will leave the
surrounding rock so rotten as to make horizontal excavation very difficult."
They walk down the main drift for fifty meters. "We are in the heart of
the ridge now," Goto Dengo says, "halfway between the two rivers. The
surface is a hundred meters straight up." In front of them, the string of
electric lights terminates in blackness. Goto Dengo gropes for a wall
switch.
"The vault," he says, and hits the switch.
The tunnel has abruptly broadened into a flat bottomed chamber with an
arched ceiling, shaped like a Quonset hut, lined with concrete, the concrete
massively ribbed every couple of meters. The floor of the vault is perhaps
the size of a tennis court. The only opening is a small vertical shaft
rising up from the middle of the ceiling, just barely big enough to contain
a ladder and a human body.
The General folds his arms and waits while the aide goes around with a
tape measure, verifying the dimensions.
"We go up," says Goto Dengo, and, without waiting for The General to
bristle, mounts the ladder up into the shaft. It only goes up for a few
meters, and then they are in another drift with another narrow gauge railway
on the floor. This one's shored up with timbers hewn from the surrounding
jungle.
"The haulage level, where we move rock around," Goto Dengo explains,
when they have all convened at the top of the ladder. "You asked about the
waste in those cars. Let me show you how it got there." He leads the group
down the tracks for twenty or thirty meters, past a train of battered cars.
"We are headed northwest, towards Lake Yamamoto."
They reach the end of the drift, where another narrow shaft pierces the
ceiling. A fat reinforced hose runs up into it, compressed air keening out
through tiny leaks. The sound of drills can be heard, from very far away. "I
would not recommend that you look up this shaft, because stray rocks
occasionally come down from where we are working," he warns. "But if you
looked straight up, you would see that, about ten meters above us, this
shaft comes up into the floor of a narrow inclined shaft that goes uphill
that way " he motions northwest " towards the lake, and downhill that way "
He turns a hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the vault.
"Toward the fool's chamber," The General says, with relish.
"Hai!" answers Goto Dengo. "As we extend the shaft up toward the lake,
we rake the broken rock downhill with an iron hoe drawn by a winch, and when
it reaches the top of this vertical shaft that you see here, it falls down
into waiting cars. From here we can drop it down into the main vault and
from there hand tram it to the exit."
"What are you doing with all the waste?" asks The General.
"Spreading some of it down the riverbed, using it to make the roadway
that we drove up on. Some of it is stored above to backfill various
ventilation shafts. Some is being crushed into sand for a trap which I will
explain later." Goto Dengo leads them back in the direction of the main
vault, but they pass by the ladder and turn into another drift, then
another. Then the drifts become narrow and cramped again, like the one at
the entrance. "Please forgive me for leading you into what seems like a
three dimensional maze," Goto Dengo says. "This part of Golgotha is
intentionally confusing. If a thief ever manages to break into the fool's
chamber from above, he will expect to find a drift through which the
material was loaded into it. We have left one there for him to find a false
drift that seems to lead away toward the Tojo River. Actually, a whole
complex of false drifts and shafts that will all be demolished by dynamite
when we are finished. It will be so difficult, not to mention dangerous, for
the thief to work his way through so much rotten rock, that he will probably
be satisfied with what he finds in the fool's chamber."
He keeps pausing and looking back at The General, expecting him to tire
of this, but clearly The General is getting a second wind. Captain Noda,
taking up the rear, gestures him onwards impatiently.
The maze takes some time to negotiate and Goto Dengo, like a
prestidigitator, tries to fill up the time with some convincing patter. "As
I'm sure you understand, shafts and drifts must be engineered to counteract
lithostatic forces."
"What?"
"They must be strong enough to support the rock overhead. Just as a
building must be strong enough to hold up its own roof."
"Of course," says The General.
"If you have two parallel drifts, one above the other like storeys in a
building, then the rock in between them the floor or the ceiling, depending
on which way you look at it must be thick enough to support itself. In the
structure we are walking through, the rock is just barely thick enough. But
when the demolition charges have been set off, the rock will be shattered so
that reconstructing these drifts will be a physical impossibility."
"Excellent!" says The General, and again tells his aide to make a note
of it apparently so that the other Goto Dengos in the other Golgothas can do
the same.
At one point a drift has been plugged by a wall made of rubble stuck
together with mortar. Goto Dengo shines his lantern on it, lets the General
see the iron rails disappearing beneath the masonry. "To a thief coming down
from the fool's chamber, this will look like the main drift," he explains.
"But if he demolishes that wall, he dies."
"Why?"
"Because on the other side of that wall is a shaft that connects to the
lake Yamamoto pipe. One blow from a sledgehammer and that wall will explode
from the water pressure that will be on the other side of it. Then Lake
Yamamoto rushes forth from that hole like a tsunami."
The General and his aide spend some time cackling over this one.
Finally they waddle down a drift into a vault, half the dimensions of
the main vault, that is illuminated from above by dim bluish sky light. Goto
Dengo turns on some electric lights as well. "The fool's vault," he
announces. He points up the vertical shaft in the ceiling. "Our ventilation
has been courtesy of this." The General peers upwards and sees, a hundred
meters above them, a circle of radiant green blue jungle quartered by the
spinning swastika of a big electric fan. "Of course, we would not want
thieves to find the fool's chamber too easily or it wouldn't fool anyone. So
we have added some features, up there, to make it interesting."
"What sorts of features?" asks Captain Noda, stepping crisply into his
role as straight man.
"Anyone who attacks Golgotha will attack from above to gain horizontal
access, the distance is too great. This means they will have to tunnel
downwards, either through fresh rock or through the column of rubble with
which this ventilation shaft will be filled. In either case, they will
discover, when they are about halfway down, a stratum of sand, three to five
meters in depth, spread across the whole area. I need hardly remind you
that, in nature, pockets of sand are never found in the middle of igneous
rock!"
Goto Dengo begins climbing up the ventilation shaft. Halfway to the
surface, it comes up into a network of small, rounded, interconnected
chambers, whittled out of the rock, with fat pillars left in place to hold
up the ceiling. The pillars are so thick and numerous that it's not possible
to see very far, but when the others have arrived, and Goto Dengo begins
leading them from room to room, they learn that this system of chambers
extends for a considerable distance.
He takes them to a place where an iron manhole is set into a hole in
the rock wall, sealed in place with tar. "There are a dozen of these," he
says. "Each one leads to the Lake Yamamoto shaft so pressurized water will
be behind it. The only thing holding them in place right now is tar
obviously not enough to hold back the pressure of the lake water. But when
we have filled these rooms with sand, the sand will hold the manholes in
place. But if a thief breaks in and removes the sand, the manhole explodes
out of its seat and millions of gallons of water force their way into his
excavation."
From there, another climb up the shaft takes them to the surface, where
Captain Noda's men are waiting to move the ventilation fan out of their way,
and his aide is waiting with bottles of water and a pot of green tea.
They sit at a folding table and refresh themselves. Captain Noda and
The General talk about goings on in Tokyo evidently The General just flew
down from there a few days ago. The General's aide performs calculations on
his clipboard.
Finally, they hike up over the top of the ridge to take a look at Lake
Yamamoto. The jungle is so thick that they almost have to fall into it
before they can see it. The General pretends to be surprised that it is an
artificial body of water. Goto Dengo takes this as a high commendation. They
stand, as people often will, at the edge of the water, and say nothing for a
few minutes. The General smokes a cigarette, squinting through the smoke
across the lake, and then turns to the aide and nods. This seems to
communicate much to the aide, who turns to face Captain Noda and pipes up
with a question: "What is the total number of workers?"
"Now? Five hundred."
"The tunnels were designed with this assumption?"
Captain Noda shoots an uneasy look at Goto Dengo. "I reviewed
Lieutenant Goto's work and found that it was compatible with that
assumption."
"The quality of the work is the highest we have seen," the aide
continues.
"Thank you!"
"Or expect to see," The General adds.
"As a result, we may wish to increase the amount of material stored at
this site."
"I see."
"Also . . . the schedule may have to be greatly accelerated."
Captain Noda looks startled.
"He has landed on Leyte with a very great force," The General says
bluntly, as if this had been expected for years.
"Leyte!? But that is so close."
"Precisely."
"It is insane," Noda raves. "The Navy will crush him it is what we have
been waiting for all these years! The Decisive Battle!"
The General and the aide stand uncomfortably for a few long moments,
seemingly unable to speak. Then The General fixes Noda with a long, frigid
stare. "The Decisive Battle was yesterday."
Captain Noda whispers, "I see." He suddenly looks about ten years
older, and he is not at a point in his life where he can spare ten years.
"So. We may accelerate the work. We may bring more workers for the
final phase of the operation," says the aide in a soft voice.
"How many?"
"The total may reach a thousand."
Captain Noda stiffens, grunts out a "Hai!" and turns towards Goto
Dengo. "We will need more ventilation shafts."
"But sir, with all due respect, the complex is very well ventilated."
"We will need more deep, wide ventilation shafts," Captain Noda says.
"Enough for an additional five hundred workers."
"Oh."
"Begin the work immediately."
Chapter 74 THE MOST CIGARETTES
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: cantrell@epiphyte.com
Subject: Pontifex Transform: tentative verdict
Randy.
I forwarded the Pontifex transform to the Secret Admirers mailing list
as soon as you forwarded it to me, so it has been rattling around there for
a couple of weeks now. Several very smart people have analyzed it for
weaknesses, and found no obvious flaws. Everyone agrees that the specific
steps involved in this transform are a little bit peculiar, and wonders who
came up with them and how but that is not uncommon with good cryptosystems.
So the verdict, for now, is that root@eruditorum.org knows what he's
doing notwithstanding his strange fixation on the number 54.
– Cantrell
"Andrew Loeb," Avi says.
