u never blew up at Charlene."
"That's right," Randy says.
"You didn't? In all those years?"
"When we had issues, we talked them out."
Amy snorts. "I'll bet you had really boring " She stops herself.
"Boring what?"
"Never mind."
"Look, I think that in a good relationship, you have to have ways for
working out any issues that might come up." Randy says reasonably.
"And you don't consider ramming your car a good way, I'll bet."
"I can think of some problems with it."
"And you had ways of working out your problems with Charlene that were
very sophisticated. No voices were ever raised. No angry words exchanged."
"No cars rammed."
"Yeah. And that worked, right?"
Randy sighs.
"How about that thing that Charlene wrote about beards?" Amy asks.
"How did you know about that?"
"Looked it up on the Internet. Was that an example of how you guys
worked out your problems? By publishing totally oblique academic papers
blasting the other person?"
"I feel like having some oatmeal."
"So don't apologize to me for blowing up at me."
"That oatmeal would really hit the spot."
"For having, and showing, emotion."
"Chow time!"
"Because that's what it's all about. That's the name of the game, Randy
boy," she says, pulling abreast of him and whacking him between the shoulder
blades in a gesture inherited from her dad. "Mmm, that oatmeal does smell
good."
***
The caravan pulls out of town a little after noon: Randy leading the
way in his damaged Acura, Amy sitting in the passenger seat with her bare,
tanned feet up on the dashboard, spoked with white lines from the straps of
her high tech sandals, oblivious to the danger (alluded to by Randy) of her
legs being snapped by an air bag deployment. The souped up Impala is driven
by its owner of record and chief engineer, Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe. Bringing
up the rear, the almost totally empty U Haul truck, driven by Robin Shaftoe.
Randy has that moving through syrup feeling he gets when enacting some
emotionally huge transition in his life. He puts Samuel Barber's Adagio for
Strings on the Acura's stereo and drives very slowly down the main street of
the town, looking all around at the remains of the coffeehouses, bars, pizza
places, and Thai restaurants where, for many years, he prosecuted his social
life. He should have performed this little ceremony before he first left for
Manila, a year and a half ago. But then he fled as if from the scene of a
crime, or, at least, a grotesque personal embarrassment. He only had a day
or two before he got on the plane, and he spent most of it on the floor of
Avi's basement, dictating whole swathes of the business plan into a
microcassette recorder, as opposed to typing them, because his hands had
gone carpal.
He never even properly said good bye to most of the people he knew
here. He did not speak to them, and barely thought of them, until yesterday
evening, when he pulled up in front of their skewed and occasionally smoking
homes in his crumpled and U Haul orange streaked car with this strange,
wiry, tanned woman who, whatever strengths and shortcomings she might have,
was not Charlene. So, taking everything into account, it was not precisely
the way that Emily Post would have orchestrated a reunion with out of touch
friends. The evening's tour is still a flurry of odd, emotionally charged
images in his memory, but he's beginning to sort it out a little, to run the
numbers as it were, and he would say that of the people he ran into
yesterday people he had exchanged dinner invitations with and loaned tools
to, people whose personal computers he had debugged in exchange for six
packs of good beer, whom he had seen important movies with that at least
three quarters of these people have really no interest whatsoever in seeing
Randy's face again as long as they live, and were made to feel intensely
awkward by his totally unexpected reappearance in their front yards, where
they were throwing impromptu parties with salvaged beer and wine. This
hostility was pretty strongly gender linked, Randy is sad to conclude. Many
of the females wouldn't talk to him it all, or would come near him only the
better to fix him with frosty glares and appraise his presumed new
girlfriend. This only stands to reason, since, before she left for Yale,
Charlene had the better part of a year to popularize her version of events.
She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage, just like a
dead white male. No doubt Randy has been classified as an abandoner, no
better than the married man who up and walks out on his wife and children
never mind that he was the one who wanted to marry her and have kids with
her. But his whining alert starts to buzz when he thinks about that, so he
backs up and tries another path.
He embodies (he realizes) just about the worst nightmare, for many
women, of what might happen in their lives. As for the men he saw last
night, they were pretty strongly incensed to back whatever stance their
wives adopted. Some of them really did, apparently, feel similarly. Others
eyed him with obvious curiosity. Some were openly friendly. Weirdly, the
ones who adopted the sternest and most terrible Old Testament moral tone
were the Modern Language Association types who believed that everything was
relative and that, for example, polygamy was as valid as monogamy. The
friendliest and most sincere welcome he'd gotten was from Scott, a chemistry
professor, and Laura, a pediatrician, who, after knowing Randy and Charlene
for many years, had one day divulged to Randy, in strict confidence, that,
unbeknownst to the academic community at large, they had been spiriting
their three children off to church every Sunday morning, and even had them
all baptized.
Randy had gone into their house once to help Scott wrestle a freshly
reconditioned clawfoot bathtub up the stairs, and had actually seen the word
GOD written on actual pieces of paper stuck to the walls of their house like
on the refrigerator door, and the walls of the children's bedrooms, where
juvenile art tends to be reposited. Little time wasting projects they had
done during Sunday school pages torn from coloring books, showing a somewhat
more multicultural Jesus than the one Randy had grown up with (curly hair,
e.g.), talking to little biblical kids or assisting disoriented Holy Land
livestock. The sight of this stuff around the house, commingled with normal
(i.e., secular) kid art junk from elementary school, Batman posters, etc.
made Randy feel grossly embarrassed. It was like going to the house of some
supposedly sophisticated people and finding a neon on black velvet Elvis
painting hanging above their state of the art Italian designer furniture.
Definitely a social class thing. And it wasn't like Scott and Laura were
deadly earnest types, and neither were they glassy eyed and foaming at the
mouth. They had after all managed to pass themselves off as members in good
standing of decent academic society for a number of years. They were a bit
quieter than many others, they took up less space in the room, but then that
was normal for people trying to raise three kids, and so they passed.
Randy and Amy had spent a full hour talking to Scott and Laura last
night; they were the only people who made any effort to make Amy feel
welcome. Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and
what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was
not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they
at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with
transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms
(Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post modern,
politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found
themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz,
society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose
only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules
with a kind of neo Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal
with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were
wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they
might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs
and How tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when
things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying
adaptability.
"Yo! Randy!" says America Shaftoe. "M.A. is honking at you."
"Why?" Randy asks. He looks in the rearview, sees a reflection of the
ceiling of the Acura, and realizes he is slouched way down in his seat. He
sits up straight, and spots the Impala.
"I think it's because you're driving ten miles an hour," Amy says, "and
M.A. likes to go ninety."
"Okay," Randy says, and, just as simple as that, pushes down on the
accelerator pedal and drives out of town forever.
Chapter 66 BUNDOK
"The name of this place is Bundok," Captain Noda tells him confidently.
"We have chosen it carefully." Goto Dengo and Lieutenant Mori are the only
other persons present in the tent, but he speaks as if addressing a
battalion drawn up on a parade ground.
Goto Dengo has been in the Philippines long enough to understand that
in the local tongue bundok means any patch of rugged mountainous terrain,
but he does not reckon that Captain Noda is the sort who would appreciate
being brought up to speed by a subordinate. If Captain Noda says that this
place is called Bundok, then Bundok it is, and forever will be.
Captain is not an especially high rank, but Noda carries himself as if
he's a general. Somewhere, this man is important. He is pale skinned, as if
he's been spending the winter in Tokyo. His boots have not begun to rot on
his feet yet.
A hard leather attache case rests on the table. He opens one end and
draws out a large piece of folded white cloth. The two lieutenants scurry to
assist him in unfolding this across the tabletop. Goto Dengo is startled by
the feel of the linen. His fingertips are the only part of his body that
will ever touch bedsheets as fine as these. THE MANILA HOTEL is printed
along the selvedge.
A diagram has been sketched out on the bedsheet. Blue black fountain
pen marks, punctuated with spreading blotches where the hand hesitated,
reinforce an earlier stratum of graphite scratches. Someone terribly
important (probably the last person to sleep on this bedsheet) has come in
with a black grease pencil and reshaped the whole thing in his own image
with fat thrusting strokes and hasty notations that look like unraveled
braids in a woman's long hair. This work has been annotated politely by a
fastidious engineer, probably Captain Noda himself, working with ink and a
fine brush.
The heavy with the grease pencil has labeled the entire thing BUNDOK
SITE.
Lieutenants Mori and Goto affix the sheet to the canvas of the tent
with some small, rusty cotter pins that a private brings to them,
triumphantly, in a cracked porcelain coffee cup. Captain Noda watches
calmly, puffing on a cigarette. "Be careful," he jokes, "MacArthur slept on
that sheet!"
Lieutenant Mori dutifully cracks up. Goto Dengo is standing on tiptoe,
holding up the top edge of the sheet, examining the faint pencil marks
underlying the whole diagram. He sees a couple' of little crosses and,
having spent too long in the Philippines, supposes at first that they are
churches. In one place, three of them are clustered together and he imagines
Calvary.
Nearby, diggings have been indicated. He thinks Golgotha: The Place of
the Skull.
Lunatic! He needs to get his mind in order. Lieutenant Mori shoves pins
through the linen with faint popping noises. Goto Dengo steps away, keeping
his back to the Captain, closes his eyes, and gets his bearings. He is
Nipponese. He is in the Southern Resource Zone of Greater Nippon. The cross
shaped marks represent summits. The diggings are some sort of excavation in
which he is destined to play an important role.
The blue black fountain pen marks are rivers. Five of them sprawl from
the triple summit of Bundok. Two of the south going streams combine to make
a larger river. A third stream roughly parallels this one. But the man with
the black grease pencil has drawn a stout line across the stream with such
force that loose curls of black grease can still be seen dangling from the
linen. The fountain pen has been used to scratch out a bulge in the river
just upstream of this mark. Apparently they want to dam the river and make a
pool, or a pond, or a lake; it is difficult to get a sense of scale. It is
labeled, LAKE YAMAMOTO.
Looking more closely, he sees that the larger river the one formed by
the confluence of the two tributaries is also to be dammed, but much farther
south. This has been dubbed TOJO RIVER. But there is no LAKE TOJO. It
appears that this dam will thicken and deepen the Tojo River but not turn it
into an actual lake. Goto Dengo infers from this that the valley of the Tojo
River must be steep sided.
