"
     "The airplane's not going to be here for a while. Orders."
     "Was there a problem or "
     "Nope. Everything's going fine. Orders.
     Beyond  that  the men  didn't want to gripe, but a lot more looks  were
exchanged across the bed  of the  truck. Finally, Enoch  Root spoke up, "You
men are probably wondering why we couldn't  kill time for a few hours <I>first,</I>
before  alerting  the Germans to our presence, and rendezvous with the plane
just in the nick of time."
     "Yeah!" said a whole bunch of guys and blokes, vigorously nodding.
     "That's a good question," said Enoch  Root. He said it  like he already
knew the answer, which made everyone in the truck want to slug him.
     The  Germans had deployed some ground  units  to secure the area's road
intersections.  When Detachment 2702 arrived at the first crossroads, all of
the  Germans were freshly  dead, and  all they had  to do  was to  slow down
momentarily so that  some Marine Raiders could run out of hiding and jump on
board.
     The  Germans at the  second intersection had no idea what was going on.
This   was  obviously  the  result   of  some  kind  of  internal  Wehrmacht
communications fuckup, clearly recognizable as such even across cultural and
linguistic  boundaries. Detachment  2702 were able to simply  open fire from
underneath the  tarp and tear  them to pieces, or at least  drive them  into
hiding.
     The  next Germans they ran  into  weren't having any  of it;  they  had
formed  a roadblock out of a  truck and two cars, and  were  lined up on the
other  side of it, pointing  weapons at them. All of their weapons looked to
be small arms. But by this time  the  Vickers had finally been put together,
calibrated, fine  tuned, inspected, and loaded. The  tarp came  off  Private
Mikulski, a surly, brooding two  hundred and fifty  pound Polish British SAS
man, commenced  operations with the Vickers at about the same time  that the
Germans did with their rifles.
     Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high  school, he'd been slotted
into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain
amount of his  time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces
of wood  or metal  into smaller  pieces. Numerous saws were available in the
shop for that  purpose, some better than others. A sawing job  that would be
just  ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand  saw would  be accomplished
with a  power  saw.  Likewise,  certain  cuts and  materials would cause the
smaller power saws to  overheat or seize up altogether and  therefore called
for  larger  power saws. But even with  the biggest  power saw  in the shop,
Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind  of stress
on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it
would vibrate, it would heat  up, and if you pushed the material through too
fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where
they  had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its  supply of  blades, its  spare  parts,
maintenance  supplies,  special tools and manuals  occupied a whole room. It
was the only tool he had ever seen with <I>infrastructure.</I> It was the size of a
car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight spoked things that
looked to have been salvaged from steam  locomotives.  Its  blades had to be
manufactured from long rolls  of blade stuff by unreeling about half a  mile
of  toothed ribbon,  cutting  it off,  and  carefully  welding  the cut ends
together into  a loop. When you hit the  power switch, nothing  would happen
for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out
of  the earth,  as if a freight train  were  approaching from  far away, and
finally the blade would begin to move,  building speed slowly but inexorably
until  the teeth disappeared and  it  became a bolt  of pure  hellish energy
stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about
accidents involving the bandsaw  were told  in hushed voices and not usually
commingled with  other  industrial  accident  anecdotes.  Anyway,  the  most
noteworthy thing about  the bandsaw was that  you could cut anything with it
and not only  did it do  the job quickly  and  coolly but it didn't seem  to
notice  that  it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being
was sliding a great  big  chunk of  stuff through it. It never  slowed down.
Never heated up.
     In Shaftoe's  post  high school experience he  had found  that guns had
much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked
back and heated up, got  dirty,  and  jammed  eventually.  They  could  fire
bullets in other words, but it  was a big deal for them, it placed a certain
amount of stress on them, and they  could not take that  stress forever. But
the Vickers in  the back of this truck was  to other guns as the bandsaw was
to other saws.  The  Vickers  was  <I>water  cooled.</I> It actually had  a fucking
<I>radiator</I>  on  it. It had <I>infrastructure,</I> just  like the bandsaw, and a whole
crew  of technicians  to fuss  over  it. But once the  damn thing was up and
running, it  could  fire  continuously  for  <I>days</I> as  long  as  people  kept
scurrying  up to it  with more belts of  ammunition. After  Private Mikulski
opened fire with the  Vickers, some of the  other Detachment 2702 men, eager
to pitch  in and  do their bit,  took  potshots at those Germans with  their
rifles, but doing so  made  them feel so small  and  pathetic that they soon
gave up and just  took cover in the ditch and  lit up cigarettes and watched
the  slow  progress  of  the  Vickers' bullet stream  across  the roadblock.
Mikulski hosed  down all  of  the German vehicles for  a  while,  yawing the
Vickers back and  forth  like a man  playing a fire extinguisher against the
base of  a  fire. Then he picked out a few  bits of  the  roadblock  that he
suspected  people might  be  standing behind and concentrated on them for  a
while, boring tunnels  through the wreckage of  the vehicles until he  could
see what was  on the  other side, sawing  through  their frames and breaking
them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside  trees behind which he
suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.
     By  this time  it  had become  evident that some  Germans had retreated
behind a gentle swell in the earth just off to one side of the road and were
taking potshots  from there,  so Mikulski swung the muzzle of the Vickers up
into the air at a steep angle and  shot the  bullet  stream  into the sky so
that  the bullets plunged down like mortar shells on  the other side of  the
rise. It took him a while to get the angle just right, but then he patiently
distributed bullets over the entire field, like a man watering his lawn. One
of the SAS blokes actually  did some calculations on his knee, figuring  out
how long Mikulski  should keep  doing  this to make  sure  that bullets were
distributed over the  ground in  question at the right density  say, one per
square foot.  When  the  territory had  been properly sown with  lead slugs,
Mikulski turned back  to the roadblock  and made sure  that the truck pulled
across  the pavement was in small enough pieces that it could be shoved  out
of the way by hand.
     Then  he  ceased firing at  last. Shaftoe felt like he should  make  an
entry in a log book, the way ships' captains do when they pull  a man of war
into port. When they drove past the wreckage,  they slowed down for a bit to
gawk.  The  brittle  grey iron  of the  German vehicles' engine  blocks  had
shattered  like  glass and you could look into  the engines all neatly cross
sectioned and see the  gleaming pistons and  crankshafts exposed to the sun,
bleeding oil and coolant.
     They  passed through what was left  of the roadblock and  drove onwards
into a sparsely populated inland area that made excellent strafing territory
for  the Luftwaffe. The first two fighters that came  around were torn apart
in midair by Mikulski and  his Vickers. The next pair managed to destroy the
truck, the big  gun, and Private Mikulski in one pass. No one else was hurt;
they  were  all in the ditch,  watching as  Mikulski sat placidly behind the
controls  of  his  weapon,  playing  chicken  with  two  Messerschmidts  and
eventually losing.
     By now it was getting dark. The detachment  began to make its way cross
country on foot, carrying Mikulski's remains on a stretcher. They ran into a
German patrol and fought it out with them; two of the SAS men were  wounded,
and one of these had to be carried the rest of the way. Finally they reached
their rendezvous  point, a  wheat  field where they laid down road flares to
outline a landing strip for a U.S. Army DC 3, which executed a deft landing,
took them all on board, and flew them to Malta without further incident.
     And that was where they were introduced to Lieutenant  Monkberg for the
first time.
     No sooner  had they been debriefed than they were on another submarine,
bound for  parts unknown or at  least unspecified.  But when  they turned in
their warm  weather gear for ten pound oiled wool sweaters, they started  to
get an idea. A few claustrophobic days later, they had been transferred onto
this freighter.
     The vessel itself is  such  a pathetic heap that they have been amusing
themselves  by substituting the  word "shit"  for "ship" in various nautical
expressions, e.g.: let's get  this cabin shit shape! Where in hell  does the
shit's master think he's taking us? And so on.
     Now, in the shit's hold, an impassioned Bobby Shaftoe is doing his best
to create a  ransacked effect. He strews  rifles and tommy guns  around  the
deck. He opens boxes of .45  cartridges and flings them all over  the place.
He finds some skis, too they'll be needing skis, right? He plants mines here
and there,  just to throw  a scare  into  whatever  German  happens along to
investigate this shitwreck. He opens crates  of grenades. These do not  look
very  ransacked, sitting there full, so he pulls out dozens of them, carries
them abovedecks, and  throws  them  overboard. He tosses  out some skis also
maybe they will wash up on shore  somewhere and  contribute to  the  overall
sense of chaos that is so important to Lieutenant Monkberg.
     He  is  on his way across the upper deck,  carrying an armload of skis,
when something catches his eye out there in the fog. He flinches, of course.
Many strafings have turned Bobby Shaftoe into a big flincher. He flinches so
hard  that  he drops all of those skis on the deck  and comes this close  to
throwing himself  down among  them.  But he holds his ground long  enough to
focus in on this  thing  in the fog.  It is directly in  front of them,  and
somewhat higher than the bridge of the freighter, and (unlike plunging Zeros
or Messerschmidts) it is not moving fast just hanging there. Like a cloud in
the sky. As if the fog had coagulated into  a dense clump, like his mother's
mashed potatoes. It  gets brighter and brighter as  he stands there watching
it, and the  edges get more  and more sharply  defined, and he starts to see
other stuff around it.
     The other stuff is green.
     Hey, wait a  minute!  He is  looking at a green mountainside with a big
white snowfield in the middle of it.
     "Heads up!" he screams, and throws himself down on the deck.
     He  is hoping  to  be  surprised by the gradualness, the gentleness  of
their collision with  the earth's crust. He  has in  mind the  kind  of deal
where you run a little motorboat at a sandy beach, cut the motor and tilt it
out of the water at the last minute, and glide up gently onto the cushioning
sand.
     This turns out to be a  very  poor analogy  for what happens  next. The
freighter is actually going a lot faster than your typical putt putt fishing
boat. And  instead of gliding up onto a sandy beach, they have a nearly head
on collision  with a vertical  granite  wall. There  is  a really impressive
noise,  the  prow of the vessel actually bends upwards, and suddenly,  Bobby
Shaftoe finds that he is sliding  on his belly across the ice glazed deck at
a high speed.
     He is  terrified, for a moment, that  he's going to slide right off the
deck and  go flying into the drink, but he manages to steer himself into  an
anchor chain, which proves  an effective  stopper.  Down below,  he can hear
approximately ten  thousand other small and large objects finding  their own
obstacles to slam into.
     There  follows a  brief and  almost  peaceful interlude  of near  total
silence. Then a hue and cry  rises up  from the extremely sparse crew of the
freighter: "ABANDON SHIT! ABANDON SHIT!"
     The men of Detachment 2702 head for  the lifeboats. Shaftoe  knows that
they can take  care  of themselves, so he heads for the  bridge, looking for
the few oddballs who always find a way to make things interesting:
     Lieutenants Root and Monkberg, and Corporal Benjamin.
     The  first person  he sees is the skipper,  slumped in a chair, pouring
himself a drink and looking like a guy who just bled to death. This poor son
of a bitch is a Navy lifer who got detached from his regular unit solely for
the  purpose  of  doing what he just did. It clearly  does not sit well with
him.
     "Nice  job, sir!" Shaftoe says, not knowing  what  else to say. Then he
follows the sound of an argument into the signals cabin.
     The dramatis personae are Corporal  Benjamin, holding up a  large Book,
in a pose that recalls an exasperated preacher sarcastically acquainting his
wayward  parishioners  with  the unfamiliar sight  of the  Bible; Lieutenant
Monkberg, semireclined in  a chair,  his damaged  Limb up  on a  table;  and
Lieutenant Root, doing some needle and thread work on same.
     "It is my sworn duty " Benjamin begins.
     Monkberg interrupts him. "It is your sworn duty, Corporal, to follow my
orders!"
     Root's medical supplies are scattered all over the deck  because of the
collision.  Shaftoe begins to pick them up  and sort  them out,  keeping  an
especially sharp eye out for any small bottles that may have gone astray.
     Benjamin  is  very excited. Clearly,  he  is  not  getting  through  to
Monkberg, and so he opens up the hefty Book at random and holds  it up above
his  head. It contains line  after line,  column  after  column,  of  random
letters.  "This," Benjamin  says,  "is the  Allied MERCHANT SHIPPING CODE! A
copy of THIS BOOK is on EVERY SHIP of EVERY CONVOY in the North Atlantic! It