He and Randy are enduring some kind of a forced march up the beach in
Pacifica; Randy's not sure why. Over and over again, Randy is surprised by
Avi's physical vigor. Avi looks like he is wasting away from some vague
disease invented as a plot device by a screenwriter. He is kind of tall, but
this just makes him seem more perilously drawn out. His slender body is a
tenuous link between huge feet and a huge head; he has the profile of a lump
of silly putty that has been drawn apart until the middle part is just a
tendril. But he can stomp up a beach like a Marine. It is January, after
all, and according to the Weather Channel there is this flume of water vapor
originating in a tropical storm about halfway between Nippon and New Guinea
and jetting directly across the Pacific and taking a violent left turn just
about here. The waves thrashing the beach, not that far away, are so big
that Randy has to look slightly upwards to see their crests.
He has been telling Avi all about Chester, and Avi has (Randy thinks)
used this as a segue into reminiscing about the old days back in Seattle. It
is somewhat unusual for Avi to do this; he tends to be very disciplined
about having any given conversation be either business or personal, but
never both at once. "I'll never forget," Randy says, "going up to the roof
of Andrew's building to talk to him about the software, thinking to myself
'gosh, this is kind of fun,' and watching him just slowly and gradually go
berserk before my eyes. It could almost make you believe in demonic
possession."
"Well, his dad apparently believed in it," Avi says. "It was his dad,
right?"
"It's been a long time. Yeah, I think it was his mom who was the
hippie, who had him in this commune, and then his dad was the one who
extracted him from there, forcibly he brought in these paramilitary guys
from Northern Idaho to actually do the job they literally took Andrew out in
a bag and then put him through all kinds of repressed memory therapy to
prove that he'd been Satanically ritually abused."
This tweaks Avi's interest. "Do you think his dad was into the militia
thing?"
"I only met him once. During the lawsuit. He took my deposition. He was
just this Orange County white shoe lawyer, in a big practice with a bunch of
Asians and Jews and Armenians. So I assumed he was just using the Aryan
Nations guys because they were convenient, and for sale."
Avi nods, apparently finding that a satisfactory hypothesis. "So he was
probably not a Nazi. Did he believe in the Satanic ritual abuse?"
"I doubt it," Randy says. "Though after spending some time with Andrew
I found it highly plausible. Do we have to talk about this? Gives me the
creeps," Randy says. "Depresses me.
"I recently learned what became of Andrew," Avi says.
"I saw his web site a while ago."
"I'm speaking of very recent developments."
"Let me guess. Suicide?"
"Nope."
"Serial killer?"
"Nope."
"Thrown into prison for stalking someone?"
"He is not dead or in prison," Avi says.
"Hmmm. Is this anything to do with his hive mind?"
"Nope. Are you aware that he went to law school?"
"Yeah. Is this something to do with his legal career?"
"It is."
"Well, if Andrew Loeb is practicing law, it must be some really
annoying and socially nonconstructive form of it. Probably something to do
with suing people on light pretexts."
"Excellent," Avi says. "You're getting warm now."
"Okay, don't tell me, let me think," Randy says. "Is he practicing in
California?"
"Yes."
"Oh, well, I've got it, then."
"You do?"
"Yes. Andrew Loeb would be one of these guys who gins up minority
shareholder lawsuits against high tech companies."
Avi smiles with his lips pressed tightly together, and nods.
"He'd be perfect," Randy continues, "because he would be a true
believer. He wouldn't think that he was just out there being an asshole. He
would really, truly, sincerely believe that he was representing this class
of shareholders who had been Satanically ritually abused by the people
running the company. He would work thirty six hours at a stretch digging up
dirt on them. Corporate memories that had been repressed. No trick would be
too dirty, because he would be on the side of righteousness. He would only
sleep or eat under medical orders."
"I can see that you got to know him incredibly well," Avi says.
"Wow! So, whom is he suing at the moment?"
"Us," Avi says.
There is now this five minute stoppage in the conversation, and in the
hike, and possibly in some of Randy's neurological processes. The color map
of his vision goes out of whack: everything's in extremely washed out shades
of yellow and purple. Like someone's clammy fingers are around his neck,
modulating the flow in his carotids to the bare minimum needed to sustain
life. When Randy finally returns to full consciousness, the first thing he
does is to look down at his shoes, because he is convinced for some reason
that he has sunk into the wet sand to his knees. But his shoes are barely
making an impression on the firmly packed sand.
A big wave collapses into a sheet of foam that skims up the beach and
divides around his feet.
"Gollum," Randy says.
"Was that an utterance, or some kind of physiological transient?" Avi
says.
"Gollum. Andrew is Gollum."
"Well, Gollum is suing us."
"Us, as in you and me?" he asks. It takes Randy about a full minute of
time to get these words around his tongue. "He's suing us over the game
company?"
Avi laughs.
"It's possible!" Randy says. "Chester told me that the game company is
now like the size of Microsoft or something."
"Andrew Loeb has filed a minority shareholder lawsuit against the board
of directors of Epiphyte(2) Corporation," Avi says.
Randy's body has now finally had time to deploy a full on fight or
flight reaction part of his genetic legacy as a stupendous badass. This must
have been very useful when saber toothed tigers tried to claw their way into
his ancestors' caves but is doing him absolutely no good in these
circumstances.
"On behalf of whom?"
"Oh, come on, Randy. There aren't that many candidates."
"Springboard Capital?"
"You told me yourself that Andrew's dad was a white shoe Orange County
lawyer. Now, archetypally, where would a guy like that put his retirement
money?"
"Oh, shit."
"That's right. Bob Loeb, Andrew's dad, got in on AVCLA very early. He
and the Dentist have been sending each other Christmas cards for like twenty
years. And so when Bob Loeb's idiot son graduated from law school, Bob Loeb,
knowing full well that the kid was too much of a head case to be employable
anywhere else, paid a call on Dr. Hubert Kepler, and Andrew's been working
for him ever since.
"Fuck. Fuck!" Randy says. "All these years. Treading water."
"How's that?"
"That time in Seattle during the lawsuit was a fucking nightmare. I
came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a
girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX."
"Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually
exclusive."
"Shut up," Randy says, "I'm trying to agonize."
"Well, I think that agonizing is so fundamentally pathetic that it
borders on funny," Avi says. "But please go ahead."
"Now, after all those years all that fucking work I'm back where I
started. A net worth of zero. Except this time I don't even have a
girlfriend per se."
"Well," Avi says, "to begin with, I think it's better to aspire to
having Amy than to actually have Charlene."
"Ouch! You are a cruel man."
"Sometimes wanting is better than having."
"Well, that's good news," Randy says brightly, "because "
"Look at Chester. Would you rather be Chester, or you?"
"Okay, okay."
"Also, you have a substantial amount of stock in Epiphyte, which I'm
quite convinced is worth something."
"Well, that all depends on the lawsuit, right?" Randy says. "Have you
actually seen any of the documents?"
"Of course I have," Avi says, irked. "I'm the president and CEO of the
fucking corporation."
"Well, what's his beef? What's the pretext for the lawsuit?"
"Apparently the Dentist is convinced that Semper Marine has stumbled
upon some kind of vast hoard of sunken war gold, as a direct byproduct of
the work they did for us."
"He knows this, or he suspects this?"
"Well," Avi says, "reading between the lines, I gather that he only
suspects it. Why do you ask?"
"Never mind for now but he's going after Semper Marine, too?"
"No! That would rule out the lawsuit he's filing against Epiphyte."
"What do you mean?"
"His point is that if Epiphyte had been competently managed if we had
exercised due diligence then we would have drawn up a much more thorough
contract with Semper Marine than we did."
"We've got a contract with Semper Marine."
"Yes," Avi says, "and Andrew Loeb is disparaging it as little better
than a handshake agreement. He asserts that we should have turned
negotiations over to a big time law firm with expertise in maritime and
salvage law. That such a law firm would have anticipated the possibility
that the sidescan sonar plots created by Semper Marine for the cable project
would reveal something like a sunken wreck."
"Oh, Jesus Christ!"
Avi gets a look of forced patience. "Andrew has produced, as exhibits,
actual copies of actual contracts that other companies made in similar
circumstances, which all contain such language. He argues it's practically
boilerplate stuff, Randy."
"I.e., that it's gross negligence to have failed to put it in our
contract with Semper."
"Precisely. Now, Andrew's lawsuit can't go anywhere unless there are
some damages. Can you guess what the damages are in this case?"
"If we'd made a better contract, then Epiphyte would own a share of
what is salvaged from the submarine. As it is, we, and the shareholders, get
nothing. Which constitutes obvious damages."
"Andrew Loeb himself could not have put it any better."
"Well, what do they expect us to do about it? It's not like the
corporation has deep pockets. We can't give them a cash settlement."
"Oh, Randy, it's not about that. It's not like the Dentist needs our
cigar box full of petty cash. It's a control thing."
"He wants a majority share in Epiphyte."
"Yes. Which is a good thing!"
Randy throws back his head and laughs.
"The Dentist can have any company he wants," says Avi, "but he wants
Epiphyte. Why? Because we are badass, Randy. We have got the Crypt contract.
We have got the talent. The prospect of running the world's first proper
data haven, and creating the world's first proper digital currency, is
fantastically exciting."
"Well, I can't tell you how excited I am."
"You should never forget what a fundamentally strong position we are
in. We are like the sexiest girl in the world. And all of this bad behavior
on the Dentist's part is just his way of showing that he wants to mate with
us."
"And control us."
"Yes. I'm sure that Andrew has been ordered to produce an outcome in
which we are found negligent, and liable for damage. And then upon looking
into our books the court will find that the damages exceed our ability to
pay. At which point the Dentist will magnanimously agree to take his payment
in the form of Epiphyte stock."
"Which will strike everyone as poetic justice because it will also
enable him to take control of the company and make sure it's managed
competently."
Avi nods.
"So, that's why he's not going up against Semper Marine. Because if he
recovers anything from them, it renders his beef against us null and void."
"Right. Although, that would not prevent him from suing them later,
after he's gotten what he wanted from us."
"So Jesus! This is perverse," Randy says. "Every valuable item that the
Shaftoes pull up from that wreck actually gets us in deeper trouble."
"Every nickel that the Shaftoes make is a nickel of damages that we
allegedly inflicted on the shareholders."
"I wonder if we can get the Shaftoes to suspend the salvage operation."
