s. The scattered clumps of businessmen begin to draw closer
together, converging on the cavern's entrance. Prag is making a head count,
taking attendance. Someone's missing.
One of the Dentist's aides is maneuvering towards Prag in lavender
pumps, a cellphone clamped to her head. Randy breaks away from Epiphyte and
sets a collision course, reaching Prag's vicinity just in time to hear the
woman tell him, "Dr. Kepler will be joining us late some important business
in California. He sends his apologies."
Dr. Pragasu nods brightly, somehow avoids eye contact with Randy, who
is now close enough to floss Prag's teeth, and turns, clamping his hardhat
down on top of his glossy hair. "Please follow me, everyone," he announces,
"the tour begins."
It is a dull tour, even for those who have never been inside the place.
Whenever Prag leads them to a new spot, everyone looks around and gets their
bearings; conversation lulls for ten or fifteen seconds, then picks up
again; the high ranking executives stare unseeingly at the hewn stone walls
and mutter to each other while their engineering consultants converge on the
Goto engineers and ask them learned questions.
All of the construction engineers work for Goto and are, of course,
Nipponese. There is another who stands apart. "Who's the heavyset blond
guy?" Randy asks Tom Howard.
"German civil engineer on loan to Goto. He seems to specialize in
military issues."
" Are there any military issues?"
"At some point, about halfway into this project, Prag suddenly decided
he wanted the whole thing bombproof."
"Oh. Is that Bomb with a capital B, by any chance?"
"I think he's just about to talk about that," Torn says, leading Randy
closer.
Someone has just asked the German engineer whether this place is
nuclear hardened.
"Nuclear hardened is not the issue," he says dismissively. "Nuclear
hardened is easy it just means that the structure can support a brief
overpressure of so many megapascals. You see, half of Saddam's bunkers were,
technically, nuclear hardened. But this does no good against precision
guided, penetrating munitions as the Americans proved. And it is far more
likely this structure will be attacked in that way than that it would ever
be nuked we do not anticipate that the sultan will get involved in a nuclear
war."
This is the funniest thing that anyone has said all day, and it gets a
laugh.
"Fortunately," the German continues, "this rock above us is far more
effective than reinforced concrete. We are not aware of any earth
penetrating munitions currently in existence that could break through."
"What about the R and D the Americans have done on the Libyan
facility?" Randy asks.
"Ah, you are talking about the gas plant in Libya, buried under a
mountain," the German says, a bit uneasily, and Randy nods.
"That rock in Libya is so brittle," says the German, "you can shatter
it with a hammer. We are working with a different kind of rock here, in many
layers."
Randy exchanges a look with Avi, who looks as if he is about to bestow
another commendation for deviousness. At the same time Randy grins, he
senses someone's stare. He turns and locks eyes with Prag, who is looking
inscrutable, verging on pissed off. A great many people in this part of the
world would cringe and wither under the glare of Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, but
all Randy sees is his old friend, the pizza eating hacker.
So Randy stares right back into Prag's black eyes, and grins. Prag
prepares for the staredown. You asshole, you tricked my German for this you
shall die! But he can't sustain it. He breaks eye contact, turns away, and
raises one hand to his mouth, pretending to stroke his goatee. The virus of
irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected
with it, it lives in your brain forever. A man like Prag can come home,
throw away his Nikes, and pray to Mecca five times a day, but he can never
eradicate it from his system.
The tour lasts for a couple of hours. When they emerge, the temperature
has doubled. Two dozen cellphones and beepers sing out as they exit the
radio silence of the cavern. Avi has a brief and clipped conversation with
someone, then hangs up and herds Epiphyte Corp. towards their car. "Small
change of plans," he says. "We need to break away for a little meeting." He
utters an unfamiliar name to the driver.
Twenty minutes later, they are filing into the Nipponese cemetery,
sandwiched between two busloads of elderly mourners.
"Interesting place for a meeting," says Eberhard Föhr.
"Given the people we're dealing with, we have to assume that all of our
rooms, our car, the hotel restaurant, are bugged," Avi snaps. No one speaks
for a minute, as Avi leads them down a gravel path towards a secluded corner
of the garden.
They end up in the corner of two high stone walls. A stand of bamboo
shields them from the rest of the garden, and rustles soothingly in a sea
breeze that does little to cool their sweaty faces. Beryl's fanning herself
with a Kinakuta street map.
"Just got a call from Annie in San Francisco," he says.
Annie in San Francisco is their lawyer.
"It's, uh ... seven P.M. there right now. Seems that just before the
close of business, a courier walked into her office, fresh off the plane
from LA, and handed her a letter from the Dentist's office."
"He's suing us for something," Beryl says.
"He's this far away from suing us."
"For what!?" Tom Howard shouts.
Avi sighs. "In a way, Tom, that is beside the point. When Kepler thinks
it's in his best interests to file a tactical lawsuit, he'll find a pretext.
We must never forget that this is not about legitimate legal issues, it is
about tactics."
"Breach of contract, right?" Randy says.
Everyone looks at Randy. "Do you know something we should know?" asks
John Cantrell.
"Just an educated guess," Randy says, shaking his head. "Our contract
with him states that we are to keep him informed of any changes in
conditions that may materially alter the business climate."
"That's an awfully vague clause," Beryl says reproachfully.
"I'm paraphrasing."
"Randy's right," Avi says. "The gist of this letter is that we should
have told the Dentist what was going on in Kinakuta."
"But we did not know," says Eb.
"Doesn't matter remember, this is a tactical lawsuit."
"What does he want?"
"To scare us," Avi says. "To rattle us. Tomorrow or the next day, he'll
bring in a different lawyer to play good cop to make us an offer."
"What kind of offer?" Tom asks.
"We don't know, of course," Avi says, "but I'm guessing that Kepler
wants a piece of us. He wants to own part of the company."
Light dawns on the face of everyone except Avi himself, who maintains
his almost perpetual mask of cool control. "So it's bad news, good news, bad
news. Bad news number one: Anne's phone call. Good news: because of what has
happened here in the last two days, Epiphyte Corp. is suddenly so desirable
that Kepler is ready to play hardball to get his hands on some of our
stock."
"What's the second bit of bad news?" Randy asks.
"It's very simple." Avi turns away from them for a moment, strolls away
for a couple of paces until he is blocked by a stone bench, then turns to
face them again. "This morning I told you that Epiphyte was worth enough,
now, that we could buy people out at a reasonable rate. You probably
interpreted that as a good thing. In a way, it was. But a small and valuable
company in the business world is like a bright and beautiful bird sitting on
a branch in a jungle, singing a happy song that can be heard from a mile
away. It attracts pythons." Avi pauses for a moment. "Usually, the grace
period is longer. You get valuable, but then you have some time weeks or
months to establish a defensive position, before the python manages to
slither up the trunk. This time, we happened to get valuable while we were
perched virtually on top of the python. Now we're not valuable any more."
"What do you mean?" Eb says. "We're just as valuable as we were this
morning."
"A small company that's being sued for a ton of money by the Dentist is
most certainly not valuable. It probably has an enormous negative value. The
only way to give it positive value again is to make the lawsuit go away.
See, Kepler holds all the cards. After Tom's incredible performance
yesterday, all of the other guys in that conference room probably wanted a
piece of us just as badly as Kepler did. But Kepler had one advantage: he
was already in business with us. Which gave him a pretext for filing the
lawsuit.
"So I hope you enjoyed our morning in the sun, even though we spent it
in a cave," Avi concludes. He looks at Randy, and lowers his voice
regretfully. "And if any of you were thinking of cashing out, let this be a
lesson to you: be like the Dentist. Make up your mind and act fast."
Chapter 45 FUNKSPIEL
Colonel Chattan's aide shakes him awake. The first thing Waterhouse
notices is that the guy is breathing fast and steady, the way Alan does when
he comes in from a cross country run.
"Colonel Chattan requests your presence in the Mansion most urgently."
Waterhouse's billet is in the vast, makeshift camp five minutes' walk from
Bletchley Park's Mansion. Striding briskly whilst buttoning up his shirt, he
covers the distance in four. Then, twenty feet from the goal, he is nearly
run over by a pack of Rolls Royces, gliding through the night as dark and
silent as U boats. One comes so close that he can feel the heat of its
engine; its muggy exhaust blows through his trouser leg and condenses on his
skin.
The old farts from the Broadway Buildings climb out of those Rolls
Royces and precede Waterhouse into the Mansion. In the library, the men
cluster obsequiously round a telephone, which rings frequently and, when
picked up, makes distant, tinny, shouting noises that can be heard, but not
understood, from across the room. Waterhouse estimates that the Rolls Royces
must have driven up from London at an average speed of about nine thousand
miles per hour.
Long tables are being looted from other rooms and chivvied into the
library by glossy haired young men in uniform, knocking flecks of paint off
the doorframes. Waterhouse takes an arbitrary chair at an arbitrary table.
Another aide wheels in a cart of wire baskets piled with file folders, still
smoking from the friction of being jerked out of Bletchley Park's infinite
archives. If this were a proper meeting, mimeographs might have been made up
ahead of time and individually served. But this is sheer panic, and
Waterhouse knows instinctively that he'd better take advantage of his early
arrival if he wants to know anything. So he goes over to the cart and grabs
the folder on the bottom of the stack, guessing that they'd have pulled the
most important one first. It is labeled: U 691.
The first few pages are just a form: a U boat data sheet consisting of
many boxes. Half of them are empty. The other half have been filled in by
different hands using different writing implements at different times, with
many erasures and cross outs and marginal notes written by bet hedging
analysts.
Then there is a log containing everything U 691 is ever known to have
done, in chronological order. The first entry is its launch, at
Wilhelmshaven on September 19, 1940, followed by a long list of the ships it
has murdered. There's one odd notation from a few months ago:
REFITTED WITH EXPERIMENTAL DEVICE (SCHNORKEL?). Since then, U 691 has
been tearing up and down like mad, sinking ships in the Chesapeake Bay,
Maracaibo, the approaches to the Panama Canal, and a bunch of other places
that Waterhouse, until now, has thought of only as winter resorts for rich
people.
Two more people come into the room and take seats: Colonel Chattan, and
a young man in a disheveled tuxedo, who (according to a rumor that makes its
way around the room) is a symphonic percussionist. This latter has clearly
made some effort to wipe the lipstick off his face, but has missed some in
the crevices of his left ear. Such are the exigencies of war.