The same basic pattern is repeated everywhere on the bedsheet. Grease
pencil wants a complete perimeter security system. Grease pencil wants one
and only one road leading to this place. Grease pencil wants two areas for
barracks: one big area and one small area. The details have been worked out
by smaller men with better penmanship.
"Worker housing," explains Captain Noda, pointing to the big area with
his swagger stick. "Military barracks," he says, pointing to the small area.
Bending closer, Goto Dengo can see that the larger, worker area is to be
surrounded by an irregular polygon of barbed wire. Actually, two polygons,
one nested within the other, a barren space in between. The vertices of this
polygon are labeled with the names of weapons:
Nambu, Nambu, Model 89 field mortar.
A road or trail, or something, leads from there up the bank of the Tojo
River, past the dam, and terminates at the site of the proposed diggings.
Goto Dengo bends close and peers. The area including both Lake Yamamoto
and the diggings has been surrounded by a tidy square, neatly crosshatched
with Captain Noda's brush and ink, and labeled "special security zone."
He jerks back as Captain Noda shoves the end of his stick into the
narrow space between his nose and the bedsheet, and whacks on the Special
Security Zone a few times. Concentric ripples speed outwards, like shock
waves from dynamite. "This area is your responsibility, Lieutenant Goto." He
moves the pointer south and taps on the zone farther down the Tojo River,
with the worker housing and the barracks. "This is Lieutenant Mori's." He
circles the whole area, windmilling his arm to cover the entire security
perimeter and the road that gives access to it. "The entirety is mine. I
report to Manila. So, it is a very small chain of command for such a large
area. Secrecy is of paramount importance. Your first and highest order is to
preserve absolute secrecy at all costs."
Lieutenants Mori and Goto blurt "Hai!" and bow.
Addressing Mori, Captain Noda continues: "The housing area will appear
to be a prison camp for special prisoners. Its existence may be known to
some on the outside the local people will see trucks going in and out along
the road and will guess as much." Turning to Goto Dengo, he says: "The
existence of the Special Security Zone, however, will be totally unknown to
the outside world. Your work will proceed under the cover of the jungle,
which is extraordinarily dense here. It will be invisible to the enemy's
observation planes."
Lieutenant Mori jerks back as if a bug has just flown into his eye. To
him, the idea of enemy observation planes over Luzon is completely bizarre.
MacArthur is nowhere near the Philippines.
Goto Dengo, on the other hand, has been to New Guinea. He knows what
happens to Nipponese Army units who try to resist MacArthur in the jungles
of the Southwest Pacific. He knows that MacArthur is coming, and obviously
so does Captain Noda. More importantly, so do the men in Tokyo who sent Noda
down to accomplish this mission whatever it is.
They know. Everyone knows we are losing the war.
Everyone important, that is.
"Lieutenant Goto, you are not to discuss any details of your work with
Lieutenant Mori except insofar as they pertain to pure logistics: road
building, worker schedules, and so on." Noda is addressing this to both men;
the clear implication is that if Goto gets loose lipped, Mori is expected to
turn him in. "Lieutenant Mori, you are dismissed!"
Mori grunts out another "Hai!" and makes himself scarce.
Lieutenant Goto bows. "Captain Noda, please permit me to say that I am
honored to have been selected to construct these fortifications."
The stoic look on Noda's face dissolves for a moment. He turns away
from Goto Dengo and paces across the floor of the tent for a moment,
thinking, then turns to face him again. "It is not a fortification."
Goto Dengo is practically startled right out of his boots for a moment.
Then he thinks, a gold mine! They must have discovered an immense gold
deposit in this valley. Or diamonds?
"You must not think as if you were building a fortification," Noda says
solemnly.
"A mine?" Goto Dengo says. But he says it weakly. He is already
realizing that it does not make sense. It would be insane to put so much
effort into mining gold or diamonds at this point in the war. Nippon needs
steel, rubber, and petroleum, not jewelry.
Perhaps some new super weapon? His heart nearly bursts from excitement.
But Captain Noda's stare is as bleak as the fat muzzle of a tommy gun.
"It is a long term storage facility for vital war making materials,"
Captain Noda finally says.
He goes on to explain, in general terms, how the facility is to be
built. It is to be a network of intersecting shafts bored through hard
volcanic rock. Its dimensions are surprisingly small given the amount of
effort that will be spent on building it. They won't be able to store much
here: enough ammunition for a regiment to fight for a week, perhaps,
assuming that they make minimal use of heavy weapons, and get their food off
the land. But those supplies will be almost inconceivably well protected.
Goto Dengo sleeps that night in a hammock stretched between two trees,
protected by mosquito netting. The jungle emits a fantastic din.
Captain Noda's sketches looked familiar, and he is trying to place
them. Just as he's falling asleep, he remembers cutaway views of the
Pyramids of Egypt that his father had shown him in a picture book, showing
the design of the pharaoh's tombs.
A horrible thought comes to him then: he is building a tomb for the
emperor. When Nippon falls to MacArthur, Hirohito will carry out the rite of
seppuku. His body will be flown out of Nippon and brought to Bundok and
buried in the chamber that Goto Dengo is building. He has a nightmare of
being buried alive in a black chamber, the grey image of the emperor's face
fading to black as the last brick is rammed home on its bed of mortar.
He sits in absolute darkness, knowing that Hirohito is there with him,
afraid to move.
He is a little boy in an abandoned mine chamber, naked and soaked with
icy water. His flashlight has died. Before it flickered out, he thought he
saw the face of a demon. Now he hears only the drip, drip of ground water
into the sump. He can stay here and die, or he can dive into the water again
and swim back.
When he wakes up, it's raining and the sun has climbed free of the
horizon somewhere. He rolls out of his hammock and walks naked in the warm
rain to wash himself. Goto Dengo has a job to do.
Chapter 67 COMPUTER
Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock of The Electrical Till Corporation and
the United States Army, in that order, prepares for today's routine briefing
from his subordinate, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, much as a test pilot
readies himself to be ripped into the stratosphere with a hot rocket engine
under his ass. He turns in early the night before, wakes up late, talks to
his aide and makes sure that (a) plenty of hot coffee is available and (b)
none of it will be given to Waterhouse. He gets two wire recorders set up in
the room, in case either goes on the fritz, and brings in a team of three
crack stenographers with loads of technical savvy. He has a couple of
fellows in his section also ETC employees during peacetime who are real math
whizzes, so he brings them in too. He gives them a little pep talk:
"I do not expect you fellows to understand what the fuck Waterhouse is
talking about. I'm gonna be running after him as fast as I can. You just hug
his legs and hold on for dear life so that I can sort of keep his backside
in view as long as possible." Comstock is proud of this analogy, but the
math whizzes seem baffled. Testily, he fills them in on the always tricky
literal vs. figurative dichotomy. Only twenty minutes remain before
Waterhouse's arrival; right on schedule, Comstock's aide comes through the
room with a tray of benzedrine tablets. Comstock takes two, attempting to
lead by example. "Where's my darn chalkboard team?" he demands, as the
powerful stimulant begins to rev up his pulse. Into the room come two
privates equipped with blackboard erasers and damp chamois cloths, plus a
three man photography team. They set up a pair of cameras aimed at the
chalkboard, plus a couple of strobe lights, and lay in a healthy stock of
film rolls.
He checks his watch. They are running five minutes behind schedule. He
looks out the window and sees that his jeep has returned; Waterhouse must be
in the building. "Where is the extraction team?" he demands.
Sergeant Graves is there a few moments later. "Sir, we went to the
church as directed, and located him, and, uh " He coughs against the back of
his hand.
"And what?"
"And who is more like it, sir," says Sergeant Graves, sotto voce. "He's
in the lavatory right now, cleaning up, if you know what I mean." He winks.
"Ohhhh," says Earl Comstock, cottoning on to it.
"After all," Sergeant Graves says, "you can't blow out the rusty pipes
of your organ unless you have a nice little assistant to get the job
properly done."
Comstock tenses. "Sergeant Graves it is critically important for me to
know did the job get properly done?"
Graves furrows his brow, as if pained by the very question. "Oh, by all
means sir. We wouldn't dream of interrupting such an operation. That's why
we are late begging your pardon."
"Don't mention it," Comstock stays, slapping Graves heartily on the
shoulder. "That is why I try to give my men broad discretion. It has been my
opinion for quite some time that Waterhouse is badly in need of some
relaxation. He concentrates a little too hard on his work. Sometimes I
frankly cannot tell whether he is saying something very brilliant, or just
totally incoherent. And I think you have made a pivotal, Sergeant Graves, a
pivotal contribution to today's meeting by having the good sense to stand
off long enough for Waterhouse's affairs to be set in order." Comstock
realizes that he is breathing very fast, and his heart is pounding madly.
Perhaps he overdid the benzedrine?
Waterhouse drifts into the room ten minutes later on flaccid legs, as
if he had inadvertently left his own skeleton behind in bed. He barely makes
it to his designated seat and thuds into it like a sack of guts, popping a
few strands of wicker out of its bottom. He is breathing raggedly through
his mouth, blinking heavy eyelids frequently.
"Looks like today's going to be a milk run, men!" Comstock announces
brightly. Everyone except Waterhouse snickers. Waterhouse has been in the
building for a quarter of an hour, and it took at least that long for
Sergeant Graves to drive him here from the church, and so it has been at
least half an hour. And yet, to look at him, you'd think that it had
happened five seconds ago.
"Someone pour that man a cup of coffee!" Comstock orders. Someone does.
Being in the military is amazing; you give orders, and things happen.
Waterhouse does not drink, or even touch, the coffee, but at least it gives
his eyes something to focus on. Those orbs wander around under their rumpled
lids for a while, like ack ack guns trying to track a house fly, before
finally fixing on the white coffee mug. Waterhouse clears his throat at some
length, as if preparing to speak, and the room goes silent. It remains
silent for about thirty seconds. Then Waterhouse mumbles something that
sounds like "coy."
The stenographers take it down in unison.
"Beg pardon?" says Comstock.
One of the math whizzes says, "He might be talking about Coy Functions.
I think I saw them when I was flipping through a graduate math textbook
once."
"I thought he was saying 'quantum' something," says the other ETC man.
"Coffee," Waterhouse says, and heaves a deep sigh.