"Andrew Loeb has no case against us," Avi says, "unless he can prove
that the contents of that wreck are worth something. If the Shaftoes keep
bringing stuff up, that's easy. If they stop bringing stuff up, then Andrew
will have to establish the value of the wreck in some other way."
Randy grins. "That's going to be really difficult for him to do, Avi.
The Shaftoes don't even know what's down there. Andrew probably doesn't even
have the coordinates of the wreck."
"There is a latitude and longitude specified in the lawsuit."
"Fuck! To how many decimal places?"
"I don't remember. The precision didn't reach out and poke me in the
eye."
"How the hell did the Dentist learn about this wreck? Doug has been
trying to keep it secret. And he knows a few things about operational
secrecy."
"You yourself told me," Avi says, "that the Shaftoes have brought in a
German television producer. That doesn't sound like secrecy to me."
"But it is. They flew this woman into Manila, put her on board Glory
IV. Allowed her to take minimal baggage. Went through her stuff to verify
she didn't have a GPS. Took her out into the South China Sea and ran in
circles for a while so she couldn't even use dead reckoning. Then took her
to the site."
"I've been on Glory. It's got GPS readouts all over the place."
"No, they didn't let her see any of that stuff. There's no way a guy
like Doug Shaftoe would screw this up."
"Well," Avi says, "the Germans aren't the most plausible source for the
leak anyway. Do you remember the Bolobolos?"
"Filipino syndicate that used to pimp for Victoria Vigo, the Dentist's
wife. Probably set up the liaison between her and Kepler. Hence, presumably,
still has influence over the Dentist."
"I would phrase it differently. I would say that they have a long
standing relationship with the Dentist that probably works both ways. And
I'm thinking that they got wind of the salvage operation somehow. Maybe a
high ranking Bolobolo overheard something in the German television
producer's hotel. Maybe a low ranking one has been keeping an eye on the
Shaftoes, taking note of the special equipment they've been shipping in."
Randy nods. "That works. Supposedly the Bolobolos have a big presence
at NAIA. They would notice something like an underwater ROV being rush
shipped to Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe. So I'll buy that."
"Okay."
"But that wouldn't give them the latitude and longitude."
"I'll bet you half of my valuable stock in Epiphyte Corp. that they
used SPOT for that."
"SPOT? Oh. Rings a bell. French photo imaging satellite?"
"Yeah. You can buy time on SPOT for a very reasonable fee. And it's got
enough resolution to distinguish Glory IV from, say, a container ship or an
oil tanker. So all they had to do was wait until their spies on the
waterfront told them that Glory was out to sea, outfitted for salvage work,
and then use SPOT to locate them."
"What kind of precision can SPOT provide in terms of latitude and
longitude?" Randy asks.
"That's a very good question. I'll have someone look into it," Avi
says.
"If it's to within a hundred meters, then Andrew can find the wreck by
just sending some people there. If it's much more than that, he'll have to
go out and do a survey of his own."
"Unless he subpoenas the information from us," Avi says.
"I'd like to see Andrew Loeb go up against the Philippine legal
system."
"You aren't in the Philippines remember?"
Randy swallows and it comes out sounding like gollum again.
"Do you have any information about that wreck on your laptop?"
"If I do, it's encrypted."
"So he'll just subpoena your encryption key."
"What if I forget my encryption key?"
"Then it's further evidence of how incompetent you are as a manager."
"Still, it's better than "
"What about e mail?" Avi asks. "Have you ever sent the location of the
wreck in an e mail message? Have you ever put it into a file?"
"Probably. But it's all encrypted."
This doesn't seem to ease the sudden tension on Avi's face.
"Why do you ask?" Randy says.
"Because," Avi says, pivoting to face in the general direction of
downtown Los Altos. "All of a sudden I am thinking about Tombstone."
"Through which passeth all of our e mail," Randy says.
"On whose hard drives all of our files are stored," Avi says.
"Which is located in the State of California, within easy subpoena
range."
"Suppose you cc'd all of us on the same e mail message," Avi says.
"Cantrell's software, running on Tombstone, would have made multiple copies
of that message and encrypted each one separately using the recipient's
public key. These would have been mailed out to the recipients. Most of whom
keep copies of their old e mail messages on Tombstone."
Randy's nodding. "So if Andrew could subpoena Tombstone, he could find
all of those copies and insist that you, Beryl, Tom, John, and Eb supply
your decryption keys. And if all of you claimed you had forgotten your keys,
then you are obviously lying through your teeth."
"Contempt of court for the whole gang," Avi says.
"The most cigarettes," Randy says. This is a contraction of the phrase,
"We could end up in prison married to the guy with the most cigarettes,"
which Avi coined during their earlier Andrew related legal troubles and had
so many occasions to repeat that it was eventually reduced to this vestigial
three words. Hearing it come out of his own mouth takes Randy back a few
years, and fills him with a spirit of defiant nostalgia. Although he would
feel considerably more defiant if they had actually won that case.
"I am just trying to figure out whether Andrew would know of
Tombstone's existence," Avi says.
He and Randy begin following their own footprints back towards Avi's
house. Randy notices that his stride is longer now. "Why not? The Dentist's
due diligence people have been lodged in our butt cracks ever since we gave
them those shares."
"I detect some resentment in your voice, Randy."
"Not at all."
"Perhaps you disagree with my decision to settle the earlier breach of
contract lawsuit by giving the Dentist some Epiphyte shares."
"It was a sad day. But there was no other way out of the situation."
"Okay."
"If I'm going to resent you for that, Avi, then you should resent me
for not having made a better contract with Semper Marine."
"Ah, but you did! Handshake deal. Ten percent. Right?"
"Right. Let's talk about Tombstone."
"Tombstone's in a closet that we are subletting from Novus Ordo
Seclorum Systems," Avi says. "I can tell you the due diligence boys have
never been to Ordo."
"We must be paying rent to Ordo, then. They'd see the rent checks."
"A trivial amount of money. For storage space."
"The computer's a Finux box. A donated piece of junk running free
software. No paper trail there," Randy says. "What about the T1 line?"
"They would have to be aware of the T1 line," Avi says. "That is both
more expensive and more interesting than renting some storage space. And it
generates a paper trail a mile wide."
"But do they know where it goes?"
"They would only need to go to the telephone company and ask them where
the line is terminated."
"Which would give them what? The street address of an office building
in Los Altos," Randy says. "There are, what, five office suites in that
building."
"But if they were smart and I'm afraid that Andrew does have this
particular kind of intelligence they would notice that one of those suites
is leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc. a highly distinctive name that
also appears on those rent checks."
"And a subpoena against Ordo would follow immediately," Randy says.
"When did you first hear about this lawsuit, by the way?"
"I got the call first thing this morning. You were still sleeping. I
can't believe you drove down from Seattle in one push. It's like a thousand
miles."
"I was trying to emulate Amy's cousins."
"You described them as teenagers."
"But I don't think that teenagers are the way they are because of their
age. It's because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot
of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their
lives."
"And that's kind of where you are right now?"
"It's exactly where I am."
"Horniness too."
"Yeah. But there are ways to deal with that."
"Don't look at me that way," Avi says. "I don't masturbate."
"Never?"
"Never. Formally gave it up. Swore off it."
"Even when you're on the road for a month?"
"Even then."
"Why on earth would you do such a thing, Avi?"
"Enhances my devotion to Devorah. Makes our sex better. Gives me an
incentive to get back home."
"Well, that's very touching," Randy says, "and it might even be a good
idea."
"I'm quite certain that it is."
"But it's more masochism than I'm really willing to shoulder at this
point in my life."
"Why? Are you afraid that it would push you into "
"Irrational behavior? Definitely."
"And by that," Avi says, "you mean, actually committing to Amy in some
way.
"I know you think that you just kicked me in the nuts rhetorically,"
Randy says, "but your premise is totally wrong. I'm ready to commit to her
at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd
be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions."
"If she were a lesbian exclusively she'd have had the basic decency to
tell you by now," Avi says. "My feeling about Amy is that she steers by her
gut feelings, and her gut feeling is that you just don't have the level of
passion that a woman like her probably would like to see as a prerequisite
for getting involved."
"Whereas, if I stopped masturbating, I would become such a deranged
maniac that she could trust me."
"Exactly. That's exactly how women think," Avi says.
"Don't you have some kind of rule against mixing business and personal
conversations?"
"This is essentially a business conversation in that it is about your
state of mind, and your current level of personal desperation, and what new
options it may have opened up for you," Avi says.
They walk for five minutes without saying anything.
Randy says, "I have a feeling that we are about to get into a
conversation about tampering with evidence."
"How interesting that you should bring that up. What's your feeling
about it?"
"I'm against it," Randy says. "But to beat Andrew Loeb, I would do
anything."
"The most cigarettes," Avi points out.
"First, we have to establish that it's necessary," Randy says. "If
Andrew already knows where the wreck is, why bother?"
"Agreed. But if he has only a vague idea," Avi says, "then Tombstone
becomes perhaps very important if the information is stored on Tombstone."
"It almost certainly is," Randy says. "Because of my GPS signature. I
know I sent at least one e mail message from Glory while we were anchored
directly over the wreck. The latitude and longitude will be right there."
"Well, if that's the case, then this could actually be kind of
significant," Avi says. "Because if Andrew gets the exact coordinates of the
wreck, he can send divers down and do an inventory and come up with some
actual figures to use in the lawsuit. He can do this all very quickly. And
if those figures exceed about half the value of Epiphyte, which frankly
wouldn't be very difficult, then we become indentured servants of the
Dentist."
"Avi, it's full of fucking gold bars," Randy says.
"It is?"
"Yes. Amy told me."
It is Avi's turn to come to a stop for a while and make swallowing
noises.
"Sorry, I would have mentioned it earlier," Randy says, "but I didn't
know it was relevant until now.
"How did Amy become aware of this?"
"Night before last, before she climbed on the plane at SeaTac, I helped
her check her e mail. Her father sent her a message saying that a certain
number of intact Kriegsmarine dinner plates had been found on the submarine.
This was a prearranged code for gold bars."
"You said 'full of fucking gold bars.' Could you translate that into an
actual number, like in terms of dollars?"
"Avi, who gives a shit? I think we can agree that if the same thing is
discovered by Andrew Loeb, we're finished."