Yet another aide rushes in with a wire basket filled with ULTRA message
decrypt slips. This looks like much hotter stuff; Waterhouse puts the file
folder back and begins leafing through the slips.
Each one begins with a block of data identifying the Y station that
intercepted it, the time, the frequency, and other minutiae. The heap of
slips boils down to a conversation, spread out over the last several weeks,
between two transmitters.
One of these is in a part of Berlin called Charlottenburg, on the roof
of a hotel at Steinplatz: the temporary site of U boat Command, recently
moved there from Paris. Most of these messages are signed by Grand Admiral
Karl Dönitz. Waterhouse knows that Dönitz has recently become the Supreme
Commander in Chief of the entire German Navy, but he has elected to hold
onto his previous title of Commander in Chief of U boats as well. Dönitz has
a soft spot for U boats and the men who inhabit them.
The other transmitter belongs to none other than U 691. These messages
are signed by her skipper, Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff.
Bischoff: Sank another merchantman. This newfangled radar shit is
everywhere.
Dönitz: Acknowledged. Well done.
Bischoff: Bagged another tanker. These bastards seem to know exactly
where I am. Thank god for the schnorkel.
Dönitz: Acknowledged. Nice work as usual.
Bischoff: Sank another merchantman. Airplanes were waiting for me. I
shot one of them down; it landed on me in a fireball and incinerated three
of my men. Are you sure this Enigma thing really works?
Dönitz: Nice work, Bischoff! You get another medal! Don't worry about
the Enigma, it's fantastic.
Bischoff: I attacked a convoy and sank three merchantmen, a tanker, and
a destroyer.
Dönitz: Superb! Another medal for you!
Bischoff: Just for the hell of it, I doubled back and finished off what
was left of that convoy. Then another destroyer showed up and dropped depth
charges on us for three days. We are all half dead, steeped in our own
waste, like rats who have fallen into a latrine and are slowly drowning. Our
brains are gangrenous from breathing our own carbon dioxide.
Dönitz: You are a hero of the Reich and the Führer himself has been
informed of your brilliant success! Would you mind heading south and
attacking the convoy at such and such coordinates? P.S. please limit the
length of your messages.
Bischoff: Actually, I could use a vacation, but sure, what the heck.
Bischoff (a week later): Nailed about half of that convoy for you. Had
to surface and engage a pesky destroyer with the deck gun. This was so
utterly suicidal, they didn't expect it. As a consequence we blew them to
bits. Time for a nice vacation now.
Dönitz: You are now officially the greatest U boat commander of all
time. Return to Lorient for that well deserved R & R.
Bischoff: Actually I had in mind a Caribbean vacation. Lorient is cold
and bleak at this time of year.
Dönitz: We have not heard from you in two days. Please report.
Bischoff: Found a nice secluded harbor with a white sand beach. Would
rather not specify coordinates as I no longer trust security of Enigma.
Fishing is great. Am working on my tan. Feeling somewhat better. Crew is
most grateful.
Dönitz: Günter, I am willing to overlook much from you, but even the
Supreme Commander in Chief must answer to his superiors. Please end this
nonsense and return home.
U 691: This is Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, second in command of U
691. Regret to inform you that KL Bischoff is in poor health. Request
orders. P.S. He does not know I am sending this message.
Dönitz: Assume command. Return, not to Lorient, but to Wilhelmshaven.
Take care of Günter.
Beck: KL Bischoff refuses to relinquish command.
Dönitz: Sedate him and get him back here, he will not be punished.
Beck: Thank you on behalf of me and the crew. We are underway, but
short of fuel.
Dönitz: Rendezvous with U 413 [a milchcow] at such and such
coordinates.
Now more people come into the room: a wizened rabbi; Dr. Alan Mathison
Turing; a big man in a herringbone tweed suit whom Waterhouse remembers
vaguely as an Oxford don; and some of the Naval intelligence fellows who are
always hanging around Hut 4. Chattan calls the meeting to order and
introduces one of the younger men, who stands up and gives a situation
report.
"U 691, a Type IXD/42 U boat under the nominal command of
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, and the acting command of Oberleutnant zur
See Karl Beck, transmitted an Enigma message to U boat Command at 2000 hours
Greenwich time. The message states that, three hours after sinking a
Trinidadian merchantman, U 691 torpedoed and sank a Royal Navy submarine
that was picking up survivors. Beck has captured two of our men: Marine
Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, an American, and Lieutenant Enoch Root, ANZAC."
"How much do these men know?" demands the don, who is making a
stirringly visible effort to sober up.
Chattan fields the question: "If Root and Shaftoe divulged everything
that they know, the Germans could infer that we were making strenuous
efforts to conceal the existence of an extremely valuable and comprehensive
intelligence source."
"Oh, bloody hell," the don mumbles.
An extremely tall, lanky, blond civilian, the crossword puzzle editor
of one of the London newspapers currently on loan to Bletchley Park, hustles
into the room and apologizes for being late. More than half of the people on
the Ultra Mega list are now in this room.
The young naval analyst continues. "At 2110, Wilhelmshaven replied with
a message instructing OL Beck to interrogate the prisoners immediately. At
0150, Beck replied with a message stating that in his opinion the prisoners
belonged to some sort of special naval intelligence unit."
As he speaks, carbon copies of the fresh message decrypts are being
passed round to all the tables. The crossword puzzle editor studies his with
a tremendously furrowed brow. "Perhaps you covered this before I arrived, in
which case I apologize," he says. "but where does the Trinidadian
merchantman come in to all of this?"
Chattan silences Waterhouse with a look, and answers: "I'm not going to
tell you." There is appreciative laughter all around, as if he had just
uttered a bon mot at a dinner party. "But Admiral Dönitz, reading these same
messages, must be just as confused as you are. We should like to keep him
that way."
"Datum 1: He knows a merchantman was sunk," pipes up Turing, ticking
off points on his fingers. "Datum 2: He knows a Royal Navy submarine was on
the scene a few hours later, and was also sunk. Datum 3: He knows two of our
men were pulled out of the water, and that they are probably in the
intelligence business, which is a rather broad categorization as far as I am
concerned. But he cannot necessarily draw any inferences, based upon these
extremely terse messages, about which vessel the merchantman or the
submarine our two men came from."
"Well, that's obvious, isn't it?" says Crossword Puzzle. "They came
from the submarine."
Chattan responds only with a Cheshire grin.
"Oh!" says Crossword Puzzle. Eyebrows go up all around the room.
"As Beck continues to send messages to Admiral Dönitz, the likelihood
increases that Dönitz will learn something we don't want him to know,"
Chattan says. "That likelihood becomes a virtual certainty when U 691
reaches Wilhelmshaven intact."
"Correction!" hollers the rabbi. Everyone is quite startled and there
is a long silence while the man grips the edge of the table with quivering
hands, and rises precariously to his feet. "The important thing is not
whether Beck transmits messages! It is whether Dönitz believes those
messages!"
"Hear, hear! Very astute!" Turing says.
"Quite right! Thank you for that clarification, Herr Kahn," Chattan
says. "Pardon me for just a moment," says the don, "but why on earth
wouldn't he believe them?"
This leads to a long silence. The don has scored a telling point, and
brought everyone very much back to cold hard reality. The rabbi begins to
mumble something that sounds rather defensive, but is interrupted by a
thunderous voice from the doorway: "FUNKSPIEL!"
Everyone turns to look at a fellow who has just come in the door. He is
a trim man in his fifties with prematurely white hair, extremely thick
glasses that magnify his eyes, and a howling blizzard of dandruff covering
his navy blue blazer.
"Good morning, Elmer!" Chattan says with the forced cheerfulness of a
psychiatrist entering a locked ward.
Elmer comes into the room and turns to face the crowd. "FUNKSPIEL!" he
shouts again, in an inappropriately loud voice, and Waterhouse wonders
whether the man is drunk or deaf or both. Elmer turns his back to them and
stares at a bookcase for a while, then turns round to face them again, a
look of astonishment on his face. "Ah was expectin' a chalkboard t'be
there," he says in a Texarkana accent. "What kind of a classroom is this?"
There is nervous laughter around the room as everyone tries to figure out
whether Elmer is cutting loose with some deadpan humor, or completely out of
his mind.
"It means 'radio games,' " says Rabbi Kahn.
"Thank, you, sir!" Elmer responds quickly, sounding pissed off. "Radio
games. The Germans have been playing them all through the war. Now it's our
turn."
Just moments ago, Waterhouse was thinking about how very British this
whole scene was, feeling very far from home, and wishing that one or two
Americans could be present. Now that his wish has come true, he just wants
to crawl out of the Mansion on his hands and knees.
"How does one play these games, Mr., uh..." says Crossword Puzzle.
"You can call me Elmer!" Elmer shouts. Everyone scoots back from him.
"Elmer!" Waterhouse says, "would you please stop shouting?"
Elmer turns and blinks twice in Waterhouse's direction. "The game is
simple," he says in a more normal, conversational voice. Then he gets
excited again and begins to crescendo. "All you need is a radio and a couple
of players with good ears, and good hands!" Now he's hollering. He waves at
the corner where the albino woman with the headset and the percussionist
with lipstick on his ear have been huddled together. "You want to explain
fists, Mr. Shales?"
The percussionist stands up. "Every radio operator has a distinctive
style of keying we call it his fist. With a bit of practice, our Y Service
people can recognize different German operators by their fists we can tell
when one of them has been transferred to a different unit, for example." He
nods in the direction of the albino woman. "Miss Lord has intercepted
numerous messages from U 691, and, is familiar with the fist of that boat's
radio operator. Furthermore, we now have a wire recording of U 691 's most
recent transmission, which she and I have been studying intensively." The
percussionist draws a deep breath and screws his courage up before saying,
"We are confident that I can forge U 691's fist."
Turing chimes in. "And since we have broken Enigma, we can compose any
message we want, and encrypt it just as U 691 would have."
"Splendid. Splendid!" says one of the Broadway Buildings guys.
"We cannot prevent U 691 from sending out her own, legitimate
messages," Chattan cautions, "short of sinking her. Which we are making
every effort to do. But we can muddy the waters considerably. Rabbi?"
Once again, the rabbi rises to his feet, drawing everyone's attention
as they wait for him to fall down. But he doesn't. "I have composed a
message in German naval jargon. Translated into English, it says, roughly,
'Interrogation of prisoners proceeding slowly request permission to use
torture' and then there are several Xs in a row and then is added the words
WARNING AMBUSH U 691 HAS BEEN CAPTURED BY BRITISH COMMANDOS'"
Sharp intakes of breath all around the room.