"Waterhouse," says Comstock, "how many fingers am I holding up?"
Waterhouse seems to realize that there are other people in the room now. He
closes his mouth, and his nostrils flare as air begins to rush through them.
He tries to move one of his hands, realizes that he is sitting on it, and
shifts heavily to and fro until it flops loose. He gets his eyes all the way
open, providing a really good, clear view of that coffee mug. He yawns,
stretches, and farts.
"The Nipponese cryptosystem that we call Azure is the same thing as the
German system that we call Pufferfish," he announces. "Both of them are also
related somehow to another, newer cryptosystem I have dubbed Arethusa. All
of these have something to do with gold. Probably gold mining operations of
some sort. In the Philippines."
Whammo! The stenographers go into action. The photographer fires off
his strobes, even though there's nothing to take pictures of just nerves.
Comstock glances beadily at his wire recorders, makes sure those reels are
spinning. He is a little unnerved by how rapidly Waterhouse is coming up to
speed. But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one's own
fears, to project confidence at all times. Comstock grins and says, "You
sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder if you can get me to
feel that same level of confidence."
Waterhouse frowns at the coffee mug. "Well, it's all math," he says.
"If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the
whole point of math."
"So you have a mathematical basis for making this assertion?"
"Assertions," Waterhouse says. "Assertion number one is that Pufferfish
and Azure are different names for the same cryptosystem. Assertion number
two is that Pufferfish/Azure is a cousin of Arethusa. Three: all of these
cryptosystems are related to gold. Four: mining. Five: Philippines."
"Maybe you could just chalk those up on the blackboard as you go
along," Comstock says edgily.
"Glad to," Waterhouse says. He stands up and turns toward the
blackboard, freezes for a couple of seconds, then turns back around, lunges
for the coffee mug, and drains it before Comstock or any of his aides can
rip it from his grasp. Tactical error! Then Waterhouse chalks up his
assertions. The photographer records it. The privates massage their chamois
cloths and glance nervously in Comstock's direction.
"Now, you have some sort of, er, mathematical proof for each one of
these assertions?" Comstock asks. Math isn't his bag, but running meetings
is, and what Waterhouse has just chalked up on that board looks, to him,
like the rudiments of an agenda. And Comstock feels a lot better when he has
an agenda. Without an agenda, he's like a grunt running around in the jungle
without a map or a weapon.
"Well, sir, that's one way to look at it," Waterhouse says after some
thought. "But it is much more elegant to view all of these as corollaries
stemming from the same underlying theorem."
"Are you telling me that you have succeeded in breaking Azure? Because
if so, congratulations are in order!" Comstock says.
"No. It is still unbroken. But I can extract information from it."
This is the moment where the joystick snaps off in Comstock's hand.
Still, he can pound haplessly on the control panel. "Well, would you mind
taking them one at a time, at least?"
"Well, let's just take, for example, Assertion Four, which is that
Azure/Pufferfish has something to do with mining." Waterhouse sketches out a
freehand map of the Southwest Pacific theater of operations, from Burma to
the Solomons, from Nippon to New Zealand. It takes him about sixty seconds.
Just for grins, Comstock pulls a printed map out of his clipboard and
compares it against Waterhouse's version. They are basically identical.
Waterhouse draws a circle with a letter A in it at the entrance to
Manila Bay. "This is one of the stations that transmits Azure messages."
"You know that from huffduff, correct?"
"That's right."
"Is that on Corregidor?"
"One of the smaller islands near Corregidor."
Waterhouse draws another circle A in Manila itself, one in Tokyo, one
in Rabaul, one in Penang, one in the Indian Ocean.
"What's that?" Comstock asks.
"We picked up an Azure transmission from a German U boat here,"
Waterhouse says.
"How do you know it was a German U boat?"
"Recognized the fist," Waterhouse says. "So, this is the spatial
arrangement of Azure transmitters not counting the stations in Europe that
are making Pufferfish transmissions, and hence, according to Assertion One,
are part of the same network. Anyway, now let us say that an Azure message
originates from Tokyo on a certain date. We don't know what it says, because
we haven't broken Azure yet. We just know that the message went out to these
places." Waterhouse draws lines radiating downward from Tokyo to Manila,
Rabaul, Penang. "Now, each one of these cities is a major military base.
Consequently, each is the source of a steady stream of traffic,
communicating with all of the Nipponese bases in its region." Waterhouse
draws shorter lines radiating from Manila to various locations in the
Philippines, and from Rabaul to New Guinea and the Solomons.
"Correction, Waterhouse," Comstock says. "We own New Guinea now."
"But I'm going back in time!" Waterhouse says. "Back to 1943, when
there were Nip bases all along the north coast of New Guinea, and through
the Solomons. So, let us say that within a brief window of time following
this Azure message from Tokyo, a number of messages are transmitted from
places like Rabaul and Manila to smaller bases in those areas. Some of them
are in ciphers that we have learned how to break. Now, it is not
unreasonable to suppose that some of these messages were sent out as a
consequence of whatever orders were contained in that Azure message."
"But those places send out thousands of messages a day," Comstock
protests. "What makes you think that you can pick out the messages that are
a consequence of the Azure orders?"
"It's just a brute force statistics problem," Waterhouse says. "Suppose
that Tokyo sent the Azure message to Rabaul on October 15th, 1943. Now,
suppose I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October
14th and I index them in various ways: what destinations they were
transmitted to, how long they were, and, if we were able to decrypt them,
what their subject matter was. Were they orders for troop movements? Supply
shipments? Changes in tactics or procedures? Then, I take all of the
messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October 16th the day after the
Azure message came in from Tokyo and I run exactly the same statistical
analysis on them."
Waterhouse steps back from the chalkboard and turns into a blinding
fusillade of strobe lights. "You see, it is all about information flow.
Information flows from Tokyo to Rabaul. We don't know what the information
was. But it will, in some way, influence what Rabaul does afterwards. Rabaul
is changed, irrevocably, by the arrival of that information, and by
comparing Rabaul's observed behavior before and after that change, we can
make inferences."
"Such as?" Comstock says warily.
Waterhouse shrugs. "The differences are very slight. They hardly stand
out from the noise. Over the course of the war, thirty one Azure messages
have gone out from Tokyo, so I have that many data sets to work with. Any
one data set by itself might not tell me anything. But when I combine all of
the data sets together giving me greater depth then I can see some patterns.
And one of the patterns that I most definitely see is that, on the day after
an Azure message went out to, say, Rabaul, Rabaul was much more likely to
transmit messages having to do with mining engineers. This has ramifications
that can be traced all the way back until the loop is closed."
"Loop is closed?"
"Okay. Let's take it from the top. Azure message goes from Tokyo to
Rabaul," Waterhouse says, drawing a heavy line down the chalkboard joining
those two cities. "The next day, a message in some other crypto system one
that we have broken goes from Rabaul to a submarine operating out of a base
here, in the Moluccas. The message states that the submarine is to proceed
to an outpost on the north coast of New Guinea and pick up four passengers,
who are identified by name. From our archives, we know who these men are:
three aircraft mechanics and one mining engineer. A few days later, the
submarine transmits from the Bismarck Sea stating that it has picked those
men up. A few days after that, our waterfront spies in Manila inform us that
the same submarine has showed up there. On the same day, another Azure
message is transmitted from Manila back up to Tokyo," Waterhouse concludes,
adding a final line to the polygon, "closing the loop."
"But that could all be a series of random, unconnected events," says
one of Comstock's math whizzes, before Comstock can say it. "The Nips are
desperate for aircraft mechanics. There's nothing unusual about this kind of
message traffic."
"But there is something unusual about the patterns," Waterhouse says.
"If, a few months later, another submarine is sent, in the same way, to pick
up some mining engineers and some surveyors who have been trapped in Rabaul,
and, upon its arrival in Manila, another Azure message is sent from Manila
up to Tokyo, it begins to look very suspicious."
"I don't know," Comstock stays, shaking his head. "I'm not sure if I
can sell this to the General's staff. It's too much of a fishing
expedition."
"Correction, sir, it was a fishing expedition. But now I'm back from
the fishing expedition, and I've got the fish!" Waterhouse storms out of the
room and down the hall toward his lab half the fucking wing. Good thing
Australia is a big continent, because Waterhouse is going to take all of it
if he's not held sternly in check. Fifteen seconds later he's back with a
stack of ETC cards a foot high, which he pounds down on the tabletop. "It's
all right here."
Comstock has never fired a gun in his life, but he knows card punching
and reading machinery like a jarhead knows his Springfield, and he's not
impressed. "Waterhouse, that stack of cards carries about as much
information as a letter home to Mom. Are you trying to tell me "
"No, this is just the summary. The result of the statistical analysis."
"Why the hell did you punch it onto ETC cards? Why not just turn in a
plain old typed report like everyone else?"
"I didn't punch it," Waterhouse says. "The machine punched it."
"The machine punched it," Comstock says very slowly.
"Yes. When it was done performing the analysis." Waterhouse suddenly
breaks into his braying laugh. "You didn't think this was the raw inputs,
did you?"
"Well, I "
"The inputs filled several rooms. I had to run almost every message we
have intercepted through the whole war through this analysis. Re member all
those trucks I requisitioned a few weeks ago? Those trucks were just to
carry the cards back and forth from storage."
"Jesus Christ!" Comstock says. He remembers the trucks now, their
incessant comings and goings, fender benders in the motor pool, exhaust
fumes coming through his window, the enlisted men shoving heavy carts up and
down the hallways, laden with boxes. Running over people's feet. Scaring the
secretaries.
And the noise. The noise, the noise, from Waterhouse's goddamned
machine. Flowerpots vibrating their way off file cabinets, standing waves in
coffee cups.
"Wait a sec," says one of the ETC men, with the nasal skepticism of a
man who has just realized he's being bullshitted. "I saw those trucks. I saw
those cards. Are you trying to get us to believe that you were actually
running a statistical analysis on each and every single one of those message
decrypts?"
Waterhouse looks a little defensive. "Well, that was the only way to do
it!"
Comstock's math whiz is homing in for the kill now. "I agree that the
only way to accomplish the analysis that is implied by that" he waves at the
mandala of intersecting polygons on Waterhouse's map "is to go through all
of those truckloads of old decrypts one by one. That is clear. That is not
what we are objecting to."
"What are you objecting to, then?"