is used by those ships  to BROADCAST THEIR POSITIONS! Do you UNDERSTAND what
is going to HAPPEN if THIS BOOK falls into the hands of THE GERMANS?!"
     "I have given you my order," Lieutenant Monkberg says.
     They go  on in this vein for a couple  of minutes as Shaftoe scours the
deck for  medical debris.  Finally he  sees what  he's  looking for:  it has
rolled beneath a storage cabinet and appears to be miraculously unscathed.
     "Sergeant Shaftoe!" says Root peremptorily. It is the  closest  he  has
ever  come to sounding  like  a  military  officer.  Shaftoe straightens  up
reflexively.
     "Sir! Yes, sir!"
     "Lieutenant Monkberg's  dose  of  morphine  may wear off pretty soon. I
need you to find my morphine bottle and bring it to me right away."
     "Sir!  Yes, sir!" Shaftoe is a Marine, which means he's  really good at
following  orders  even when his  body is telling him not  to. Even so,  his
fingers do  not  want to release  their grip  on the little bottle, and Root
almost has to pry it loose.
     Benjamin and Monkberg,  locked in their dispute, are  oblivious to this
little  exchange.  "Lieutenant Root!" Benjamin says, his voice now  high and
trembly.
     "Yes, Corporal," Root says absent mindedly.
     "I have reason  to believe that Lieutenant Monkberg is a German spy and
that he should  be relieved of his command of this mission and placed  under
arrest!"
     "You son of a bitch!" Monkberg shouts. As well he might, since Benjamin
has just accused him of treason, for which he could face a firing squad. But
Root has Monkberg's leg clamped in place up there on the table, and he can't
move.
     Root  is completely  unruffled. He seems  to welcome this  unbelievably
serious accusation. It is an  opportunity to talk about  something with more
substance  than, for example, finding ways to substitute the word "shit" for
"ship" in nautical expressions.
     "I'll see you court martialed for this, you bastard!" Monkberg hollers.
     "Corporal Benjamin, what grounds do you have for this accusation?" says
Enoch Root in a lullaby voice.
     "The lieutenant has refused to allow me to destroy the codebooks, which
it  is my sworn duty to  do!" Benjamin  shouts.  He has  completely lost his
temper.
     "I  am under  very specific  and  clear orders  from  Colonel Chattan!"
Monkberg says, addressing Root.  Shaftoe is startled by this. Monkberg seems
to be recognizing  Root's authority in the matter. Or maybe he's scared, and
looking for an ally. The officers closing ranks against the enlisted men. As
usual.
     "Do you have a  written  copy of  those  orders  I could examine?" Root
says.
     "I don't think it's  appropriate for  us  to be having this  discussion
here and now," Monkberg says, still pleading and defensive.
     "How would you suggest  that we handle it?" Root says, drawing a length
of silk through Monkberg's numbed flesh. "We are aground. The  Germans  will
be here soon. We either leave the code books or we don't. We have  to decide
now."
     Monkberg goes limp and passive in his chair.
     "Can you show me written orders?" Root asks.
     "No. They were given verbally," Monkberg says.
     "And did these orders specifically mention the code books?" Root asks.
     "They did," Monkberg says, as if he's a witness in a courtroom.
     "And did these orders state  that the code books were to be  allowed to
fall into the hands of the Germans?"
     "They did."
     There is silence for  a moment as  Root ties  off  a  suture and begins
another  one.  Then  he says, "A  skeptic, such  as Corporal Benjamin, might
think that this business of the code books is an invention of yours."
     "If I falsified my own orders," Monkberg says, "I could be shot."
     "Only if you, and some witnesses to the event, all made their  way back
to  friendly territory, and compared notes with Colonel Chattan," says Enoch
Root, coolly and patiently.
     "What the fuck is going on!?"  says one of the SAS blokes,  bursting in
through  a hatch down below and  charging up the gangway. "We're all waiting
in the fucking  lifeboats!"  He bursts into the room, his face red with cold
and anxiety, and looks around wildly.
     "Fuck off," Shaftoe says.
     The SAS bloke pulls up short. "Okay, Sarge!"
     "Go down  and tell the men in the boats to fuck off too," Shaftoe says.
"Right away, Sarge!" the  SAS man says, and makes himself scarce. "As  those
anxious men in the  lifeboats  will  attest,"  Enoch  Root  continues,  "the
likelihood of you and several witnesses making it back to friendly territory
is diminishing by the minute. And  the fact that you <I>just happened</I> to suffer
a grievous <I>self inflicted</I> leg wound, just a few minutes ago, complicates our
escape  tremendously. Either  we  will all be captured together, or else you
will  volunteer  to  be left behind  and captured. Either way, you are saved
assuming that  you  are a  German spy from the court martial and  the firing
squad."
     Monkberg  can't  believe  his  ears.  "But  but  it  was  an  accident,
Lieutenant Root! I hit myself in the leg with a fucking ax you don't think I
did that deliberately!?"
     "It is very difficult for us to know," Root says regretfully.
     "Why don't we just destroy  the code  books? It's  the safest thing  to
do,"  Benjamin says. "I'd just be following  a  standing order nothing wrong
with that. No court martial there."
     "But that would ruin the mission!" Monkberg says.
     Root thinks this one  over  for a  moment.  "Has  anyone ever died," he
says,  "because  the enemy  stole  one  of  our secret  codes  and read  our
messages?"
     "Absolutely," Shaftoe says.
     "Has  anyone on our side ever died," Root continues, "because the enemy
<I>didn't</I> have one of our secret codes?"
     This is quite  a poser.  Corporate Benjamin makes  his mind up soonest,
but even he has to think about it. "Of course not!" he says.
     "Sergeant  Shaftoe? Do you have an opinion?" Root  asks, fixing Shaftoe
with a sober and serious gaze.
     Shaftoe says, "This code business is some tricky shit."
     Monkberg's turn. "I ...  I think... I believe I  could  come up with  a
hypothetical situation in which someone could die, yes."
     "How about you, Lieutenant Root?" Shaftoe asks.
     Root  does not say anything for a long time now. He just works with his
silk and his  needles. It seems like several minutes go by. Perhaps it's not
that long. Everyone is nervous about the Germans.
     "Lieutenant Monkberg  asks me to believe  that  it will  prevent Allied
soldiers from dying  if we turn over the Allied merchant shipping code books
to. the Germans today," Root finally  says. Everyone  jumps nervously at the
sound of his voice. "Actually, since we must use a sort of calculus of death
in these  situations, the real question  is, will this  some  how save  <I>more</I>
lives than it will lose?"
     "You  lost  me  there, padre,"  says Shaftoe. "I  didn't even  make  it
through algebra."
     "Then let's start with what we know: turning over  the  codes will lose
lives  because it  will enable the  Germans to figure  out where our convoys
are, and sink them. Right?"
     "Right!" Corporal Benjamin says. Root seems to be leaning his way.
     "That will be true,"  Root continues, "until such  time  as  the Allies
change the code systems which they will probably do as soon as possible. So,
on the negative side of the calculus of death,  we have some convoy sinkings
in  the  short term.  What about the positive side?" Root  asks, raising his
eyebrows in contemplation even as he stares down into Monkberg's wound. "How
might  turning  over  the  codes   save  some  lives?   Well,  that  is   an
imponderable."
     "A what?" Shaftoe says.
     "Suppose,  for  example,  that there is a secret convoy  about to cross
over from New York, and it contains thousands of troops, and some new weapon
that will turn the tide in the war and save  thousands of lives. And suppose
that it is using a different code system, so that even after the Germans get
our code books  today  they will  not know about it. The Germans will  focus
their  energies  on sinking  the convoys  that  they do know about  killing,
perhaps, a few hundred  crew members. But while their  attention is on those
convoys, the secret convoy will slip through and  deliver its precious cargo
and save thousands of lives."
     Another  long  silence. They  can  hear  the  rest of  Detachment  2702
shouting now, down in the lifeboats,  probably having a detailed  discussion
of their  own: if we leave all of  the fucking officers behind on a grounded
ship, does it qualify as mutiny?
     "That's  just hypothetical," Root says. "But it demonstrates that it is
at least theoretically possible that there might be a  positive  side to the
calculus of death. And now that I think about  it, there might not even be a
negative side."
     "What do you mean?" Benjamin says. "Of course there's a negative side!"
     "You are assuming that the Germans have not  already broken that code,"
Root says, pointing a bloody and  accusing finger at Benjamin's  big tome of
gibberish. "But maybe they have. They've been sinking  our convoys left  and
right, you know. If that's the case, then there is no negative in letting it
fall into their hands."
     "But that contradicts your  theory  about the secret convoy!"  Benjamin
says.
     "The secret convoy was just a <I>Gedankenexperiment,"</I> Root says.
     Corporal  Benjamin rolls his eyes;  apparently,  he actually knows what
that means.  "If they've already broken it, then why are  we going to all of
this trouble, and risking our lives to GIVE IT TO THEM!?"
     Root ponders that one for a while. "I don't know."
     "Well, what  do  you think,  Lieutenant Root?" Bobby Shaftoe asks a few
excruciatingly silent minutes later.
     "I  think  that  in  spite  of  my  <I>Gedankenexperiment,</I>  that  Corporal
Benjamin's explanation i.e., that Lieutenant Monkberg  is  a  German spy  is
more plausible."
     Benjamin lets  out a sigh  of relief. Monkberg  stares  up into  Root's
face, paralyzed with horror.
     "But implausible things happen all the time," Root continues.
     "Oh, for pete's sake!" Benjamin shouts, and slams his hand down  on the
book.
     "Lieutenant Root?" Shaftoe says.
     "Yes, Sergeant Shaftoe?"
     "Lieutenant Monkberg's injury was an accident. I seen it happen."
     Root looks up into Shaftoe's eyes. He finds this interesting. "Really?"
     "Yes, sir. It was an accident all the way."
     Root  breaks  open  a  package of sterile gauze  and  begins to wind it
around  Monkberg's leg; the blood soaks through immediately, faster  than he
can wind  new layers around it. But gradually, Root starts to get the better
of it, and the  gauze  stays white and  clean.  "Guess  it's time to make  a
command decision," he says. "I say we leave the code books behind, just like
Lieutenant Monkberg says."
     "But if he's a German spy " Benjamin begins.
     "Then his ass is grass when we get back on friendly soil," Root says.
     "But you said yourself the chances of that were slim."
     "I shouldn't have said that," Enoch Root  says apologetically.  "It was
not  a wise or a thoughtful comment. It did not  reflect  the true spirit of
Detachment 2702.  I am convinced  that  we will  prevail  in the face of our
little problem here. I am convinced that we will make  it to Sweden and that
we will bring Lieutenant Monkberg along with us."
     "That's the spirit!" Monkberg says.
     "If  at any point, Lieutenant Monkberg shows  signs  of malingering, or
volunteers to be  left behind, or in any way behaves  so as to  increase our
risk of capture by the Germans, then we can  all  safely assume that he is a
German spy."
     Monkberg seems  completely  unfazed.  "Well, let's get the fuck out  of
here,  then!" he blurts, and gets to  his feet, somewhat unsteady from blood
loss.
     "Wait!" Sergeant Shaftoe says.
     "What is it now, Shaftoe?" Monkberg shouts, back in command again.
     "How are we going to know if he's increasing our risk of capture?"
     "What do you mean, Sergeant Shaftoe?" Root says.
     "Maybe it  won't  be  obvious," Shaftoe says. "Maybe  there's a  German
detachment  waiting  to capture us at a certain location in  the woods.  And
maybe Lieutenant Monkberg is going to lead us directly to the trap."
     "Atta boy, Sarge!" Corporal Benjamin says.
     "Lieutenant  Monkberg," says Enoch Root, "as the closest thing  we have
to a ship's doctor, I am relieving you of your command on medical grounds."
     "What medical grounds!?" Monkberg shouts, horrified.
     "You are short on blood,  and what blood  you do  have is  tainted with
morphine," says Lieutenant Enoch Root.  "So the second in command will  have
to  take over for you and make all decisions as  to which direction  we will
take."
     "But you're the only  other  officer!"  Shaftoe says.  "Except  for the
skipper, and <I>he</I> can't be a skipper without a boat."
     "Sergeant Shaftoe!" Root  barks, doing such  an effective impersonation
of a Marine that Shaftoe and Benjamin both stiffen to attention.
     "Sir! Yes sir!" Shaftoe returns.
     "This is the  first  and last order I am  going to give you, so  listen
carefully!" Root insists.
     "Sir! Yes sir!"
     "Sergeant Shaftoe, take me and the rest of this unit to Sweden!"
     "Sir!  Yes  sir!"  Shaftoe  hollers, and  marches  out  of  the  cabin,
practically knocking Monkberg  aside.  The others soon follow,  leaving  the
code books behind.
     After about half an hour of  screwing around with lifeboats, Detachment
2702  finds  itself on the ground  again,  in Norway. The snowline  is about
fifty feet above sea level; it is fortunate that Bobby Shaftoe knows what to
do with  a pair of skis. The SAS blokes also know this particular drill, and
they even know how to rig up a sort of sled arrangement that they can use to
pull Lieutenant Monkberg.  Within a few hours,  they are deep in the  woods,
headed east, not having seen a single  human  being,  German  or  Norwegian,
since they ran  aground. Snow  begins  to  fall, filling  in  their  tracks.
Monkberg is behaving himself not demanding to be left behind, not sending up
flares. Shaftoe begins to think that making it out to Sweden might be one of
Detachment 2702's  easier  missions.  The  only  hard  part,  as  usual,  is
understanding what the fuck is going on.