"Is contemporary German naval jargon a normal part of Talmudic
studies?" asks the don.
"Mr. Kahn has spent a year and a half analyzing naval decrypts in Hut
4," Chattan says. "He has the lingo down pat." He goes on: "we have
encrypted Mr. Kahn's message using today's naval Enigma key, and passed it
on to Mr. Shales, who has been practicing."
Miss Lord rises to her feet, like a child reciting her lessons in a
Victorian school, and says, "I am satisfied that Mr. Shales's rendition is
indistinguishable from U 691's."
All eyes turn towards Chattan, who turns towards the old farts from the
Broadway Buildings, who even now are on the phone relaying all this to
someone of whom they are clearly terrified.
"Don't the Jerrys have huffduff?" asks the Don, as if probing a flaw in
a student's dissertation.
"Their huffduff network is not nearly so well developed as ours,"
responds one of the young analysts. "It is most unlikely that they would
bother to triangulate a transmission that appeared to come from one of their
own U boats, so they probably won't figure out the message originated in
Buckinghamshire, rather than the Atlantic."
"However, we have anticipated your objection," Chattan says, "and made
arrangements for several of our own ships, as well as various aeroplanes and
ground units, to flood the air with transmissions. Their huffduff network
will have its hands full at the time of our fake U 691 transmission."
"Very well," mutters the don.
Everyone sits there in churchly silence while the most senior of the
Broadway Buildings contingent winds up his conversation with Who Is at the
Other End. Elmer hanging up the phone, he intones solemnly, "You are
directed to proceed."
Chattan nods at some of the younger men, who dash across the room, pick
up telephones, and begin to talk in calm, clinical voices about cricket
scores. Chattan looks at his watch. "It will take a few minutes for the
huffduff smokescreen to develop. Miss Lord, you will notify us when the
traffic has risen to a suitably feverish pitch?"
Miss Lord makes a little curtsey and sits down at her radio.
"FUNKSPIEL!" shouts Elmer, scaring everyone half out of their skins,
"We already done sent out some other messages. Made 'em look like Royal Navy
traffic. Used a code the Krauts just broke a few weeks ago. These messages
have to do with an operation a fictitious operation, y'know in which a
German U boat was supposedly boarded and seized by our commandos."
There is a whole lot of tinny shouting from the telephone. The gentle
man who has the bad luck to be holding it translates into what is probably
more polite English: "What if Mr. Shales's performance is not convincing to
the radio operators at Charlottenburg? What if they do not succeed in
decrypting Mr. Elmer's false messages?"
Chattan fields that one. He steps over to a map that has been set up on
an easel at the end of the room. The map depicts a swath of the Central
Atlantic bordered on the east by France and Spain. "U 691's last reported
position was here," he says, pointing to a pin stuck in the lower left
corner of the map. "She has been ordered back to Wllhelmshaven with her
prisoners. She will go this way," he says, indicating a length of red yarn
stretched in a north northeasterly direction, "assuming she avoids the
Straits of Dover." (1)
"There happens to be another milchcow here," Chattan continues,
indicating another pin. "One of our own submarines should be able to reach
it within twenty four hours, at which point it will approach at periscope
depth and engage it with torpedoes. Chances are excellent that the milchcow
will be destroyed immediately. If she has time to send out any
transmissions, she will merely state that she is being attacked by a
submarine. Once we have destroyed this milchcow, we will call once again
upon the skills of Mr. Shales, who will transmit a fake distress call that
will appear to originate from the milchcow, stating that they have come
under attack from none other than U 691."
"Splendid!" someone proclaims.
"By the time the sun rises tomorrow," Chattan concludes, "we will have
one of our very best submarine hunting task forces on the scene. A light
carrier with several antisubmarine planes will comb the ocean night and day,
using radar, visual reconnaissance, huffduff, and Leigh lights to hunt for U
691. The chances are excellent that she will be found and sunk long before
she can approach the Continent. But should she find her way past this
formidable barrier she will find the German Kriegsmarine no less eager to
hunt her down and destroy her. Any information she may transmit to Admiral
Dönitz in the meantime will be regarded with the most profound suspicion."
"So," Waterhouse says, "the plan, in a nutshell, is to render all
information from U 691 unbelievable, and subsequently to destroy her, and
everyone on her, before she can reach Germany."
"Yes," Chattan says, "and the former task will be greatly simplified by
the fact that U 691's skipper is already known to be mentally unstable."
"So it seems likely that our guys, Shaftoe and Root, will not survive,"
Waterhouse says slowly.
There is a long, frozen silence, as if Waterhouse had interrupted high
tea by making farting sounds with his armpit.
Chattan responds in a precise, arch tone that indicates he's really
pissed off. "There is the possibility that when U 691 is engaged by our
forces, she will be forced to the surface and will surrender."
Waterhouse studies the grain of the tabletop. His face is hot and his
chest is burning.
Miss Lord rises to her feet and speaks. Several important heads turn
toward Mr. Shales, who excuses himself and goes to a table in the corner of
the room. He fiddles with the controls on a radio transmitter for a few
moments, spreads the encrypted message out in front of himself, and takes a
deep breath, as though preparing for a big solo. Finally he reaches out,
rests one hand lightly on the radio key, and begins to tap out the message,
rocking from side to side and cocking his head this way and that. Mrs. Lord
listens with her eyes closed, concentrating intensely.
Mr. Shales stops. "Finished," he announces in a quiet voice, and looks
nervously at Mrs. Lord, who smiles. Then there is polite applause around the
library, as if they had just finished listening to a harpsichord concerto.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse keeps his hands folded in his lap. He has just
heard the death warrant of Enoch Root and Bobby Shaftoe.
Chapter 46 HEAP
To: root@eruditorum.org
From: dwarf@siblings.net
Subject: Re(8) Why?
Let me just take stock of what I know so far: you say that asking
"why?" is part of what you do for a living; you're not an academic; and you
are in the surveillance business. I am having trouble forming a clear
picture.
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To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re(9) Why?
Randy, I never said that I, myself, am in the surveillance business.
But I know people who are. Formerly public– and now private sector. We
stay in touch. The grapevine and all that. Nowadays, my involvement in such
things is limited to noodling around with novel cryptosystems, as a sort of
hobby.
Now, to get back to what I would consider to be the main thread of our
conversation. You guessed that I was an academic. Were you being sincere, or
was this purely an attempt to "gotcha" me?
The reason I ask is that I am, in fact, a man of the cloth, so
naturally I consider it my job to ask "why?" I assumed this would be fairly
obvious to you. But I should have taken into account that you are not the
churchy type. This is my fault.
It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over
funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue
or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric
and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be
very interesting.
But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed
almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over
weddings and funerals but also to say something thought provoking to large
numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the
profession of philosophy.
I still think of this as the priest's highest calling or at least the
most interesting part of the job hence my question to you, which I cannot
fail to notice, remains unanswered.
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"Randy, what is the worst thing that ever happened?"
This is never a difficult question to answer when you are hanging
around with Avi. "The Holocaust," Randy says dutifully.
Even if he didn't know Avi, their surroundings would give him a hint.
The rest of Epiphyte Corp. have gone back to the Foote Mansion to prepare
for hostilities with the Dentist. Randy and Avi are sitting on a black
obsidian bench planted atop the mass grave of thousands of Nipponese in
downtown Kinakuta, watching the tour buses come and go.
Avi pulls a small GPS receiver out of his attache case, turns it on,
and sets it out on a boulder in front of them where it will have a clear
view of the sky. "Correct! And what is the highest and best purpose to which
we can devote our allotted lifespans?"
"Uh . . . enhancing shareholder value?"
"Very funny." Avi is annoyed. He is baring his soul, which he does
rarely. Also, he's in the midst of cataloging another small h holocaust
site, adding it to his archives. It is clear he would appreciate some
fucking solemnity here. "I visited Mexico a few weeks ago," Avi continues.
"Looking for a site where the Spanish killed a bunch of Aztecs?" Randy
asks.
"This is exactly the kind of thing I'm fighting," Avi says, even more
irritated. "No, I was not looking for a place where a bunch of Aztecs were
massacred. The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the
Aztecs can go fuck themselves,"
"The Aztecs can go fuck themselves," Randy says cheerfully, drawing a
baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.
"To begin with, I was hundreds of miles from Mexico City, the former
Aztec capital. I was on the outer fringes of the territory that the Aztecs
controlled." Avi scoops his GPS off the boulder and begins to punch keys on
its pad, telling it to store the latitude and longitude in its memory. "I
was looking," Avi continues, "for the site of a Nahuatl city that was raided
by the Aztecs hundreds of years before the Spanish even showed up. You know
what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?"
Randy uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face. "Something
unspeakable?"
"I hate that word 'unspeakable.' We must speak of it."
"Speak then."
"The Aztecs took twenty five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them
back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days."
"Why?"
"Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don't know.
The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when
I talk about Holocaust type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit
about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted,
that's why."
"Don't tell me you're about to come down on the side of the Spaniards."
"As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the
Inquisition, I have no illusions about them," Avi says, "but, at their
worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it
really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the
Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better
around there."
"Avi?"
"Yes."
"We are sitting here in the Sultanate of Kinakuta, trying to build a
data haven while fending off an oral surgeon turned hostile take over maven.
I have pressing responsibilities in the Philippines. Why are we discussing
the Aztecs?"
"I'm giving you a pep talk," Avi says. "You are bored. Dangerously so.
The Pinoy gram thing was cool for a while, but now it's up and running,
there's no new technology there."
"True."
"But the Crypt is amazingly cool. Tom and John and Eb are going nuts,
and every Secret Admirer in the world is spamming me with resumes. The Crypt
is exactly what you would like to be doing right now."
"Again, true."
"Even if you were working on the Crypt, though, philosophical issues
would be gnawing at you issues based on the types of people who you see
getting involved, who may be our first customers."
"I cannot deny that I have philosophical issues," Randy says. Suddenly
he has come up with a new hypothesis: Avi is actually root@eruditorum.org.
"Instead, you are laying cable in the Philippines. This is a job that
because of changes we just became aware of yesterday is basically irrelevant
to our corporate mission. But it's a lingering contractual obligation, and
if we put anyone less important than you on it, the Dentist will be able to
prove to the most half witted jury of tofu brained Californians that we are
malingering."