The whiz laughs angrily. "I'm just worried about the inconvenient fact
that there is no machine in the whole world that is capable of processing
all of that data, that fast."
"Didn't you hear the noise?" Waterhouse asks.
"We all heard the goddamn noise," Comstock says. "What does that have
to do with anything?"
"Oh," Waterhouse says, and rolls his eyes at his own stupidity. "That's
right. Sorry. Maybe I should have explained that part first."
"What part?" Comstock asks.
"Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah
bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah," Waterhouse
says, or words to that effect. He pauses for breath, and turns fatefully
towards the blackboard. "Do you mind if I erase this?" A private lunges
forward with an eraser. Comstock sinks into a chair and grips its arms. A
stenographer reaches for a benzedrine tablet. An ETC man chomps down on a
number two lead pencil like a dog on a drumstick. Strobes flash. Waterhouse
grabs a fresh stick of chalk, reaches up, and presses its tip to the
immaculate slate. The crisp edge of the stick fractures with a slight pop,
and a tiny spray of chalk particles drifts to the floor spreading into a
narrow parabolic cloud. Waterhouse bows his head for a minute, like a priest
getting ready to stride up the aisle, and then draws a deep breath.
The benzedrine wears off five hours later and Comstock finds himself
sprawled across a table in a room filled with haggard, exhausted men.
Waterhouse and the privates are pasty with chalk dust, giving them a
ghoulish appearance. The stenographers are surrounded with used pads, and
frequently stop writing to flap their limp hands in the air like white
flags. The wire recorders are spinning uselessly, one reel full and one
empty. Only the photographer is still going strong, hitting that strobe
every time Waterhouse manages to fill the chalkboard.
Everything smells like underarm sweat. Comstock realizes that
Waterhouse is looking at him expectantly. "See?" Waterhouse asks.
Comstock sits up and glances furtively at his own legal pad, where he
hoped to draw up an agenda. He sees Waterhouse's four assertions, which he
copied down during the first five minutes of the meeting, and then nothing
except a tangled field of spiky doodles surrounding the words BURY and
DISINTER.
It behooves Comstock to say something. "This thing, the, uh, the
burying procedure, that's the, uh "
"The key feature!" Waterhouse says brightly. "See, these ETC card
machines are great for input and output. We've got that covered. The logic
elements are straightforward enough. What was needed was a way to give the
machine memory, so that it could, to use Turing's terminology, bury data
quickly, and just as quickly disinter it. So I made one of those. It is an
electrical device, but its underlying principles would be familiar to any
organ maker."
"Could I, uh, see it?" Comstock asks.
"Sure! It's down in my lab."
Going to see it is more complicated. First everyone has to use the
toilet, then the cameras and strobes have to be moved down to the lab and
set up. When they've all filed in, Waterhouse is standing next to a giant
rack of pipes with thousands of wires hanging out of it.
"That's it?" Comstock says, when the group is finally assembled. Pea
sized drops of mercury are scattered around the floor like ball bearings.
The flat soles of Comstock's shoes explode them into bursts rolling in all
directions.
"That's it."
"What did you call it again?"
"The RAM," Waterhouse says. "Random Access Memory. I was going to put a
picture of a ram on it. Y'know, one of those sheeps with the big huge curly
horns?"
"Yes."
"But I didn't have time, and I'm not that good at drawing pictures."
Each pipe is four inches in diameter and thirty two feet long. There must be
a hundred of them, at least Comstock is trying to remember that requisition
that he signed, months ago Waterhouse had ordered enough drain pipe to plumb
a whole goddamn military base.
The pipes are laid out horizontally, like a rank of organ pipes that
has been knocked flat. Stuck into one end of each pipe is a little paper
speaker ripped from an old radio.
"The speaker plays a signal a note that resonates in the pipe, and
creates a standing wave," Waterhouse says. "That means that in some parts of
the pipe, the air pressure is low, and in other parts it is high." He is
backing down the length of one of the pipes, making chopping motions with
his hand. "These U tubes are full of mercury." He points to one of several U
shaped glass tubes that are plumbed into the bottom of the long pipe.
"I can see that very plainly, Waterhouse," Comstock says. "Could you
keep backing up to the next one?" he requests, peering over the
photographers' shoulder through the viewfinder. "You're blocking my view
that's better farther farther " because he can still see Waterhouse's
shadow. "That's good. Hit it!"
The photographer pulls the trigger, the strobe flares.
"If the air pressure in the organ pipe is high, it pushes the mercury
down a little bit. If it's low, it sucks the mercury up. I put an electrical
contact into each U tube just a couple of wires separated by an air gap. If
those wires are high and dry (like because high air pressure in the organ
pipe is shoving the mercury down away from them), no current flows. But if
they are immersed in the mercury (because low air pressure in the organ pipe
is sucking the mercury up to cover them), then current flows between them,
because mercury conducts electricity! So the U tubes produce a set of binary
digits that is like a picture of the standing wave a graph of the harmonics
that make up the musical note that is being played on the speaker. We feed
that vector back to the oscillator circuit that is driving the speaker, so
that the vector of bits keeps refreshing itself forever, unless the machine
decides to write a new pattern of bits into it."
"Oh, so the ETC machinery actually can control this thing?" Comstock
asks.
Again with the laugh. "That's the whole point! This is where the logic
boards bury and disinter the data!" Waterhouse says. "I'll show you!" And
before Comstock can order him not to, Waterhouse has nodded to a corporal
standing at the other end of the room, wearing the protective earmuffs that
are generally issued to the men who fire the very largest artillery. That
corporal nods and hits a switch. Waterhouse slams his hands over his ears
and grins, showing a little too much gum for Comstock's taste, and then time
stops, or something, as all of those pipes come alive playing variations on
the same low C.
It's all Comstock can do not to drop to his knees; he has his hands
over his ears, of course, but the sound's not really coming in through his
ears, it is entering his torso directly, like X rays. Hot sonic tongs are
rummaging through his viscera, beads of sweat being vibrated loose from his
scalp, his nuts are hopping around like Mexican jumping beans. The crescents
of mercury in all those U tubes are shifting up and down, opening and
closing the contacts, but systematically: it is not turbulent sloshing
around, but a coherent progression of discrete controlled shiftings,
informed by some program.
Comstock would draw his sidearm and put a bullet through Waterhouse's
head, but he'd have to take one hand off one ear. Finally it stops.
"The machine just calculated the first hundred numbers in the Fibonacci
sequence," Waterhouse says.
"As I understand it, this RAM is just the part where you bury and
disinter the data," Comstock says, trying to master the higher harmonics in
his own voice, trying to sound and act as if he saw this kind of thing
daily. "If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you
call it?"
"Hmmm," Waterhouse says. "Well, its basic job is to perform
mathematical calculations like a computer."
Comstock snorts. "A computer is a human being."
"Well ... this machine uses binary digits to do its computing. I
suppose you could call it a digital computer."
Comstock writes it out in block letters on his legal pad: DIGITAL
COMPUTER.
"Is this going to go into your report?" Waterhouse asks brightly.
Comstock almost blurts report? This is my report! Then a foggy memory
comes back to him. Something about Azure. Something about gold mines. "Oh,
yeah," he murmurs. Oh, yeah, there's a war on. He considers it. "Nah. Now
that you mention it, this isn't even a footnote." He looks significantly at
his pair of hand picked math whizzes, who are gazing at the RAM like a
couple of provincial Judean sheep shearers getting their first look at the
Ark of the Covenant. "We'll probably just keep these photos for the
archives. You know how the military is with its archives."
Waterhouse goes into that dreadful laugh again.
"Do you have anything else to report before we adjourn?" Comstock says,
desperate to silence him.
"Well, this work has given me some new ideas on information theory
which you might find interesting "
"Write them down. Send them to me."
"There's one other thing. I don't know if it is really germane here,
but "
"What is it, Waterhouse?"
"Uh, well ... it seems that I'm engaged to be married!"
Chapter 68 CARAVAN
Randy has lost all he owned, but gained an entourage. Amy has decided
that she might as well come north with him, as long as she happens to be on
this side of the Pacific Ocean.
This makes him happy. The Shaftoe boys, Robin and Marcus Aurelius,
consider themselves invited along like much else that in other families
would be the subject of extended debate, this goes without saying,
apparently.
This makes it imperative that they drive the thousand or so miles to
Whitman, Washington, because the Shaftoe boys are not really the sort who
are in position to simply drop the hot rod off at the Park 'n' Ride, run
into the airport, and demand tickets on the next flight to Spokane. Marcus
Aurelius is a college sophomore on an ROTC scholarship and Robin's attending
some kind of military prep school. But even if they did have that kind of
money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend
their native frugality. Or so Randy assumes, for the first couple of days.
It's the obvious assumption to make, given that the Cash Flow Issue seems
always to be on their mind. For example the boys made Herculean efforts to
consume every spoonful of the gut busting vat of oatmeal cooked by Amy the
morning after the quake, and finding it beyond their endurance they
carefully decanted the remainder into a Ziploc bag while fretting at length
about the high cost of Ziploc bags and didn't Randy have any old glass jelly
jars or something, some where in the basement, that might be unbroken and
usable for this purpose.
Randy has had plenty of time to disabuse himself of this fallacy
(namely that their airplane avoidance is dictated by financial constraints)
and to draw the real reason out of them after they have dropped Amy's U Haul
off near SFO and begun to caravan northwards in the Acura and the jacked up,
thundering Impala. People are rotated from car to car whenever they stop,
according to some system that no one is divulging to Randy, but that always
situates him alone in a car with either Robin or Marcus Aurelius. Both of
them are too dignified to spill their guts on light pretexts, and too polite
to assume that Randy gives a shit about anything they think, and perhaps too
basically suspicious of Randy to share a whole lot with him. Some kind of
bonding is required first. The ice doesn't start to break up until Day 2 of
the drive, after they have all slept in an Interstate 5 rest area near
Redding in the reclined seats of the vehicles (each of the Shaftoe boys
solemnly and separately informs him that the chain of lodgings known as
Motel 6 is one giant con game, that if those rooms ever did cost six dollars
a night, which is doubtful, they certainly don't now, and many are the
innocent young travelers who have been drawn in by the siren calls of those
fraudulent signs rising above interstate cloverleaves; they try to sound
impartial and wise about it, but the way their faces flush and their eyes
glance aside and their voices rise makes Randy suspect he is actually
listening to some thinly veiled personal and recent history). Again without
anyone saying anything, it is taken to be obvious that Amy, as the female,
will require her own car to sleep in, which puts Randy in the hot rod with
Robin and Marcus Aurelius; As the guest, Randy gets the reclining passenger
seat, the best bed in the house, and M.A. curls up on the back seat while
Robin, the youngest, sleeps behind the steering wheel. For about the first
thirty seconds after the dome light has gone off and the Shaftoes have
finished saying their prayers out loud, Randy lies there feeling the Impala
rock on its suspension from the wake blasts of passing long haul semis and
feels considerably more alienated than he did while trying to sleep in the
jeepney in the jungle town in northern Luzon. Then he opens his eyes and
it's morning, and Robin's out there doing one handed pushups in the dust.