     <B>Chapter 31 DILIGENCE</B>


     Maps  of Southeast Asia  are  up on  the walls,  and even  covering the
windows, lending a  bunkerlike ambience to Avi's hotel room. Epiphyte  Corp.
has assembled for its first full on shareholder's meeting in two months. Avi
Halaby,  Randy Waterhouse, Tom Howard,  Eberhard F&ouml;hr,  John  Cantrell,  and
Beryl Hagen crowd into the room and pillage the minibar for  snacks and soft
drinks. Some  of them sit on the bed. Eberhard sits barefoot and crosslegged
on the floor with his laptop up  on a footstool.  Avi remains  standing.  He
crosses  his arms  and  leans  back, eyes  closed,  against  the  endangered
mahogany  doors  of his  entertainment  center. He  is wearing a brilliantly
laundered white shirt, so freshly and heavily starched that  it still cracks
when he moves.  Until fifteen minutes ago he was wearing a t shirt he hadn't
taken off his body for forty eight hours.
     Randy thinks for  a  minute  that Avi  may have  fallen  asleep  in the
unorthodox standing position. But "Look at that map," Avi says suddenly,  in
a  quiet voice. He opens his eyes  and swivels them in their sockets towards
same,  not  wasting precious energy  by turning  his head.  "Singapore,  the
southern  tip of  Taiwan,  and the northernmost point  of  Australia  form a
triangle."
     "Avi," says Eb solemnly, "any  three points form a triangle." Generally
they don't look  to  Eberhard to leaven the  proceedings with  humor,  but a
chuckle passes around the room, and Avi grins not so much because it's funny
as because it's evidence of good morale.
     "What's in the middle of the triangle?"
     Everyone  looks again. The  correct answer is a <I>point in the middle  of
the Sulu Sea,</I> but it's clear what Avi is getting at. "We are," Randy says.
     "That's correct," Avi says.  "Kinakuta is ideally situated to act as an
electronic crossroads. The perfect place to put big routers."
     "You're talking shareholderese," Randy warns.
     Avi ignores him. "Really it makes a lot more sense this way."
     "What way?" Eb asks sharply.
     "I've become aware that  there are other  cable people here. There is a
group  from Singapore and  a consortium from  Australia and New Zealand.  In
other words:  we used  to be  the sole carriers  into the Crypt. As of later
today, I suspect we will be one of three."
     Tom Howard grins triumphantly: he works in the Crypt,  he probably knew
before anyone. Randy and John Cantrell exchange a look.
     Eb sits up stiffly.  "How long  have you known  about this?"  he  asks,
Randy sees  a look of annoyance flash across Beryl's face. She does not like
being probed.
     "Would  the rest of  you  excuse  Eb and me  for a minute?" Randy says,
getting to his feet.
     Dr. Eberhard F&ouml;hr looks startled, then gets up and follows Randy out of
the room. "Where are we going?"
     "Leave  your laptop," Randy  says, escorting him  out into the hallway.
"We're just going here."
     "Why?"
     "It's like this," Randy says,  pulling the  door closed but not letting
it lock. "People like Avi and Beryl,  who  have been in business a lot, have
this noticeable preference for two person conversations like the one you and
I are having right now. Not only that, they rarely write things down."
     "Explain."
     "It's  kind of an  information theory thing. See,  if  worse  comes  to
worst, and there is some kind of legal action "
     "Legal action? What are you talking about?"
     Eb  came from a small city near the border with Denmark. His father was
a  high  school  mathematics  teacher,  his  mother an  English teacher. His
appearance  would  probably  make him an outcast in  his home town, but like
many of the people  who still live there, he believes that things should  be
done in a plain, open, and logical fashion.
     "I don't mean to alarm  you,"  Randy says,  "I'm not implying  that any
such thing is happening, or  about to. But America being the way it is right
now, you'd be amazed how often business ventures lead to lawsuits. When that
happens, any and all documents are disclosable. So people like Avi and Beryl
never  write  anything  down  that they wouldn't want  to see in open court.
Furthermore,  anyone  can be  asked,  under  oath,  to  testify  about  what
happened. That's why two person conversations, like this one, are best."
     "One person's word against another. I understand this."
     "I know you do."
     "We should anyway have been discreetly told."
     "The reason that Avi and Beryl didn't tell us about this  until now was
that they wanted  to  work  out the  problem  face to  face,  in  two person
conversations.  In other  words,  they did  it  to  protect  us  not to hide
anything from us. Now they are formally presenting us with the news."
     Eberhard is no longer suspicious. Now he is irked, which is worse. Like
a lot of techies, he can become obstreperous when he decides that others are
not being logical. Randy holds up his hands, palms out, in surrender.
     "I stipulate that this does not make sense," Randy says.
     Eb glares into the distance, not mollified.
     "Will you agree  with me that the world  is full of  irrational people,
and crazy situations?"
     "Jaaaa " Eb says guardedly.
     "If you  and I  are going to  hack and get paid for  it, people have to
hire us, right?"
     Eb considers it carefully. "Yes."
     "That means dealing with those people, at some  level, unpleasant as it
may be.  And accepting a whole  lot of  other nonsense, like lawyers and  PR
people and marketroids. And if you or I tried to deal with them, we would go
out of our minds. True?"
     "Most likely, yes."
     "It  is good, then, that people  like Avi  and  Beryl  have  come  into
existence, because they are our interface." An image from the Cold War comes
into  Randy's  head.  He reaches out  with both hands and gropes in the air.
"Like those glove boxes that they use to handle plutonium. See?"
     Eberhard nods. An encouraging sign.
     "But  that  doesn't  mean  that  it's  going  to  be  like  programming
computers. They  can only  filter  and soften the irrational  nature  of the
world  beyond, so  Avi  and Beryl  may still  do things that  seem a  little
crazy."
     Eb has been getting a more and more faraway look in his eyes. "It would
be  interesting to  approach this  as a problem in  information  theory," he
announces. "How can data  flow back and forth between  nodes  in an internal
network" Randy  knows  that  by  this Eb means <I>people in a small corporation</I>
&ndash; "but not exist to a person outside?"
     "What do you mean, not exist?"
     "How could a  court subpoena a document if, from their reference frame,
it had never existed?"
     "Are you talking about encrypting it?"
     Eb looks slightly pained by Randy's simple mindedness. "We are  already
doing that.  But  someone  could still prove that a document, of  a  certain
size, had been sent out at a certain time, to a certain mailbox."
     "Traffic analysis."
     "Yes.  But what if one jams it? Why couldn't I  fill my hard drive with
random bytes, so that individual files  would not be discernible? Their very
existence would be  hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass.
And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other."
     "That would be expensive."
     Eberhard waves his hand dismissively. "Bandwidth is cheap."
     "That  is  more an article of  faith than  a  statement of fact," Randy
says, "but it might be true in the future."
     "But  the rest  of  our lives  will happen in the future, Randy,  so we
might as well get with the program now.
     "Well," Randy says, "could we continue this discussion later?"
     "Of course."
     They go back into the room.  Tom, who has  spent the most time here, is
saying: "The  five footers  with yellowish brown spots on an aqua background
are harmless and make great pets. The six footers with brownish yellow spots
on a  turquoise  background  kill  you  with a single  bite, in ten minutes,
unless you commit suicide in the meantime to escape the intolerable pain."
     This is all a way of letting Randy and Eb know that the others have not
been discussing business while they were out of the room.
     "Okay,"  Avi  says,  "the  upshot  is that  the  Crypt  is going to  be
potentially much bigger than we thought  at first, so this is good news. But
there is one thing that we have to  deal with." Avi has known Randy forever,
and knows that Randy won't really be bothered by what is to come.
     All  eyes  turn towards Randy, and  Beryl picks up the thread.  She has
arrogated to herself the role of worrying about people's feelings, since the
other people  in  the company  are so manifestly unqualified, and she speaks
regretfully. "The work Randy's been doing  in the Philippines, which is very
fine work, is no longer a critical part of this corporation's activities."
     "I  accept that," Randy says. "Hey, at least  I got my first tan in ten
years."
     Everyone seems immediately relieved that Randy is not pissed off.
     Tom,  typically, gets  right to brass  tacks: "Can we pull  out  of our
relationship with the Dentist? Just make a clean break?"
     The rhythm  of the  conversation  is abruptly  lost. It's  like a power
failure in a discotheque.
     "Unknown," Avi finally says. "We looked at the contracts. But they were
written by the Dentist's lawyers."
     "Aren't some of his partners lawyers?" Cantrell asks.
     Avi shrugs impatiently, as if that's not the half of it. "His partners.
His  investors. His  neighbors, friends,  golfing buddies.  His  <I>plumber</I>  is
probably a lawyer."
     "The point being that he is famously litigious," Randy says.
     "The other potential problem," Beryl  says, "is  that, if we did find a
way to  extract ourselves from  the  deal with AVCLA, we would then lose the
short term cash flow that we were counting on from the  Philippines network.
The ramifications of that turn out to be uglier than we had expected."
     "Damn!" Randy says, "I was afraid of that."
     "What are the  ramifications?" Tom says, hewing  as  ever to the bottom
line.
     "We  would have to  raise some more money to cover  the shortfall," Avi
says. "Diluting our stock."
     "Diluting it how much?" John asks.
     "Below fifty percent."
     This magic figure  touches  off  an epidemic of  sighing,  groaning and
shifting around among the officers of  Epiphyte Corp., who collectively hold
over  fifty  percent  of  the company's  stock. As  they  work  through  the
ramifications in their heads, they begin to look significantly at Randy.
     Finally Randy  stands, and holds out his  hands as if warding them off.
"Okay,  okay,  okay," he  says. "Where does this take us? The business  plan
states,  over and over, that the Philippines network makes  sense in and  of
itself that it could be  spun  off into an  independent business at any time
and still make money. As far as we know, that's still true, right?"
     Avi thinks this over before issuing the carefully engineered statement:
     "It is as true as it ever was."
     This elicits  a  titter,  and  a  bit of sarcastic  applause,  from the
others. Clever Avi! Where would we be without him?
     "Okay,"  Randy says. "So if  we stick with the  Dentist even though his
project is now irrelevant to us we hopefully make enough money that we don't
need to sell any more stock. We can  retain control over the company. On the
other hand, if we break our  relationship with AVCLA, the Dentist's partners
start to hammer us with lawsuits which they can do at virtually no cost,  or
risk. We get mired in court in  L.A.  We  have to fly back there and testify
and give depositions. We spend a ton of money on lawyers."
     "And we might even lose," Avi says.
     Everyone laughs.
     "So we  have to stay  in," Randy concludes. "We have to work  with  the
Dentist whether we want to or not."
     No one says anything.
     It's not that they disagree with Randy; on the contrary. It's just that
Randy is the guy who's been doing the Philippines stuff, and who is going to
end up handling this unfortunate  situation. Randy's going  to take all  the
force of this blow  personally. It is better that  he volunteer than that it
be forced on him. He is volunteering now, loudly and publicly,  putting on a
performance. The other actors in the ensemble are Avi, Beryl, Tom, John, and
Eb. The  audience consists of  Epiphyte Corp.'s minority  shareholders,  the
Dentist, and various  yet to  be empaneled juries.  It is a performance that
will never come to light unless  someone files a  lawsuit  against them  and
brings them all to the witness box to recount it under oath.
     John decides to trowel  it on a little thicker. "AVCLA's financing  the
Philippines on spec, right?"
     "Correct,"   Avi  says  authoritatively,   playing   directly   to  the
hypothetical juries of the future. "In the old days, cable layers would sell
capacity first to raise capital. AVCLA's building it with their own capital.
When it's  finished, they'll own it outright, and  they'll sell the capacity
to the highest bidder."
     "It's not all AVCLA's money  they're  not that rich," Beryl says. "They
got a big wad from NOHGI."
     "Which is?" Eb asks.
     "Niigata Overseas Holding Group Inc.," three people say in unison.
     Eb looks baffled.
     "NOHGI laid the deep sea cable from Taiwan to Luzon," Randy says.
     "Anyway," John says, "my point is that  since the Dentist is wiring the
Philippines  on  spec,  he  is  highly exposed.  Anything  that  delays  the
completion of that  system  is going  to  cause  him  enormous  problems. It
behooves us to honor our obligations."
     John is saying to  the hypothetical jury in  Dentist v. Epiphyte Corp.:
<I>we carefully observed the terms of our contract with AVCLA.</I>