"Well, thank you for making it so clear why I should be miserable,"
Randy says forbearingly.
"So," Avi continues, "I wanted to let you know that you aren't
necessarily just making license plates here. And furthermore that the Crypt
is not a morally bankrupt endeavor. Actually, you are playing a big role in
the most important thing in the world."
Randy says, "You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose
to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is 'to prevent
future Holocausts.'"
Avi laughs darkly. "I'm glad it's obvious to you, my friend. I was
beginning to think I was the only one."
"What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are commemorating the Holocaust
all the time."
"Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same
thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the
commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad
about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one
will want to commit genocide in the future."
"I take it you do not share this view, Avi?"
"Look at Bosnia!" Avi scoffs. "Human nature doesn't change, Randy.
Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into
Aztecs or Nazis just like that." He snaps his fingers.
"So what hope is there?"
"Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts,
we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking
attention."
"Educate them in what way?"
Avi closes his eyes and shakes his head. "Oh, shit, Randy, I could go
on for hours I have drawn up a whole curriculum."
"Okay, we'll get into that later."
"Definitely later. For now, the key point is that the Crypt is all
important. I can take all of my ideas and put them into a single pod of
information, but almost every government in the world would prevent
distribution to its citizens. It is essential to build the Crypt so that the
HEAP can be freely distributed throughout the world."
"HEAP?"
"Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod."
"Oh, Jesus Christ!"
"This is the true meaning of what you are working on," Avi says, "and
so I urge you not to lose heart. Whenever you are about to get bored
stamping out those license plates in the Philippines, think of the HEAP.
Think of what those Nahuatl villagers could have done to those fucking
Aztecs if they'd had a holocaust prevention manual a handbook on guerilla
warfare tactics."
Randy sits and ponders for a while. "We have to go and buy some water,"
he finally says. "I've sweated away a few liters just sitting here."
"We can just go back to the hotel," Avi says, "I'm basically finished."
"You're finished. I haven't even started," Randy says.
"Started what?"
"Telling you why there's no chance I'm going to be bored in the
Philippines."
Avi blinks. "You met a girl?"
"No!" Randy says testily, meaning Yes, of course. "Come on, let's go."
They go to a nearby 24 Jam and purchase bluish plastic bottles of water
the size of cinderblocks. Then they wander around through streets crowded
with unbearably savory smelling food carts, guzzling the water.
"I got e mail from Doug Shaftoe a few days ago," Randy says. "From his
boat, via satellite phone."
"In the clear?"
"Yeah. I keep bothering him to get Ordo and encrypt his e mail, but he
won't."
"That is really unprofessional," Avi grumbles. "He needs to be more
paranoid."
"He's so paranoid that he doesn't even trust Ordo." Avi's scowl eases.
"Oh. That's okay then."
"His e mail contained a stupid joke about Imelda Marcos."
"You took me on this walk to tell me a joke?"
"No, no, no," Randy says. "The joke was a prearranged signal. Doug told
me that he would send me e mail containing an Imelda joke if a certain thing
happened."
"What certain thing?"
Randy takes a big swig of water, draws a deep breath, and composes
himself. "More than a year ago, I had a conversation with Doug Shaftoe
during that big party that the Dentist threw on board the Rui Faleiro. He
wanted us to hire his company, Semper Marine Services, to do the survey work
on all future cable lays. In return he offered to cut us in on any sunken
treasure he found while performing the survey."
Avi skids to a stop and clutches his water bottle in both hands as if
he's afraid he might drop it. "Sunken treasure, like, yo ho ho and a bottle
of rum? Pieces of six? That kind of thing?"
"Pieces of eight. Same basic idea," Randy says. "The Shaftoes are
treasure hunters. Doug is obsessed with the idea that there are vast hoards
of treasure in and around the Philippines."
"From where? Those Spanish galleons?"
"No. Well, yes, actually. But that's not what Doug's after." He and Avi
have begun walking again. "Most of it is either much older than that pottery
from sunken Chinese junks or much more recent Japanese war gold."
As Randy had expected, the mention of Japanese war gold makes a huge
impact on Avi. Randy keeps talking. "Rumor has it that the Nipponese left a
lot of gold in the area. Supposedly, Marcos recovered a big stash buried in
a tunnel somewhere that's where he got all his money. Most people think
Marcos was worth something like five, six billion dollars, but a lot of
people in the Philippines think he recovered more like sixty billion."
"Sixty billion!" Avi's spine stiffens. "Impossible."
"Look, you can believe the rumors or not, I don't care," Randy says.
"But since it looks like one of Marcos's bag men is going to be a founding
depositor in the Crypt, it is the kind of thing you should know."
"Keep talking," Avi says, suddenly ravenous for data.
"Okay. So people have been running all over the Philippines ever since
the war, digging holes and dredging the seafloor, trying to find the
legendary Nipponese war gold. Doug Shaftoe is one of those people. Problem
is, making a thorough sidescan sonar survey of the whole area is quite
expensive you can't just go out and do it on spec. He saw an opportunity
when we came along."
"I see. Very smart," Avi says approvingly. "He would do the survey work
that we needed anyway, in order to lay the cables."
"Perhaps a bit more than was strictly necessary, as long as he was out
there."
"Right. Now I remember some angry mail from the Dentist's due diligence
harpies because the survey was costing too much and taking too long. They
felt we could have hired a different company and gotten the same results
quicker and cheaper."
"They were probably right," Randy admits. "Anyway, Doug wanted to cut a
deal that gave us ten percent of whatever he found. More, if we wanted to
underwrite recovery operations."
All of a sudden Avi's eyes go wide and he swallows a big gulp of air.
"Oh, shit," he says. "He wanted to keep the whole thing a secret from the
Dentist."
"Exactly. Because the Dentist would end up taking all of it. And
because of the Dentist's peculiar domestic situation, that means that the
Bolobolos would know everything about it too. These guys would happily kill
to get their hands on gold."
"Wow!" Avi says, shaking his head. "Y'know, I don't want to seem like
one of those hackneyed Jews that you see in heartwarming movies. But at
times like this, all I can say is 'Oy, gevalt!' "
"I never told you about this deal, Avi, for two reasons. One of them is
just our general policy of not blabbing about things. The other reason is
that we decided to hire Semper Marine Services anyway just on their own
merits so Doug Shaftoe's proposition was irrelevant."
Avi thinks this one over. "Correction. It was irrelevant, as long as
Doug Shaftoe didn't find any sunken treasure."
"Right. And I assumed that he wouldn't."
"You assumed wrong."
"I assumed wrong," Randy admits. "Shaftoe has found the remains of an
old Nipponese submarine."
"How do you know that?"
"If he found a Chinese junk he was going to send me a joke about
Ferdinand Marcos. If he found World War II stuff, it was going to be Imelda.
If it was a surface ship, it was going to be about Imelda's shoes. If it was
a submarine, her sexual habits. He sent me a joke about Imelda's sexual
habits."
"Now, did you ever formally respond to Doug Shaftoe's proposition?" Avi
says.
"No. Like I said, it wasn't relevant, we were going to hire him any
way. But then, after the contracts were all signed and we were drawing up
the survey schedule, he told me about this code involving the Marcos jokes.
I realized then he believed that by hiring him, we had implicitly said yes
to his proposition."
"It's a funny way to do business," Avi says, wrinkling his nose. "You'd
think he would have been more explicit."
"He is the kind of guy who does deals on a handshake. On personal
honor," Randy says. "Once he had made the proposition, he would never
withdraw it."
"The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect
everyone else to be honorable in the same way."
"It is true."
"So he believes, now, that we are accomplices in this plan to hide the
existence of this sunken treasure from the Dentist and the Bolobolos," Avi
says.
"Unless we come clean to them right away."
"In which case we are betraying Doug Shaftoe," Avi says.
"Cravenly backstabbing the ex SEAL who served six years of combat duty
in Vietnam, and who has scary and well connected friends all over the
world," Randy adds.
"Damn, Randy! I thought I was going to freak you out by telling you
about the HEAP."
"You did."
"And then you spring this on me!"
"Life's rich pageant. And all that," Randy says.
Avi thinks for a minute. "Well, I guess it comes down to whom would we
rather have on our side in a bar fight."
"The answer can only be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe," Randy says. "But
that doesn't mean we'll make it out of the bar alive."
Chapter 47 SEEKY
They have stuffed him into the narrow gap between the U boat's slotted
outer hull and the pressure hull within, so that bitterly cold, black water
streams through with the bludgeoning force of a firehose and wracks him with
malarial chills: bones cracking, joints freezing, muscles knotting. He is
wedged in tightly between uneven surfaces of hard rough steel, bending him
in ways he's not supposed to bend, and punishing him when he tries to move.
Barnacles are beginning to grow on him: sort of like lice but bigger and
capable of burrowing deeper into the flesh. Somehow he is able to fight for
breath anyway, just enough to stay alive and really savor just how
unpleasant the situation is. He's been breathing cold seawater for a long
time, it has made his windpipe raw, and he suspects that plankton or
something are eating his lungs from the inside out. He pounds on the
pressure hull but the impact makes no noise. He can sense the warmth and
heat inside, and he would like to get in and enjoy both of them. Finally
some kind of dream logic thing happens and he finds a hatch. The current
sweeps Shaftoe out, leaving him suspended alone in the watery cosmos, and
the U boat hisses away and abandons him. Shaftoe is lost now. He cannot tell
up from down. Something bashes him on the head. He sees a few black drumlike
things moving inexorably through the water with parallel comet trails of
bubbles behind them. Depth charges.
Then Shaftoe comes awake and knows that this was all just his body
desiring morphine. He is certain for a moment that he is back in Oakland and
that Lieutenant Reagan is looming over him, preparing for Phase 2 of the
interview.
"Good afternoon, Sergeant Shaftoe," Reagan says. He has adopted a heavy
German accent for some reason. A joke. These actors! Shaftoe smells meat,
and other things not so inviting. Something heavy, but not especially hard,
thuds into his face. Then it draws back. Then it hits him again.
***
"Your companion is morphium seeky?" says Beck.
Enoch Root is a bit taken aback; they've only been on the boat for
eight hours. "Is he already making a nuisance of himself?"
"He is semiconscious," Beck says, "and has a great deal to say about
giant lizards among other subjects."
