not recognize the river. Until now, it has always
been a few trickles of water braided down a rocky bed. Even before they ran
a road up it, you could get up almost as far as the waterfall by hopping
from one dry rock to the next.
Now, all of a sudden, the river is wide, deep, and murky. The tips of a
few big rocks protrude from the surface here and there.
He remembers something he saw a hundred years ago, in a previous
incarnation, on another planet: a bedsheet from the Manila Hotel with a
crude map sketched on it. The Tojo River drawn in with a fat trail of blue
fountain pen ink.
"We dynamited the rockfall," Noda says, "according to the plan."
Long ago, they had poised rocks above a bottleneck in the river, ready
to create a little dam. But setting off that dynamite was supposed to be
almost the last thing they did before sealing themselves up inside.
"But we are not ready," Goto Dengo says.
Noda laughs. He seems quite high spirited. "You have been telling me
for a month that you are ready."
"Yes," Lieutenant Goto says, slowly and thickly, "you are right. We are
ready."
Noda slaps him on the back. "You must get to the main entrance before
it floods."
"My crew?"
"Your crew is waiting for you there."
Goto Dengo begins walking towards the trail that will take him down to
the main entrance. Along the way, he passes the top of another ventilation
shaft, Several dozen workers are queued up there, thumbs lashed together
behind their backs with piano wire, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets.
One by one, prisoners kneel at the lip of the shaft. Lieutenant Mori whips
his officer's sword into the nape of each neck with a terrific grunt. Head
and body tumble forward into the ventilation shaft and thud meatily into
other bodies, far below, a couple of seconds later. Every leaf and pebble
within a three meter radius of the shaft opening is saturated with bright
red blood, and so is Lieutenant Mori.
"Don't worry about that," Captain Noda says. "I will see to it that the
tops of the shafts are backfilled with rubble, as we discussed. The jungle
will grow over them long before the Americans ever find this place."
Goto Dengo averts his eyes and turns to leave.
"Lieutenant Goto!" says a voice. He turns around. It is Lieutenant
Mori, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. A Filipino kneels before
him, mumbling a prayer in Latin, fumbling with a rosary that dangles from
his bound hands.
"Yes, Lieutenant Mori."
"According to my roster, six prisoners are signed out to you. I will
need them."
"Those six prisoners are down below, helping to load in the last
shipment."
"But all of the shipment is inside the tunnels now."
"Yes, but not well placed. The entire purpose of the fool's vault is
ruined if we strew gold and diamonds around the place in such a way as to
lead thieves deeper into the caverns. I need these men to continue that
work."
"You take full responsibility for them?"
"I do," Goto Dengo says.
"If there are only six," Captain Noda says, "then your crew should be
able to keep them under control."
"I will see you at Yasukuni, Goto Dengo," says Lieutenant Mori.
"I will look forward to it," Goto Dengo says. He does not add that
Yasukuni must be a very crowded place by now, and they will probably have a
terrible time finding each other.
"I envy you. The end will be longer and harder for those of us on the
outside." Lieutenant Mori snaps his blade into the back of the Filipino's
head, cutting him off between an Ave and a Maria.
"Your heroism will not go unrewarded," Goto Dengo says.
Lieutenant Mori's crew awaits him down below, in front of the mouse
hole that leads into Golgotha: four hand picked soldiers. Each wears a
thousand stitch headband, and so each has an orange ball centered on his
forehead, reminding Goto Dengo not of the Rising Sun but of an exit wound.
The water is up to mid thigh now, and the entrance tunnel is half full. When
Goto Dengo arrives, followed closely by Captain Noda, the men all cheer him
politely.
Goto Dengo squats in the opening. Only his head and shoulders are above
the water. Before him the tunnel is black. It takes a powerful effort of
will for him to enter. But it is no worse than what he used to do in the
abandoned mines, back in Hokkaido.
Of course, the abandoned mines weren't going to be dynamited shut
behind him.
Going forward is his chance to survive. If he hesitates, Noda will kill
him on the spot, and all his crew, and others will be sent in to finish the
job. Noda made sure that others were trained to do it.
"See you at Yasukuni," he says to Captain Noda, and without waiting for
a response he sloshes forward into blackness.
Chapter 78 PONTIFEX
By the time Randy reaches the Air Kinakuta boarding lounge, he has
already forgotten how he reached the airport. He honestly can't remember.