"Wow!" Avi says. "So, in this, a hypothetical person who was not above
tampering with evidence would certainly have a strong motive."
"It is make or break," Randy agrees.
They stop conversing for a while because they now have to dodge cars
across the Pacific Coast Highway, and there is this unspoken agreement
between them that not getting hit by speeding vehicles merits one's full
attention. They end up running across the last couple of lanes in order to
exploit a fortuitous break in the northbound traffic. Then neither of them
especially feels like dropping back to a walk, so they run all the way
across the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store and into the wooded
creek valley where Avi has his house. They are back at the house directly,
and then Avi points significantly at the ceiling, which is his way of saying
that they had better assume the house is bugged now. Avi walks over to his
answering machine, which is blinking, and ejects the incoming message tape.
He shoves it in his pocket and strides across the house's living room,
ignoring frosty glares from one of his Israeli nannies, who doesn't like him
to wear shoes inside the house. Avi scoops a brightly colored plastic box
off the floor. It has a handle, and rounded corners, and big bright buttons,
and a microphone trailing behind it on a coiled yellow cord. Avi continues
through the patio doors without breaking stride, the microphone bouncing up
and down behind him on its helical cord. Randy follows him outside, across a
strip of dead grass, and into a grove of cypress trees. They keep walking
until they have dropped into a little dell that shields them from view of
the street. Then Avi squats down and ejects a Raffi tape from the little kid
tape recorder and shoves in his incoming message tape, rewinds it, and plays
it.
"Hi, Avi? This is Dave? Calling from Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems? I'm
the, uh, president here, you might remember? You have this computer in our
wiring closet? Well, we just, like, got some visitors here? Like, guys in
suits? And they said that they wanted to see that computer? And, like, if we
handed it over to them right away they would be totally cool about it? But
if we didn't, they'd come back with a subpoena and with cops and turn the
place inside out and just take it? So, now we're playing stupid? Please call
me."
"The machine said there were two messages," Avi says.
"Hi, Avi? This is Dave again? Playing stupid didn't work, and so now we
told them to fuck off. The head suit is very mad at us. He called me out. We
had a really tense discussion in the McDonald's across the street. He says
that I am being stupid. That when they come and turn the place upside down
looking for Tombstone, that it will totally fuck up Ordo's corporate
operations and inflict major losses on our shareholders. He said that this
would probably be grounds for a minority shareholder lawsuit against me and
that he'd be happy to file that lawsuit. I haven't told him yet that Ordo
has only five shareholders and that all of us work here. The manager of the
McDonald's asked us to leave because we were disrupting some children's
Happy Meals. I acted scared and told him that I would go in and look at
Tombstone and see what would be involved in removing it. Instead, I am
calling you. Hal and Rick and Carrie are uploading the entire contents of
our own system to a remote location so that when these cops come and rip
everything out nothing will be lost. Please call me. Good bye."
"Gosh," Randy says, "I feel like shit for having inflicted all of this
on Dave and his crew.
"It'll be great publicity for them," Avi says. "I'm sure Dave has half
a dozen television crews poised in the McDonald's at this moment, stoking
themselves to the rim of insanity on thirty two ounce coffees."
"Well . . . what do you think we should do?"
"It is only fitting and proper that I should go there," Avi says.
"You know, we could just 'fess up. Tell the Dentist about the ten
percent handshake deal."
"Randy, get this through your head. The Dentist doesn't give a shit
about the submarine. The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine."
"The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine," Randy says.
"So, I am going to replace this cassette," Avi says, popping the tape
out of the machine, "and start driving really really fast."
"Well, I'm going to do what my conscience tells me to do," Randy says.
"The most cigarettes," Avi says.
"I'm not going to do it from here," Randy says, "I'm going to do it
from the Sultanate of Kinakuta."
Chapter 75 CHRISTMAS 1944
Goto Dengo has pointed wing out to Lieutenant Mori, and Mori's guard
troops, and made it clear that they are not to run their bayonets through
Wing's torso and wiggle the blades around in his vitals unless there is some
exceptionally good reason, such as suppressing all out rebellion. The same
qualities that make Wing valuable to Goto Dengo make him the most likely
leader of any organized breakout attempt.
As soon as the general and his aide have departed from Bundok, Goto
Dengo goes and finds Wing, who is supervising the boring of the diagonal
shaft towards Lake Yamamoto. He is one of those lead by example types and so
he is way up at the rock face, working a drill, at the end of a few hundred
meters of tunnel so narrow that it has to be negotiated on hands and knees.
Goto Dengo has to present himself at the Golgotha end of the tunnel and send
a messenger crawling up into it, wearing a rusty helmet to protect himself
from the shattered stone that drizzles down from the rock face.
Wing appears fifteen minutes later, black from the rock dust that has
condensed onto his sweaty skin, red where the skin has been abraded or
slashed by stone. He devotes a few minutes to methodically hawking dust up
out of his lungs. Every so often he rolls his tongue like a peashooter and
fires a jet of phlegm against the wall and clinically observes it run down
the stone. Goto Dengo stands by politely. These Chinese have an entire
medical belief system centering on phlegm, and working in the mines gives
them a lot to talk about.
"Ventilation not good?" Goto Dengo says. Whorehouse Shanghainese has
not equipped him with certain technical terms like "ventilation," so Wing
has taught him the vocabulary.
Wing grimaces. "I want to finish tunnel. I do not want to sink more
ventilation shaft. Waste of time!"
The only way to keep the workers at the rock face from suffocating is
by sinking vertical air shafts from the surface down to the diagonal shaft
at intervals. They have devoted as much effort to these as they have to the
diagonal itself, and were hoping they'd never have to dig another.
"How much farther?" Goto Dengo asks, as Wing finishes another paroxysm.
Wing looks thoughtfully at the ceiling. He has Golgotha mapped out in his
head better than its designer does. "Fifty meter."
The designer cannot help grinning. "Is that all? Excellent."
"We go fast now," Wing says proudly, his teeth gleaming for a moment in
the lamplight. Then he seems to remember that he is a slave laborer in a
death camp and the teeth disappear. "We can go faster if we dig in straight
line."
Wing is alluding to the fact that the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto:
is laid out in the blueprints like this. But Goto Dengo, without
changing the blueprints, has ordered that it actually be dug like this:
These bends increase the length of the tunnel by quite a bit.
Furthermore the rubble tends to pile up in the flatter western section and
must be raked along by hand. The only people who know about the existence of
these bends are him, Wing, and Wing's crew. The only person who understands
the true reason for their existence is Goto Dengo.
"Do not dig in a straight line. Keep digging as I said."
"Yes."
"Also, you will need a new ventilation shaft."
"More ventilation shaft! No . . ." Wing protests.
The ventilation shafts shown on the plans, awkward zig zags and all,
are bad enough.
But Goto Dengo has several times told Wing and his crew to begin work
on some additional "ventilation shafts," before changing his mind and
telling them to abandon the work with this result:
"These new ventilation shafts will be dug from the top down," says Goto
Dengo.
"No!" says Wing, still completely flabbergasted. This is utter madness
in that if you dig a vertical shaft from the top downwards, you have to haul
the rubble up out of the hole. If you do it the other way, the rubble falls
down and can be easily disposed of.
"You will get new helpers. Filipino workers."
Wing looks stunned. He is even more cut off from the world than Goto
Dengo. He must infer the progress of the war from maddeningly oblique hints.
He and his workers fit the crazily scattered evidence at their disposal into
elaborate theories. These theories are all so wildly wrong that Goto Dengo
would laugh out loud at them, if not for the fact that he is sympathetic.
Neither he nor Captain Noda knew that MacArthur had landed on Leyte, or that
the Imperial Navy had been crushed, until the general told them.
One thing that Wing and his men have got right is that Bundok employs
imported labor in order to ensure secrecy. If any of the Chinese workers do
manage to escape, they will find themselves on an island, far from home,
among people who do not speak their language, and who do not especially like
them. The fact that Filipino workers will soon be arriving gives them a lot
to think about. They will be up all night whispering to each other, trying
to reconstruct their theories.
"We don't need new workers. We are almost done," Wing says, his pride
hurt again.
Goto Dengo taps himself on both shoulders with both index fingers,
suggesting epaulets. It takes Wing only an instant to realize that he's
talking about the general, and then a profoundly conspiratorial look comes
over his face and he takes half a step closer. "Orders," Goto Dengo says.
"We dig lots of ventilation shafts now."
Wing was not a miner when he arrived at Bundok, but he is now. He is
baffled. As he should be. "Ventilation shafts? To where?"
"To nowhere," Goto Dengo says.
Wing's face is still blank. He thinks Goto Dengo's bad Shanghainese is
preventing understanding. But Goto Dengo knows that Wing will figure it out
soon, some night during the bad fretful moments that always come just before
sleep.
And then he will lead the rebellion, and Lieutenant Mori's men will be
ready for it; they will open fire with their mortars, they will detonate the
mines, use the machine guns, sweeping across their carefully plotted
interlocking fields of fire. None of them will survive.
Goto Dengo doesn't want that. So he reaches out and slaps Wing on the
shoulder. "I will give you instructions. We will make a special shaft." Then
he turns around and leaves; he has surveying to do. He knows that Wing will
put it all together in time to save himself.
***
Filipino prisoners arrive, in columns that have degenerated into ragged
skeins, shuffling on bare feet, leaving a wet red trail up the road. They
are prodded onwards by the boots and bayonets of Nipponese Army troops, who
look almost as wretched. When Goto Dengo sees them staggering into the camp,
he realizes that they must have been on their feet continuously since the
order was given by the general, two days ago. The general promised five
hundred new workers; slightly fewer than three hundred actually arrive, and
from the fact that none of them is being carried on stretchers a statistical
impossibility, given their average physical condition Goto Dengo assumes
that the other two hundred must have stumbled or passed out en route, and
been executed where they hit the ground.
Bundok is eerily well stocked with fuel and rations, and he sees to it
that the prisoners and the Army troops alike are well fed, and given a day
of rest.