"When we get there," Robin pants, after he's finished, "do you s'pose
you could show me that video on the Internet thing you were telling me
about?" He asks it with all due boyishness. Then suddenly he looks abashed
and adds, "Unless it's like real expensive or something."
"It's free. I'll show it to you," Randy says. "Let's get some
breakfast." It goes without saying that McDonald's and their ilk charge
scandalously more for, e.g., a dish of hash browns than one would pay for
the equivalent mass of potatoes in raw form at (if you think money grows on
trees) Safeway or (if you have any kind of decent regard for the value of a
buck) farmer's markets situated at lonely interchanges in the boon docks. So
for breakfast they must drive to a small town (grocery stores in big places
like Redding being a tipoff) and find an actual grocery store (convenience
stores being etc., etc., etc.) and purchase breakfast in the most elemental
form conceivable (deeply discounted well past their prime bananas that are
not even in a bunch but swept up from the floor, or something, and gathered
together in a gaily printed paper sack, and generic Cheerio knockoffs in a
tubular bag, and a box of generic powdered milk) and eat it from tin
military surplus messkits that the Shaftoes produce with admirable coolness
from the hot rod's trunk, a ferrous, oily chasm all a bang with tire chains,
battered ammo boxes, and, unless Randy's eyes are playing tricks on him, a
pair of samurai swords.
Anyway, this is all done pretty nonchalantly, and not like they are
trying to test Randy's mettle or anything, and so he doesn't imagine that it
qualifies as a true bonding experience. If, hypothetically, the Impala
throws a rod in the desert and they have to fix it with parts stolen from a
nearby junkyard guarded by rabid dogs and shotgun packing gypsies, that
would be a bonding experience. But Randy's wrong. On Day 2 the Shaftoes (the
male ones anyway) open up to him a bit.
It seems (and this is abstracted from many hours of conversation) that
when you are an able bodied young male Shaftoe and you are a stranger in a
strange land with a car that you have, with plenty of advice and elbow
grease from your extended family, fixed up pretty nicely, the idea of
parking it in favor of some other mode of conveyance is, in addition to
obvious financial folly, some kind of moral failure, pure and simple. That's
why they are driving to Whitman, Washington. But why (one of them finally
summons the boldness to inquire) why are they taking two cars? There is
plenty of room in the Impala for four. Randy has gotten the sense all along
that the Shaftoes are dismayed by Randy's insistence on taking the redundant
and repulsively scarred Acura, and that only their formidable politeness has
prevented them from pointing out the sheer madness of it. "I do not imagine
that we will stay together beyond Whitman," Randy says (after being around
these guys for a couple of days he has begun to fall out of the habit of
using contractions those tawdry shortcuts of the verbally lazy and
pathologically rushed). "If we have two cars, we can split up at that
point."
"The drive is not that far, Randall," says Robin, slapping the Impala's
gas pedal against the floor to rip the transmission into passing gear, and
careening around a gasoline tanker. From the initial "Sir" and "Mr.
Waterhouse," Randy has been able to talk them down into addressing him by
his first name, but they have agreed to it only on the condition
(apparently) that they use the full "Randall" instead of "Randy." Early
attempts to use "Randall Lawrence" as a compromise were vigorously denounced
by Randy, and so "Randall" it is for now. "M.A. and I would be happy to drop
you back off at the San Francisco Airport or, uh, wherever you elected to
park your Acura."
"Where else would I park it?" Randy says, not getting this last bit.
"Well, I mean that you could probably find a place where you could park
it free of charge for a few days, if you did some looking around. Assuming
you wanted to keep it." He adds encouragingly, "That Acura probably would
have some decent resale value even considering all the body work it needs."
Only at this point does Randy figure out that the Shaftoes believe him
to be utterly destitute, helpless, and adrift in the wide world. A total
charity case. He recalls, now, seeing them discard a whole sack of
McDonald's wrappers when they arrived at his house. This whole austerity
binge has been concocted to avoid putting financial pressure on Randy.
Robin and M.A. have been observing him carefully, talking about him,
thinking about him. They happen to have made some faulty assumptions, and
come to some wrong conclusions, but all the same, they have shown more
sophistication than Randy was giving them credit for. This causes Randy to
go back and review the conversations he has had with them the last couple of
days, just to get some idea of what other interesting and complicated things
might have been going on in their heads. M.A. is a pretty straightforward by
the book type, the kind who'll get good grades and fit well into any kind of
hierarchical organization. Robin, on the other hand, is more of a wild card.
He has the makings of either a total loser or a successful entrepreneur, or
maybe one of those guys who will oscillate between those two poles. Randy
realizes now, in retrospect, that he has spilled a hell of a lot of
information to Robin, in just a couple of days, about the Internet and
electronic money and digital currency and the new global economy. Randy's
mental state is such that he is prone to babbling aimlessly for hours at a
time. Robin has hoovered it all up.
To Randy it's just been aimless ventilating. He hasn't even considered,
until now, what effect it has been exerting on the trajectory of Robin
Shaftoe's life. Randall Lawrence Waterhouse hates Star Trek and avoids
people who don't hate it, but even so he has seen just about every episode
of the damn thing, and he feels, at this moment, like the Federation
scientist who beams down to a primitive planet and thoughtlessly teaches an
opportunistic pre Enlightenment yahoo how to construct a phaser cannon from
commonly available materials.
Randy still has some money. He cannot begin to guess how he can convey
this fact to these guys without committing some grievous protocol error, so
the next time they stop for gas, he asks Amy to convey it to them. He thinks
(based on his hazy understanding of the rotation system) that it's his turn
to be alone in a car with Amy, but if Amy is going to convey this data about
the money to one of the boys, she'll need to spend the next leg with him,
because it must be conveyed indirectly, which will take a while, and because
of that indirectness, time will then need to be allotted for it to sink in.
But three hours later, then, at the gas stop after that, it naturally
follows that M.A. and Robin must be placed together in the same car, so that
Robin (who now knows and understands, and who gets out of the Impala with a
big grin on his face and punches Randy affably on the shoulder) can pass the
message on to M.A., whose recent conversational gambits vis à vis Randy made
no sense at all until Randy figured out that they thought of him as a beggar
and that M.A. was trying in a really oblique way to find out if Randy needed
to share any of M.A.'s personal toiletry items. At any rate, Randy and Amy
get into the Acura and they head north into Oregon, trying to keep up with
the hot rod.
"Well, it's nice to have a chance to spend some time with you," Randy
says. His back is still a bit sore from where Amy struck him whilst
asserting, the other morning, that expressing one's feelings was "the name
of the game." So he figures he will express those aspects of his feelings
least likely to get him in serious trouble.
"Ah figgered you 'n' ah'ud have plenny a tahm to chew the rag," Amy
says, having reverted utterly to the tongue of her ancestors in the last
couple of days. "But it has been ages and ages since I saw those two boys,
and you've never seen 'em at all."
"Ages and ages? Really?"
"Yeah."
"How long?"
"Well, last time I saw Robin he was just starting kindergarten. And I
saw M.A. more recently he was probably eight or ten."
"And you are related to them how, one more time?"
"I think Robin is my second cousin. And I could explain M.A.'s
relationship to me, but you'd start shifting around and heaving great big
sighs before I got more'n halfway through it."
"So, to these guys, you are a shirttail relative they glimpsed once or
twice when they were tiny little boys."
Amy shrugs. "Yeah."
"So, like what possessed them to come out here?"
Amy looks blank.
"I mean," Randy says, "from the general attitude they copped, when they
fishtailed to a stop in the middle of my front yard and leapt out of their
red hot, bug encrusted vehicle, fresh from Tennessee, obviously the number
one mission objective was to ensure that the flower of Shaftoe womanhood was
being treated with all of the respect, decency, worshipfulness, et cetera,
properly owed it."
"Oh. That's not really the vibe that I got."
"Oh, it wasn't? Really?"
"No. Randy, my family sticks together. Just 'cause we haven't seen each
other for a while doesn't mean our obligations have lapsed."
"Well, you are making an implied comparison to my family here which I'm
not that crazy about and maybe we should talk about later. But as far as
those family obligations go, I do certainly think that one of those
obligations is to preserve your notional virginity."
"Who says it's notional?"
"It's got to be notional to them because they haven't seen you for most
of your life. That's all I mean."
"I think you are blowing the perceived sexual aspect of this thing way
out of proportion," Amy says. "Which is perfectly normal, for a guy, and I
don't think less of you for it."
"Amy, Amy. Have you done the math on this thing?"
"Math?"
"Counting the trip through Manila traffic to NAIA, the check in
procedure, and formalities at SFO, my entire journey from Manila to San
Francisco took me something like eighteen hours. Twenty for you. Another
four hours to get down to my house. Then eight hours after we got to my
house, in the middle of the night, Robin and Marcus Aurelius showed up. Now,
if we assume that the Shaftoe family grapevine functions at the speed of
light, it means that these guys, shooting hoops in front of their trailer in
Tennessee, received a news flash that a female Shaftoe was in some kind of
guy related personal distress at about the time you jumped off of Glory IV
and hopped in a taxi in Manila."
"I sent e mail from Glory," Amy says.
"To whom?"
"The Shaftoe mailing list."
"God!" Randy says, slapping himself in the face. "What did this e mail
say?"
"Can't remember," Amy says. "That I was headed for California. I might
have made some kind of backhanded remark about a young man I wanted to talk
to. I was kinda upset at the time and I can't remember exactly what I have
said."
