force
that alienated and atomized society."
Tom: "But as the result of being the number one Digibomber suspect for
a while, he'd been forcibly made aware of the Internet, which changed
computers by connecting them."
"Oh, my god!" Randy says.
"And he'd been mulling over the Internet while he was doing whatever
Andrew Loeb does," Tom continues.
Randy: "Squatting naked in icy mountain streams strangling muskrats
with his bare hands."
Tom: "And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society."
Randy: "And I'll bet he was just the guy to unite it."
Cantrell: "Well, that's actually not far away from what he said."
Randy: "So, are you about to tell me that he became a Eutropian?"
Cantrell: "Well, no. It's more like he discovered a schism in the
Eutropian movement we didn't know was there, and created his own splinter
group.
Randy: "I think of the Eutropians as being totally hard core
individuals, pure libertarians."
"Well, yeah!" Cantrell says. "But the basic premise of Eutropianism is
that technology has made us post human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is
effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net,
and headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were
libertarians."
Tom says, "But the idea has attracted all kinds of people including
Andy Loeb. He showed up one day and started yammering about hive minds."
"And of course he was flamed to a crisp by most of the Eutropians,
because that concept was anathema to them," Cantrell says.
Tom: "But he kept at it, and after a while, some people started
agreeing with him. Turned out there was really a pretty substantial faction
within the Eutropians who didn't especially care for libertarianism and who
found the idea of a hive mind attractive."
"So, now Andy's the leader of that faction?" Randy asks.
"I would suppose so," Cantrell says. "They split away and formed their
own newsgroup. We haven't heard much from them in the last six months or
so."
"So how did you become aware of a connection between Andy and me?"
"He stills pops into the Secret Admirers newsgroup from time to time,"
Tom says. "And there's been a lot of discussion there about the Crypt
lately."
Cantrell says, "When he found out that you and Avi were involved, he
posted this vast rant twenty or thirty K of run on sentences. Not very
complimentary."
"Well, Jesus. What's his beef? He won the case. Completely bankrupted
me. You'd think he'd have something better to do than beat this dead horse,"
Randy says, thumping himself on the chest. "Doesn't he have a day job?"
"He's some kind of a lawyer now," Cantrell says.
"Ha! Figures."
"He's been denouncing us," Tom says. "Capitalist roader. Atomizing
society. Making the world safe for drug traffickers and Third World
kleptocrats."
"Well, at least he got something right," Randy says. He's delighted to
have an answer, finally, to the question of why they're building the Crypt.
Chapter 27 RETROGRADE MANEUVER
Sio is a mud cemetery. Those who have already given their lives for the
emperor compete for mire space with those who intend to. Bizarre forktailed
American planes dive out of the sun every day to murder them with terrible
glowing rains of cannon fire and the mind crushing detonations of bombs, so
they sleep in open topped graves and only come out at night. But their pits
are full of reeking water that chums with hostile life, and when the sun
goes down, rain beats them, carrying into their bones the deadly chill of
high altitudes. Every man in the 20th Division knows that he will not leave
New Guinea alive, so it remains only to choose the method of death:
surrender to be tortured, then massacred by the Australians? Put grenades to
their heads? Remain where they are to be killed by the airplanes all day,
and all night by malaria, dysentery, scrub typhus, starvation, and
hypothermia? Or walk two hundred miles over mountains and flooding rivers to
Madang, which is tantamount to suicide even when it is peacetime and you
have food and medicine...?
But that is what they are ordered to do. General Adachi flies to Sio it
is the first friendly plane they have seen in weeks and lands on the rutted
septic field that they call an airstrip, and orders the evacuation. They are
to move inland in four detachments. Regiment by regiment, they bury their
dead, pack up what is left of their equipment, hoard what little food is
left, wait for dark, and trudge towards the mountains. The later echelons
can find their path by smell, following the reek of dysentery and of the
corpses dropped behind the pathfinder groups like breadcrumbs.
The top commanders stay to the end, and the radio platoon stays with
them; without a powerful radio transmitter, and the cryptographic
paraphernalia that goes with it, a general is not a general, a division is
not a division. Finally they go off the air, and begin breaking the
transmitter down into the smallest pieces they can, which unfortunately are
not all that small; a divisional radio transmitter is a powerful beast, made
for lighting up the ionosphere. It has an electrical generator,
transformers, and other components that cannot be made light. The men of the
radio platoon, who would find it difficult to move even the weight of their
own skeletons over the mountains and across the surging rivers, will carry
the additional burdens of engine blocks, fuel tanks, and transformers.