Then he puts them to work. Goto Dengo has been commanding men long
enough, now, that he picks out the good ones right away. There is a
toothless, pop eyed character named Rodolfo with iron grey hair and a big
cyst on his cheek, arms that are too long, hands like grappling hooks, and
splay toed feet that remind him of the natives he lived with on New Guinea.
His eyes are no particular color they seem to have been put together from
shards of other people's eyes, scintillas of grey, blue, hazel, and black
all sintered together. Rodolfo is self conscious about his lack of teeth and
always holds one of his sprawling, prehensile paws over his mouth when he
speaks. Whenever Goto Dengo or another authority figure comes nearby, all of
the young Filipino men avert their gaze and look significantly at Rodolfo,
who steps forward, covers his mouth, and fixes his weird, alarming stare
upon the visitor.
"Form your men into half a dozen squads and give each squad a name and
a leader. Make sure each man knows the name of his squad and of his leader,"
Goto Dengo says rather loudly. At least some of the other Filipinos must
speak English. Then he bends closer and says quietly, "Keep a few of the
best and strongest men for yourself."
Rodolfo blinks, stiffens, steps back, removes his hand from his mouth
and uses it to snap out a salute. His hand is like an awning that throws a
shadow over his entire face and chest. It is obvious that he learned to
salute from Americans. He turns on his heel.
"Rodolfo."
Rodolfo turns around again, looking so irritated that Goto Dengo must
stifle a laugh.
"MacArthur is on Leyte."
Rodolfo's chest inflates like a weather balloon and he gains about
three inches in height, but the expression on his face does not change.
The news ramifies through the Filipino camp like lightning seeking the
ground. The tactic has the desired effect of giving the Filipinos a reason
to live again; they suddenly display great energy and verve. A supply of
badly worn drills and air compressors has arrived on carabao drawn carts,
evidently brought in from one of the other Bundok like sites around Luzon.
The Filipinos, experts at internal combustion, cannibalize some compressors
to fix others. Meanwhile the drills are passed around to Rodolfo's squads,
who drag them up onto the top of the ridge between the rivers and begin
sinking the new "ventilation shafts" while Wing's Chinese men put the last
touches on the Golgotha complex below.
The carts that brought in the equipment were simply grabbed off the
roads by the Nipponese Army, along with their drivers mostly farm boys and
pressed into service on the spot. The farmboys can never leave Bundok, of
course. The weaker carabaos are slaughtered for meat, the stronger ones put
to work on Golgotha, and the drivers are assimilated into the workforce. One
of these is a boy named Juan with a big round head and a distinctly Chinese
cast to his features. He turns out to be trilingual in English, Tagalog, and
Cantonese. He can communicate in a sort of pidgin with Wing and the other
Chinese, frequently by using a finger to draw Chinese characters on the palm
of his hand. Juan is small, healthy, and has a kind of wary agility that
Goto Dengo thinks may be useful in what is to come, and so he becomes one of
the special crew.
The submerged plumbing in Lake Yamamoto needs to be inspected. Goto
Dengo has Rodolfo ask around and see if there are any men among them who
have worked as pearl divers. He quickly finds one, a lithe, frail looking
fellow from Palawan, named Agustin. Agustin is weak from dysentery, but he
seems to perk up around water, and after a couple of days' rest is diving
down to the bottom of Lake Yamamoto with no trouble. He becomes another one
of Rodolfo's picked men.
There are really too many Filipinos for the number of tools and holes
that they have available, and so the work goes quickly at first as fresh men
are quickly rotated through by the squad leaders. Then, one night at about
two in the morning, an unfamiliar sound reverberates through the jungle,
filtering up from the lowlands where the Tojo River meanders through cane
fields and rice paddies.
It is the sound of vehicles. Masses of them. Since the Nipponese have
been out of fuel for months, Goto Dengo's first thought is that it must be
MacArthur.
He throws on a uniform and runs down to Bundok's main gate along with
the other officers. Dozens of trucks, and a few automobiles, are queued up
there, engines running, headlights off. When he hears a Nipponese voice
coming from the lead car, his heart sinks. He long ago stopped feeling bad
about wanting to be rescued by General Douglas MacArthur.
Many soldiers ride atop the trucks. When the sun rises, Goto Dengo
savors the novel and curious sight of fresh, healthy, well fed Nipponese
men. They are armed with light and heavy machine guns. They look like
Nipponese soldiers did way back in 1937, when they were rolling across
northern China. It gives Goto Dengo a strange feeling of nostalgia to
remember a day when a terrible defeat was not imminent, when they were not
going to lose everything horribly. A lump actually gathers in his throat,
and his nose begins to run.
Then he snaps out of it, realizing that the big day has finally
arrived. The part of him that is still a loyal soldier of the emperor has a
duty to see that the vital war materiel, which has just arrived, is stored
away in the big vault of Golgotha. The part of him that isn't a loyal
soldier anymore still has a lot to accomplish.
In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the
big day actually arrives, you still can't find your ass with both hands.
This day is no exception. But after a few hours of chaos, things get
straightened out, people learn their roles. The heavier trucks cannot make
it up the rough road that Goto Dengo has had built up the streambed of the
Tojo River, but a couple of the small ones can, and these become the
shuttles. So the big trucks pull, one by one, into a heavily fenced and
guarded area well sheltered from MacArthur's observation planes that was
built months ago. Filipinos swarm into these trucks and unload crates, which
are small, but evidently quite heavy. Meanwhile the smaller trucks shuttle
the crates up the Tojo River Road to the entrance of Golgotha, where they
are unloaded onto hand cars and rolled into the tunnel to the main vault. As
per the instructions handed down from on high, Goto Dengo sees to it that
every twentieth crate is diverted to the fool's chamber.
The unloading proceeds automatically from there, and Goto Dengo devotes
most of these days to supervising the final stages of the digging. The new
ventilation shafts are proceeding on schedule, and he only needs to check
them once a day. The diagonal is now only a few meters away from the bottom
of Lake Yamamoto. Groundwater has begun to seep through small cracks in the
bedrock and trickle down the diagonal into Golgotha, where it collects in a
sump that drains into the Tojo. Another few meters of cutting and they will
break through into the short stub tunnel that Wing and his men created many
months ago, digging downwards from what later became the bottom of the lake.
Wing himself is otherwise engaged these days. He and Rodolfo and their
special crew are completing final preparations. Rodolfo and company are
digging down from the top of the ridge, cutting what looks like just another
vertical ventilation shaft. Wing and company are directly below, engaged in
a complicated subterranean plumbing project.
Goto Dengo has entirely lost track of what day it is. About four days
after the trucks come, though, he gets a clue. The Filipinos spontaneously
break into song over their evening rice bowls. Goto Dengo recognizes the
tune vaguely; he occasionally heard the American Marines singing it in
Shanghai.
What child is this, Who laid to rest, On Mary's lap is sleeping?
The Filipinos sing that and other songs, in English and Spanish and
Latin, all evening long. After they get their lungs unlimbered they sing
astonishingly well, occasionally breaking into two– and three part
harmony. At first, Lieutenant Mori's guards get itchy trigger fingers,
thinking it's some kind of a signal for a mass breakout. Goto Dengo doesn't
want to see his work cut short by a massacre, and so he explains to them
that it is a religious thing, a peaceful celebration.
That night, another midnight truck convoy arrives and the workers are
rousted to unload it. They work cheerfully, singing Christmas carols and
making jokes about Santa Claus.
The whole camp stays up well past sunrise unloading trucks. Bundok has
gradually become a nocturnal place anyway, to avoid the gaze of observation
planes. Goto Dengo is just thinking of hitting the sack when a fusillade of
sharp crackling noises breaks out up above the camp on the Tojo River.
Ammunition being in short supply, hardly anyone actually fires guns anymore,
and he almost doesn't recognize the sound of the Nambu.
Then he jumps onto the running board of a truck and tells the driver to
head upstream. The shooting has died down as suddenly as it started. Beneath
the bald tires of the truck, the river has turned opaque and bright red.
About two dozen corpses lie in the water before the entrance to
Golgotha. Nipponese soldiers stand around them, up to their calves in the
red water, their weapons slung from their shoulders. A sergeant is going
around with a bayonet, stirring the guts of the Filipinos who are still
moving.
"What is going on?" Goto Dengo says. No one answers. But no one shoots
him, either; he will be allowed to figure it out himself.
The workers had clearly been unloading another small truck, which is
still parked there at the head of the road. Resting beneath its tailgate is
a wooden crate that was apparently dropped. Its heavy contents have exploded
the crate and spilled across the uneven conglomerate of river rocks, poured
concrete and mine tailings that make up the riverbed here.
Goto Dengo sloshes up to it and looks. He sees it clearly enough, but
he can't somehow absorb the knowledge until he feels it in his hands. He
bends down, wraps his fingers around a cold brick on the bottom of the
river, and heaves it up out of the water. It is a glossy ingot of yellow
metal, incredibly heavy, stamped with words in English: BANK OF SINGAPORE.
There is a scuffle behind him. The sergeant stands at the ready as two
of his men jerk the Filipino driver out of the cab of his truck that Goto
Dengo rode in on. Calmly looking almost bored the sergeant bayonets the
driver. The men drop him in the red water and he disappears. "Merry
Christmas" one of the soldiers cracks. Everyone laughs, except for Goto
Dengo.
Chapter 76 PULSE
As Avi walks back through his house, he utters something biblical
sounding in Hebrew that causes his kids to burst into tears, and his nannies
to rise from the kid mat and begin shoving stuff into bags. Devorah emerges
from a back room where she's been sleeping off some morning sickness. She
and Avi embrace tenderly in the hallway and Randy begins to feel like a
fleck of debris lodged in someone's eye. So he heads straight for an exit,
goes out to his car and starts driving. He winds through the hills over the
San Andreas Fault to Skyline and then heads south. Ten minutes later, Avi's
car howls past him in the left lane, doing ninety or a hundred. Randy barely
has time to read the bumper sticker: MEAN PEOPLE SUCK.