"Oh, that's normal for him," Root says, relieved. "What makes you think
he is morphium seeky?"
"The morphium bottle and hypodermic syringe that were in his pocket,"
Beck says with that deadpan Teutonic irony, "and the needle marks in his
arms."
Root observes that the U boat is like a tunnel bored out of the sea and
lined with hardware. This cabin (if that's not too grand a word for it) is
by far the largest open space Root has seen, meaning that he can almost
stretch his arms out without hitting someone or inadvertently tripping a
switch or a valve. It even sports some wooden cabinetry, and has been sealed
off from the corridor by a leather curtain. When they first brought Root in
here, he thought it was a storage closet. But as he looks around the place,
he begins to realize that it's the nicest place on the whole boat: the
captain's private cabin. This is confirmed when Beck unlocks a desk drawer
and produces a bottle of Armagnac.
"Conquering France hath its privileges," Beck says.
"Yeah," Root says, "you blokes really know how to sack a place."
***
Lieutenant Reagan is back again, molesting Bobby Shaftoe with a
stethoscope that appears to have been kept in a bath of liquid nitrogen
until ready for use. "Cough, cough, cough!" he keeps saying. Finally he
takes the instrument away.
Something is fucking with Shaftoe's ankles. He tries to get up on his
elbows to look, and smashes his face into a blistering hot pipe. When he's
recovered from that, he peeks carefully down the length of his body and sees
a goddamn hardware store down there. The bastards have put him in leg irons!
He lies back down and gets slugged in the face by a dangling ham. Above
him is a firmament of pipes and cables. Where has he seen this before? On
the Dutch Hammer, that's where. Except the lights are on in this U boat, and
it doesn't appear to be sinking, and it's full of Germans. The Germans are
calm and relaxed. None of them is bleeding or screaming. Damn! The boat
rocks sideways, and a giant Blutwurst socks him in the belly.
He begins looking around, trying to get his bearings. There's not much
else to see except hanging meat. This cabin is a six foot long slice of U
boat, with a narrow gangway down the center, hemmed in by bunks. Or maybe
they are bunks. The one directly across from him is occupied by a dirty
canvas sack.
Fuck that. Where is the box with the purple bottles?
***
"It is amusing to read my communications from Charlottenburg," Beck
says to Root, changing the subject to the message decrypts on his table.
"They were perhaps written by that Jew Kafka."
"How so?"
"It seems that they do not expect that we will ever make it home
alive."
"What makes you say that?" Root says, trying not to savor the Armagnac
too much. When he brings it up to his nose and inhales, its perfume nearly
obliterates the reek of urine, vomit, rotten food, and diesel that suffuses
everything on the U boat down to the atomic level.
"They are pressing us for information about our prisoners. They are
very interested in you guys," Beck says.
"In other words," Root says carefully, "they want you to question us
now."
"Precisely."
"And send the results in by radio?"
"Yes," Beck says. "But I really should be concentrating on how to keep
us alive the sun will be up soon, and then we are in for some very bad
trouble. You'll remember that your ship radioed our coordinates before I
sunk it. Every allied plane and ship is now out looking for us."
"So, if I cooperate," Root says, "you can get back to the business of
keeping us all alive."
Beck tries to control a smile. His little tactic was crude and obvious
to begin with, and Root has already seen through it. Beck is, if any thing,
more uncomfortable than Root with this whole interrogation business.
"Suppose I tell you everything I know," Root says. "If you send it all
back to Charlottenburg, you'll be running your radio, on the surface, for
hours. Huffduff will pick you out in a few seconds and then every destroyer
and bomber within a thousand miles will jump on you."
"On us," Beck corrects him.
"Yes. So if I really want to stay alive, it's best if I shut up," Root
says.
***
"Are you looking for this?" says the German with the stethoscope, who
(Shaftoe has learned) is not a real doctor just the guy who happens to be in
charge of the box of medical stuff. Anyway, he is holding up just the thing.
The very thing.
"Gimme that!" Shaftoe says, making a weak grab for it. "That's mine!"
"Actually, it's mine," the medic says. "Yours is with the captain. I
might share some of mine with you, if you are cooperative."
"Fuck you," Shaftoe says.
"Very well then," the medic says, "I will by leave it." He puts the
syringe full of morphine on the bunk opposite and one level below Shaftoe's,
so that Shaftoe, by peering between a couple of Knockwursts, can see it. But
he can't reach it. Then the medic leaves.
***
"Why was Sergeant Shaftoe carrying a German morphine bottle and a
German syringe?" says Beck quizzically, doing his best to make it sound
conversational and not interrogational. But the effort is too much for him
and that smile tries to seize control of his lips again. It is the smile of
a whipped dog. Root finds this somewhat alarming, since Beck's the guy in
charge of keeping everyone on the boat alive.
"That's news to me," Root says.
"Morphine is closely regulated," Beck says. "Each bottle has a number.
We have already radioed the number on Sergeant Shaftoe's bottle to
Charlottenburg, and soon they'll know where it came from. Even though they
may not tell us."
"Good work. That should keep them busy for a while. Why don't you go
back to running the ship?" Root suggests.
"We are in the calm before the storm," Beck says, "and I have not so
much to do. So I try to satisfy my own curiosity about you."
***
"We're fucked, aren't we!?" says a German voice.
"Huh?" Shaftoe says.
"I said, we're fucked! You guys broke the Enigma!"
"What's the Enigma?"
"Don't play stupid," says the German.
Shaftoe feels prickly on the back of his neck. That sounds exactly like
the kind of thing a German would say before commencing torture.
Shaftoe composes his face into the cool, heavy lidded, dopey expression
that he always uses when he's trying to irritate an officer. As best he can
when his legs are bolted down, he rolls over on his side, towards the sound
of the voice. He is expecting to see an aquiline SS officer in a black
uniform, jackboots, death's head insignia, and riding crop, perhaps
twiddling a pair of thumbscrews in his black leather gloves.
Instead he sees no one at all. Shit! Hallucinations again!
Then the dirty canvas sail bag in the bunk opposite him begins to move
around. Shaftoe blinks and resolves a head sticking out of one end: straw
blond but prematurely half bald, contrasting black beard, catlike pale green
eyes. The man's canvas garment is not exactly a bag, but a voluminous
overcoat. He has his arms crossed over his body.
"Oh, well," the German mutters, "I was just trying to make
conversation." He turns his head and scratches his nose by nuzzling his
pillow for a while. "You can tell me any secret you want," he says. "See,
I've already notified Dönitz that the Enigma is shit. And it made no
difference. Except he ordered me a new overcoat. The man rolls over,
exposing his back to Shaftoe. The sleeves of the garment are sewn shut at
the ends and tied together behind his back. "It is more comfortable than you
would think, for the first day or two."
***
A mate pulls the leather curtain aside, nods apologetically, and hands
Beck a fresh message decrypt. Beck reads it, raises his eyebrows, and blinks
tiredly. He sets it down on the table and stares at the wall for fifteen
seconds. Then he picks it up and reads it again, carefully.
"It says that I am not to ask you any more questions."
"What!?"
"Under no circumstances," Beck says, "am I to extract any more
information from you."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Probably that you know something I am not authorized to know," Beck
says.
***
It has been about two hundred years, now, since Bobby Shaftoe had a
trace of morphine in his system. Without it, he cannot know pleasure or even
comfort.
The syringe gleams like a cold star on the shelf underneath the crazy
German in the straitjacket. He'd rather that they just tore his fingernails
out or something.
He knows he's going to crack. He tries to think of a way to crack that
won't kill any Marines.
"I could bring you the syringe in my teeth," suggests the man, who has
introduced himself as Bischoff.
Shaftoe mulls it over. "In exchange for?"
"You tell me whether the Enigma has been decrypted."
"Oh." Shaftoe's relieved; he was afraid maybe Bischoff was going to
demand a blow job. "That's the code machine thingamajig you were telling me
about?" He and Bischoff have had a lot of time to shoot the breeze.
"Yeah."
Shaftoe's desperate. But he's also highly irritable, which serves him
well now. "You expect me to believe that you are just a crazy guy who is
curious about Enigma, and not a German naval officer who's dressed up in a
straitjacket to trick me?"
Bischoff is exasperated. "I already said that I've told Dönitz that
Enigma is crap! So if you tell me it's crap, that doesn't make any
difference!"
***
"Let me ask you a question, then," Root says.
"Yes?" Beck says, making a visible effort to raise his eyebrows and
look like he cares.
"What have you told Charlottenburg about us?"
"Names, ranks, serial numbers, circumstances of capture."
"But you told them that yesterday."
"Correct."
"What have you told them recently?"
"Nothing. Except for the serial number on the morphium bottle."
"And how long after you told them that did they send you the message to
stop extracting information from us?"
"About forty five minutes," Beck says. "So, yes, I would very much like
to ask you where that bottle came from. But it is against orders."
***
"I might consider answering your question about Enigma," Shaftoe says,
"if you tell me whether this pipe bomb is carrying any gold."
Bischoff's brow furrows; he's having translation problems. "You mean
money? Geld?"
"No. Gold. The expensive yellow metal."
"A little, maybe," Bischoff says.
"Not petty cash," Shaftoe says. "Tons and tons."
"No. U boats don't carry tons of gold," Bischoff says flatly.
"I'm sorry you said that, Bischoff. Because I thought you and I were
starting a good relationship. Then you went and lied to me you fuck!"
To Shaftoe's surprise and mounting irritation, Bischoff thinks that
it's absolutely hilarious to be called a fuck. "Why the hell should I lie to
you? For god's sake, Shaftoe! Since you bastards broke Enigma and put radar
on everything that moves, virtually every U boat that's put to sea has been
sunk! Why would the Kriegsmarine load tons of gold onto a ship that they
know is doomed! ?"
"Why don't you ask the guys who loaded it on board U 553?"
"Ha! This only proves you are full of shit!" Bischoff says. "U 553 was
sunk a year ago, during a convoy attack."
"Not so. I was on board it just a couple of months ago," Shaftoe says,
"off Qwghlm. It was full of gold."
"Bullshit," Bischoff says. "What was painted on its conning tower?"
"A polar bear holding a beer stein."
Long silence.
"You want to know more? I went into the captain's cabin," Shaftoe said,
"and there was a photo of him with some other guys, and now that I think of
it, one of them looked like you."
"What were we doing?"
"You were all in swimming trunks. You all had whores on your laps!"