And the big steel trunk with all of the Army codebooks. These books
were heavy as death when they were bone dry; now they are sodden. To carry
them out is beyond imagining. The rules dictate that they must therefore be
burned.
The men of the 20th Division's radio platoon are not much inclined to
humor of any kind at the moment, not even the grim sardonic humor universal
among soldiers. If anything in the world is capable of making them laugh at
this moment, it is the concept of trying to construct a bonfire out of
saturated codebooks in a swamp during a rainstorm. They might be able to
burn them if they used a lot of aviation fuel more than they actually have.
Then the fire would produce a towering column of smoke that would draw P 38s
as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.
Burning them can't be necessary. New Guinea is a howling maelstrom of
decay and destruction; the only things that endure are rocks and wasps. They
rip off the covers to bring home as proof that they have been destroyed,
then pack the books into their trunk and bury it in the bank of an
especially vindictive river.
It's not a very good idea. But they have been getting bombed a lot.
Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb's shock wave is like a stone wall
moving at seven hundred miles an hour. Unlike a stone wall, it passes
through your body, like a burst of light through a glass figurine. On its
way through your flesh, it rearranges every part of you down to the
mitochondrial level, disrupting every process in every cell, including
whatever enables your brain to keep track of time and experience the world.
A few of these detonations are enough to break the thread of consciousness
into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as
they were when they left home; they cannot be expected to think clearly or
to do things for good reasons. They throw mud on the trunk not as a sane
procedure for getting rid of it but as a kind of ritual, just to demonstrate
the proper respect for its lode of strange information.
Then they shoulder their burdens of iron and rice and begin to strain
up into the mountains. Their comrades have left a trampled path that is
already growing back into jungle. The mileposts are bodies by now just
stinking battlegrounds disputed by frenzied mobs of microbes, bugs, beasts,
and birds never catalogued by scientists.
Chapter 28 HUFFDUFF
The huffduff mast is planted before they even have a roof on the new
headquarters of Detachment 2702, and the huffduff antenna is raised before
there is any electricity to run it.
Waterhouse does his best to pretend as if he cares. He lets the workers
know: vast tank armadas clashing in the African desert might be dashing and
romantic, but the real battle of this war (ignoring, as always, the Eastern
Front) is the Battle of the Atlantic. We can't win the Battle of the
Atlantic without sinking some U boats, and we can't sink them until we find
them, and we need a way of finding them other than the tried and true
approach of letting our convoys steam through them and get blown to bits.
That way, men, is to get this antenna in action as soon as humanly possible.
Waterhouse is no actor, but when the second ice storm of the week blows
through and inflicts grievous damage on the antenna, and he has to stay up
all night repairing it by the light of the Galvanick Lucifer, he is pretty
sure that he has them hooked. The castle staff work late shifts to keep him
supplied with hot tea and brandy, and the builders give him some zesty hip
hip hoorays the next morning when the patched antenna is winched back up to
the top of the mast. They are all so sure that they are saving lives in the
North Atlantic that they would probably lynch him if they knew the truth.
This huffduff story is ridiculously plausible. It is so plausible that
if Waterhouse were working for the Germans, he'd be suspicious. The antenna
is a highly directional model. It receives a strong signal when pointed
towards the source and a weak signal otherwise. The operator waits for a U
boat to begin transmitting and then swings the antenna back and forth until
it gives the maximum reading; the direction of the antenna then gives the
azimuth to the source. Two or more such readings, supplied by different
huffduff stations, can be used to triangulate the origin of the signal.
In order to keep up appearances, the station needs to be manned 24
hours a day, which almost kills Waterhouse during the first weeks of 1943.
The rest of Detachment 2702 has not shown up on schedule, so it is up to
Waterhouse to preserve the illusion in the meantime.
Everyone within ten miles basically, the entire civilian population of
Qwghlm, or, to put it another way, the entire Qwghlmian race can see the new
huffduff antenna rising from the mast on the castle. They are not stupid
people and some of them, at least, must understand that the damn thing
doesn't do any good if it is always pointed in the same direction. If it's
not moving, it's not working. And if it's not working, then just what the
hell is going on up there in the castle anyway?
So Waterhouse has to move it. He lives in the chapel, sleeping when he
sleeps in a hammock strung at a perilous altitude above the floor
("skerries" are excellent jumpers, he has found).