Randy's looking for a totally anonymous location where he can patch
into the Internet. A hotel doesn't work because a hotel keeps good records
of outgoing telephone calls. What he should really do is use this packet
radio interface he has for his laptop, but even that requires a place to sit
down and work undisturbed for a while. Which gets him thinking in terms of a
fast food joint, not to be found in the mid peninsular wasteland. By the
time he has reached the northern skirts of the Valley Menlo Park and Palo
Alto he has decided fuck it, he'll just go to the scene of the action. Maybe
he could be of some use there. So he gets off at the El Monte exit and heads
into the business district of Los Altos, a pretty typical mid twentieth
century American downtown gradually being metabolized by franchises.
A major street intersects, at something other than a ninety degree
angle, a smaller commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute angle lots
and two (larger) obtuse angle lots. On one side of the major street, the
obtuse angle lot is occupied by a two storey office building, home of Ordo's
offices and Tombstone. The acute angle lot is occupied by the McDonald's. On
the opposite side of the major street, the acute angle lot is occupied by,
weirdly enough, a 24 Jam, the only one Randy has ever seen in the Western
Hemisphere. The obtuse angle lot is occupied by a Park 'n' Lock, where you
can park for the old fashioned purpose of wandering around the business
district from store to store.
The parking lot of the McDonald's is full, and so Randy pulls through
its drive through window, chooses n, where n is a random number between one
and six, and asks for Value Meal n with super size fries. This having been
secured, he guns the Acura directly across the big street into the Park 'n'
Lock just in time to see its last available space being seized by a minivan
bearing the logo of a San Jose television station. Randy is not planning to
stray far from his car, so he just blocks in another car. But as he is
setting the parking brake, he notices movement inside it, and with a bit of
further attention realizes he is watching a man with long hair and a beard
methodically ramming shells into a pump shotgun. The man catches sight of
Randy in his rearview mirror and turns around with a scrupulously polite
pardon me sir but you seem to have blocked me in look. Randy recognizes him
as Mike or Mark, a graphics card hacker who farms ostriches in Gilroy
(quirky hobbies being de rigueur in the high tech world). He moves the
Acura, blocking in what looks like an abandoned van from the Starsky and
Hutch epoch.
Randy climbs up on the roof of his car with his laptop and his Value
Meal n. Until recently he would never have sat on top of his Acura because
his considerable mass would dimple the sheet metal. But after Amy rammed it
with the truck, Randy became much less anal, and now sees it as a tool to be
used until it is just a moraine of rusted shards. He happens to have a
twelve volt adapter for the laptop, so he runs that down into his cigarette
lighter socket. Finally, he's settled, and gets a chance to take a good look
around.
The parking lot of Novus Ordo Seclorum's office building is filled with
cop cars, and BMWs and Mercedes Benzes that Randy assumes belong to lawyers.
Avi's Range Rover is parked jauntily on top of some landscaping, and a few
TV camera crews have set up, as well. In front of the building's main
entrance a lot of people are jammed into the smallest possible space
screaming at each other. They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring
of cops, media, and law firm minions collectively, what Tolkien would call
Men and a few non– or post human creatures imbued with peculiar
physiognomies and vaguely magical powers: Dwarves (steady, productive,
surly) and Elves (brilliant in a more ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has
begun to realize that his grandfather may have been an Elf. Avi is a Man
with a strong Elvish glow about him. Somewhere in the center of this whole
thing, presumably, is Gollum.
There is a little window on the screen of Randy's laptop showing a
cheesy 1940s newsreel style animation of a radio tower, with zigzaggy
conceptual radio waves radiating outwards from it over the whole earth,
which is shown ludicrously not to scale in this rendering the diameter of
the earth is about equal to the height of the radio tower. That these Jovian
info bolts are visible and moving is a visual cue that his radio adapter has
managed to patch itself into the packet radio network. Randy opens a
terminal window and types
telnet laundry.org
and in a few seconds bang! he gets a login prompt. Randy now has
another look at the animated window, and notes with approval that the info
bolts have been replaced with gouts of question marks. This means that his
computer has recognized laundry.org as a S/WAN machine running the Secure
Wide Area Network protocol which means that every packet going back and
forth between Randy's laptop and laundry.org is encrypted. Definitely a good
idea when you are about to do something illegal over the radio.
Mike or Mark gets out of his car, cutting a dramatic figure in a long
black Western style coat, a look rather spoiled by the t shirt he's got on
underneath it: black with a fat red question mark in the middle. He hitches
the strap of his shotgun up onto his shoulder and leans into his back door
to retrieve a large black cowboy hat, which he places on the roof of his
car. He thrusts his elbows into the air and gathers his long hair back
behind his ears, staring up at the sky, and then clamps the cowboy hat down
on his head. Tied loosely around his neck is a black bandanna with a
question mark pattern, which he now pulls up over the bridge of his nose so
that just an eye slit shows between it and the cowboy hat. Randy would be
really alarmed if it weren't for the fact that several of his friends, such
as John Cantrell, often go around looking this way. Mike or Mark strides
across the Park 'n' Lock, tracked carefully by a panning cameraman, and jogs
across the street to the 24 Jam.
Randy logs onto laundry.org using ssh "secure shell" a way of further
encrypting communications between two computers. Laundry.org is an
anonymizing service; all packets routed through it to another computer are
stripped of identifying information first, so that anyone down the line who
intercepts one of those packets has no way of knowing where it originated.
Once he's patched into the anonymizer, Randy types
telnet crypt.kk
and hits the return key and then actually, literally, prays. The Crypt
is still going through its shakedown period (which, indeed, is the only
reason that all of Tombstone's contents have not been moved onto it yet).
In the lot of the 24 Jam, Mike or Mark has joined three other
elvishlooking sorts in black cowboy hats and bandannas, whom Randy can
identify based on the length and color of their ponytails and beards.
There's Stu, a Berkeley grad student who is somehow mixed up in Avi's HEAP
project, and Phil, who invented a major programming language a couple of
years ago and goes helicopter skiing in his spare time, and Craig, who knows
everything there is to know about encrypted credit card transactions on the
Net and is a devotee of traditional Nipponese archery. Some of these guys
are wearing long coats and some aren't. There is a lot of Secret Admirers
iconography: t shirts bearing the number 56, which is a code for Yamamoto,
or just pictures of Yamamoto himself, or big fat question marks. They are
having an energetic and very happy conversation though it looks a bit forced
because, to a man, they are carrying long weapons out in plain sight. One of
them has a hunting rifle, and each of the others is slinging a rudimentary
looking gun with a banana clip sticking out of the side. Randy thinks, but
is not sure, that these are HEAP guns.
This scene, not surprisingly, has caught the attention of the police,
who have surrounded these four with squad cars, and who are standing at the
ready with rifles and shotguns. It is an oddity of the law in many
jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one shot .22 derringer
requires a license, openly carrying (e.g.) a big game rifle is perfectly
legal. Concealed weapons are outlawed or at least heavily regulated, and
unconcealed ones are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers who tend to be gun
nuts have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out
the absurdity of those rules. Their point is this: who gives a shit about
concealed weapons anyway, since they are only useful for defending oneself
against assaults by petty criminals, which almost never happens? The real
reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending
oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your
handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going
to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by
packing something really big.
A bunch of junk scrolls up Randy's screen. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, it
begins, and then there's a paragraph of information about what a great idea
the Crypt is and how anyone who gives a damn about privacy should get an
account here. Randy truncates the commercial message with the whack of a
key, and logs in as Randy. Then he enters the command
telnet tombstone.epiphyte.com
and gets two gratifying messages in return: one saying that a
connection has been established with Tombstone, and the next saying that a
S/WAN link has been automatically negotiated. Finally he gets
tombstone login:
which means that he is now free to log on to the machine right across
the street from him. And now Mr. Randy has a little decision to make.
So far, he's clean. The bits coming out of his laptop are encrypted; so
even if someone is monitoring the local packet radio net, all they know is
that some encrypted bits are flying around. They cannot trace any of those
bits to Randy's machine without bringing in an elaborate radio direction
finding rig and zeroing in on him most conspicuously. Those encrypted bits
are eventually finding their way to laundry.org up in Oakland, which is a
big Internet host that probably has thousands of packets rushing in and out
of it every second. If someone were tapping laundry.org's T3 line, which
would require an enormous investment in computers and communications gear,
they would detect a very small number of encrypted packets going out to
crypt.kk in Kinakuta. But these packets would have been stripped of any
identifying information before leaving laundry.org and so there would be no
way to tell where they originated. Now, crypt.kk is also an anonymizer, and
so an entity tapping its staggeringly enormous T5 line (a job on the order
of eavesdropping on a small country's telecommunications system) might
theoretically be able to detect a few packets going back and forth between
crypt.kk and Tombstone. But again, these would be stripped of identifying
information, and so it would be impossible to trace them even as far back as
laundry.org, to say nothing of tracing them all the way back to Randy's
laptop.
But in order for Randy to get into Tombstone and begin actually
tampering with the evidence, he must now log on. If it were a poorly secured
host of the type that used to be legion on the Internet, he could just
exploit one of its numerous security holes and crack his way into it, so
that if his activities on the machine were discovered, he could claim that
it wasn't him just some cracker who happened to break into the machine at
the very moment it was being seized by the cops. But Randy has spent the
last several years of his life making machines such as this one impregnable
to crackers, and he knows it's impossible.
Furthermore, there's no point in logging on as just any old user like
using a guest account. Guests are not allowed to tamper with system files.
In order to do any meaningful evidence tampering here, Randy has to log on
as the superuser. The name of the superuser account is, inconveniently,
"randy" and you can't actually log in as "randy" without entering a password
that only Randy would know. So after using the very latest in cryptographic
technology and trans oceanic packet switching communications to conceal his
identity, Randy now finds himself faced with the necessity of typing his
name into the fucking machine.
A little scenario flashes up in his head in which he sends an anonymous
broadcast message to all laundry.org users telling them that the password
for the "randy" account on "tombstone.epiphyte.com" is such and such and
urging them to spread this information all over the Internet as fast as
possible. This might have been a decent idea if he had thought of it an hour
ago. Now it is too late; any sentient prosecutor tracing the time stamps on
the messages would be able to prove that it was just a blind.
Besides, time is running low. The discussion across the street, which
is just a shrill hubbub at this distance, is rising to some sort of climax.