Shaftoe shouts. "Unless those were your wives in which case I'm sorry your
wife is a whore!"
"Oh, ho ho ho ho ho!" Bischoff says. He rolls onto his back and stares
up into the plumbing for a while, considering this, and then continues. "Ho
ho ho ho ho ho ho!"
"What, did I just say something secret? Fuck you and your mother if I
did," Shaftoe says.
"Beck!" Bischoff screams. "Achtung!"
"What're you doing?" Shaftoe asks.
"Getting you your morphine."
"Oh. Thank you."
Half an hour later, the skipper's there. Pretty punctual by officer
standards. He and Bischoff talk for a while in German. Shaftoe hears the
word morphium several times. Finally, the skipper summons the medic, who
pokes the needle into Shaftoe's arm and injects about half of it.
"You have something to say?" the skipper asks Shaftoe. Seems like a
nice enough guy. They all seem like pretty nice guys, now.
First, Shaftoe addresses Bischoff. "Sir! I'm sorry I used harsh
language on you, sir!"
"It's okay," Bischoff replied, "she was a whore, like you said."
The skipper clears his throat impatiently.
"Yeah. I was just wondering," Shaftoe says turning to the skipper, "you
have any gold on this U boat?"
"The yellow metal?"
"Yeah. Bars of it."
The captain is still nonplussed. Shaftoe is beginning to feel a certain
mischievous satisfaction. Playing with officers' minds isn't as good as
having a brain saturated with highly refined opiates, but it will do in a
pinch. "I thought all these U boats carried it," he says.
Beck dismisses the medic. Then he and Bischoff talk about Shaftoe for a
while in German. In the middle of this conversation, Beck drops some kind of
a bomb on Bischoff. Bischoff is stunned, and refuses to believe it for a
while, and Beck keeps telling him it's true. Then Bischoff goes back into
that strange ho ho ho thing.
"He can't ask you questions," Bischoff says. "Orders from Berlin. Ho,
ho! But I can."
"Shoot," Shaftoe says.
"Tell us more about gold."
"Give me more morphine."
Beck summons the medic again, and the medic gives him the rest of the
syringe. Shaftoe's never felt better. What a fucking deal! He's getting
morphine out of the Germans in exchange for telling them German military
secrets.
Bischoff starts interrogating Shaftoe in depth, while Beck watches.
Shaftoe tells the whole story of U 553 about three times over. Bischoff is
fascinated, Beck looks sad and scared.
When Shaftoe mentions that the gold bars had Chinese characters stamped
on them, both Beck and Bischoff are floored. Their faces come aglow, as if
lit up by the scanning beam of a Leigh light on a moonless night. Beck
begins to sniffle, as if he's caught a cold, and Shaftoe's startled to
realize that he's actually crying. He is crying tears of shame. But Bischoff
is still fascinated and focused.
Then a mate bursts in and hands Beck a message. The mate is clearly
shocked and scared out of his wits. He keeps looking, not at Beck, but at
Bischoff.
Beck gets a grip on himself and reads the message. Bischoff lunges out
of his bunk, hooks his chin over Beck's shoulder, and reads it at the same
time. They look like a two headed circus geek who hasn't bathed since the
Hoover Administration. Neither speaks for at least a minute. Bischoff is
silent because his mental wheels are spinning like the gyroscope of a
torpedo. Beck is silent because he's on the verge of blacking out. Outside
the cabin, Shaftoe can hear the news, whatever it is, traveling up and down
the length of the U boat with the speed of sound.
Some of the men are shouting in rage, some sobbing, some laughing
hysterically. Shaftoe figures a big battle must have been won, or lost.
Maybe Hitler's been assassinated. Maybe Berlin's been sacked.
Beck is now visibly terrified.
The medic enters. He has adopted an erect military posture the first
time Shaftoe's seen such formality on the U boat. He addresses Beck briefly
in German. Beck nods continuously while the medic is talking. Then he helps
the doctor get Bischoff out of his straitjacket.
Bischoff's a bit stiff, a bit unsteady, but he limbers up fast. He's
shorter than average, with a strong frame and a trim waist, and as he
pounces from bunk to deck, he reminds Shaftoe of a jaguar deploying itself
from a tree. He shakes hands heartily with the medic, and with the miserable
Beck. Then he opens the hatch that leads towards the control room. Half the
crew is jammed into the gangway, watching that door, and when they see
Bischoff, ecstasy floods over their faces and they erupt into wild cheering.
Bischoff accepts handshakes from all of them, making his way towards his
duty station like a politician through an adoring crowd. Beck slinks out the
other hatch and loses himself among the hammering diesels.
Shaftoe has no idea what the fuck's going on until Root shows up a
quarter of an hour later. Root picks the message up off the deck and reads
it. His perpetually bemused affect, normally so annoying, serves him well at
times like this. "This is a broadcast to all ships at sea from German
supreme naval command, Tirpitzufer, Berlin. It says that U 691 which is this
boat we're on, Bobby has been boarded and captured by Allied commandos, and
has already attacked and sunk a milchcow in the Atlantic. Now it appears to
be on its way towards continental Europe where it will presumably try to
infiltrate German naval bases and sink more ships. All German naval and air
forces are ordered to be on the lookout for U 691 and to destroy it on
sight."
"Shit," Shaftoe says.
"We are on the wrong boat at the wrong time," Root says.
"What's the deal with that Bischoff character?"
"He was relieved of command earlier. Now he's back."
"That maniac's running the boat?"
"He is the captain," Root says.
"Well, where's he going to take us?"
"I'm not sure if even he knows that."
***
Bischoff goes to his cabin and pours himself a slug of that Armagnac.
Then he goes to the chart room, which he's always preferred to his cabin.
The chart room is the only civilized place on the whole boat. It's got a
beautiful sextant in a polished wooden box, for example. Speaking tubes
converge here from all over the boat, and even though no one is speaking
into them directly, he can hear snatches of conversation from them, the
distant clamor of the diesels, the zap of a deck of cards being shuffled,
the hiss of fresh eggs hitting the griddle. Fresh eggs! Thank god they
managed to rendezvous with the milchcow before she was sunk.
He unrolls a small scale chart that encompasses the whole Northeast
Atlantic, divided into numbered and lettered grid squares for convoy
hunting. He should be looking at the southern part of the chart, which is
where they are now. But eyes are drawn, again and again, northwards to the
Qwghlm Archipelago.
Put it at the center of a clock. Then Great Britain is at five and six
o'clock, and Ireland is at seven o'clock. Norway is due east, at three
o'clock. Denmark is just south of Norway, at four o'clock, and at the base
of Denmark, where it plugs into Germany, is Wilhelmshaven. France, home to
so many U boats, is far, far to the south completely out of the picture.
A U boat that was headed from the open sea towards a safe port on
Fortress Europe would just go to the French ports on the Bay of Biscay
Lorient, most likely. Getting to Germany's North Sea and Baltic ports would
be a far longer and more complicated and dangerous trip. The U boat would
have to get around Great Britain somehow. To the south, it would have to
make a dash up the Channel, which (setting aside that it's a bottleneck,
crackling with British radar) has been turned into a maze of sunken block
ships and minefields by those Royal Navy spoil sports. There is a lot more
room up north.
Assuming Shaftoe's story is true and there must be some truth in it, or
else where would he have gotten the morphine bottle then it should have been
a reasonably simple matter for U 553 to get around Great Britain via the
northern route. But U boats almost always had mechanical problems to some
degree, especially after they had been at sea for a while. This might cause
a skipper to hug the coast rather than taking to the open seas, where there
would be no hope of survival if the engines shut down entirely. During the
last couple of years, stricken U boats had been abandoned on the coasts of
Ireland and Iceland.
But supposing that an ailing, coast hugging U boat happened to pass
near the Royal Navy base at Qwghlm at just the time some other U boat was
staging a raid there, as Shaftoe claimed. Then the dragnet of destroyers and
airplanes that was sent out to capture the raiders could quite easily
capture U 553, especially if her ability to maneuver were impaired to begin
with.
There are two implausibilities in Shaftoe's story. One, that a U boat
would be carrying a trove of solid gold. Two, that a U boat would be headed
for German ports instead of one of the French ports.
But these two together are more plausible than either one of them by
itself. A U boat carrying that much gold might have very good reasons for
going straight to the Fatherland. Some highly placed person wanted to keep
this gold secret. Not just secret from the enemy, but secret from other
Germans as well.
Why are the Japanese giving gold to Germans? The Germans must be giving
them something they need in return: strategic materials, plans for new
weapons, advisors, something like that.
He writes out a message:
Dönitz!
It is Bischoff. I am back in command. Thank you for the pleasant
vacation. Now I am refreshed.
How uncivilized for you to order that we should be sunk. There must be
a misunderstanding. Can we not discuss it face to face?
A drunken polar bear told me some fascinating things. Perhaps I will
broadcast this information in an hour or so. Since I do not trust the Enigma
anyway, I will not bother to encrypt it.
Yours respectfully,
Bischoff
***
A flock of white Vs migrates north from Gibraltar across a sunlit sea.
At the apex of each V is a nitlike mote. The motes are ships, hauling
megatons of war crap, and thousands of soldiers from North Africa (where
their services are no longer needed) to Great Britain. That's how it looks
to the pilots of the airplanes over the Bay of Biscay. All of those pilots
and all of those planes are English or American the Allies own Biscay now
and have turned it into a crucible for U boat crews.
Most of the Vs track straight parallel courses northwards, but a few of
them curl and twist incessantly: these are destroyers, literally running
circles around the plodding transports, pinging. Those tin cans will protect
the convoys; the pilots of the airplanes who are trying to find U 691 can
therefore search elsewhere.
The powerful sun casts a deep shadow in front of each ship; the eyes of
the lookouts, irised down to pinpoints and squinting against the maritime
glare, can no more penetrate that shade than they could see through plywood.
If they could, they might notice that one of the big transports in the front
rank has got some kind of unusual attachment: a pipe sticking vertically out
of the water just in front and to one side of its bow.
Actually it is a cluster of pipes, one sucking in air, another spewing
diesel exhaust, another carrying a stream of information in the form of
prismatically reflected light. Follow that data stream a few yards down into
the water and you will enter the optic nerve of one Kapitänleutnant Günter
Bischoff. This in turn leads to his brain, which is highly active.