"I think you said something like 'I am going to California where
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, who has AIDS, is going to forcibly sodomize me
upon arrival.' "
"No, it was nothing of the kind."
"Well, I think that someone read it between the lines. So, anyway, Ma
or Auntie Em or someone emerges from the side door, shaking flour out of her
gingham apron I'm imagining this."
"I can tell."
"And she says, 'Boys, your umpteenth cousin thrice removed America
Shaftoe has sent us e mail from Uncle Doug's boat in the South China Sea
stating that she is having some kind of dispute with a young man and it's
not out of the question that she might need someone around to lend her a
hand. In California. Would you swing by and look in on her?' And they put
away their basketball and say, 'Yes ma'am, what city and address?' and she
says, 'Never you mind, just get on Interstate 40 and drive west not failing
to maintain an average speed of between one hundred and a hundred and twenty
percent of the legal speed limit and call me collect from a Texaco somewhere
and I will supply you with specific target coordinates later,' and they say,
'Yes ma'am' and thirty seconds later they are laying a patch in the driveway
as they pull five gees backing out of the garage and thirty hours
subsequently they are in my front yard, shining their twenty five D cell
flashlights into my eyes and asking me a lot of pointed questions. Do you
have any idea how far the drive is?"
"I have no idea."
"Well, according to M.A.'s Rand McNally Road Atlas, it is an even
twenty one hundred miles."
"So?"
"So that means that they maintained an average speed of seventy miles
an hour for a day and a half"
"A day and a quarter," Amy says.
"Do you have any idea how difficult that is to do?"
"Randy, you push on the gas pedal and keep it between the lines. How
hard is that?"
"I'm not saying it's an intellectual challenge. I'm saying that this
willingness to, e.g., urinate into empty McDonald's cups rather than stop
the car, suggests a kind of urgency. Passion, even. And being a guy, and
having had the experience of being a guy of the age of M.A. and Robin, I can
tell you that one of the few things that gets your blood boiling to that
extent is this notion of some female you love being done wrong by a strange
male."
"Well, what if they did?" Amy says. "Now they think you're okay."
"They do? Really?"
"Yeah. The financial disaster aspect makes you more human. More
approachable. And it excuses a lot."
"Do I need an excuse for something?"
"Not in my book."
"But to the extent they thought I was a rapist, it kind of palliates my
image problems."
A brief lull in the conversation ensues. Then Amy pipes up.
"So tell me about your family, Randy."
"In the next couple of days, you're going to learn a great deal more
than I would like you to about my family. And so am I. So let's talk about
something else."
"Okay. Let's talk about business."
"Okay. You go first."
"We got a German television producer coming out next week to have a
look at the U boat. They might do a documentary about it. We have already
hosted several German print journalists."
"You have?"
"It has caused a sensation in Germany."
"Why?"
"Because no one can figure out how it got there. Now, your turn."
"We are going to launch our own currency." By saying this, Randy is
divulging proprietary information to someone not authorized to hear it. But
he does it anyway, because opening himself up to Amy in this way, making
himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard on.
"How do you go about that? Don't you have to be a government?"
"No. You have to be a bank. Why do you think they're called bank
notes?" Randy is fully aware of the insanity of divulging secret business
information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self titillation but it
is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn't especially care.
"Okay but still, usually it's done by government banks, right?"
"Only because people tend to respect the government banks. But
government banks in Southeast Asia have a huge image problem right now. That
image problem translates directly into crashing exchange rates."
"So, how do you do it?"
"Get a big pile of gold. Issue certificates saying 'this certificate
can be redeemed for such and such an amount of gold.' That's all there is to
it."
"What's wrong with dollars and yen and stuff?"
"The certificates the banknotes are printed on paper. We're going to
issue electronic banknotes."
"No paper at all?"
"No paper at all."
"So you can only spend it on the Net."
"Correct."
"What if you want to buy a sack of bananas?"
"Find a banana merchant on the Net."
"Seems like paper money'd be just as good."
"Paper money is traceable and perishable and has other drawbacks.
Electronic banknotes are fast and anonymous."
"What's an electronic banknote look like, Randy?"
"Like any other digital thing: a bunch of bits."
"Doesn't that make it kind of easy to counterfeit?"
"Not if you have good crypto," Randy says. "Which we do."
"How did you get it?"
"By hanging out with maniacs."
"What kind of maniacs?"
"Maniacs who think that having good crypto is of near apocalyptic
importance."
"How'd they get around to thinking any such thing?"
"By reading about people like Yamamoto who died because they had bad
crypto, and then projecting that kind of thing into the future."
"Do you agree with them?" Amy asks. It might be one of those pivotal
moment in the relationship questions.
"At two in the morning, when I'm lying awake in bed, I do," Randy says.
"In the light of day, it all seems like paranoia." He glances over at Amy,
who's looking at him appraisingly, because he hasn't actually answered the
question yet. He's got to pick one thing or the other. "Better safe than
sorry, I guess. Having good crypto can't hurt, and it might help."
"And it might make you a lot of money along the way," Amy reminds him.
Randy laughs. "At this point, it's not even about trying to make
money," he says. "I just don't want to be totally humiliated."
Amy smiles cryptically.
"What?" Randy demands.
"You sounded just like a Shaftoe when you said that," Amy says.
Randy drives the car in silence for about half an hour after that. He
was right, he suspects: it was a pivotal moment in the relationship. All he
can do now is totally screw it up. So he shuts up and drives.
Chapter 69 THE GENERAL
For two months he sleeps on a beach on New Caledonia, stretched out
under a mosquito net, dreaming of worse places, polishing his line.
In Stockholm, someone from the British Embassy got him to a certain
cafe. A gentleman he met in the cafe got him to a car. The car got him to a
lake where a floatplane just happened to be sitting with its motors running
and its lights off. The Special Air Service got him to London. Naval
Intelligence got him back to D.C., drained his brain, and turned him over to
the Marines with a big stamp on his papers saying that he must never again
be sent into combat; he Knew Too Much to be taken prisoner. The Marines
found that he Knew Too Little to serve as a Rear Echelon Motherfucker, and
gave him a choice: a one way ticket home, or higher education. He opted for
the ticket home, then talked a green officer into believing that his family
had moved, and home was now San Francisco.
You could practically cross San Francisco Bay by jumping from one Navy
ship to the next. The waterfront was lined with the Navy's piers, depots,
hospitals, and prisons. All of them were guarded by Shaftoe's military
brothers. Shaftoe's tattoos were obscured by civilian clothes and his
haircut grown out. But he only had to look a Marine in the eye from a
stone's throw, and that Marine would recognize him for a brother in need and
open any gate for him, break any regulation, probably even lay down his
life. Shaftoe stowed away on a ship bound for Hawaii so fast he didn't even
have time to get drunk. From Pearl, it took him four days to get on a ship
to Kwajalein. There, he was a legendary hero. His money was no good on Kwaj;
he smoked, drank and ate for a week without being allowed to spend a dime,
and finally his brothers got him on a plane that took him a couple of
thousand miles due south to Noumea, in New Caledonia.
They did so with great reluctance. They would willingly have hit a
beach with him, but this was different: they were sending him perilously
close to SOWESPAC, the Southwest Pacific Theater, the domain of The General.
Even now, a couple of years after The General had sent them into action,
poorly armed and poorly supported, on Guadalcanal, Marines still spent
approximately fifty percent of their waking hours talking about what a bad
guy he was. He secretly owned half of Intramuros. He had become a
billionaire from Spanish gold that his father had dug up when he'd been
governor of the Philippines. Quezon had secretly named him postwar dictator
of the archipelago. The General was running for president, and in order to
win, he was going to start throwing battles just to make F.D.R. look bad,
and blaming it all on the Marines. And if that didn't work he'd come back to
the States and stage a coup d'etat. Which would be beaten back, against
enormous odds, by the United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi!
Anyway, his brothers got him to New Caledonia. Noumea's a neat French
city of wide streets and tin roofed buildings, fronting on a big harbor
lined with mountainous dumps of nickel and chromium ore from gigantic mines
up island. The place is about one third Free French (there's pictures of de
Gaulle all over the place), one third American servicemen, and one third
cannibals. Word on the street is that the cannibals have not eaten any white
people in twenty seven years, so Bobby Shaftoe, sleeping out on that beach,
feels almost as safe as he did in Sweden.
But when he reached Noumea he slammed into a barrier more impervious
than any brick wall: the imaginary line between the Pacific theater
(Nimitz's turf) and SOWESPAC. Brisbane, The General's headquarters, is just
a short (by Pacific standards) hop almost due west. If he can just get there
and deliver his line, everything's going to be fine.
During his first couple of weeks on the beach, he's stupidly
optimistic. Then he's depressed for about a month, thinking he'll never get
off this place. Finally he starts to come around, starts to display
adaptability again. He's had no luck getting on board a ship. But the amount
of air traffic is incredible. Seems that The General likes airplanes.
Shaftoe starts tailing flyboys. The MPs won't give him the time of day, he
can't get into an Army NCOs' Club to save his life.
But an NCOs' Club offers strictly limited entertainments. Customers in
search of more profound satisfactions must leave the perimeter defined by
hardassed MPs and enter the civilian economy. And when horny, well paid
American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and
half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy. Shaftoe finds a
vantage point outside an airbase gate, plants himself there, his pockets
loaded with cigarette packs (the Marines on Kwaj left him with a lifetime
supply) and waits. Flyboys come out in twos and threes. Shaftoe picks out
the sergeants, follows them to bars and whorehouses, sits down in their line
of sight, begins to chain smoke. Before long they've come over and started
to bum cigarettes off him. This leads to conversations.
Once he gets this routine figured out, he learns a lot about the Fifth
Air Force in a big hurry, makes a lot of friends. In a few weeks, he strikes
the jackpot. He goes over the airfield fence at 1:00 A.M. of a moonless
night, belly crawls for about a mile along the shoulder of a runway, and
just barely makes a rendezvous with the crew of the Tipsy Tootsie, a B 24
Liberator bound for Brisbane. In fairly short order, he finds himself
stuffed into the glass sphere at the tail of the plane: the rear ball
turret. Its purpose, of course, is to shoot down Zeroes, which tend to
attack from behind. But Tipsy Tootsie's crew seems to think that they are
about as likely to find Zeroes around here as they would be over central
Missouri.