If he sleeps during the daytime, even casual observers in the town will
notice that the antenna does not move. That's no good. But he can't sleep at
night, when the Germans bounce their transmissions off the ionosphere
between the U boats in the North Atlantic and their bases in Bordeaux and
Lorient because a really close observer say an insomniacal castle worker, or
a German spy up in the rocks with a pair of binoculars will suspect that the
immobile huffduff antenna is just a cover story. So Waterhouse tries to
split the difference by sleeping for a few hours around dusk and another few
hours around dawn a plan that does not go over well with his body. And when
he gets up, he has absolutely nothing to look forward to besides sitting at
the huffduff console for eight or twelve hours at a stretch, watching the
breath come out of his mouth, twiddling the antenna, listening to nothing!
He freely stipulates that he is a selfish bastard for feeling sorry for
himself when other men are being blown to bits.
Having gotten that out of the way, what is he going to do to stay sane?
He has got his routine down pat: leave the antenna pointed generally
westwards for a while, then swing it back and forth in diminishing arcs,
pretending to zero in on a U boat, then leave it sitting for a while and do
jumping jacks to warm back up. He has ditched his uniform for raiments of
warm Qwghlmian wool. Every once in a while, at totally unpredictable
intervals, members of the castle staff will burst in on him with an urn of
soup or tea service or simply to see how he is doing and tell him what a
fine chap he is. Once a day, he writes down a bunch of gibberish his
purported results and dispatches it over to the naval base.
He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about
mathematics. The former keeps intruding upon the latter. It gets worse when
the stout fiftyish cook named Blanche, who has been bringing him his meals,
comes down with dropsy or ague or gout or colic or some other Shakespearian
ailment and is replaced by Margaret, who is about twenty and quite fetching.
Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he
goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an
inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned
in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the
real thing. The effect wears off too soon.
While he's waiting for it to wear off, he gets a lot of solid math
done. Alan provided him with some notes on redundancy and entropy, relating
to the voice encryption work he is currently doing in New York City.
Waterhouse works through that stuff and comes up with some nice lemmas which
he lamentably cannot send to Alan without violating both common sense and
any number of security procedures. This done, he turns his attention to
cryptology, pure and raw. He spent enough time at Bletchley Park to realize
just how little of this art he really understood.
The U boats talk on the radio way too much and everyone in the German
Navy knows it. Their security experts have been nagging their brass to
tighten up their security, and they finally did it by introducing the four
rotor version of the Enigma machine, which has knocked Bletchley Park on its
ass for about a year...
Margaret has to walk round the castle out of doors to bring Waterhouse
his meals, and by the time she gets here, her cheeks have turned rosy red.
The steam coming from her mouth floats around her face like a silken veil
Stop that, Lawrence! The subject of today's lecture is the German Naval
four wheel Enigma, known to them as Triton and to the Allies as Shark.
Introduced on 2 February of last year (1942), it wasn't until the recovery
of the beached German U boat U 559 on 30 October that Bletchley Park got the
material they needed to break the code. A couple of weeks ago, on 13
December, Bletchley Park finally busted Shark, and the internal
communications of the German Navy became an open book to the Allies once
more.
The first thing they have learned, as a result, is that the Germans
have broken our merchant shipping codes wide open, and that all year long
they have known exactly where to find the convoys.
All of this information has been provided to Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse within the last few days, via the totally secure one time pad
channel. Bletchley is telling him this stuff because it raises a question of
information theory, which is his department and his problem. The question
is: how quickly can we replace our busted merchant shipping codes without
tipping the Germans off to the fact that we have broken Shark?
Waterhouse does not have to think about this one for very long before
he concludes that it is far too tricky to play games with. The only way to
handle the situation is to concoct an incident of some sort that will
explain to the Germans why we have totally lost faith in our own merchant
shipping codes and are changing them. He writes up a message to this effect,
and begins to encrypt it using the one time pad that he shares with Chattan.
"Is everything quite all right?"
Waterhouse stands and whirls around, heart thrashing.
It is Margaret, standing there veiled in the steam of her own breath, a
grey wool overcoat thrown over her maid's uniform, supporting a tray of tea
and scones with grey wool mittens. The only parts of her not encased in wool
are her ankles and her face. The former are well turned; Margaret is not
above wearing heels. The latter has never been exposed to the direct rays of
the sun and brings to mind rose petals strewn over Devonshire clotted cream.