In the age of sonar, Bischoffs U boat was a rat in a dark, cluttered,
infinite cellar, hiding from a man who had neither torch nor lantern: only
two rocks that would spark when banged together. Bischoff sank a lot of
ships in those days.
One day, while he was on the surface, trying to make some time across
the Caribbean, a Catalina appeared out of nowhere. It came from a clear blue
sky and so Bischoff had plenty of time to dive. The Catalina dropped a few
depth charges and then went away; it must have been at the end of its range.
Two days later, a front moved in, the sky became mostly cloudy, and
Bischoff made the mistake of relaxing. Another Catalina found them: this one
used the clouds to conceal his approach, waited until U 691 was crossing a
patch of sunlit water, and then dove, centering his own shadow on the U
boat's bridge. Fortunately, Bischoff had double sun sector air lookouts.
This was a jargonic way of saying that at any given moment, two shirtless,
stinking, unshaven, sunburned men were standing on the deck, casting shadows
over their eyes with their outstretched hands. One of these men said
something in a quizzical tone of voice, which alerted Bischoff. Then both
lookouts were torn apart by a rocket. Five more of Bischoffs men were
wounded by cannon fire and rockets before Bischoff could get the boat under
the surface.
The next day, the front had covered the sky with low blue grey clouds
from horizon to horizon. U 691 was far out of sight of land. Even so,
Bischoff had Holz, his chief engineer, take her up to periscope depth first.
Bischoff scanned the horizon meticulously. Satisfied that they were
perfectly alone, he had Holz bring her to the surface. They fired up the
diesels and pointed the boat east. Their mission was finished, their boat
was damaged, it was time to go home.
Two hours later a flying boat bellied down through the cloud layer and
dropped a skinny black egg on them. Bischoff was up on the bridge, enjoying
some fresh air, and had the presence of mind to scream some thing about
evasive action into the speaking tube. Metzger, the helms man, instantly
took it hard to starboard. The bomb plunged into the water exactly where the
deck of U 691 would have been.
It continued in that vein until they got far away from land. When they
finally limped back to their base at Lorient, Bischoff told this story to
his superiors in tones of superstitious awe, when they finally broke the
news to him that the enemy had this new thing called radar.
Bischoff studied it and read the intelligence reports: the Allies were
even putting the shit on airplanes now! It could see your periscope!
His U boat is no longer a rat in a dark cellar. Now it is a wingless
horsefly dragging itself across an immaculate tablecloth in the streaming
light of the afternoon sun.
Dönitz, bless him, is trying to build new U boats that can stay
submerged all the time. But he has to beg for every ton of steel and for the
services of every engineer. In the meantime there is this stopgap measure,
the Schnorkel, which is just plumbing: a pipe that sticks up out of the
water and enables you to run on diesel power, just beneath the surface. Even
the Schnorkel will show up on radar, but less brilliantly. Every time U 691
surfaces for more than an hour, Holz is up there working on the Schnorkel,
welding new bits on, grinding old bits off, wrapping it in rubber or some
other stuff that he hopes will absorb the radar. The engineers who installed
the Schnorkel in Lorient six months ago wouldn't recognize it now because it
has evolved, like shrews evolving into tigers. If Bischoff can just get U
691 back to a safe port, others can learn from Holz's innovations, and the
few U boats that haven't been sunk can derive some benefit from the
experiment.
He snaps out of it. This must be how officers die, and get their men
killed: they spend more time reviewing the past than planning for the
future. It is nothing short of masturbation for Bischoff to be thinking
about all of this. He must concentrate.
He doesn't have to worry so much about being sunk by Germans. As soon
as he sent Dönitz the message threatening to broadcast the information about
the gold, Dönitz retracted his general order to sink U 691. But there is the
possibility that some ship might have received the first order but missed
the second one, so he still has to watch himself.
Big deal. There is hardly any German Navy left to sink him anyway. He
can worry about being sunk by the Allies instead. They will be intently
irritated when they figure out that he has been shadowing this convoy for
two whole days. Bischoff is pretty irritated himself, it is a fast convoy
that protects itself by zigzagging, and if U 691 does not zigzag in perfect
unison with the ship above it, it will either be crushed by her, or blunder
out of her shadow and be noticed. This has put quite a strain on skipper and
crew, and quite a drain on the boat's supply of benzedrine. But they've
covered five hundred miles! Soon, fatal Biscay will be behind them, Brittany
will be off to starboard, and Bischoff will have a choice: hang a right into
the English Channel, which would be suicidal; head north between Britain and
Ireland, which would be suicidal; or veer to the west around Ireland, which
would be suicidal.
Of course there's always France, which is friendly territory, but it is
a siren whose allure must be sternly resisted. It's not enough for Bischoff
just to run the U boat aground on a godforsaken beach somewhere; he wants to
get the thing back to a proper base. But the skies above the proper bases
are infested with Catalinas, illuminating the sea with the satanic light of
their radars. It is much cleverer to make them think that he's headed for
France, and then head for a German port instead.
Or at least it seemed that way two days ago. Now the complexities of
the plan are weighing on him.
The shadow of the ship above them suddenly seems much longer and
deeper. This means either that the earth's rotation has just sped up
tremendously, moving the sun around to a different angle, or that the ship
has veered towards them. "Hard to starboard," Bischoff says quietly. His
voice travels down a pipe to the man who controls the rudder. "Anything on
the radio?"
"Nothing," says the Funkmaat. That's weird; usually when the ships are
zigzagging, they coordinate it on the radio. Bischoff spins the periscope
around and gets a load of the transport, still trying to shoulder its way
into them. He checks his course; the bitch has veered a full ninety degrees!
"They've seen us," Bischoff says. "We'll dive in just a moment." But
before he loses his ability to use the periscope, he does one more three
sixty, just to verify that his mental map of the convoy is accurate. It is,
more or less; why, there's a destroyer, right there where he thought it was.
He steadies the 'scope, calls out target bearings. The Torpedomaat echoes
the digits while dialing them into the targeting computer: the very latest
fully analog technology. The computer grinds through some calculations and
sets the gyroscopes on a couple of torpedoes. Bischoff says: fire, fire,
dive. It happens, almost that fast. The diesels' anvil chorus, which has
been subtly driving them all insane for a couple of days, is replaced by a
startling silence. They are running on batteries now.
As has always been the case, and as will continue to be the case for at
least another half century, batteries suck. The convoy seems to bolt forward
as U 691's speed drops to a pathetic wallow. The destroyers can go about
five times as fast as they can now. Bischoff hates this part.
"The destroyer is taking evasive action," says the sound man.
"Did we have time to get the weather forecast?" he asks.
"Storm front moving in this evening. Foul weather tomorrow."
"Let's see if we can stay alive until the storm hits," Bischoff says.
"Then we'll run this bucket of shit straight up the middle of the English
Channel, right up Winston Churchill's fat ass, and if we die, we'll die like
men."
A terrible clamor radiates through the water and pierces the hull. The
men cheer sullenly; they have just sunk another ship. Whoopdy doo!
"I think it was the destroyer," says the sound man, as if he can hardly
believe their luck.
"Those homing torpedoes are bastards," Bischoff says, "when they don't
turn round and home in on you."
One destroyer down, three to go. If they can sink another one, they
have a chance of escaping the remaining two. But it's nearly impossible to
escape from three destroyers.
"There's no time like the present," he says. "Periscope depth! Let's
see what the fuck is going on, while we've got them rattled."
It is like this: one of the destroyers is sinking and another is
heading towards it to render assistance. The other two are converging on
where U 691 was about thirty seconds ago, but they are hindered by having to
make their way through the middle of the convoy. Almost immediately, they
begin to fire their guns. Bischoff looses a spread of torpedoes towards the
assisting destroyer. Water is spouting up all around them now as they are
straddled by shells from the other two. He does another three sixty, fixing
the image of the convoy in his mind's eye.
"Dive!" he says.
Then he has a better idea. "Belay that! Surface and go to flank speed."
Any other U boat crew would cut his throat at this moment, then surrender.
But these guys don't even hesitate; either they really do love him, or
they've all decided they're going to die anyway.
Twenty seconds of raw terror ensue. U 691 is screaming across the
surface, banking like a Messerschmidt as shells pound into the water all
around her. Crewmen are spilling out of her hatches, looking like prison
camp inmates in the bright sun, trying not to slide off the deck as it tilts
this way and that, diving to snap the carabiners of their safety lines onto
cables before they are blown out of their shoes by the waterspouts from the
exploding shells. They are manning the guns.
Then there's a big transport ship between them and the two destroyers.
They're safe now, for a minute. Bischoff's up on the conning tower. He turns
aft and gets a load of the other destroyer, spiraling crazily in an effort
to shake off those homing torpedoes.
When they come out from behind the shelter of the big transport,
Bischoff sees that his mental map of the convoy was more or less accurate.
He speaks more orders to the rudder and the engines. Before the two
attacking destroyers have a chance to open up with their guns again,
Bischoff has got himself positioned between them and a troop transport: a
decrepit ocean liner covered with a hasty coat of wartime camo. They can't
shoot at him now without blowing hundreds of their own troops to shreds. But
he can shoot at them. When Bischoff's men see the liner above them, and gaze
across the water at the impotent destroyers, they actually break out into
song: a congratulatory beer hall ditty.
U 691 is topheavy with weaponry, armed to the teeth because of the
aircraft threat. Bischoffs crew opens fire on the destroyers with all of the
small and medium sized stuff, to give the deck gun crew a chance to line up
its shot. At this range, the danger is that the shell will pass all the way
through the destroyer's hull, and out the other side, without detonating.
You have to be patient, take your time, aim for the engines. Bischoff's crew
knows this.
A skull cracking explosion sounds from the barrel of the deck gun; the
shell skims the water, hits the closest destroyer right in the boilers. The
destroyer doesn't blow up, but it does go dead in the water. They take a few
more shots at the other destroyer and manage to knock out one of its guns
and one of its depth charge launchers. Then the lookouts see airplanes
headed their way, and it's time to dive. Bischoff does one final periscope
scan before they go under, and is surprised to see that the destroyer that
was trying to evade the torpedoes managed to do so; apparently two of them
curved back and hit transport ships instead.
They go straight down to a hundred and sixty meters. Destroyers drop
depth charges on them for eight hours. Bischoff takes a nap. When he wakes
up, depth charges are booming all over the place and everything is fine. It
should be dark and stormy up there now: bad weather for Catalinas. He evades
the destroyers by (in a nutshell) doing clever things he has learned the
hard way. The U boat is as thin as a knitting needle, and when you turn it
directly toward or away from the source of a ping, it makes almost no
reflection. All that's required is a clear mental map of where you are with
respect to the destroyers.