Randy has meanwhile booted up his browser and gone to the ordo.net home
page. Usually it's a pretty dull corporate home page, but today all of the
blurbs and quotidian press releases have been obliterated by a window
showing live color video of what is going on in front of the building (or
rather, what was going on a couple of seconds ago; coming over his miserable
low bandwidth radio link, the video changes frames about once every three
seconds). The video is originating from Ordo itself, where they've evidently
aimed a camera out the window and are slamming the images straight out over
their very own T3 line.
Randy glances up just in time to see the guy who invented the term
"virtual reality" walking across the lot, deep in conversation with the
executive editor of TURING Magazine. Not far behind them is Bruce, an
operating systems engineer who, in his spare time, records Tierra del Fuegan
folk music and makes it available for free over the Internet.
"Bruce!" Randy shouts.
Bruce falters and looks over in Randy's direction. "Randy," he says.
"Why are you here?"
"Word on the street is that the Feds were raiding Ordo," Bruce says.
"Interesting. . . . any particular Feds?"
"Comstock," Bruce says. Meaning Paul Comstock, who, by virtue of being
Attorney General of the United States, runs the FBI. Randy does not believe
this rumor, but in spite of himself he scans the area for people fitting the
general profile of FBI agents. The FBI hates and fears strong crypto.
Meanwhile another Secret Admirer type shouts, "I heard Secret Service!"
Which is even creepier, in a way, because the Secret Service is part of the
Treasury Department, and is charged with combating wire fraud and protecting
the nation's currency.
Randy says, "Would you be open to the possibility that it's all a Net
rumor? That what's really going on is that a piece of equipment inside
Ordo's offices is being seized as part of a legal squabble?"
"Then why are all these cops here?" Bruce says.
"Maybe the masked men with assault rifles drew them."
"Well, why did the Secret Admirers show up in the first place if it
wasn't a government raid?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's just some kind of spontaneous self organizing
phenomenon like the origin of life in the primordial soup."
Bruce says, "Isn't it just as possible that the legal squabble is a
pretext?"
"In other words that the squabble is sort of like a Trojan horse put
together by Comstock?"
"Yeah."
"Knowing all of the parties involved, I'd rate it as unlikely," Randy
says, "but let me think about it."
The noise and intensity of the argument in the Ordo parking lot spike
upwards. Randy looks at the video window, which unfortunately has no sound
track. The transactions between frames come as isolated blocks of new pixels
slapped up one at a time over the old, like a large billboard being posted
sections. High definition TV it ain't. But Randy definitely recognizes Avi,
standing there tall, pale, and calm, flanked by one guy who's probably Dave
the Ordo president, and another guy who's obviously a lawyer. They are
literally standing in the doorway of the building and facing off against two
cops and none other than Andrew Loeb, who is in rapid motion and hence poses
an insurmountable bandwidth problem. The Internet video gear is smart enough
not to mess with parts of an image that aren't changing very much, and so
the planted cops get refreshed maybe a couple of times a minute, and then
just in a few rectangular image shards. But Andrew Loeb is waving his arms
around, hopping up and down, lunging towards Avi from time to time, pulling
back and taking calls on his cellphone, and waving documents in the air. The
computers have identified him as a bunch of pixels that require a great deal
of attention and bandwidth, and so somewhere some poor algorithm is churning
through the high pressure slurry of compressed pixels that is the image of
Andrew Loeb, and doing its level best to freeze the most rapidly moving
parts into discrete frames and chop them up into checkerboard squares that
can be broadcast as packets over the Net. These packets arrive in Randy's
computer as the radio network passes them along, i.e., sporadically and in
the wrong order. So Andrew Loeb appears as a cubist digital video artifact,
a rectilinear amoeba of mostly trench coat beige pixels. From time to time
his eyes or his mouth will suddenly appear, disembodied, in the center of an
image block, and remain frozen there for a few seconds, crystallized in a
moment of howling rage.
This is weirdly mesmerizing until Randy's startled out of his reverie
by a clunk. He looks over to see that the van he's blocked in wasn't
abandoned after all; it was full of Dwarves, who have now thrown the back
doors open to reveal a nest of cables and wires. A couple of the Dwarves are
heaving a boxy apparatus up onto the roof of the van. Cables run out of it
to another boxy apparatus down below. The apparatus is electrical in nature
and doesn't appear capable of firing projectiles so Randy decides not to pay
it much attention for the moment.
Voices well up across the street. Randy sees some cops climbing out of
a cop van carrying a battering ram.
Randy types:
randy
and hits the return key. Tombstone answers:
password:
and Randy types it in. Tombstone informs him that he's logged on, and
that he has mail.
The fact that Randy has logged on has now been recorded by the system
in several locations on the hard drive. He has, in other words, just slapped
big greasy fingerprints all over a weapon that the police are moments away
from seizing as evidence. If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops
before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the
very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for
tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe
could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But
then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will
never be aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe
the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in
secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.
Randy could just reformat the hard drive with a single command, but (1)
it would take several minutes to execute and (2) it would not thoroughly
erase the incriminating bits, which could be lifted from the hard drive by a
motivated technician. Because he knows which files have recorded his log on,
he executes a command that finds those files on the hard drive. Then he
types another command that causes random numbers to be written over those
areas of the hard drive seven times in a row.
The cops are slamming the battering ram against the side door of the
office building when Randy's right pinky slams the Enter key and executes
that command. He is almost certainly safe from the tampering with evidence
charge now. But he hasn't actually tampered yet, which is the whole point of
this exercise. He needs to find all the copies of the e mail message that
specifies the latitude and longitude of the wreck, and do the same multiple
erase trick on them. If the damn things were not encrypted, he could search
for the critical strings of digits. As it is, he will have to search for
files that were created during a certain time period, around the time that
Randy was out on Glory, anchored over the wreck. Randy knows roughly what
day that was, and so he sets the limits of the search to give him any files
created five days either side of that, just to be safe, and limits it to
only those directories used for e mail.
The search takes forever, or maybe it just seems that way because the
cops have smashed the side door off its hinges now and are inside the
building. The video window catches Randy's eye as it changes dramatically;
he gets a veering montage of grainy frozen images of a room; a doorway; a
hallway; a reception area; and finally a barricade. The Ordo guys have
yanked their video camera out of the window and restationed it at their
front desk, recording a barrier built of cheap modular office furniture
piled against the glass entrance to the reception. The camera tilts up to
show that one of the four glass door slabs has already been crystallized by
(one supposes) the impact of the battering ram.
Randy's "find" command finally returns with a list of about a hundred
files. The half dozen or so critical ones are on the list somewhere, but
Randy doesn't have time to go through the list figuring out which is which.
He has the system generate a list of the disk blocks occupied by those
files, so that he can go back later and do a super erase. Once he's got that
information, he does a "rm" or "remove" command on all of them. This is a
paltry and miserable way to expunge secrets from a hard drive, but Randy's
afraid he may not have time to do it more thoroughly. The "rm" only takes a
few moments and then Randy goes back and has the system write random numbers
on top of those disk blocks seven times in a row, just as he did earlier. By
this time the barricade has been scattered all over Ordo's lobby and the
cops are inside. They have weapons drawn and pointed at the ceiling and they
don't look very happy.
There is one thing left to do. Actually it's a pretty big thing. The
Epiphyte people use Tombstone for all kinds of purposes, and there's no way
of telling whether other copies of that latitude and longitude exist on it
somewhere. Most of Epiphyte is made up of inveterate computer users who
would be just the sort to write little scripts to back up all of their old e
mail messages to an archive every week. So he whips up his own script that
will just write random information to every sector on the entire hard drive,
then go back and do it again, and again, and again, forever or until the
cops pull the plug. Just after he whacks the Enter key to send this command
in to Tombstone, he hears an electrical buzzing noise from the van that
makes his hair stand on end for a moment. He sees a cop in the video window,
frozen. Then the screen of his computer goes blank.
Randy looks over toward the old van. The Dwarves are high fiving each
other.
There is a screeching of tires, and the sound of a low speed collision,
out on the street. About a dozen cars have rolled quietly to a stop, and
some have been rear ended by others that are still functioning. The
McDonald's has gone dark. Television technicians are cursing inside their
mobile units. Police officers and lawyers are pounding their walkie talkies
and cellphones against their hands.
"Pardon me," Randy says to the Dwarves, "but would you gentlemen like
to share anything with me?"
"We just took out the whole building," says one of the Dwarves.
"Took it out, in what sense?"
"Nailed it with a big electromagnetic pulse. Fried every chip within
range.
"So it's a scorched earth kind of deal? Go ahead and confiscate that
gear, you damn Feds, it's all worthless junk now?"
"Yeah."
"Well, it certainly worked on those cars," Randy says, "and it
definitely worked on this piece of junk that used to be my computer."
"Don't worry it has no effect on hard drives," the Dwarf says, "so all
of your files are intact."
"I know you are expecting me to take that as good news," Randy says.
Chapter 77 BUDDHA
A car is coming. The engine noise is expensively muffled, but it sounds
like a diesel. Goto Dengo is awake, waiting for it, and so is the rest of
the camp. No one stirs at Bundok during the day anymore, except for the
radio men and those manning the anti aircraft guns. They have not been told
that MacArthur is on Luzon, but they all sense The General's presence. The
American planes rip across the sky all day long, glittering and proud, like
starships from a distant future that none of them will ever see, and the
earth rings like a bell from the impacts of distant naval guns. The
shipments have become smaller but more frequent: one or two broken down
lorries every night, their rear bumpers practically scraping the road under
crippling burdens of gold.
Lieutenant Mori has placed anther machine gun at the front gate,
concealed in the foliage, just in case some Americans happen to blunder up
this road in a jeep. Somewhere out there in the dark, the barrel of that
weapon is tracking this car as it jounces up the road. The men know every
dip and rise in that road, and can tell where the vehicles are by listening
for the scrape of their undercarriages against the hardpan, a signature
pattern of metallic dots and dashes.