     But this is not  necessarily going to look so good to the  hypothetical
jury in  the <I>other</I> hypothetical  minority  shareholder  lawsuit, Springboard
Group  v.  Epiphyte  Corp.  So  Avi  hastens  to  add,  "As  I  think  we've
established, through  a  careful  discussion  of the  issues,  honoring  our
obligations to the Dentist is part and  parcel of our obligation  to our own
shareholders. These two goals dovetail."
     Beryl rolls her eyes and heaves a deep sigh of relief.
     "Let us therefore go forth and wire the Philippines," Randy says.
     Avi addresses him  in  formal tones, as if his hand were  resting, even
now, on a Gideon Bible. "Randy, do you  feel that  the resources allotted to
you  are  sufficient  for you  to  meet our  contractual  obligations to the
Dentist?"
     "We need to have a meeting about that," Randy says.
     "Can it wait until after tomorrow?" Avi says.
     "Of course. Why shouldn't it?"
     "I have to use the bathroom," Avi says.
     This is a signal  that Avi and  Randy have used many times in the past.
Avi gets up and goes into the bathroom. A moment later, Randy says, "Come to
think of it . . ." and follows him in there.
     He is startled to find that Avi is actually pissing. On the spur of the
moment,  Randy unzips and starts pissing  right along  with him. It  doesn't
occur to him how remarkable this is until he's well into it.
     "What's up?" Randy asks.
     "I went down to the lobby to change money this morning," Avi says, "and
guess who came stalking into the hotel, fresh from the airport?"
     "Oh, shit," Randy says.
     "The Dentist himself."
     "No yacht?"
     "The yacht's following him."
     "Did he have anyone with him?"
     "No, but he might later."
     "Why is he here?"
     "He must have heard."
     "God. He's the last guy I want to run into tomorrow."
     "Why? Is there a problem?"
     "Nothing I can put my finger on," Randy says. "Nothing dramatic."
     "Nothing  that,  if  it  came  to  light  later,  would  make you  look
negligent?"
     "I don't think so," Randy says.  "It's just that this Philippines thing
is complicated and we need to talk about it."
     "Well,  for  God's  sake," Avi  says,  "if  you  run into  the  Dentist
tomorrow, don't say anything about your work. Keep it social."
     "Got it," Randy says, and zips up.  But what he's  really thinking  is:
why did I  waste  all those  years in academia when I could have  been doing
great shit like this?
     Which then reminds him of something: "Oh, yeah. Got a weird e mail."
     Avi immediately says "From Andy?"
     "How'd you guess?"
     "You said it was <I>weird.</I> Did you really get e mail from him?"
     "I don't really  know who it was from. Probably  not  Andy.  It  wasn't
weird in <I>that</I> way."
     "Did you respond to it?"
     "No. But dwarf@siblings.net did."
     "Who's that? Siblings.net is the system you used to administer, right?"
     "Yeah.  I still  have  some  privileges there.  I created a new account
there, name  of  dwarf,  which can't be traced to me. Sent anonymous  e mail
back to this guy telling him that until he proves otherwise, I'm assuming he
is an old enemy of mine."
     "Or a new one."