They warned him to wear something warm, but he didn't have any thing of
that nature. Tipsy Tootsie has barely left the runway when he begins to
understand his mistake: the temperature drops like a five hundred pound
bomb. It is physically impossible for him to get out of the turret. Even if
he could, it would just lead to his getting arrested; he has been smuggled
on board without the knowledge of the officers who are actually flying the
plane. Calmly he decides to add prolonged hypothermia to his already
extensive knowledge of suffering. After a couple of hours, he either loses
consciousness or falls asleep, and this helps.
He is awakened by pink light that comes from every direction at once.
The plane has lost altitude, the temperature has risen, his body has thawed
out enough to bring him awareness. After a few minutes he's able to move his
arms. He reaches into the pink glow and rubs condensation off the inside of
the ball turret. He takes out a hanky, wipes the whole thing clean, and now
he's looking straight down the throat of a Pacific dawn.
The sky is streaked and mottled by black clouds, like jets of squid ink
in a Caribbean cove. For a while, it's as if he is under water with
Bischoff.
Puckered scars mar the Pacific in loops and lines, and he is reminded
of his own naked flesh. But the hard jagged pieces work their way out of the
scar tissue like old shrapnel: coral reefs emerging from a shallowing sea.
Warmer and warmer. He begins to shiver again.
Someone has dumped brown dust into the Pacific, made a great pile of
it. On the edge of the pile, is a city. The city swings around them, comes
closer. Warmer and warmer. It's Brisbane. A runway streaks up and he thinks
it's going to take his ass off, like the world's biggest belt sander. The
plane stops. He smells gasoline.
The pilot discovers him, loses his temper, and makes ready to call the
MPs. "I'm here to work for The General," Shaftoe mumbles through blue lips.
It just makes the pilot want to slug him. But after Shaftoe has uttered
these words, everything is different, the angry officers stand a pace or two
farther away from him, tone down their language, knock off the threats.
Shaftoe knows, from this, that The General does things differently.
He spends a day recovering in a flophouse, then rises, shaves, drinks a
cup of coffee, and strikes out in search of brass.
To his extreme chagrin, he learns that The General has relocated his
headquarters to Hollandia, in New Guinea. But his wife and son, and a bunch
of his staff, are still staying at Lennon's Hotel. Shaftoe goes there and
analyzes the traffic pattern: to pull into the hotel's horseshoe drive, the
cars have to come around a particular corner, just up the street. Shaftoe
finds a good loitering place near that corner, and waits. Looking through
the windows of the approaching cars, he can see the epaulets, count the
stars and eagles.
Seeing two stars, he decides to make his move. Jogging down the block,
he reaches the awning of the hotel just as this general's door is being
hauled open by his driver.
"'Scuse me, General, Bobby Shaftoe reporting for duty, sir!" he blurts,
snapping out the perfectest salute in military history.
"And who the hell might you be, Bobby Shaftoe?" says this general,
hardly batting an eye. He talks like Bischoff! This guy actually has a
German accent!
"I've killed more Nips than seismic activity. I'm trained to jump out
of airplanes. I speak a little Nip. I can survive in the jungle. I know
Manila like the back of my hand. My wife and child are there. And I'm kinda
at loose ends. Sir!"
In London, in D.C., he'd never have gotten this close, and if he had
he'd have been shot or arrested.
But this is SOWESPAC, and so the next morning at dawn he's on a B 17
bound for Hollandia, wearing Army green, no rank.
New Guinea is a nasty looking piece of work: a gangrenous dragon with a
wicked, rocky spine, covered with ice. Just looking at it makes Shaftoe
shiver from a queasy combination of hypothermia and incipient malaria. The
whole thing belongs to The General now. Shaftoe can plainly see that such a
country could only be conquered by a man who was completely fucking out of
his mind. A month in Stalingrad would be preferable to twenty four hours
down there.
Hollandia is on the north shore of this beast, facing, naturally,
towards the Philippines. It is well known throughout Marinedom that The
General has caused a palace to be built for himself there. Some credulous
fools actually believe the rumor that it is merely a complete 200% scale
replica of the Taj Mahal, built by enslaved Marines, but savvy jarheads know
that it is actually a much vaster compound built out of construction
materials stolen from Navy hospital ships, dotted with pleasure domes and
fuck houses for his string of Asiatic concubines, with a soaring cupola so
high that The General can go up there and see what the Nips are doing to his
extensive real estate holdings in Manila, 1,500 miles to the northwest.
Bobby Shaftoe sees no such thing out the windows of the B 17. He
glimpses one large and nice looking house up on a mountain above the sea. He
supposes that it is a mere sentry post, marking the benighted perimeter of
The General's domain. But almost immediately the B 17 bounces down on a
runway. The cabin is invaded by an equatorial miasma. It's like breathing
Cream O' Wheat direct from a blurping vat. Shaftoe feels his bowels
loosening up already. Of course there are many Marines who feel that Army
uniform trousers look best when feces stained. Shaftoe must put such
thoughts out of his head.
All the passengers (mostly colonels and better) move as to avoid
working up a sweat, even though they are already drenched. Shaftoe wants to
kick their fat, waffled butts downstairs he's in a hurry to get to Manila.
Pretty soon he is hitching a ride on the rear bumper of a jeep full of
brass. The airfield is still ringed with ack ack guns, and shows signs of
having been bombed and strafed not too long ago. Some of these signs are
obvious physical evidence like shell holes, but Shaftoe gets most of his
information from watching the men: their posture, their facial expressions
as they stare into the sky, tell him exactly what the threat level is.
No wonder, he thinks, remembering the sight of that big white house up
on the mountain. You can probably see that thing by moonlight, for
crissakes! It must be visible from Tokyo! It's just begging to be strafed.
Then, as the jeep begins to trundle up the mountain in first gear, he
figures it out: that thing's just a decoy. The General's real command post
must be a network of deep tunnels hidden beneath the jungle floor, and that
is where you would have to look for your Asiatic concubines, etc.
The trip up the mountain takes an eon. Shaftoe jumps off and soon
outpaces the whining jeep, and the one in front of it. Then he's on his own,
walking through the jungle. He'll just follow the tracks until they lead him
straight to the cleverly camouflaged mineshaft that leads down to The
General's HQ.
The walk gives him plenty of time to have a couple of smokes and savor
the unrelieved nightmarishness of the New Guinea jungle, compared to which
Guadalcanal, which he thought was the worst place on earth, seems like a
dewy meadow strewn with bunnies and butterflies. Nothing is more satisfying
than to consider that the Nips and the United States Army spent a couple of
years beating the crap out of each other here. Pity the Aussies had to get
mixed up in it, though.
The tracks take him straight to that big white clay pigeon of a house
up on the mountainside. They've gone way overboard in trying to make the
house look like someone's actually living there. Shaftoe can see furniture
and everything. The walls are crisscrossed by bullet trails. They have even
set up a mannequin on the balcony, in a pink silk dressing gown, corncob
pipe, and aviator sunglasses, scanning the bay through binoculars! As
reluctant as he is to approve of anything done by the Army, Shaftoe cannot
keep himself from laughing out loud at this witticism. Military humor at its
finest. He can't believe they got away with it. A couple of press
photographers are standing down below, taking pictures of the scene.
Standing in the middle of the house's mud parking lot, he plants his
feet wide and thrusts his middle finger up at that mannequin. Hey, asshole,
this one's from the Marines on Kwajalein! Damn, this feels good.
The mannequin swivels and aims its binoculars directly at Bobby
Shaftoe, who freezes solid in his bird flipping posture as if caught in the
gaze of a basilisk. Down below, air raid sirens begin to weep and wail.
The binoculars come away from the sunglasses. A puff of smoke blurts
out of the pipe. The General snaps out a sarcastic salute. Shaftoe remembers
to put his finger away, then stands there, rooted like a dead mahogany.
The General reaches up and removes the pipe from his mouth so he can
say, "Magandang gabi."
"You mean, 'magandang umaga,' " Shaftoe says. "Gabi means night and
umaga means morning."
The drone of airplane engines is now getting quite noticeable. The
press photographers decide to pack it in, and disappear into the house.
"When you're headed north from Manila towards Lingayen and you get to
the fork in the road at Tarlac and you take the right fork, there, and head
across the cane breaks towards Urdaneta, what's the first village you come
to?"
"It's a trick question," Shaftoe says. "North of Tarlac there are no
cane breaks, just rice paddies."
"Hmm. Very good," The General says grumpily. Down below, the
antiaircraft guns open up with a fantastic clattering; from this distance it
sounds as if the north coast of New Guinea is being jackhammered into the
sea. The General ignores it. If he were only pretending to ignore it, he
would at least look at the incoming the Zeroes, so that he could stop
pretending to ignore them when it got too dangerous. But he doesn't even do
so much as look. Shaftoe forces himself not to look either. The General asks
him a big long question in Spanish. He has a beautiful voice. He sounds like
he is standing in an anechoic sound booth in New York City or Hollywood,
narrating a newsreel about how great he is.
"If you're trying to find out if I hablo Español, the answer is,
un poquito," Shaftoe says.
The General cups a hand to his ear irritably. He can't hear anything
except for the pair of Zeroes converging on him and Shaftoe at three hundred
odd miles per hour, liquefying tons of biomass with dense streams of 12.7
millimeter slugs. He keeps a sharp eye on Shaftoe as a trail of bullets
thuds across the parking lot, spraying Shaftoe's trouser legs with mud. The
same line of bullets makes a sudden upwards right angle turn when it reaches
the wall of the General's house, climbs straight up the wall, tears out a
chunk of the balcony's railing about a foot away from where the General's
hand is resting, beats up a bunch of furniture back inside the house, and
then clears the roof of the house and vanishes.
Now that the planes have passed overhead, Shaftoe can look at them
without having to worry that he is giving The General the idea that he is
some kind of lily livered pansy. The meatballs on their wings broaden and
glower as they bank sharply, sharper than any American plane, and come round
for a second try.
"I said " The General begins. But then the atmosphere's riven by a
series of bizarre whizzing noises. One of the house's windows is suddenly
punched out of its frame. Shaftoe hears a thud from inside and some crockery
breaking. For the first time, The General shows some awareness that a
military action is taking place. "Warm up my jeep, Shaftoe," he says, "I
have a bone to pick with my triple A boys." Then he turns around and Shaftoe
gets a look at the back of his pink silk dressing gown. It is embroidered,
in black thread, with a giant lizard, rampant.