The car's headlamps are off, of course, and the guards at the gate dare
not shine bright lights around. One of them risks opening up a kerosene
lantern, and aims its beam at the visitor. A silver Mercedes Benz hood
ornament springs forth from the blackness, supported by a chrome plated
radiator grille. The beam of the lantern fondles the car's black fenders,
its sweeping silver exhaust pipes, its running boards, clotted with the meat
of young coconuts it must have sideswiped a pile on its way up here. In the
driver's side window is the face of a Nipponese man in his forties, so
haggard and tired he looks as though he is about to burst into tears. But he
is just a driver. Next to him is a sergeant with a sawed off shotgun,
Nipponese rifles being generally too long to wield in the front seat of a
luxury car. Behind them, a drawn curtain conceals whatever, or whoever, is
in the backseat.
"Open!" demands the guard, and the driver reaches up behind his head
and parts the curtain. The lantern beam falls through the opening and
bounces back sharply from a pale face in the back seat. Several of the
soldiers shout. Goto Dengo steps back, rattled, then moves in for a better
look.
The man in the backseat has a very large head. But the strange thing
about him is that his skin is a rich yellow color not the normal Asian
yellow and it glitters. He is wearing a peculiar, pointed hat, and he has a
calm smile on his face an expression the likes of which Goto Dengo has not
seen since the war began.
More lantern beams come on, the ring of soldiers and officers closes in
on the Mercedes. Someone pulls the rear door open and then jumps back as if
he has burned his hand on it.
The passenger is sitting crosslegged on the backseat, which has been
crushed into a broad V beneath his weight.
It is a solid gold Buddha, looted from somewhere else in the Greater
East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere, coming to meditate in serene darkness atop
the hoard of Golgotha.
It turns out to be small enough to fit through the entrance, but too
big to go in one of the little railway cars, and so the strongest Filipino
men must spend the next hours shoving it down the tunnel one inch at a tame.
The early shipments were neatly crated, and the crates were stenciled
with labels identifying the contents as machine gun ammunition or mortar
rounds or the like. The crates that come later don't have the stencils. At a
certain point, the gold begins to arrive in cardboard boxes and rotten
steamer trunks. They fall open all the time, and the workers patiently
gather the gold up and carry it to the tunnel entrance in their arms and
throw it into the hand cars. The bars tumble end over end and smash into the
sheet metal with a din that scares clouds of birds out of the overhanging
trees. Goto Dengo cannot help looking at the bars. They come in different
sizes, some of them so large that it takes two men to carry one. They are
stamped with the names of central banks from a few places Goto Dengo has
been and many he's only heard of: Singapore, Saigon, Batavia, Manila,
Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton. There is French gold that was
apparently shipped to Cambodia, and Dutch gold shipped to Jakarta, and
British gold shipped to Singapore all to keep it out of the hands of the
Germans.
But some shipments consist entirely of gold from the Bank of Tokyo.
They get five convoys in a row of the stuff. According to the tally that
Goto Dengo is keeping in his head, two thirds of the tonnage stored in
Golgotha ends up coming straight from Nippon's central reserves. All of it
is cold to the touch, and stored in good but old crates. He concludes that
it was shipped to the Philippines a long time ago and has been sitting in a
cellar in Manila ever since, waiting for this moment. They must have shipped
it here at about the same time that Goto Dengo was plucked off the beach in
New Guinea, way back in late 1943.
They have known. They have known for that long that they were going to
lose the war.
By the middle of January, Goto Dengo has begun to look back on the
Christmas Day massacre with something almost like nostalgia, missing the
atmosphere of naive innocence that made the killings necessary. Until that
morning, even he had managed to convince himself that Golgotha was an arms
cache that the emperor's soldiers would someday use to stage a glorious
reconquest of Luzon. He knows that the workers believed it too. Now everyone
knows about the gold, and the camp has changed. Everyone understands that
there will be no exit.
At the beginning of January, the workers are made up of two types:
those who are resigned to die here, and those who aren't. The latter group
make various escape attempts of a desultory and hopeless nature and are shot
by the guards. The era of hoarding ammunition seems to be over, or perhaps
the guards are just too sick and hungry to climb down out of the watch
towers and personally bayonet all of the people who present themselves to be
killed. So it is all done with bullets, and the bodies left to balloon and
blacken. Bundok is immanent with their stench.
Goto Dengo hardly notices, though, because the camp is suffused with
the crazy, sick tension that always precedes a battle. Or so he supposes; he
has seen a lot of excitement in this war, but he has never been in a proper
battle. The same is automatically true of most of the Nipponese here,
because essentially all of the Nipponese who go into battles wind up dead.
In this army you are either a greenhorn or a corpse.
Sometimes, a briefcase arrives along with the gold shipment. The
briefcase is always handcuffed to the wrist of a soldier who has grenades
dangling all over his body so that he can blow himself and it to powder if
the convoy should be assaulted by Huks. The briefcases go straight to the
Bundok radio station and their contents are placed in a safe. Goto Dengo
knows that they must contain codes not the usual books, but some kind of
special codes that are changed every day because every morning, after the
sun has come up, the radio officer performs a ceremony of burning a single
sheet of paper in front of the transmitter shack, and then rubbing the
withered leaf of ash between his hands.
It is through that radio station that they will receive the final
order. All is in readiness, and Goto Dengo goes through the complex once a
day checking everything.
The diagonal tunnel finally reached the stub tunnel at the bottom of
Lake Yamamoto a couple of weeks ago. The stub was filled with water that had
seeped past the concrete plug during the months since it had been put into
place, and so when the two tunnels were finally joined, several tons of
water ran down the diagonal into Golgotha. This was expected and planned
for; all of it went into a sump and drained from there into the Tojo River.
Now it is possible to go all the way up the diagonal and look at the
concrete plug from the underside. Lake Yamamoto is on the other side. Goto
Dengo goes up there every couple of days, ostensibly to check the plug and
its demolition charges, but really to check on the progress being made,
unbeknownst to Captain Noda, by Wing's and Rodolfo's crews. They are mostly
drilling upwards, making more of those short, vertical, dead end shafts, and
enlarging the chambers at their tops. The system (including the new
"ventilation shafts" ordered by The General, and dug from the top down just
to the east of the ridgeline) looks like this now:
Inside the primary storage complex is a small room that Captain Noda
has dubbed the Hall of Glory. It does not look very glorious right now. Most
of it is filled with a snarl of wires which have been run into it from all
parts of the Golgotha complex, and which dangle from the ceiling or trail on
the floor with hand lettered paper tags dangling from them, saying things
like MAIN ENTRANCE DEMOLITION CHARGES. There are several crates of lead acid
batteries to supply power for the detonations, and to give Goto Dengo a few
minutes of electric light by which to read those paper tags. Extra boxes of
dynamite and blasting caps are stacked at one end of the Hall of Glory in
case some tunnels need a little extra destruction, and coils of red fuse
cord in case the electrical system fails completely.
But the demolition order hasn't yet come, so Goto Dengo does the things
soldiers do while waiting to die. He writes letters to his family that will
never be delivered or even mailed. He smokes. He plays cards. He goes and
checks his equipment another time, and then another. A week goes by without
any gold deliveries. Twenty prisoners try to escape together. The ones who
don't get sprayed across the killing ground by mines get tangled in barbed
wire and are each shot by a team of two guards, one aiming a flashlight and
the other aiming a rifle. Captain Noda spends all night, every night, pacing
back and forth in front of the main gate and smoking cigarettes, then drinks
himself to sleep at dawn. The radio men sit in front of their rig watching
the tubes glow, jerking like electrified frog legs whenever a feeble string
of beeps comes in on their frequency. But the order does not come.
One night, then, the trucks come again, just as they did the first
time. The convoy must contain all that's left of the Nipponese motor pool on
Luzon. They all come together, making a rumble that can be heard half an
hour before they actually reach the gate. When their cargo has been taken
out and stacked on the ground, the soldiers guarding this convoy remain
behind at Bundok. The only people who leave are the drivers.
It takes two days to move this last hoard into the tunnels. One of
their shuttle trucks has broken down for good and been cannibalized to keep
the other one going. It is running on half of its cylinders and is so feeble
that it has to be pushed up the riverbed road by teams of workers and hauled
over the rough patches on ropes. It has finally begun to rain, and the Tojo
River is rising.
The main vault is nearly full of treasure, and so is the fool's vault.
The new shipment has to be packed in wherever it will fit; they break it out
of its crates and jam it into crannies. The crates are stenciled with double
headed eagles and swastikas, and the gold bars inside come from Berlin,
Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, Riga, Copenhagen, Budapest,
Bucharest, Milan. There are also cardboard boxes filled with diamonds. Some
of the crates are still damp, and smell of the sea. Seeing this, Goto Dengo
knows that a big submarine must have arrived from Germany, filled with Nazi
treasure. So that explains the two week lull: they've been awaiting the
arrival of this U boat.
He works in the tunnels for two days, wearing a miner's headlamp,
shoving jewels and gold bars into crevices. He goes into a sort of trance
that is finally interrupted by a heavy thud reverberating through the rock.
Artillery, he thinks. Or a bomb from one of MacArthur's planes.
He comes up the main ventilation shaft to the top of the ridge, where
it's broad daylight. He is crushed to discover that there is no battle
underway. MacArthur isn't going to rescue him. Lieutenant Mori has brought
almost all of the workers up here, and they are hauling on ropes, dragging
Bundok's heavy equipment up and throwing it down into the recently dug
"ventilation shafts." Both of the trucks are up here, and men with torches
and sledgehammers are breaking them up into pieces small enough to drop down
the shafts. Goto Dengo arrives just in time to see the engine block of the
radio station's generator tumbling down a shaft into blackness. The rest of
the radio gear follows it directly.
Somewhere nearby, concealed in the trees, someone is grunting heavily,
doing some kind of hard physical labor. It is a practiced martial arts type
of grunt, from way down in the diaphragm.
"Lieutenant Goto!" says Captain Noda. He is daft with alcohol. "Your
duties are below."
"What was that loud noise?"
Noda beckons him over to an outcropping from which they can see down
into the valley of the Tojo River. Goto Dengo, unsteady for any number of
reasons, suffers a spell of dizziness and nearly falls off. The problem is
disorientation: he does