Did he hail a taxi? Not likely in down town Los Altos. Did he get a ride
from some hacker? He couldn't have driven the Acura, because the Acura's
electronics had been burned to a crisp by the electromagnetic pulse gun. He
had pulled the title out of the glove compartment and signed it over to a
Ford dealer three blocks away, in exchange for five thousand dollars in
cash.
Oh, yeah. The Ford dealer gave him a ride to the airport.
He has always wanted to pull the stunt of walking up to the counter of
an exotic foreign airline and saying, "Get me on the next plane to X." But
now he's just done it and it wasn't cool and romantic as he had hoped. It
was sort of bleak and stressful and expensive. He had to buy a first class
ticket, which consumed most of the five thousand dollars. But he doesn't
feel like beating himself to death over how he is managing his assets just
now, i.e., at a time when his net worth is a negative number that can only
be expressed using scientific notation. The probability is high that he
failed to wipe Tombstone's hard drive before the cops seized it, and that
the Dentist's lawsuit will consequently succeed.
On his way down the concourse he stands and stares at a bank of
telephones for a while. He very much wants to notify the Shaftoes of recent
events. It would be a good thing if they could somehow strip the sunken sub
clean of treasure as fast as possible, reducing its value and hence the
damage that the Dentist can inflict on Epiphyte.
The math is pretty simple here. The Dentist has a way to claim damages
from Epiphyte. The amount of those damages is x, where x is what the
Dentist, as a minority shareholder, would have made in capital gains if
Randy had been responsible enough to write a better contract with Semper
Marine. If such a contract had specified a fifty fifty split, then x would
be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth
of Epiphyte that the Dentist owns minus a few percent for taxes and other
frictional effects of the real world. So if there's ten million dollars in
the wreck, then x works out to around half a million bucks.
In order for the Dentist to gain control of Epiphyte, he has to acquire
an additional forty percent of its stock. The price of that stock (if it
were for sale) is simply 0.4 times the total value of Epiphyte. Call it y.
If x > y, the Dentist wins. Because then the judge is going to say,
"You, Epiphyte, owe this poor aggrieved minority shareholder $x. But as I
look at the parlous state of the corporation's finances I see that there's
no way for you to raise that kind of money. And so the only way to settle
the debt is to give the plaintiff the one asset you have in abundance, which
is your crappy stock. And since the value of the whole corporation is
really, really close to being zero, you're going to have to give him almost
all of it."
So how to make x < y? Either reduce the value of the wreck, by
stripping it of its gold, or else increase the value of Epiphyte, by what,
exactly?
In better times they could maybe take the company public. But setting
up an IPO takes months. And no investor's going to touch it when it's
encumbered by a lawsuit from the Dentist.
Randy has this vision of driving through the jungle with an end loader
and scooping up that big pile of gold bars he found with Doug and taking it
straight to a bank and depositing it in Epiphyte's account. That'd do it.
The whole concept makes his body tingle as he stands there in the middle of
the international concourse.
Off to the left, some kind of huddled or teeming mass, heavy on the
women and children, passes, and Randy hears some familiar voices. His mind
has wrapped itself like a starving squid around this gold in the jungle
concept, and in order to address reality for just a second, he has to peel
the tentacles away, popping those suckers off of it one by one. He
eventually focuses in on the scuttling group and identifies it as Avi's
family: Devorah and a bunch of kids and the two nannies, clutching passports
and tickets in El Al jackets. The kids are small and prone to sudden darting
tactics, the adults are tense and not inclined to let them stray, so the
group's movement down the concourse has the general aspect of a sack of
beagles heading in the approximate direction of some fresh meat. Randy is
probably personally responsible for this exodus and would much rather slink
into the men's room and crawl down a toilet, but he has to say something. So
he catches up with Devorah and startles her by offering to carry the child
support bag that she has slung over her shoulder. This turns out to be
shockingly heavy: several gallons of apple juice, he would estimate, plus
complete asthma attack management infrastructure, and maybe a few bricks of
solid gold in case of some totalizing civil breakdown en route.
"So. Uh, going to Israel?"
"El Al doesn't fly to Acapulco." Pow! Devorah is in peak form.
"Did Avi give you any kind of rationale for this?"
"You're asking me? I kind of assumed you would know," Devorah says.
"Well, things have been, certainly, volatile," Randy says. "I don't
know if fleeing the country is warranted."
"Then why are you in the airport with an Air Kinakuta ticket sticking
out of your pocket?"
"Oh, you know ... some business issues need resolving."