"Oh! Let me take it!" Waterhouse blurts, and lunges forward with a
jerkiness born of passion blended with hypothermia. While taking the tray
from her hands, he inadvertently pulls off one of her mittens, which falls
to the floor. "Sorry!" he says, realizing he has never seen her hands
before. She has red polish on the nails of the offended hand, which she cups
over her mouth and blows on. Her large green eyes are looking at him, full
of placid expectation.
"Beg pardon?" Waterhouse says.
"Is everything quite all right?" she repeats.
"Yes! Why shouldn't it be?"
"The antenna," Margaret says. "It hasn't moved in over an hour."
Waterhouse is so flummoxed he can barely remain standing.
Margaret is still breathing through her lacquered fingertips, so that
Waterhouse can only see her green eyes, which now angle and twinkle
mischievously. She glances towards his hammock. "Been napping on the job,
have we?"
Waterhouse's first impulse is to deny it and to explain the truth,
which is that he was thinking about sex and crypto and forgot to move the
antenna. But then he realizes that Margaret has supplied him with a better
excuse. "Guilty as charged," he says. "Was up late last night."
"That tea will keep you alert," Margaret says. Then her eyes return to
the hammock. She pulls her mitten back on. "What is it like?"
"What is what like?"
"Sleeping in one of those. Is it comfortable?"
"Very comfortable."
"Can I just see what it's like?"
"Ah. Well, it's very difficult to get in at that height."
"You manage it, though, don't you?" she says chidingly. Waterhouse
feels himself blushing. Margaret walks over to the hammock and kicks off her
heels. Waterhouse winces to see her bare feet on the stone floor, which has
not been warm since the Barbary Corsairs burned the place down. Her toenails
are also painted red. "I don't mind it," Margaret says, "I'm a farmer's
daughter. Come on, give me a leg up!"
Waterhouse has completely lost whatever control he might ever have had
over the situation and himself. His tongue seems to be made of erectile
tissue. So he lumbers over, bends down, and makes a stirrup of his hands.
She puts her foot into it and launches herself into the hammock,
disappearing with a whoop and a giggle into his bulky nest of grey wool
blankets. The hammock swings back and forth across the center of the chapel,
like a censer dispersing a faint lavender scent. It swings once, twice. It
swings five times, ten times, twenty. Margaret is silent and motionless.
Waterhouse stands as if his feet were planted in mortar. For the first time
in weeks he does not know exactly what is going to happen next, and the loss
of control leaves him stunned and helpless.
"It's dreamy," she says. Dreamily. Then, finally, she shifts.
Waterhouse sees her little face peeking out over the edge, shrouded in the
grey cowl of a blanket. "Ooh!" she screams, and flips flat on her back
again. The sudden movement puts an eccentric jiggle into the rhythmic motion
of the hammock.
"What's wrong?" Waterhouse says hopelessly.
"I'm afraid of heights!" she exclaims. "I'm so sorry, Lawrence, I
should have warned you. Is it all right if I call you Lawrence?" She sounds
as if she would be terribly hurt if he said no. And how can Lawrence wound
the feelings of a pretty, barefoot, acrophobic girl, helpless in a hammock?
"Please. By all means," he says. But he knows perfectly well that the
ball is still in his court. "Can I be of any assistance?"
"I should be so obliged," Margaret says.
"Well, would you like to climb down onto my shoulders, or some thing?"
Waterhouse essays.
"I'm really far too terrified," she says.
There is only one way out. "Well. Would you take it the wrong way if I
came up there to help?"
"It would be so heroic of you!" she says. "I should be unspeakably
grateful."
"Well, then . . ."
"But I insist that you continue with your duties first!"
"Beg pardon?"
"Lawrence," Margaret says, "when I get down from this hammock I shall
go to the kitchen and mop the floor which is already quite clean enough,
thank you. You, on the other hand, have important work to do work that might
save the lives of hundreds of men on some Atlantic convoy! And I know that
you have been very naughty in sleeping on the job. I refuse to allow you up
here until you have made amends."
"Very well," Waterhouse says, "you leave me no alternative. Duty
calls." He squares his shoulders, spins on his heel, and marches back to his
desk. Skerries have already made off with all of Margaret's scones, but he
pours himself some tea. Then he resumes encrypting his instructions to
Chattan: ONLY BRUTE FORCE APPROACH WILL BE SAFE PUT CODE BOOK ON SHIP INSERT
SHIP IN MURMANSK CONVOY WAIT FOR FOG RAM NORWAY.