     <B>Chapter 32 SPEARHEAD</B>


     The  young Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse,  visiting his grandparents in
Dakota, follows a plow across a field. The diving blades  of the  plow heave
the  black soil up  out of the furrows and pile  it into  ridges, rough  and
jumbled when seen up close  but mathematically clean and  straight, like the
grooves of  a  phonograph  record, when  viewed  from  a  distance.  A  tiny
surfboard shaped object  projects  from  the crest of one  of those  earthen
waves.  Young  Waterhouse  bends down and  plucks  it  out. It is  an Indian
spearhead neatly chipped out of flint.
     U 553 is  a black  steel spear point  thrusting into the  air about ten
miles  north  of Qwghlm. The  grey rollers pick  it up and slam it down, but
other  than  that,  it does not  move;  it is  grounded on  a submerged  out
cropping  known  to the locals as  Caesar's Reef,  or Viking's Grief, or the
Dutch Hammer.
     On the  prairie, those flint arrowheads  can be  found lodged  in every
sort of natural matrix: soil, sod, the mud of a riverbank, the  heartwood of
a tree. Waterhouse has a talent for finding  them. How can  he walk across a
field salted, by the retreat of the last glacier, with countless stones, and
pick out the arrowheads? Why can the human eye detect a tiny artificial form
lost in nature's torn and turbulent  cosmos, a needle of data in  a haystack
of noise? It  is a sudden, sparking  connection between minds, he  supposes.
The  arrowheads are human things broken loose  from humanity, their  organic
parts  perished, their mineral forms enduring  crystals of intention. It  is
not the form  but the lethal intent that demands  the attention of a selfish
mind. It worked for young Waterhouse, hunting for arrowheads. It worked  for
the pilots  of the airplanes that  hounded U 553 this morning. It  works for
the listeners of the <I>Beobachtung Dienst,</I> who have trained their ears to hear
what is being said by Churchill and FDR on what are supposed to be scrambled
telephones.  But it doesn't  work very well with crypto. That is too bad for
everyone except the British and the Americans, who have devised mathematical
systems for picking out arrowheads amid pebbles.
     Caesar's Reef gashed  the underside of U  553's bow section  open while
shoving  the entire boat  up  and  partly out of the water. Momentum  almost
carried her over the hump, but she got hung  up  in the middle,  stranded, a
wave battered teeter totter. Her bows have mostly filled with water now, and
so it is  the sharp stern that projects up above the crests of the seas. She
has been abandoned by her crew, which means that according to the traditions
of maritime law, she is  up for  grabs. The Royal  Navy  has called dibs.  A
screen  of  destroyers patrols the area, lest some sister U boat slip in and
torpedo the wreck.
     Waterhouse had  been collected from the castle  in unseemly haste. Dusk
is now  falling like a lead curtain, and wolf packs hunt  at night. He is on
the bridge  of a corvette, a tiny escort ship that, in any kind of chop, has
the exact hydrodynamics  of an empty oil drum. If he stays down  below he'll
never  stop vomiting, and so he stands  abovedecks, feet braced wide,  knees
bent, holding  onto a rail with both hands, watching the wreck  come closer.
The number <I>553</I> is painted on her conning tower, beneath a cartoon of a polar
bear hoisting a beer stein.
     "Interesting,"  he says to  Colonel Chattan.  "Five five three  is  the
product of two prime numbers seven and seventy nine."
     Chattan manages  an appreciative  smile, but  Waterhouse can tell  that
it's nothing more than a spectacular display of breeding.
     The  remainder of  Detachment  2702  is,  meanwhile,  finally arriving.
Having just  finished with the successful Norway ramming mission,  they were
on their way to their new base of  operations on  Qwghlm  when they received
word of U 553's grounding.  They  rendezvoused with Waterhouse right here on
this  boat haven't  even had a chance  to sit  down yet,  much less  unpack.
Waterhouse  has  told  them several times how much  they  are going to  like
Qwghlm  and has  run out  of other things  to  say the crew of this corvette
lacks  Ultra  Mega clearance, and there is  nothing  that  Waterhouse  could
conceivably talk about with Chattan and the others that is not classified at
the Ultra Mega level. So he's trying gamely with prime number chitchat.
     Some of  the detachment the Marine lieutenant and most of  the enlisted
men were  dropped off in  Qwghlm so that they could  settle  into  their new
quarters.  Only Colonel Chattan  and a noncom  named Sergeant Robert Shaftoe
have accompanied Waterhouse to the U boat.
     Shaftoe  has a wiry build,  bulging Alley Oop  forearms and hands,  and
blond hair in a buzz cut that makes his big blue eyes look bigger.  He has a
big nose  and a big Adam's  apple  and big  acne  scars and some other scars
around the orbits of his eyes.  The large features in the trim body give him
an  intense presence; it is hard not to keep looking over in his  direction.
He  seems  like a  man  with  powerful emotions  but  an  even more powerful
discipline  that  keeps  them   under   control.   He  stares  directly  and
unblinkingly into the eyes of whoever is talking. When no one is talking, he
stares  at  the horizon and  thinks. When he is  thinking,  he  twiddles his
fingers incessantly.  Everyone  else  is using  their fingers  to hold on to
something, but Shaftoe is  planted on the deck like  a fat geezer waiting in
line  for  a movie.  He, like Waterhouse, but unlike  Chattan, is dressed in
heavy foul  weather gear  that  they  have  borrowed from the stores of this
torpedo boat.
     It is known, and word has  gone  out to all present, that the U  boat's
skipper the last  man to abandon ship had the presence of mind to bring  the
boat's Enigma  machine with  him. The RAF  planes, still circling  overhead,
watched the  skipper  rise  to a precarious kneel in his life raft and fling
the wheels of the machine in different directions, into the steep pitches of
hill sized waves. Then the machine itself went overboard.
     The Germans know that the machine will never be recovered. What they do
not know  is  that they will  never even be looked for, because there  is  a
place called Bletchley  Park that  already knows  all that there  is to know
about the four  wheel naval  Enigma. The Brits will  make a show  of looking
anyway, in case anyone is watching.
     Waterhouse is not looking  for Enigma machines. He is looking for stray
arrowheads.
     The corvette first approaches the U  boat  head on, thinks better of it
and swings  far  around  astern of the wreck, then beats upwind towards  it.
That way, Waterhouse reckons, the wind will  tend to blow them away from the
reef. Seen from underneath, the U boat is actually kind of fat  cheeked. The
part that's supposed to be above water, when it's surfaced, is neutral grey,
and it's as skinny as a knife. The part that's supposed to be below, when it
hasn't just crashed into a  great big rock, is  wide and black. She has been
boarded by  adventuresome  Royal  Navy  men who have cheekily raised a White
Ensign from her conning tower.
     They have apparently reached her in a shallow draft whaler that is tied
up alongside, loosely bound to her  by a sparse web of  lines,  kept away by
bald  tires slung  over  the rail.  The  corvette  carrying the  members  of
Detachment  2702 edges  towards the U  boat cautiously;  each  rolling  wave
nearly slams the boats together.
     "We're  definitely in a non Euclidean spatial geometry now!" Waterhouse
says puckishly. Chattan  bends towards him and cups a hand to his  ear. "Not
only  that but it's <I>real</I> time dependent, <I>definitely</I> something that has to be
tackled in four dimensions not three!"
     "I beg your pardon?"
     Any closer and they'll be grounded on the  reef themselves. The sailors
launch an actual rocket that carries a line between the  vessels, and devote
some time to rigging up a ship to ship transfer system. Waterhouse is afraid
they're  going to  put him  on it. Actually he's more resentful than afraid,
because  he  was under the impression  that he  wouldn't be put in any  more
danger  for  the  rest of the  war. He  tries to kill  time  looking  at the
underside of the U boat and watching  the sailors. They've formed  a sort of
bucket brigade  to haul books and papers up out  of the wreck to the conning
tower  and  from  there  down  into  the  whaler. The conning  tower  has  a
complicated  spidery  look  with gun barrels  and  periscopes  and  antennas
sticking out all over the place.
     Waterhouse  and Shaftoe  are  indeed sent  over  to  U 553 on a sort of
trolley contraption that rolls along a stretched cable. The sailors put life
jackets on them first, as a sort of hilarious token gesture, so that if they
avoid being smashed to bits they can die of hypothermia instead of drowning.
     When Waterhouse is halfway across, the trough  of a wave passes beneath
him, and he looks down into  the sucking cavity and sees the top of Caesar's
Reef, momentarily exposed, covered  with an indigo fur of mussels. You could
go  down there and  stand on it. For  an instant.  Then thousands of tons of
really cold water slams into the cavity and rises up  and punches him in the
ass.
     He  looks up  at  U 553, entirely  too much of which  is above him. His
basic impression is that it's hollow,  more colander than warship. The  hull
is perforated with rows of oblong slots arranged  in swirling  patterns like
streamlines  tattooed  onto the metal.  It seems impossibly flimsy.  Then he
peers through the slots light is shining all the way through from more slots
in the deck and perceives the silhouette of the pressure hull nested inside,
curved and much more solid looking than the outer hull. She's got two triple
bladed brass  propellers,  maybe a yard across,  dinged here and there  from
contact with who knows what. Right now  they are thrust up into the air, and
looking  at  them  Waterhouse  feels  the  same absurd embarrassment he felt
looking at  dead  guys in  Pearl Harbor whose  private parts  were  showing.
Diving  planes  and  rudders  stick  out  of  the  hull  downstream  of  the
propellers, and  aft of those, near the apex  of the stern,  are  two  crude
hatchlike slabs  of  metal which,  Waterhouse realizes, must  be  where  the
torpedoes come out.
     He slides the last twenty feet  at  terrifying speed  and is caught and
held, in various  places, by eight strong hands who lift  him to what passes
for safety: the deck of the U boat,  just  aft of the conning tower, sort of
nestled underneath an antiaircraft gun. Way up at the boat's  stern, there's
a big T shaped stanchion with cables  coming out of the ends of the crossbar
and stretched tight all  the way to the conning tower railing, near to hand.
Following  the example  of  a  Royal  Navy  officer  who  appears to  be his
appointed guardian, Waterhouse climbs uphill i.e.  towards  the stern  using
one of those cables as  a sort of banister, and follows him  down a hatch in
the afterdeck  and into the  interior  of the boat.  Shaftoe  follows a  few
moments later.
     It is the worst place Waterhouse has  ever been. Like  the  corvette he
has just  left, it rises smoothly on each roller, but unlike the corvette it
comes down with a crash on the rocks, nearly throwing him to the deck. It is
like  being sealed  up  in  a  garbage  can  that  is  being  beaten with  a
sledgehammer.  U 553 is about half full of a rich brew of cheap wine, diesel
fuel,  battery acid, and raw sewage. Because of the way she is pitched, this
soup quickly gets deeper as you go forward, but  it rolls aft in a drenching
tsunami every time  her midsection  slams down  on  the rocks.  Fortunately,
Waterhouse  is now  far  beyond nausea, in some  kind of transcendent  state
where his mind has become even more divorced from his body than usual.
     The officer in charge waits for the noise to subside and then says,  in
a  startlingly quiet voice, "Is there  anything in  particular you'd like to
inspect, sir?"
     Waterhouse is still trying to  get  some idea of where he is by shining
his flashlight beam around the place, which is  kind of like peering through
a  soda  straw.  He  can't get any  synoptic view  of his surroundings, just
narrow glimpses of pipes and wires. Finally he tries  holding his head still
and  sort  of  scribbling the flashlight beam around really  fast. A picture
emerges:  they are  in  a narrow crawl  space, obviously designed by and for
engineers,  intended to give access to a few thousand  linear miles of pipes
and wires that have been forced through some kind of bottleneck.
     "We  are looking for the skipper's  papers," Waterhouse  says. The boat
goes into free fall again; he leans against  something slippery,  claps  his
hands over his ears, closes his eyes and mouth, and exhales through his nose
so  that none of the soup  will force its way into his body. The thing  he's
leaning  against is  really  hard and cold and round. It's greasy. He shines
his light on it; it's made of brass. The light scribbling trick produces the
image  of a  brass spaceship of some sort, nestled  underneath (unless  he's
mistaken) a bunk. He's just on the verge of making a total ass of himself by
asking what it is, when he identifies it as a torpedo.
     In the next quiet interlude, he asks, "Is there anything like a private
cabin where he might have . ."
     "It's forward," the officer says. Forward is not an encouraging view.
     "Fuck!"  Sergeant Shaftoe says.  It's the  first  thing he has  said in
about half an hour. He begins to slosh forward, and the British  officer has
to hurry to  catch up.  The deck falls out from beneath their feet again and
they stop and turn around  so that the wave  of sewage will hit them in  the
backs.
     They travel  downhill. Every step's a pitched battle  vs. prudence  and
sound judgment, and they take a lot of steps. What Waterhouse had pegged  as
a bottleneck goes on and on  all the way, apparently, to the bow. Eventually
they find something that gives them an excuse to stop: a cabin, or maybe (at
about  four by six  feet) a corner of  a cabin. There's a bed, a little fold
out table, and cabinets  made of actual  wood. These in combination with the
photographs of family and friends give it  a cozy, domestic flavor which is,
however, completely  ruined  by  the framed picture  of Adolf Hitler  on the
wall.  Waterhouse finds  this  to  be in  shockingly  poor  taste  until  he
remembers it's a German boat. The mean high tide level  of the sewage angles
across  the  cabin  and  cuts it approximately  in half.  Papers  and  other
bureaucratic detritus are floating every where, written in the occult Gothic
script that Waterhouse associates with Rudy.
     "Take it all," Waterhouse says, but Shaftoe and the officer are already
sweeping  their  arms  through  the  brew and bringing  them up  wrapped  in
dripping papier m&acirc;ch&eacute;. They stuff it all into a canvas sack.
     The skipper's bunk is on the aft or uphill end of  the  cabin.  Shaftoe
strips it, looks under the pillow and under the mattress, finds nothing.
     The  fold out table  is on the totally  submerged end. Waterhouse wades
into  it carefully, trying not to lose his footing. He  finds  the desk with
his feet, reaches down into the murk with his hands, explores as a blind man
would.  He finds  a few drawers  which he  is able to  pull out of  the desk
entirely and hand off to  Shaftoe, who dumps their contents  into the  sack.
Within a short time he is pretty sure that there's nothing left in the desk.
     The boat rises and slams down. As the sewage rolls forward, it exposes,
for just a moment, something in the corner of  the cabin, something attached
to the forward bulkhead. Waterhouse wades over to identify it.
     "It's a safe!" he says.  He spins the  dial.  It's  heavy. A good safe.
German. Shaftoe and the British officer look at each other.
     A British  sailor  appears in the open  hatchway. "Sir!" he  announces.
"Another U boat has been sighted in the area."
     "I'd love to have a stethoscope," Waterhouse  hints. "This thing have a
sickbay?"
     "No,"  says the British officer. "Just a box of medical gear. Should be
floating around somewhere."
     "Sir!  Yes sir!"  Shaftoe  says,  and vanishes from  the room. A minute
later he's back holding a German  stethoscope  up above his head  to keep it
clean.  He tosses it  across the  cabin to Waterhouse, who snares it  in the
air, sockets it into his ears, and thrusts the business end down through the
sewage to the front of the safe.
     He has  done a little  of  this  before, as  an  exercise. Kids who are
obsessed  with locks  frequently  turn  into  adults who  are obsessed  with
crypto. The manager of the grocery store in Moorhead, Minnesota, used to let
the young Waterhouse play with his  safe. He broke the  combination,  to the
manager's  great  surprise, and  wrote  a  report about the  experience  for
school.
     This  safe  is a lot  better than that one was. Since he can't see  the
dial anyway, he closes his eyes.
     He is  vaguely conscious that the other  fellows  on the submarine have
been  shouting  and  carrying  on  about something  for  a while, as if some
sensational news has just come in. Perhaps the war is over. Then the head of
the stethoscope is wrenched loose  from his grasp. He opens  his eyes to see
Sergeant Shaftoe lifting it to his mouth as if it were a microphone. Shaftoe
stares at him coolly and speaks into the stethoscope: "Sir, torpedoes in the
water, sir." Then Shaftoe turns and leaves Waterhouse alone in the cabin.
     Waterhouse is about halfway up the conning tower ladder, looking  up at
a disk of greyish black sky, when the whole vessel jerks and booms. A piston
of sewage rises up beneath him  and  propels him upwards,  vomiting  him out
onto the top  deck  of  the  boat,  where his  comrades  grab  him  and very
considerately prevent him from rolling off into the ocean.
     The movement of  the  U 553 with the  waves has changed. She's moving a
lot more now, as if she's about to break free from the reef.
     It takes Waterhouse a minute to get  his  bearings.  He is starting  to
think he may have  suffered  some damage  during all of that.  Something  is
definitely wrong with his left arm, which is the one he landed on.
     Powerful  light  sweeps  over  them: a  searchlight  from  the  British
corvette  that  brought them  here.  The British  sailors  curse. Waterhouse
levers himself up on  his good elbow and sights down the hull of the U boat,
following the beam of  the searchlight to a bizarre sight. The boat has been
blown open just beneath the waterline, shards of  her hull peeled back  from
the wound  and projecting  jaggedly into the air. The  foul  contents of the
hull are draining out, staining the Atlantic black.
     "Fuck!" Sergeant Shaftoe  says. He shrugs  loose from a small but heavy
looking  knapsack  that he's been carrying around, pulls it open. His sudden
activity draws the attention of the  Royal Navy men who help out by pointing
their flashlights at his furious hands.
     Waterhouse, who may be in  some kind of delirium  by this point,  can't
quite believe what he sees: Shaftoe has pulled out a bundle of neat brownish
yellow cylinders, as thick  as a finger  and maybe  six inches long. He also
takes out  some small items, including  a coil of  thick, stiff red cord. He
jumps to his feet so decisively that he nearly knocks someone down, and runs
to the conning tower and disappears down the ladder.
     "Jesus," an officer says, "he's going to do some blasting." The officer
thinks  about  this for  a  very  small  amount  of  time;  the  ship  moves
terrifyingly with the waves and  makes scraping noises which might  indicate
it's sliding off the reef. "Abandon ship!" he hollers.
     Most of them  get into the whaler. Waterhouse  is bundled back onto the
trolley contraption. He is about  halfway across to the torpedo boat when he
feels, but scarcely hears, a sharp shock.
     For the rest of the way over he can't really see diddly, and even after
he's  back  on the  torpedo  boat, all is confusion, and someone named Enoch
Root  insists on  taking  him  below  and working on his  arm and  his head.
Waterhouse did not know until now that his head was damaged, which stands to
reason, in that your head is where you know things, and if it's damaged, how
can you know it? "You'll  get  at least a Purple Heart for this," Enoch Root
says.  He says it with a marked  lack of enthusiasm, as if he couldn't  care
less about Purple Hearts,  but is condescending to suppose that it will be a
big thrill for Waterhouse. "And Sergeant  Shaftoe probably has another major
decoration coming too, damn him."