"You seem really depressed. Do you have a problem?" Devorah asks.
Randy sighs. "That depends. Do you?"
"Do I what? Have a problem? Why should I have a problem?"
"Because you've been uprooted and sent packing on ten minutes' notice."
"We're going to Israel, Randy. That's not being uprooted. That's being
rerooted." Or perhaps she is saying "rerouted." Without a transcript, there
is no way for Randy to tell.
"Yeah, but it's still kind of a hassle "
"Compared to what?"
"Compared to staying at home and living your life."
"This is my life, Randy." Devorah is definitely kicking out a prickly
vibe here. Randy figures that she is incredibly pissed off, but under some
kind of emotional nondisclosure agreement. This is probably better than the
only other two alternatives Randy can think of, namely (1) dissolving into
hysterical recriminations and (2) beatific serenity. It is an I'll do my
job, you do yours, why are you in my face attitude. Randy feels like an
idiot, all of a sudden, for having taken Devorah's bag. She is clearly just
this side of aghast, wondering why the fuck Randy is toiling as a skycap at
this critical moment. Like she and the nannies are not capable of humping a
sack down a hallway. Has she, Devorah, offered to step in and help Randy
write any code lately? And if Randy really has nothing better to do, why
doesn't he be a man, and strap grenades all over his body and give the
Dentist a big hug?
Randy says, "I assume you'll be in touch with Avi before you take off.
Would you give him a message?"
"What's the message?"
"Zero."
"That's it?"
"That's it," Randy says.
Devorah is perhaps not familiar with Randy and Avi's practice of
conserving precious bandwidth by communicating in binary code, one bit at a
time, la Paul Revere and the Old North Church. In this case, "zero" means
that Randy did not succeed in wiping out all the data on Tombstone's hard
drive.
***
Air Kinakuta's first class lounge, with its free drinks and highly un
American concept of service, beckons. Randy avoids it because he knows he
will sink straight into a coma if he goes there, and they would have to load
him onto the 747 with a forklift. Instead he walks around the airport,
clutching his hip spastically every time he re realizes that his laptop
isn't dangling there. He is not adjusting very quickly to the fact that most
of the laptop is stuffed into a wastebasket at the Ford dealership where he
unloaded the Acura. While he was waiting for his man to scurry back from the
bank with the five grand, he used the screwdriver attachments on his
multipurpose pocket tool to extract the laptop's hard drive, and then threw
away the rest.
Very large television sets hang from the ceilings in the departure
lounge, showing the Airport Channel, which is a parade of news bits even
more punishingly flimsy than normal television news, mixed in with a great
deal of weather and stock quotes. Randy is struck, but not precisely
surprised, to see footage of black hatted Secret Admirers exercising their
Second Amendment rights in the streets of Los Altos, and of Ordo's barricade
avalanching towards the camera, and the police storming over it weapons
drawn. Paul Comstock is shown pausing, as he climbs into a limousine to say
something, looking hale and smug. The conventional wisdom about TV news is
that the image is everything and if that is the case then this is a big win
for Ordo, which looks like the victim of jackbooted thugs. Which gets
Epiphyte nowhere, since Ordo is, or ought to be, nothing more than a
bystander. This is supposed to be a private conflict between the Dentist and
Epiphyte and now it's become a public one between Comstock and Ordo, and
this makes Randy irritated and confused.
He goes and gets on his plane and starts eating caviar. Normally he
doesn't partake, but caviar has a decadent fiddling while Rome burns thing
going for it that works for him just now.
As is his nerdly custom, Randy actually reads the informational cards
that are stuffed in among the in flight magazines and vomit sacs. One of
these extols the fact that Sultan Class passengers (as first class
passengers are called) can not only make outgoing phone calls from their
seats but can also receive incoming ones. So Randy dials the number for
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe's GSM telephone. It's an Australian phone number,
but it'll ring anywhere on the planet. Right now it's something like six
A.M. in the Philippines, but Doug is bound to be awake, and indeed he
answers his phone on the second ring. Randy can tell from the sound of horns
and diesels that he is stuck in Manila traffic, probably in the back of a
taxi.
"It's Randy. On a plane," says Randy. "An Air Kinakuta plane."
"Randy! Well I've just been watching you on television," Doug says. It
takes a minute for that to sink in; Randy has used a couple of vodkas to
cleanse his palate of the caviar.
"Yeah," Doug continues, "I turned on CNN when I woke up and glimpsed
you sitting on top of a car typing. What's going on?"