The one time pad encryption takes a while. Lawrence can do mod 25
arithmetic in his sleep, but doing it with an erection is a different
matter. "Lawrence? What are you doing?" Margaret asks from her nest in the
hammock, which, Lawrence imagines, is getting warmer and cozier by the
minute. He glances surreptitiously at her discarded high heels.
"Preparing my report," Lawrence says. "Doesn't do me any good to make
observations if I don't send them out."
"Quite right," Margaret says thoughtfully.
This is an excellent time to stoke the chapel's pathetic iron stove. He
puts in a few scoops of precious coal, his worksheet, and the page from the
one time pad that he has just used to do the encryption. "Should warm up
now," he says.
"Oh, lovely," Margaret says, "I'm all shivery."
Lawrence recognizes this as his cue to initiate a rescue operation.
About fifteen seconds later, he is up there in the hammock with Margaret. To
the great surprise of neither one of them, the quarters are awkward and
tight. There is some flopping around which ends with Lawrence on his back
and Margaret on top of him, her thigh between his.
She is shocked to discover that he has an erection. Ashamed,
apparently, that she did not anticipate his need. "You poor dear!" she
exclaims. "Of course! How could I have been so dense! You must have been so
lonely here." She kisses his cheek, which is nice since he is too stunned to
move. "A brave warrior deserves all the support we civilians can possibly
give him," she says, reaching down with one hand to open his fly.
Then she pulls the grey wool over her head and burrows to a new
position. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is stunned by what happens next. He
gazes up at the ceiling of the chapel through half closed eyes and thanks
God for having sent him what is obviously a German spy and an angel of mercy
rolled into one adorable package.
When it's finished, he opens his eyes again and takes a deep breath of
cold Atlantic air. He is seeing everything around him with newfound clarity.
Clearly, Margaret is going to do wonders for his productivity on the
cryptological front if he can only keep her coming back.
Chapter 29 PAGES
It has been a long time since horses ran at the Ascot Racetrack in
Brisbane. The infield's a commotion of stretched khaki. The grass has died
from lack of sun and from the trampling feet of enlisted men. The field has
been punctured with latrines, mess tents have been pitched. Three shifts a
day, the residents trudge across the track, round back of the silent and
empty stables. In the field where the horses used to stretch their legs, two
dozen Quonset huts that have popped up like mushrooms. The men work in those
huts, sitting before radios or typewriters or card files all day long,
shirtless in the January heat.
It has been just as long since whores sunned themselves on the long
veranda of the house on Henry Street, and passing gentlemen, on their way to
or from the Ascot Racetrack, peered at their charms through the white
railing, faltered, checked their wallets, forgot their scruples, turned on
their heels, and climbed up the house's front stairs. Now the place is full
of male officers and math freaks: mostly Australians on the ground floor,
mostly Americans upstairs, and a sprinkling of lucky Brits who were spirited
out of Singapore before General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya and the
conqueror of that city, was able to capture them and mine their heads for
crucial data.
Today the old bordello has been turned upside down; everyone with Ultra
clearance is out in the garage, which thrums and roars with the sound of
fans, and virtually glows with contained heat. In that garage is a rusted
steel trunk, still spattered with riverbank mud that partially obscures the
Nipponese characters stenciled on its sides. Had a Nipponese spy glimpsed
the trunk during its feverish passage from the port to the whorehouse's
garage, he would have recognized it as belonging to the radio platoon of the
20th Division, which is currently lost in the jungles of New Guinea.
The rumor, shouted over the sound of the fans, is that a digger an
Australian grunt found it. His unit was sweeping the abandoned headquarters
of the 20th Division for booby traps when his metal detector went nuts along
the banks of a river.
The codebooks are stacked inside as neatly as gold bars. They are wet
and mildewed and their front covers are all missing, but this is mint
condition by the standards of wartime. Stripped to the waist and streaming
with sweat, the men raise the books out one by one, like nurses lifting
newborn infants from the bassinette, and carry them to tables where they
slice away the rotten bindings and peel the sodden pages off the stacks one
by one, hanging them from improvised clotheslines strung overhead. The
stench and damp of New Guinea saturate the air as the river water trapped in
those pages is lifted out by the rushing air; it all vents to the outside
eventually, and half a mile downwind, pedestrians wrinkle their noses. The
whorehouse's closets still redolent of French perfume, powder, hairspray and
jism, but now packed to the ceiling with office supplies are raided for more
string. The web of clotheslines grows, new layers crisscrossing above and
below the old ones, every inch of string claimed by a wet page as soon as it
is stretched. Each page is a grid, a table with hiragana or katakana or
kanji in one box, a group of digits or Romanji in another box, and the pages
all cross referenced to other pages in a scheme only a cryptographer could
love.