     <B>Chapter 33 MORPHIUM</B>


     Shaftoe still sees the word every time he closes his  eyes. It would be
a lot  better  if  he  were  paying  attention to the  work at hand: packing
demolition charges around the gussets that join the safe to the U boat.
     MORPHIUM. It is printed thus on  a yellowed  paper label.  The label is
glued to a  small glass  bottle. The  color of  the glass  is the  same deep
purple that you see when your eyes have been dazzled by a powerful light.
     Harvey,  the sailor who has volunteered  to help him, keeps shining his
flashlight into Shaftoe's eyes. It is unavoidable; Shaftoe is wedged into  a
surpassingly  awkward position beneath  the  safe, working with the charges,
trying to set the primers with slimy fingers drained of warmth and strength.
This  would  not even be possible if the boat hadn't been torpedoed; before,
this cabin was half full of sewage and the safe was  immersed in it.  Now it
has been conveniently drained.
     Harvey is  not wedged  into  anything; he is being flung around  by the
paroxysms of the U boat, which like a  beached shark, is trying stupidly but
violently to thrash  its way loose from the reef. The beam of his flashlight
keeps  sweeping across Shaftoe's eyes. Shaftoe  blinks, and sees a cosmos of
purple: tiny purple bottles labeled MORPHIUM.
     "God damn it!" he hollers.
     "Is everything all right, Sergeant?" Harvey says.
     Harvey doesn't get  it. Harvey thinks  that Shaftoe is cursing  at some
problem with the explosives.
     The explosives  are  just fucking  <I>great.</I> There's  no problem  with the
<I>explosives.</I> The problem is with Bobby Shaftoe's brain.
     He  was <I>right  there.</I>  Waterhouse  sent him to find a  stethoscope, and
Shaftoe went chambering through the U  boat until he found a wooden  box. He
opened it up and saw right away it was full of medic stuff. He pawed through
it, looking for what Waterhouse wanted,  and there was the  bottle, plain as
day, right in front of  his face.  His hand  brushed  against it,  for god's
sake. He saw the label as the beam of his flashlight swept across it:
     MORPHIUM.
     But he didn't grab it. If it had said MORPHINE he would have grabbed it
in a second. But it said MORPHIUM. And it  wasn't until about thirty seconds
later that he realized that this was a fucking German boat and of course the
words would all be different and there  was about a 99 percent  chance  that
MORPHIUM was, in fact, exactly the same stuff  as MORPHINE. When he realized
that  he planted his feet in the passageway of the darkened  U  boat and let
out  a deep long scream  from  way  down in  his gut. With the noise of  the
waves, no one heard him. Then he continued onwards and carried out his duty,
handing over the stethoscope to Waterhouse.  He carried out his duty because
he is a Marine.
     Blowing this fucking safe off the wall is  not  his duty.  It's just an
idea that popped into  his head. They've been training him  how to use these
explosives; why  not put it into  practice?  He's blowing this safe up,  not
because he is a Marine, but because  he is  Bobby Shaftoe. And also  because
it's a great excuse to go back for that morphium.
     The U boat bucks and sends Harvey sprawling to the  deck. Shaftoe waits
for the  motion  to subside, then flails for handholds and pulls himself out
from under the safe.  His weight is mostly on his feet now, but it  wouldn't
be correct to say he's standing up. In this place, the best you can hope for
is to  scramble for  balance somewhat  faster than you are  falling on  your
Keister. Harvey has just lost that race  and Shaftoe is winning  it  for the
moment.
     "Fire in the hole!"  Shaftoe hollers.  Harvey finds  his feet!  Shaftoe
gives  him  a  helpful shove out into the passageway. Harvey  turns left and
heads uphill for the conning  tower  and  the  exit. Shaftoe turns right. He
heads  downhill. Towards the  bow. Towards Davy Jones's Locker.  Towards the
box with the MORPHIUM.
     Where the fuck is that box? When he found it before,  it was bobbing in
the soup.  Maybe horrible thought maybe it just drained out of the hole made
by the torpedo. He passes through a couple of bulkheads. The boat's angle is
getting steeper all  the time and he  ends up walking  backwards, like  he's
descending a ladder,  making handholds  out of pipes, electrical cables, and
the chains that suspend the submarines' bunks. This boat is so damn <I>long.</I>

     It seems like  a strange way to kill people.  Shaftoe's not  sure if he
approves of  everything that  is implied by this U  boat. Shaftoe has killed
Chinese bandits on the banks  of the  Yangtze by stabbing them  in the chest
with  a bayonet. He thinks he killed one, once, just  by  hitting him pretty
hard  in  the head. On Guadalcanal he  killed Nips  by shooting at them with
several  different  kinds  of  arms,  by rolling  rocks  down  on  them,  by
constructing  large bonfires at the entrances to caves where they were holed
up, by  sneaking up on them in  the jungle and  cutting  their  throats,  by
firing mortars into their positions, even by picking one up and throwing him
off a  cliff into the pounding surf. Of course he has known for  a long time
that  this face to face  style  of  killing the  bad guys  is  kind  of  old
fashioned, but it's not like he's spent a lot of time <I>thinking</I> about it. The
demonstration of the Vickers machine gun that he witnessed in Italy <I>did</I> sort
of  get him  thinking,  and now here he is, inside one  of  the most  famous
killing machines in  the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves. Or
rather the cast  iron wheels  that are used for opening and  closing valves.
Entire  bulkheads  are covered with iron wheels,  ranging from  a  couple of
inches to over a foot in diameter,  packed in as densely as barnacles  on  a
rock, in what looks like a completely random and irregular fashion. They are
painted  either red  or  black, and they are polished to  a  gleam from  the
friction of men's hands.
     And where it's not valves  it's switches, huge Frankenstein movie ones.
There is one  big rotary switch, half green and half red, that's a good  two
feet in diameter. And it's not like this boat has  a lot of  windows in  it.
It's  got no windows at all.  Just a periscope that can only be used by  one
guy at a time. And so for these guys, the war comes down to being sealed  up
in an airtight drum  full  of  shit and  turning valve  wheels and  throwing
switches on command, and from time to time maybe some officer comes back and
tells them that they just killed a bunch of guys.
     There's that box it ended up  on  a bunk. Shaftoe yanks it  closer  and
hauls it  open. The contents  are all jumbled up, and there's more than  one
purple  bottle in there,  and he panics for a moment, thinking he'll have to
read all of the labels in their creepy Germanic script, but in a few seconds
he finds the MORPHIUM, grabs it, pockets it.
     He's on  his way back up towards the  conning tower when  a big  roller
slams  into the  outside of the boat and knocks him  off balance. He tumbles
downhill for a long, long ways, doing backward somersaults straight down the
middle  of  the  boat,  before he gets himself under control. Everything has
gone black; he's lost his flashlight.
     He comes very close to panicking now. It's not that he's a panicky guy,
just that it's  been  a while since he  had morphine, and when  he gets this
way, his body reacts badly to things. He's half blinded by a  powerful flash
of blue  light  that is gone before his eyes have time to  blink.  There's a
sizzling noise down below. He moves his left hand and  feels  a  tug  on his
wrist:  the flashlight's lanyard, which  he had the presence of mind to wrap
around himself. The light scrapes  and  clanks against  the steel grating on
which  Shaftoe  is now spreadeagled, like a  saint on  the gridiron. There's
another  flash of  blue light, reticulated by black  lines, accompanied by a
sizzling  noise. Shaftoe smells electricity. He raps  the flashlight against
the grating a couple of times and it comes on again, flickeringly.
     The  grid's woven from  pencil  thick rods spaced a  couple  of  inches
apart. He's  facedown on it, looking into a hold that,  if this U  boat were
level, would  be below him. The  hold is a  disaster, its neatly stacked and
crated  contents  now  Osterized  into  a slumgullion  of  shattered  glass,
splintered  wood, foodstuffs, high  explosives, and  strategic minerals, all
mingled with  seawater so that it sloshes back and forth with the rocking of
the dead U boat.  A perfect, quivering  globe  of silver  fills through  the
grating right near his head and  descends  through  his  flashlight beam and
explodes against a piece of debris. Then another. He looks uphill and sees a
rain of silver globules bouncing and rolling down the deckplates toward him:
the mercury columns  that  they  use  to measure  pressure  must  have  been
ruptured. There's another blinding  blue flash: an electrical spark  with  a
lot  of power  behind  it. Shaftoe  looks  down through  the  grid again and
perceives that the hold  is filled with huge metal cabinets with giant bolts
sticking out of them. Every  so often a piece of wet  debris will bridge the
gap between a couple of those bolts and a spark will light the place up: the
cabinets are batteries, they are what enable the U boat to run underwater.
     As  Sergeant  Robert Shaftoe lies  there with his face pressed  against
that chilly grid,  taking a few deep breaths and trying to regain his nerve,
a big wave rocks the boat back  so hard that he's afraid  he's going to fall
backwards and  plummet all  the way to  the submerged bow. The swill in  the
battery  hold  rolls downhill, gathering power and velocity as it falls, and
batters the forward  bulkhead of the hold with terrifying power; he can hear
rivets  giving  way  under the impact. As this happens, most of the  battery
hold is exposed to the  beam of Bobby Shaftoe's flashlight, all the way down
to the bottom.  And  that  is when he  sees the splintered crates down there
very  small  crates, such  as might be  used to contain very heavy supplies.
They  have been busted open. Through the  gaps in the  wreckage, Shaftoe can
see  yellow bricks, once  neatly stacked, now  scattered. They look  exactly
like he  would imagine gold bars. The only thing wrong  with that theory  is
that there are way too many of them down there  for them to be gold bars. It
is  like when he turned over rotten logs in Wisconsin and found thousands of
identical insect eggs sown on the dark earth, glowing with promise.
     For a  moment, he's  tempted. The amount of money down there is  beyond
calculation.  If  he  could get his  hands  on just one  of those  bars  The
explosives  must have detonated,  because Bobby  Shaftoe has just gone deaf.
That's  his  cue  to  get  the fuck out of here. He  forgets about  the gold
morphine's  good enough plunder  for  one  day. He half scrambles  and  half
climbs up the grid, up the passageway, up the skipper's cabin, smoke pouring
out of its hatch, its bulkheads now weirdly ballooned by the blast wave.
     The safe has broken loose! And the cable that he and Harvey attached to
it, though it's damaged, is still intact. Someone must be hauling away on it
up abovedecks because it is stubbornly and annoying taut. Right now the safe
is caught up on jagged  obstructions. Shaftoe has to pry it loose. The  safe
jerks onward and upward, drawn  by the taut cable,  until it  gets caught in
something  else.  Shaftoe  follows  the  safe  out  of  the  cabin,  up  the
passageway, up the  conning tower ladder, and finally  levers himself up out
of the submarine and into the teeth of the storm, to a hearty cheer from the
waiting sailors.
     No more than five minutes later, the U boat goes away. Shaftoe imagines
it  tumbling end  over end down the side of the reef, headed for an undersea
canyon, scattering gold bars and mercury globules into the black  water like
fairy dust. Shaftoe's back on the  corvette and  everyone is pounding him on
the  back and toasting him. He just wants to find a private place to open up
that purple bottle.