"Nothing! Nothing at all," Randy says. He figures that this is a big
stroke of luck. Now that Doug has seen him on CNN, he'll be more likely to
effect superbly dramatic measures out of sheer paranoia. Randy slurps vodka
and says, "Wow, this Sultan Class service is great. Anyway, if you do a Web
search on Ordo, you'll see this nonsense had absolutely nothing to do with
us. Nothing."
"That's funny, because Comstock is denying that it's a crackdown on
Ordo," Doug says. When speaking of official U.S. government denials, Vietnam
combat veterans like Doug are capable of summoning up a drawling irony that
is about as subtle as having automotive jumper cables connected directly to
your fillings, but much funnier. Vodka climbs about halfway up Randy's nose
before he controls it. "They say that it's just a little old civil suit,"
Doug says, now using a petal soft, wounded innocent tone.
"Ordo's status as purveyor of stuff that the government hates and fears
is just coincidental," Randy guesses.
"That's right."
"Well then, I'm sure there's nothing to it other than our troubles with
the Dentist," Randy says.
"What troubles are those, Randy?"
"Happened during the middle of the night, your time. I'm sure you will
have some interesting faxes awaiting you this morning."
"Well, maybe I should look at those faxes, then," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Maybe I'll give you a buzz when I reach Kinakuta," Randy says.
"You have a good flight, Randall."
"Have a nice day, Douglas."
Randy puts the phone back in its armrest cradle and prepares to sink
into a well deserved plane coma. But five minutes later the phone rings. It
is so disorienting to have one's phone ring on an airplane that he doesn't
know what to make of it for a while. When he finally realizes what's going
on, he has to consult the instruction card to figure out how to answer it.
When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says,
"You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two
people in the world who know that Sultan Class passengers can receive
incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he's never heard this voice before.
It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age,
but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral.
"Um, who's this?"
"Am I right in thinking that you want Mr. Shaftoe to go to a pay
telephone somewhere and then call you back?"
"Who is this, please?"
"You think that's more secure than his GSM phone? It's not really." The
speaker pauses frequently before, during, and after sentences, as if he's
been spending a lot of time alone, and is having trouble hitting his
conversational stride.
"Okay," Randy says, "you know who I am and whom I was calling. So
obviously you are surveilling me. You're not working for the Dentist, I take
it. That leaves what? The United States Government? The NSA, right?"
The man laughs. "As a rule the Fort Meade boys don't bother to check in
with the people whose lines they are tapping." The caller has an un American
crispness in his voice, vaguely Northern European. "In your case the NSA
might make an exception, it's true when I was there, they were all great
admirers of your grandfather's work. In fact, they liked it so much they
stole it."
"No higher flattery, I guess."
"You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not."
"Why do you say that?"
"Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to
make difficult choices who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much
worse than being a moron."
"Did Grandpa work for you at the NSA?"
"He wasn't interested. Said he had a higher calling. So while he made
better and better computers to solve the Harvard Waterhouse Prime Factor
Challenge, my friends at the NSA watched him, and learned."
"And you did too."
"I? Oh, no, I have only modest skills with a soldering iron. I was
there to watch the NSA watching your grandfather."
"On behalf of whom? Don't tell me eruditorum.org?"
"Well done, Randy."
"What should I call you Root? Pontifex?"
"Pontifex is a nice word."
"It's true," Randy says. "I checked it out, looking for clues in the
etymology it's an old Latin word meaning 'priest.' "
"Catholics call the Pope 'Pontifex Maximus,' or pontiff for short,"
says Pontifex agreeably, "but the word was also used by pagans to denote
their priests, and Jews their rabbis it is ever so ecumenical."
"But the literal meaning of the word is 'bridge builder,' and so it's a
good name for a cryptosystem," Randy says.
"Or, I hope, for me," Pontifex says drily. "I am glad you feel that
way, Randy. Many people would think of a cryptosystem as a wall, rather than
a bridge."
"Well, gosh. It's nice to telephonically meet you, Pontifex."
"The pleasure is mutual."
"You've been so quiet on the e mail front recently."
"Didn't want to give you the creeps. I was afraid if I bothered you any
more, you'd think I was proselytizing."
"Not at all. By the way people in the know think your cryptosystem is
weird, but good."
"It's not weird at all, once you understand it," Pontifex says
politely.
"Well, uh, what occasions this phone call? Obviously your friends are
still surveilling me on behalf of whom, exactly?"