The photographer comes in, trailed by assistants who are burdened with
miles of film. All he knows is that each page must be photographed
perfectly. The malarial reek practically flattens him the moment he walks in
the door, but when he recovers, his eyes scan the garage. All he can see,
stretching as if to infinity, are pages dripping and curling, turning white
as they dry, casting their grids of information into sharp relief, like the
reticules of so many bomb sights, the graven crosshairs of so many
periscopes, plunging through cloud and fog to focus, distinctly on the
abdomens of Nipponese troopships, pregnant with North Borneo fuel, alive
with burning steam.
Chapter 30 RAM
"Sir! Would you mind telling me where we are going, sir!"
Lieutenant Monkberg heaves a deep, quivering sigh, his rib cage
shuddering like a tin shack in a cyclone. He executes a none too snappy
pushup. His hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his
head from the bowl, of a toilet or "head," as it is referred to in this
context: an alarmingly rundown freighter. He jerks down a strip of abrasive
Euro bumwad and wipes his mouth before looking up at Sergeant Robert
Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.
And Shaftoe does need some serious bracing, because he is carrying
close to his own weight in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully
prepacked.
He could have left it that way. But this is not how an Eagle Scout
operates. Bobby Shaftoe has gone through and unpacked all of it, spread it
out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.
This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he
infers that the men of Detachment 2702 are expected to spend most of the
next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This
will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well armed sons of bitches.
German, most likely.
"N N N Norway," Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that
Shaftoe considers offering him some m m m morphine, which induces a mild
nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he
comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose
duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck
himself sideways.
"Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?"
Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. "Ram and run," he says.
"Sir! Ram what, sir?"
''Norway."
"Sir! Run where, sir?"
"Sweden."
Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U boat
infested waters, the collision with Norway, the desperate run across frozen
Nazi occupied territory, all seem trivial compared with the shining goal of
dipping into the world's largest and purest reservoir of authentic Swedish
poontang.
"Shaftoe! Wake up!"
''Sir! Yes, sir!"
"You have noticed the way we are dressed." Monkberg refers to the fact
that they have discarded their dog tags and are all wearing civilian or
merchant marine clothing.
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"We don't want the Nuns, or anyone else, to know what we really are."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"Now, you might ask yourself, if we're supposed to look like civilians,
then why the hell are we carrying tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges,
et cetera."
"Sir! That was going to be my next question, sir!"
"Well, we have a cover story all worked out for that. Come with me."
Monkberg looks enthusiastic all of a sudden. He clambers to his feet
and leads Shaftoe down various passageways and stairs to the freighter's
cargo hold. "You know those other ships?"
Shaftoe looks blank.
"Those other ships around us? We are in the middle of a convoy, you
know."
"Sir, yes sir!" Shaftoe says, a little less certainly. None of the men
has been abovedecks very much in the hours since they were delivered, via
submarine, to this wallowing wreck. Even if they had gone up for a look
around they would have seen nothing but darkness and fog.
"A Murmansk convoy," Monkberg continues. "All of these ships are
delivering weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. See?"
They have reached a cargo hold. Monkberg turns on an overhead light,
revealing crates. Lots and lots and lots of crates.
"Full of weapons," Monkberg says, "including tommy guns, grenades,
demolition charges, et cetera. Get my drift?"
"Sir, no sir! I do not get the lieutenant's drift!"
Monkberg comes one step closer to him. Unsettlingly close. He speaks,
now, in a conspiratorial tone. "See, we're all just crew members on this
merchant ship, making the run to Murmansk. It gets foggy. We get separated
from our convoy. Then, boom! We slam into fucking Norway. We are stuck on
Nazi held territory. We have to make a break for Sweden! But wait a second,
we say to ourselves. What about all those Germans between us and the Swedish
border? Well, we had better be armed to the teeth, is what. And who is in a
better position to arm themselves to the teeth than the crew of this
merchant ship that is jam packed with armaments? So we run down into the
cargo hold and hastily pry open a few crates and arm ourselves."