     <B>Chapter 34 SUIT</B>


     Randy's posture is righteous and alert: it is all because of his suit.
     It is trite to observe that  hackers don't like fancy clothes. Avi  has
learned that  good  clothes  can actually be  comfortable the slacks that go
with  a business  suit, for example, are really much  more comfortable  than
blue jeans. And he has spent enough time with hackers  to obtain the insight
that is it not  <I>wearing</I> suits that they  object to, so  much as <I>getting them
on.</I> Which includes not only the donning process per se but also picking them
out,  maintaining them,  and worrying  whether they are still in  style this
last being  especially  difficult  for men  who  wear  suits once every five
years.
     So  it's  like this: Avi has  a spreadsheet on  one  of  his computers,
listing the necks, inseams, and other vital measurements of every man in his
employ. A couple of weeks before an important meeting, he will simply fax it
to his tailor  in  Shanghai. Then,  in a classic demonstration of  the Asian
just in time delivery  system as pioneered by Toyota, the  suits will arrive
via Federal  Express, twenty four  hours ahead of time  so that  they can be
automatically piped to the hotel's laundry room. This morning, just as Randy
emerged from the shower, he heard a knock  at his door, and swung it open to
reveal  a  valet  carrying a  freshly  cleaned and  pressed  business  suit,
complete with shirt and tie. He put  it all on (a tenth generation photocopy
of a bad diagram of the half Windsor knot was thoughtfully provided). It fit
perfectly. Now he stands in  a lobby of the Foote Mansion, watching electric
numbers  above  an elevator count down, occasionally  sneaking  a  glance at
himself in a big  mirror. Randy's head protruding from a suit is a sight gag
that will be good for grins at least through lunchtime.
     He is pondering the morning's e mail.
     To: dwarf@siblings.net
     From: root@eruditorum.org
     Subject: Re: Why?
     Dear Randy,
     I  hope  you don't  mind if  I address  you as  Randy, since it's quite
obvious that you are you, despite your  use of an anonymous front. This is a
good idea, by the way. I applaud your prudence.
     Concerning the  possibility that I  am ''an old  enemy'' of  yours. I'm
dismayed that one so young  can already have old enemies. Or perhaps you are
referring to a recently acquired enemy of advanced years? Several candidates
come to  mind.  But I suspect you are referring to Andrew Loeb. I am not he.
This would be obvious to you if you had visited his website recently.
     Why are you building the Crypt? Signed.


     &ndash; BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK &ndash; (etc., etc.)
     &ndash; END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
     It is not at all interesting to  watch the  numbers over  the elevators
and try to predict which  one  will arrive first, but it is more interesting
than  just standing  there. One  of them has been stuck  on  the floor above
Randy's for at least a minute;  he can hear it buzzing angrily. In Asia many
business men especially some  of the overseas Chinese would think nothing of
commandeering  one of  the hotel's elevators around the  clock for their own
personal use, stationing minions in it, in eight hour  shifts, to hold their
thumbs on the DOOR OPEN button, ignoring its self righteous alarm buzzer.
     <I>Ding.</I> Randy spins around on the balls of his feet (just try <I>that</I> little
maneuver in a  pair of sneakers!). Once again he has backed the wrong horse:
the winner is  an elevator that was on the  very top floor of the hotel last
time  he scanned it. This is an elevator with purpose, a fast track lift. He
walks towards the  green light. The doors part. Randy stares  squarely  into
the face of Dr. Hubert (the Dentist) Kepler, D.D.S.
     <I>Or  perhaps you are referring to a recently  acquired enemy of advanced
years?</I>

     "Good morning, Mr. Waterhouse! When you stand with your mouth open like
that, you remind me of one of my patients."
     "Good morning, Dr. Kepler." Randy hears his words from the other end of
a mile long bumwad  tube,  and immediately  reviews them in  his own mind to
make sure he has not revealed any proprietary corporate information or given
Dr. Kepler any reason to file a lawsuit.
     The  doors start  to close and Randy has to whack  them open  with  his
laptop case.
     "Careful! That's an expensive  piece of equipment, I'd wager," says the
Dentist.
     Randy  is  about  to say <I>I go  through laptops like a transvestite goes
through nylons</I> though maybe <I>like a high speed drill through a necrotic molar</I>
would be more thematically apropos, but instead he clams up and says nothing
at all, finding  himself in  dangerous territory: he is carrying proprietary
AVCLA information on this thing, and if the Dentist gets the impression that
Randy's being cavalier with it, he might spew out a barrage  of torts,  like
Linda Blair and the pea soup.
     "It's, uh, a pleasant surprise to see you in Kinakuta," Randy stammers.
     Dr.  Kepler wears eyeglasses the size of a 1959 Cadillac's  windshield.
They are special dentist eyeglasses, as  polished  as  the  Palomar  mirror,
coated  with  ultrareflective  material  so  that  you  can always  see  the
reflection of your own yawning maw in them, impaled on a shaft of hot light.
The Dentist's own eyes merely haunt the background, like a childhood memory.
They are squinty grey blue eyes, turned  down at the edges as if he is tired
of  the world, with Stygian pupils.  A trace  of a smile always seems to  be
playing  around his withered  lips. It is the smile of a man who is worrying
about  how to  meet  his next malpractice insurance  payment while patiently
maneuvering the point of his surgical steel  crowbar  under the edge of your
dead bicuspid, but who has read in a professional magazine that patients are
more likely  to come back, and less likely to sue you, if you smile at them.
"Say," he says, "I wonder  if I could have a quick huddle with  you sometime
later."
     <I>Spit, please.</I>

     Saved by  the bell! They have  reached  the ground floor.  The elevator
doors  open to reveal  the  endangered  marble lobby of  the  Foote Mansion.
Bellhops,  disguised as wedding  cakes,  glide to and fro  as  if mounted on
casters. Not ten feet away is Avi, and with him are two beautiful suits from
which protrude the heads of Eb and John. All three heads  turn towards them.
Seeing  the Dentist,  Eb and John adopt the  facial  expressions of  B movie
actors whose characters  have just taken small caliber bullets to the center
of the forehead. Avi, by contrast, stiffens up like  a man  who stepped on a
rusty nail a week ago and has  just felt the first stirrings  of the tetanus
infection that will eventually break his spine.
     "We've got a busy day  ahead of us," Randy says. "I guess my answer  is
yes, subject to availability."
     "Good. I'll hold you  to it,"  says  Dr. Kepler, and  steps out of  the
elevator. "Good morning, Mr. Halaby. Good  morning, Dr. F&ouml;hr. Good  morning,
Mr. Cantrell. Nice to see you all looking so very much like gentlemen."
     <I>Nice to see you acting like one.</I>

     "The  pleasure  is ours,"  Avi says.  "I  take  it we'll  be seeing you
later?"
     "Oh,  yes,"  says  the Dentist, "you'll  be  seeing  me  all day." <I>This
procedure will be a lengthy one,  I'm afraid.</I>  He turns his back on them and
walks  across the lobby  without  further  pleasantries. He is  headed for a
cluster  of  leather  chairs  nearly  obscured  by  an explosion of  bizarre
tropical flowers. The occupants of  those chairs are  mostly  young, and all
smartly  dressed. They snap to attention as their boss glides  towards them.
Randy counts three women and two men. One of the men is obviously a gorilla,
but the  women inevitably referred to  as Fates, Furies,  Graces,  Norns, or
Harpies are rumored to have bodyguard training, and to carry weapons, too.
     "Who are those?" John Cantrell asks. "His hygienists?"
     "Don't laugh," Avi says. "Back when he  was in practice, he got used to
having  a staff of women do  the pick and  floss work for him. It shaped his
paradigm."
     "Are you shitting me?" Randy asks.
     "You  know how it works,"  Avi says. "When  you go to the  dentist, you
never actually see  the dentist, right? Someone else makes  the appointment.
Then there's always this elite coterie  of highly efficient women who scrape
the plaque out of the way, so that the dentist doesn't have to deal with it,
and  take your  X rays.  The  dentist himself sits in the back somewhere and
looks at the X rays he deals  with you as this abstract greyscale image on a
little  piece of film. If  he sees holes, he goes into  action.  If  not, he
comes in  and  exchanges small  talk with you  for a minute  and then you go
home."
     "So, why is he here?" demands Eberhard F&ouml;hr.
     "Exactly!" Avi says. "When he walks into the room, you  never  know why
he's here to drill  a hole in your skull, or just talk about his vacation in
Maui."
     All eyes turn to Randy. "What went on in that elevator?"
     "I nothing!" Randy blurts.
     "Did you discuss the Philippines project at all?"
     "He just said he wanted to talk to me about it."
     "Well, shit." Avi says. "That means <I>we</I> have to talk about it first."
     "I know that," Randy says, "so I told him that I might talk to him if I
had a free moment."
     "Well, we'd best  make damn sure you have no free  moments today,"  Avi
says. He thinks for  a  moment  and continues,  "Did he  have  a hand in his
pocket at any time?"
     "Why? You expecting him to pull out a weapon?"
     "No," Avi says, "but someone told me, once, that the Dentist is wired."
     "You mean, like a police informant?" John asks incredulously.
     "Yeah," Avi says, like  it's no big deal. "He makes a habit of carrying
a tiny  digital recorder  the  size  of a  matchbook around in  his  pocket.
Perhaps  with  a  wire running  up inside his  shirt  to  a  tiny microphone
somewhere. Perhaps not. Anyway, you never know when he's recording you."
     "Isn't that illegal or something?" Randy asks.
     "I'm not a lawyer," Avi says.  "More to the point, I'm not  a Kinakutan
lawyer. But it wouldn't matter in a civil suit if he slapped us with a tort,
he could introduce any kind of evidence he wanted."
     They all  look across the lobby. The Dentist  is standing flatfooted on
the  marble, arms  folded over his chest, chin pointed at  the floor  as  he
absorbs input from his aides.
     "He might have put his  hand  in his pocket. I  don't remember,"  Randy
says. "It doesn't matter. We kept it extremely general. And brief."
     "He could still subject the recording  to  a voice stress analysis,  to
figure  out  if you were lying," John points  out.  He  relishes  the  sheer
unbridled paranoia of this. He's in his element.
     "Not to worry," Randy says, "I jammed it."
     "Jammed it? How?" Eb  asks, not catching the irony in Randy's voice. Eb
looks surprised and interested,  It is clear from the look on  his face that
Eb longs to get into a conversation about something arcane and technical.
     "I was joking," Randy explains. "If the Dentist analyzes the recording,
he'll find nothing but stress in my voice."
     Avi and John  laugh  sympathetically. But  Eb is  crestfallen. "Oh," Eb
says.  "I  was thinking  that we could  absolutely  jam his  device if we so
wanted."
     "A tape recorder doesn't use radio," John says. "How could we jam it?"
     "Van Eck phreaking," Eb says.
     At this  point,  Tom  Howard emerges  from the cafe  with  a thoroughly
ravished  copy of  the <I>South  China  Morning Post</I>  under  his arm, and Beryl
emerges from an elevator, prepped for combat in a dress and  makeup. The men
avert their eyes shyly and pretend  not to notice.  Greetings and small talk
ensue.  Then  Avi  looks at his watch  and says,  "Let's  head over  to  the
sultan's palace," as  if he were proposing they go grab some french fries at
Mickey Ds.