After another hour, the destroyers give up and leave. Bischoff takes U
691 up to schnorkel depth and points her straight up the middle of the
English Channel, as advertised. He also uses the periscope to verify that
the weather is, also as advertised, awful.
Those bastards have a big fat red pin on the map marking his position
as last reported by those destroyers. Around that pin, as the hours go by,
they will draw circles of steadily increasing radius, widening gyres
enclosing the set of all points in the ocean where U 691 could possibly be
at the moment, based on their assumptions about her speed. The square
mileage that must be searched will increase as the square of that radius.
Going up the Channel, while submerged, just isn't going to work they'll
run into one of the block ships that the Brits sank there to prevent U boats
from doing just that. The surface is the only way, and it's a hell of a lot
faster too. This raises the airplane issue. Airplanes search not for the
boat itself, which is tiny and dark, but for its wake, which is white and
spreads for miles on calm water. There will be no wake behind U 691 tonight
or rather, there will be, but it will be lost in random noise of much higher
amplitude. Bischoff decides that covering distance is more important than
being subtle at the moment, and so he brings her up to the surface and then
pins the throttle. This will burn fuel insanely, but U 691 has a range of
eleven thousand miles.
Sometime around noon the next day, U 691, battering its way through a
murderous storm, lances the Straits of Dover and breaks through into the
North Sea. She must be lighting up every radar screen in Europe, but
airplanes can't do much in this weather.
"The prisoner Shaftoe wishes to speak to you," says Beck, who has gone
back to being his second in command, as if nothing had ever been different.
War gives men good ignoring skills. Bischoff nods.
Shaftoe enters the control room, accompanied by Root, who will
apparently serve as translator, spiritual guide, and/or wry observer. "I
know a place where we can go," Shaftoe says.
Bischoff is floored. He hasn't thought about where they were actually
going in days. The concept of having a coherent goal is almost beyond his
comprehension.
"It is " Bischoff gropes " touching that you have taken an interest."
Shaftoe shrugs. "I heard you were in deep shit with Dönitz."
"Not as bad as I was," Bischoff says, immediately perceiving the folksy
wisdom of this American barnyard metaphor. "The depth is the same, but now I
am head up instead of head down."
Shaftoe chuckles delightedly. They are all buddies now. "You have any
charts of Sweden?"
This strikes Bischoff as a good but half witted idea. Seeking temporary
refuge in a neutral country: fine. But much more likely is that they run the
boat aground on a rock.
"There's a bay there, by this little town," Shaftoe says. "We know the
depths."
"How could that be?"
"Because we charted the fucking thing ourselves, a couple of months
ago, with a rock on a string."
"Was this before or after you boarded the mysterious U boat full of
gold?" Bischoff asks.
"Just before."
"Would it be out of line for me to inquire what an American Marine
Raider and an ANZAC chaplain were doing in Sweden, a neutral country,
performing bathymetric surveys?"
Shaftoe doesn't seem to think it's out of line at all. He's in such a
good mood from the morphine. He tells another yam. This one begins on the
coast of Norway (he is deliberately vague about how he got there) and is all
about how Shaftoe led Enoch Root and a dozen or so men, including one who
had a serious ax wound to the leg (Bischoff raises his eyebrows) all the way
across Norway on skis, slaying pursuing Germans right and left, and into
Sweden. The story then bogs down for a while because there are no more
Germans to kill, and Shaftoe, sensing that Bischoffs attention is beginning
to wander, tries to inject some lurid thrills into the narrative by
describing the progress of the gangrene up the leg of the officer who ran
afoul of the ax (who, as far as Bischoff can make out, was under suspicion
as a possible German spy). Shaftoe keeps encouraging Root to jump in and
tell the story of how Root performed several consecutive amputations of the
officer's leg, all the way up to the pelvis. Just as Bischoff is finally
starting to actually care about this poor bastard with the gangrenous leg,
the story takes another zigzag: they reach a little fishing town on the Gulf
of Bothnia. The gangrenous officer is delivered into the hands of the town
doctor. Shaftoe and his comrades hole up in the woods and strike up what
sounds like an edgy relationship with a Finnish smuggler and his lissome
daughter. And now it's clear that Shaftoe has reached his favorite part of
the story, which is this Finnish girl. And indeed, up to this point his
story telling style has been as rude and blunt and functional as the inside
of a U boat. But now he relaxes, begins to smile, and becomes damn near
poetic to the point where a few members of Bischoff's crew, who speak a
little bit of English, start to loiter within earshot. Essentially the story
goes totally off the rails at this point, and while it's entertaining
material, it appears to be headed exactly nowhere. Bischoff finally
interrupts with "What about the guy with the bad leg?" Shaftoe frowns and
bites his lip. "Oh, yeah," he finally says, "he died."
"The rock on the string," prompts Enoch Root. "Remember? That's why you
were telling the story."
"Oh, yeah," Shaftoe says, "they came and picked us up with a little
submarine. That's how we got to Qwghlm and saw the U boat with the gold. But
before they could enter the harbor, they had to have a chart. So Lieutenant
Root and I went out on a fucking rowboat with a rock on a string and charted
it."
"And you still have a copy of this chart with you?" Bischoff asks
skeptically.
"Nah," Shaftoe says, with a flip coolness that in a less charismatic
man would be infuriating. "But the lieutenant remembers it. He's really good
at remembering numbers. Aren't you, sir?"
Enoch shrugs modestly. "Where I grew up, memorizing the digits of pi
was the closest thing we had to entertainment."
Chapter 48 CANNIBALS
Goto Dengo flees through the swamp. He is fairly certain that he is
being chased by the cannibals who just cooked up the friend with whom he had
washed ashore. He climbs up a tangle of vines and hides himself several
meters above the ground; men with spears search the general area, but they
do not find him.
He passes out. When he wakes up, it's dark, and some small animal is
moving in the branches nearby. He is so desperate for food that he grabs at
it blindly. The creature has a body the size of a house cat, but long
leathery arms: some kind of huge bat. It bites him several times on the
hands before he crushes it to death. Then he eats it raw.
The next day he goes forth into the swamp, trying to put more distance
between himself and the cannibals. Around midday he finds a stream the first
one he's seen. For the most part the water just seeps out of New Guinea
though marshes, but here is an actual river of cold, fresh water, just
narrow enough to jump across.
A few hours later he finds another village that is similar to the first
one, but only about half as big. The number of dangling heads is much
smaller; maybe these headhunters are not quite as fearsome as the first
group. Again there is a central fire where white stuff is being cooked in a
pot: in this case, it appears to be a wok, which they must have gotten
though trade. The people of this village don't know a starving Nipponese
soldier is lurking in the vicinity, so they are not very vigilant. Around
twilight, when the mosquitoes come out of the swamps in a humming fog, they
all retire into their longhouses. Goto Dengo runs out into the middle of the
compound, grabs the wok, and makes off with it. He forces himself not to
take any of the food until he is far away, hidden in a tree again, and then
he gorges himself. The food is a rubbery gel of what would appear to be pure
starch. Even to a ravenous man, it has no flavor at all. Nevertheless he
licks the wok clean. While he is doing so, an idea comes to him.
The next morning, when the sun's bubble bursts out of the sea, Goto
Dengo is kneeling in the bed of the river, scooping sand up into the wok and
swirling it around, hypnotized by the maelstrom of dirt and foam, which
slowly develops a glittering center.
The next morning Dengo is standing on the edge of the village bright
and early, shouting: "Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!" which is what the people in the
first village called gold.
The villagers wriggle out of their tiny front doors, bewildered at
first, but when they see his face and the wok dangling from one hand, rage
flashes over them like the sun burning out from behind a cloud. A man
charges with a spear, sprinting straight across the clearing. Goto Dengo
dances back and takes half shelter behind a coconut tree, holding the wok up
over his chest like a shield. "Ulab! Ulab!" he cries again. The warrior
falters. Goto Dengo holds out his fist, swings it to and fro until it finds
a warm shaft of sunlight, and then loosens it slightly. A tiny cascade of
glittering flakes trickles out, catching the sun, then plunges into shadow,
hissing as it strikes the leaves below.
It gets their attention. The man with the spear stops. Someone behind
him says something about patah.
Goto Dengo levels the wok, resting it on his forearm, and sprinkles the
entire handful of gold dust into it. The village watches, transfixed. There
is a great deal more whispering about patah. He steps forward into the
clearing, holding the wok out before him as an offering to the warrior,
letting them see his nakedness and his pitiful condition. Finally he
collapses to his knees, bows his head very low, and sets the wok on the
ground at the warrior's feet. He remains there, head bowed, letting them
know that they can kill him now if they want to.
If they want to choke off their newly discovered gold supply, that is.
The matter will require some discussion. They tie his elbows together behind
his back with vines, put a noose around his neck, and tie that to a tree.
All of the kids in the village stand around him and stare. They have purple
skin and frizzy hair. Flies swarm around their heads.
The wok is taken into a hut that is decorated with more human heads
than any of the other huts. All of the men go in there. Furious discussion
ensues.
A mud daubed woman with long skinny breasts brings Goto Dengo half a
shell of coconut milk and a handful of white, knuckle sized grubs wrapped up
in leaves. Her skin is a tangle of overlapping ringworm scars and she is
wearing a necklace that consists of a single human finger strung on a piece
of twine. The grubs squirt when Goto Dengo bites down on them.
The children abandon him to watch a pair of American P 38s fly by, out
over the ocean. Bored with airplanes, Goto Dengo squats on his haunches and
observes the menagerie of arthropods that have converged on him in hopes of
sucking his blood, taking a bite of his flesh, eating his eyeballs out of
his skull, or impregnating him with their eggs. The haunch position is a
good one because every five seconds or so he has to bash his face against
one knee, then the other, in order to keep the bugs out of his eyes and
nostrils. A bird drops out of a tree, lands clumsily on his head, pecks
something out of his hair, and flies away. Blood jets out of his anus and
pools hotly under the arches of his feet. Creatures with many legs gather at
the edge of the pool and begin to feast. Goto Dengo moves away, and leaving
them to it, gets a few minutes' respite.
The men in the hut arrive at some sort of agreement. The tension is
broken. There is laughter, even. He wonder what counts as funny to