Shaftoe looks at the crates. None of them have been pried open.
"Then," Monkberg continues, "we abandon ship and head for Sweden."
There is a long silence. Shaftoe finally rouses himself to say, "Sir!
Yes, sir!"
"So get prying."
''Sir! Yes, sir!"
"And make it look hasty! Hasty! C'mon! Shake a leg!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
Shaftoe tries to get into the spirit of the thing. What's he going to
use to pry a crate open? No crowbars in sight. He exits the cargo hold and
strides down a passageway. Monkberg following him closely, hovering, urging
him to be hastier: "You're in a hurry! The Nazis are coming! You have to arm
yourself! Think of your wife and kids back in Glasgow or Lubbock or wherever
the fuck you're from!"
"Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sir!" Shaftoe says indignantly.
"No, no! Not in real life! In your pretend role as this stranded
merchant son of a bitch! Look, Shaftoe! Look! Salvation is at hand!"
Shaftoe turns around to see Monkberg pointing at a cabinet marked
FIRE.
Shaftoe pulls the door open to find, among other implements, one of
those giant axes that firemen are always carrying in and out of burning
structures.
Thirty seconds later, he's down in the cargo hold, Paul Bunyaning a
crate of .45 caliber ammunition. "Faster! More haphazard!" Monkberg shouts.
"This isn't a precise operation, Shaftoe! You are in a blind panic!" Then he
says, "Goddamn it!" and runs forward and seizes the ax from Shaftoe's hands.
Monkberg swings wildly, missing the crate entirely as he adjusts to the
tremendous weight and length of the implement. Shaftoe hits the deck and
rolls to safety. Monkberg finally gets his range and azimuth worked out, and
actually makes contact with the crate. Splinters and chips skitter across
the deck.
"See!" Monkberg says, looking over his shoulder at Shaftoe, "I want
splinteriness! I want chaos!" He is swinging the ax at the same time as he's
talking and looking at Shaftoe, and he's moving his feet too because the
ship is rocking, and consequently the blade of the weapon misses the crate
entirely, overshoots, and comes down right on Monkberg's ankle.
"Gadzooks!" Lieutenant Monkberg says, in a quiet, conversational tone.
He is looking down at his ankle in fascination. Shaftoe comes over to see
what's so interesting.
A good chunk of Monkberg's lower left leg has been neatly cross
sectioned. In the beam of Shaftoe's flashlight, it is possible to see
severed blood vessels and ligaments sticking out of opposite sides of the
meaty wound, like sabotaged bridges and pipelines dangling from the sides of
a gorge.
"Sir! You are wounded, sir!" Shaftoe says. "Let me summon Lieutenant
Root!"
"No! You stay here and work!" Monkberg says. "I can find Root myself."
He reaches down with both hands and squeezes his leg above the wound,
causing blood to gush out onto the deck. "This is perfect!" he says
meditatively. "This adds so much realism."
After several repetitions of this order, Shaftoe reluctantly goes back
to crate hacking. Monkberg hobbles and staggers around the hold for a few
minutes, bleeding on everything, then drags himself off in search of Enoch
Root. The last thing he says is, "Remember! We are aiming for a ransacked
effect!"
But the bit with the leg wound gets the idea across to Shaftoe more
than Monkberg's words ever could. The sight of the blood brings up memories
of Guadalcanal and more recent adventures. His last dose of morphine is
wearing off, which makes him sharper. And he's staffing to get really
seasick, which makes him want to fight it by doing some hard work.
So he more or less goes berserk with that ax. He loses track of what is
going on.
He wishes that Detachment 2702 could have stayed on dry land preferably
dry warm land such as that place they stayed, for two sunny weeks, in Italy.
The first part of that mission had been hard work, what with humping
those barrels of shit around. But the remainder of it (except for the last
few hours) had been just like shore leave, except that there weren't any
women. Every day they'd taken turns at the observation site, looking out
over the Bay of Naples with their telescopes and binoculars. Every night,
Corporal Benjamin sat down and radioed more gibberish in Morse code.
One night, Benjamin received a message and spent some time deciphering
it. He announced the news to Shaftoe: "The Germans know we're here."
"What do you mean, they know we're here?"
"They know that for at least six months we have had an observation post
overlooking the Bay of Naples," Benjamin said.
"We've been here less than two weeks."
''They're going to begin searching this area tomorrow."
"Well, then let's get the fuck out of here," Shaftoe said.