     <B>Chapter 35 CRACKER</B>


     Waterhouse has to keep an eye on that safe; Shaftoe is  itching to blow
it open  with  high explosives, and  Chattan (who  firmly overrules Shaftoe)
intends to ship it back to London so that it can be opened by experts at the
Broadway Buildings. Waterhouse only wants to  have  another crack at opening
it himself, just to see if he can do it.
     Chattan's position is the correct one. Detachment 2702 has a very clear
and specialized mission which most certainly  does not include opening safes
from  U boats. For  that matter,  it does not include going onto abandoned U
boats to recover safes, or other  crypto  data, in the first place. The only
reason they did that was because they  happened to be the  only people  with
Ultra clearance  who  were  in  the  neighborhood,  and U  553's  precarious
position did not give Bletchley Park time to send out its own experts.
     But Waterhouse's desire to open the safe himself has nothing to do with
Detachment   2702's  mission,  or   his  own   personal  duties,   or  even,
particularly, with winning the war. It is something that  Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse is driven to do. His is not to reason why. Even as he was reeling
down that stretched line from  U 553 to  the torpedo boat, battered by waves
and wind and rain, with a busted arm and a busted head, not knowing from one
moment to the next whether he would make it  back to the boat or plunge into
the Atlantic, he  was remembering the infinitesimal tremors picked up by the
half frozen neurons  in his  fingertips as he  twiddled the safe's submerged
dial. Even as Enoch  Root patched him up on  board the  boat, Waterhouse was
constructing  a crude mental  model  of how  the  safe's  tumblers  might be
constructed, visualizing the  thing in his mind's eye. And even  as the rest
of Detachment 2702 collapses into their cots and hammocks and sleeping  bags
around the chapel  of  Qwghlm Castle, the splinted and  bandaged  Waterhouse
stalks the polished corridors  of that building's better corner, looking for
a couple of used razor blades and a hunk of carbon.
     The razors he finds in a rubbish bin and  the carbon he steals from the
closet where Ghnxh  keeps the  galvanick  lucipher.  He brings them, plus  a
brick sized  crystal of hard glue and a blowtorch, back to the chapel, where
everyone else  is  sleeping. Enlisted men are in the nave, as befits Marines
who are  basically a  naval  organization. Officers  are  in  the  transept:
Chattan has the south arm  of it all to himself, Waterhouse and Root and the
SAS and USMC lieutenants have bunk beds  in  the north.  A  small  moiety of
Detachment 2702's astounding tarp supply has, then, been  hung up across the
eastern end of  the  place,  partitioning off the  chancel, Holy of  Holies,
where  once the Body  and  Blood  of Christ were  housed. Now it  contains a
Hallicrafters Model  S 27 15 tube superheterodyne radio receiver using state
of the  art  acorn tubes in its front end,  capable of tuning VHF from 27 to
143  Megahertz and of  receiving  AM,  FM,  and CW, and  including a  signal
strength meter which would  come in  handy if they were really  operating  a
huffduff station here, which they aren't.
     The lights are burning  behind those tarps and  one of the  Marines  is
snoring away in  a  chair in front of the altar. Waterhouse wakes him up and
sends  him to  bed. The Marine is  ashamed;  he knows  he was supposed to be
awake, twiddling that antenna convincingly.
     The radio itself has hardly been used they only turn it on when someone
comes to  visit  who is  not  in on the Secret.  It sits there on the altar,
pristine, as if it  had just come from the Hallicrafters factory in Chicago,
Illinois. All  of the altar's fancy bits (if  it  ever  had them) have  long
since succumbed to fire, rot, plunder, or the gnawing tusks of nest building
skerries.  What remains  is a  rectangular monolith  of basalt,  featureless
except for some  marks from the tools that were used to quarry and shape it.
It is a perfect foundation for tonight's experiment.
     Waterhouse  gets the safe  up  there  at some  cost  to the  disks  and
ligaments  in his lower back. It  is tubular  in  shape, like an  excerpt of
naval gun barrel. He stands it  up on its back end so that  its round  door,
with the round dial in the center, is staring up at the ceiling like a blind
eye, the radial lines on the  dial looking very  much like the striations of
an iris.
     Behind  that  dial is  a bunch  of  mechanical  stuff  that  has gotten
Waterhouse completely  pissed  off,  driven  him  into  a  frantic state. By
manipulating  this  dial  in  some  way, he  should  be  able to tease  that
mechanical stuff  into some configuration that allows the door to be opened.
That's all there is to it. That this door  remains locked is an outrage. Why
should the tiny volume inside  this  safe much less than a single cubic foot
be  so different from the space that Waterhouse moves through at  will? What
the hell is inside there?
     The  glue looks like bad amber, flawed and bubbled but still beautiful.
He fires up the little blowtorch and plays the flame over one end of it. The
glue softens, melts, and drips onto the door of  the safe, next to the dial,
forming a little puddle about the size of a silver dollar.
     Working quickly, Waterhouse sets two single edged razor blades into it,
the blades dangerously  upward facing, parallel  and somewhat  less than  an
inch apart. He holds them in place for a few moments while  the frigid metal
of the safe  sucks the heat out of that glue and makes it hard again. He has
employed a pair of toothpicks  as  spacers to make sure that the blunt backs
of the blades do not actually  touch the door of the safe; he  does not want
an electrical connection between them.
     He  solders a  wire  onto each of the razor  blades and runs the  wires
across  the altar  toward the radio. Then  he takes a little chunk of carbon
and lays it across the two blades, forming a bridge between them.
     He tears open the back of the radio and does a bit of rewiring. Most of
the rig  is already set up the way he  needs it; basically  he's looking for
something  that  will convert electrical impulses into sound  and pump  that
sound into the headphones, which is what a radio does. But the source of the
signal is no longer a transmitter on a U boat but rather the current flowing
up one of  Waterhouse's wires, into the left razor blade, across the  carbon
bridge, into the right razor blade, and back down the other wire.
     Getting this  hooked up the way he wants it  takes some doing.  When he
blunders down a blind alley and gets frustrated, he will go over and twiddle
the antenna for a while, pretending  to zero in  on a U boat. Then  an  idea
will occur to him and he will go back to work.
     Sometime around dawn, he hears a squeal from the headphones: a pair  of
Bakelite cups  bridged by a contraption that looks like a primitive surgical
device, hooked up to the radio by a twisted pair of black  and red wires. He
turns the volume down and claps the phones over his head.
     He reaches out and lays one fingertip on  the safe, and hears a painful
thud in his ears. He slides the fingertip over the surface of the cold metal
and  hears  a  rasping  sound. Any vibrations cause the bridge of carbon  to
tremble on the razor blades, making and breaking the  electrical connection,
modulating  the  electrical  current.  The  blades  and  the  carbon  are  a
microphone, and the microphone works almost too well.
     He takes his hand off the safe  and just sits  there and  listens for a
while. He can hear the footfalls  of skerries going through the detachment's
rations. He  can hear the impact of waves on the shore, miles  away, and the
thump of  the Taxi's bald tires  on  chuckholes out on the Road. Sounds like
the Taxi has a little alignment  problem! He can hear  the  scrub, scrub  of
Margaret  cleaning the floor  of the  kitchen, and some minor arrhythmias in
the heartbeats of the enlisted men, and the boom  of glaciers calving on the
coast of Iceland, and the  squirrely drone of hastily machined propellers on
approaching  convoy ships. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is plugged into the
Universe in a way that exceeds even what Bletchley Park has to offer.
     The center of that particular universe is the Safe  from U 553, and its
axis passes up through the center of the  Dial, and  now Waterhouse has  his
hand on it. He turns the volume way down before he touches any thing so that
he won't  blow  his eardrums out. The Dial spins  heavily but easily, as  if
mounted on gas bearings. Still,  there is mechanical friction in there which
is not perceptible to Waterhouse's admittedly frozen fingers but which comes
through in his earphones like a rockslide.
     When the  tumblers move, it sounds like Waterhouse is shooting the main
bolt on the Gate of Hell. It takes him a little while, and  a few more false
starts,  to get his bearings;  he  doesn't know how many  numbers are in the
combination, or  which way he should  turn  the dial to begin with. But with
experimentation,  some  patterns  begin to show through,  and  eventually he
works out the following combination:
     23 right  37 left 7 right  31 left 13 right  and then  there's a really
meaty click and  he knows in his marrow that he can take off the headphones.
He spins a little wheel that is mounted on the front of the safe adjacent to
the dial. This withdraws the radial dogs that  have been  holding  the  door
shut.  He  hauls  the  door up, careful  not  to slash his hand  on the twin
razors, and looks into the safe.
     His feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has  nothing
to  do  with the  contents of the safe.  He is disappointed because  he  has
solved  the problem,  and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and
low level irritation  that  always  comes  over  him  when  he's  not  doing
something that inherently needs to  be done, like picking a lock or breaking
a code.
     He sticks his arm all the  way down to the bottom of the safe and finds
a metal object about the size of a hot dog bun.  He  knew it  would be there
because,  like children  investigating wrapped  presents in  the days before
Christmas, they  have been tilting the safe this way and that, and when they
did,  they heard something sliding from one  end to  the  other  going <I>tink,
tonk, tink, tonk</I> &ndash; and wondered what it was.
     This  object  is  so  cold,  and  sucks  the heat  out of his  hands so
efficiently, that  it  hur