The General suddenly turns around. "Is that you screaming down there,
Shaftoe?"
"Sir, no sir!"
"I distinctly heard you scream." MacArthur turns his back on Shaftoe
again, giving him another look at the lizard (which on second thought might
be some sort of Chinese dragon design) and goes inside the house, mumbling
irritably to himself.
Shaftoe gets into the vehicle indicated and starts the engine.
The General emerges from the house and begins to plod across the lot
cradling an unexploded antiaircraft shell in his arms. The wind makes his
pink silk dressing gown billow all around him.
The Zeroes come back and strafe the parking lot again, cutting a truck
nearly in half. Shaftoe feels as if his intestines have dissolved and are
about to spurt from his body. He closes his eyes, puckers his anal
sphincter, and clenches his teeth. The General takes a seat next to him.
"Down the hill," he orders. "Drive towards the sound of the guns."
They have barely gotten onto the road when their progress is blocked by
the two jeeps that had been carrying all the brass up from the airfield.
They now sit empty on the road, their doors hanging open, engines still
running. The General reaches across in front of Shaftoe and honks the horn.
Colonels and brigadier generals begin to emerge from the shadows of the
jungle, like some especially bizarre native tribe, clutching their attache
cases talismanically. They salute The General, who ignores them testily.
"Move my vehicles!" he intones, jabbing at them with the stem of his pipe.
"This is the road. The parking lot is that way."
The Zeroes come back for a third pass. Shaftoe now realizes (as perhaps
The General has) that these pilots are not the best; it is late in the war
and all the good pilots are dead. Consequently they do not line their
trajectories up properly with the road; the strafing trails cut across it
diagonally. Still, a bullet bores through the engine block of one of the
jeeps. Hot oil and steam spray out of it.
"Come on, push it out of the way!" The General says. Shaftoe
instinctively begins to climb out of the jeep, but The General yanks him
back with a word: "Shaftoe! I need you to drive this vehicle."
Wielding his pipestem like a conductor's baton, The General gets his
staff back out on the road and they begin shoving the ruined jeep into the
jungle. Shaftoe makes the mistake of inhaling through his nose and gets a
strong diarrheal whiff at least one of these officers has shit his pants.
Shaftoe's still trying hard not to do the same, and probably would have if
he'd pushed the jeep. The Zeroes are trying to line up for another strafing
run, but a few American fighter planes have now appeared on the scene, which
complicates matters.
Shaftoe maneuvers them through a gap between the remaining jeep and a
huge tree, then guns it down the road. The General hums to himself for a
while, then says, "What's your wife's name?"
"Gory."
"I mean, Glory."
"Ah. Good. Good Filipina name. Filipinas are the most beautiful women
in the world, don't you think?"
Experienced world traveler Bobby Shaftoe screws up his face and begins
to review his experiences in a systematic way. Then he realizes that The
General probably does not actually want his considered opinion.
Of course, The General's wife is American, so this could be tricky. "I
guess the woman you love is always the most beautiful," Shaftoe finally
says.
The General looks mildly pissed off. "Of course, but..."
"But if you don't really give a shit about them, the Filipinas are the
most beautiful, sir!" Shaftoe says.
The General nods. "Now, your boy. What's his name, then?"
Shaftoe swallows hard and thinks fast. He doesn't even know if he has a
kid he fabricated that to make his line sound better and even if he does,
the chances are only fifty fifty that it's a boy. But if he does have a boy,
he knows already what the name will be. "His name well, sir, his name and I
hope you don't mind this but his name is Douglas." The General grins
delightedly and cackles, slapping the antiaircraft shell in his lap for
emphasis. Shaftoe flinches.
When they arrive at the airfield, a full fledged dogfight is in
progress overhead. The place is deserted because everyone except them is
hiding behind sandbags. The General has Shaftoe drive up and down the length
of the field, stopping at each gun emplacement so that he can peer over the
barrier.
"There's the fellow!" The General finally says, pointing his swagger
stick at a gun on the opposite side of the runway. "I just saw him poking
his head out, yammering on the telephone."
Shaftoe guns it across the runway. A flaming Zero, traveling at about
half the speed of sound, impacts the runway a few hundred feet away and
disintegrates into a howling cloud of burning spare parts that comes
skittering and rolling and bounding across the runway in their general
direction. Shaftoe falters. The General yells at him. Reckoning that he
can't avoid what he can't see, Shaftoe turns into the storm. Having seen
this kind of thing happen before, he knows that the first thing to come
their way will be the engine block, a red hot tombstone of fine Mitsubishi
iron. And indeed there it is, one of its exhaust manifolds still dangling
from it like a broken wing, spinning end over end and spading huge divots
out of the runway with each bounce. Shaftoe swings wide around it. He
identifies the fuselage and sees that it has plowed to a stop already. He
looks for the wings; they broke up into a few large pieces that are slowing
down rapidly, but the tires broke loose from the landing gear and are
bounding along towards them, burning wheels of red fire. Shaftoe maneuvers
the jeep between them, guns it across a small patch of flaming oil, then
makes another hard turn and continues towards their objective.
The explosion of the Zero sent everyone back down behind their
sandbags. The General has to climb out of the jeep and peer over the top of
the barrier. He holds the antiaircraft shell up above his head. "Say,
Captain," he says in his perfect radio announcer voice, "this arrived on my
end table with no return address, but I believe it came from your unit." The
captain's helmeted head pops into view over the top of the sandbags as he
jumps to attention. He is gaping at the shell. "Would you please look after
it, and make sure that it has been properly defused?" The General tosses the
shell at him sideways, like a watermelon, and the captain barely has the
presence of mind to catch it. "Carry on," The General says, "let's see if we
can actually shoot down some Nips next time." He waves disparagingly at the
burning wreckage of the Zero and climbs into the jeep with Shaftoe. "All
right, back up the hill, Shaftoe!"
"Yes, sir!"
"Now, I know that you hate me because you are a Marine."
Officers like it when you pretend to be straight with them. "Yes, sir,
I do hate you, sir, but I do not feel that this need be an impediment to our
killing some Nips together, sir!"
"We agree. But in the mission I have in mind for you, Shaftoe, killing
Nips will not be the primary objective."
Shaftoe's a bit off balance now. "Sir, with all due respect, I believe
that killing Nips is my strong point."
"I don't doubt it. And that is a fine skill for a Marine. Because in
this war, a Marine is a first rate fighting man under the command of
admirals who don't know the first thing about ground warfare, and who think
that the way to win an island is to hurl their men directly into the teeth
of the Nips' prepared defenses."
The General pauses here, as if giving Shaftoe an opportunity to
respond. But Shaftoe says nothing. He is remembering the stories that his
brothers told him on Kwajalein, about all the battles they had fought on
small Pacific islands, precisely as The General describes.
"Consequently, a Marine must be very good at killing Nips, as I have no
doubt you are. But now, Shaftoe, you are in the Army, and in the Army we
actually have certain wonderful innovations, such as strategy and tactics,
which certain admirals would be well advised to acquaint themselves with.
And so your new job, Shaftoe, is not simply to kill Nips, but to use your
head."
"Well, I know that you probably think I am a stupid jarhead, General,
but I do think that I have a good head on my shoulders."
"And on your shoulders is exactly where I would like it to stay!" The
General says, slapping him heartily on the back. "What we are trying to do
now is to create a tactical situation that is favorable to us. Once that is
accomplished, the actual killing of Nips can be handled by more efficient
means such as aerial bombardment, mass starvation, and the like. It will not
be necessary for you to personally cut the throat of every Nip you run into,
as eminently qualified as you might be for such an operation."
"Thank you, General, sir."
"We have millions of Filipino guerillas, and hundreds of thousands of
troops, to handle the essentially quotidian business of turning live Nips
into dead, or at least captive, Nips. But in order to coordinate their
activities, I need intelligence. That will be one of your missions. But the
country is already crawling with my spies, and so it will be a secondary
mission.
"And the primary mission, sir?"
"Those Filipinos need leadership. They need coordination. And perhaps
most of all, they need fighting spirit."
"Fighting spirit, sir?"
"There are many reasons for the Filipinos to be down in the dumps. The
Nips have not been kind to them. And although I have been very busy, here in
New Guinea, preparing the springboard for my return, the Filipinos don't
know about any of this, and many of them probably think I have forgotten
about them entirely. Now it is time to let them know I'm coming. That I
shall return but soon!"
Shaftoe snickers, thinking that The General is engaging in some self
mocking humor here yes, a bit of irony but then he notes that The General
does not seem especially amused. "Stop the vehicle!" he shouts.
Shaftoe parks the jeep at the apex of a switchback, where they can look
northwest across the outermost reaches of the Philippine Sea. The General
extends one arm toward Manila, hand slightly cupped, palm canted upward,
gesturing like a Shakespearean actor in a posed photo graph. "Go there,
Bobby Shaftoe!" says The General. "Go there and tell them that I am coming."
Shaftoe knows his cue, and he knows his line. "Sir, yes sir!"
Chapter 70 ORIGIN
From the point of view of admittedly privileged white male technocrats
such as Randy Waterhouse and his ancestors, the Palouse was like one big
live in laboratory for nonlinear aerodynamics and chaos theory. Not much was
alive there, and so one's observations were not forever being clouded by
trees, flowers, fauna, and the ploddingly linear and rational endeavors of
humans. The Cascades blocked any of those warm, moist, refreshing Pacific
breezes, harvesting their moisture to carpet ski areas for dewy skinned
Seattleites, and diverting what remained north to Vancouver or south to
Portland. Consequently the Palouse had to get its air shipped down in bulk
from the Yukon and British Columbia. It flowed across the blasted volcanic
scab land of central Washington in (Randy supposed) a more or less
continuous laminar sheet that, when it hit the rolling Palouse country,
ramified into a vast system of floods, rivers and rivulets diverging around
the bald swelling hills and recombining in the sere declivities. But it
never recombined exactly the way it was before. The hills had thrown entropy
into the system. Like a handful of nickels in a batch of bread dough this
could be kneaded from place to place but never removed. The entropy
manifested itself as swirls and violent gust