"Colonel Chattan orders you to wait," Benjamin said, "until you know
that the Germans know that we are here."
"But I do know that the Germans know that we are here," Shaftoe said,
"you just told me."
"No, no no no no," Benjamin said, "wait until you would know that the
Germans knew even if you didn't know from being told by Colonel Chattan over
the radio."
"Are you fucking with me?"
"Orders," Benjamin said, and handed Shaftoe the deciphered message as
proof.
As soon as the sun came up they could hear the observation planes
crisscrossing the sky. Shaftoe was ready to execute their escape plan, and
he made sure that the men were too. He sent some of those SAS blokes down to
reconnoiter the choke points along their exit route. Shaftoe himself just
laid down on his back and stared up at the sky, watching those planes.
Did he know that the Germans knew now?
Ever since he'd woken up, a couple of SAS blokes had been following him
around, staring at him. Shaftoe finally looked in their direction and
nodded. They ran away. A moment later he heard wrenches crashing against the
insides of toolboxes.
The Germans had observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was
pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans knew. And those
planes were clearly visible to Shaftoe, so he could, arguably, know that
they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put "until positively
sighted by Germans," whatever that meant.
One of those planes, in particular, was coming closer and closer. It
was searching very close to the ground, cutting only a narrow swath on each
pass. Waiting for it to pass over their position, Shaftoe wanted to scream.
This was too stupid to be real. He wanted to send up a flare and get this
over with.
Finally, in midafternoon, Shaftoe, lying on his back in the shade of a
tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of
that German airplane: a Henschel Hs 126 (1) with a single swept
back wing mounted above the fuselage, so as not to block the view downwards,
and with ladders and struts and giant awkward splay footed landing gear
sticking out all over. One German encased in a glass shroud and flying the
plane, another out in the open, peering down through goggles and fiddling
with a swivel mounted machine gun. This one did all but look Shaftoe in the
eye, then tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.
The Henschel altered its normal search pattern, cutting the pass short
to swing round and fly over their position again.
"That's it," Shaftoe said to himself. He stood up and began walking
towards the dilapidated barn. "That's it!" he shouted. "Execute!"
The SAS guys were in the back of the truck, under a tarp, working with
their wrenches. Shaftoe glanced in their direction and saw gleaming parts
from the Vickers laid out on clean white fabric. Where the hell had these
guys gotten clean white fabric? They'd probably been saving it for today.
Why couldn't they have got the Vickers in good working order before? Because
they'd had orders to assemble it hastily, at the last possible minute.
Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key.
"Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?"
Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild
challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed
watching.
Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a
clearing a few yards away. Behind him, he could hear the other men of
Detachment 2702 jockeying for position in the doorway, trying to get a clear
view of him.
The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the
ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.
Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung
it up and around, and opened fire.
Now some might complain that the trench broom lacked penetrating power,
but he was positive he could see pieces of crap flying out of the Henschel's
motor. The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. It banked until
its wings were vertical, veered, banked some more until it was upside down,
shed what little altitude it had to begin with, and made an upside down
pancake landing in the olive trees no more than a hundred yards distant. It
did not immediately burst into flame: something of a letdown there.
There was perfect silence from the other men. The only sound was the
beepity beep of Corporal Benjamin, his question now answered, sending out
his little message. Shaftoe was able to follow the Morse code for once this
message was going out plaintext. "WE ARE DISCOVERED STOP EXECUTING PLAN
TORUS."
As their first contribution to Plan Torus, the other men climbed onto
the truck, which pulled out from its hidey hole in the barn and idled in the
trees nearby. When Benjamin was finished, he abandoned his radio and joined
them.
As his first task of Plan Torus, Shaftoe walked around the premises in
a neat crisscross pattern echoing that of the searching reconnaissance
planes. He was carrying an upside down gasoline can with no lid on it.
He left the can about one third full, standing upright in the middle of
the barn. He pulled the pin from a grenade, dropped it into the gasoline,
and ran out of the building. The truck was already pulling away when he
caught up with it and dove into the waiting arms of his unit, who pulled him
on board. He got himself situated in the back of the truck just in time to
see the building go up in a satisfying fireball.
"Okay," Shaftoe said to the men. "We got a few hours to kill."
All the men in the truck except for the SAS blokes working on the
Vickers looked at each other like did he really just say that?
"Uh, Sarge," one of them finally said, "could you explain that part
about killing some time?