"I don't even know," Pontifex says. "But I do know that you're trying
to crack Arethusa."
Randy cannot even remember ever uttering the word "Arethusa." It was
printed on the wrappers on the bricks of ETC cards that he ran through
Chester's card reader. Now Randy pictures a box inside Grandpa's old trunk
labeled Harvard Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge and dated in the early
1950s. So that at least gives him a date to peg on Pontifex. "You were at
NSA during the late forties and early fifties," Randy says. "You must have
worked on Harvest." Harvest was a legendary code breaking supercomputer,
three decades ahead of its time, built by ETC engineers working under an NSA
contract.
"I told you," Pontifex says, "your grandfather's work came in handy."
"Chester's got this retired ETC engineer working on his card
machinery," Randy says. "He helped me read the Arethusa cards. Saw the
wrappers. He's a friend of yours. He called you."
Pontifex chuckles. "Among our little band there is hardly a word with
more memories attached to it than Arethusa. He nearly hit the floor when he
saw it. Called me from the cellphone on his boat, Randy."
"Why? Why was Arethusa such a big deal?"
"Because we spent ten years of our lives trying to break the damned
code! And we failed!"
"It must have been really frustrating," Randy says, "you still sound
angry."
"I'm angry at Comstock."
"Not the "
"Not Attorney General Paul Comstock. His father. Earl Comstock."
"What!? The guy that Doug Shaftoe threw off the ski lift? The Vietnam
guy?"
"No, no! I mean, yes. Earl Comstock was largely responsible for our
Vietnam policy. And Doug Shaftoe did get his fifteen minutes of fame by
throwing him off a ski lift in, I believe, 1979. But all of that Vietnam
nonsense was just a coda to his real career."
"Which was?"
"Earl Comstock, to whom your grandfather reported in Brisbane during
World War II, was one of the founders of the NSA. And he was my boss from
1949 through about 1960. He was obsessed with Arethusa."
"Why?"
"He was convinced it was a Communist cipher. That if we could break it,
we could then exploit that break to get into some later Soviet codes that
were giving us difficulty. Which was ridiculous. But he believed it or
claimed to and so we battered our heads against Arethusa for years. Strong
men had nervous breakdowns. Brilliant men concluded that they were stupid.
In the end it turned out to be a joke."
"A joke? What do you mean by that?"
"We ran those intercepts through Harvest backwards and forwards. The
lights dimmed in Washington and Baltimore, we used to say, when we were
doing Arethusa work. I still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA
and so on. Those double As! People wrote dissertations about their
significance. We concluded in the end that they were just flukes. We
invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it wrote new volumes
of the Cryptonomicon. The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in
them was like trying to read a book that had been burned, and its ashes
mixed with all the cement that went into the Hoover Dam. We never got
anything that was worth a damn.
"After ten years or so, we began using it to haze incoming recruits. By
that time the NSA was getting fantastically huge, we were hiring all of the
most brilliant math prodigies in the United States, and when we got one who
was especially cocky we'd put him on the Arethusa project just to give him
the message that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. We broke a lot of
kids on that wheel. But then, around 1959, this one kid came in the smartest
kid we had seen yet and he broke it."
"Well, I assume you didn't place this phone call just to keep me in
suspense," Randy says. "What did he find?"
"He found that the Arethusa intercepts did not represent coded messages
at all. They were simply the output of a particular mathematical function, a
Riemann zeta function, which has many uses one being that it is used in some
cryptosystems as a random number generator. He proved that if you set up
this function in a particular way, and then gave it, as input, a particular
string of numbers, it would crank out the exact sequence that was on those
intercepts. So that was all she wrote. And it almost ended Comstock's
career."
"Why?"
"Partly because of the insane amount of money and manpower he had
thrown into the Arethusa project. But mostly because the input string the
seed for the random number generator was the boss's name.
C O M S T O C K."
"You're kidding."
"We had the proof right there. It was impeccable from a pure math
standpoint. So, either Comstock had generated the Arethusa intercepts
himself, and been stupid enough to use his own name as the seed and believe
me, he really was that kind of guy or else someone had played an enormous
practical joke on him."
"Which do you think it was?"
"Well, he never divulged where he had gotten these intercepts in the
first place and so it was difficult to form a hypothesis. I am inclined
toward the joke theory, because he was the sort of man who gives his
subordinates a powerful urge to play practical jokes on him. But in the end
it didn't matter. He was drummed out of the NSA at the age of forty six. A
classic grey man, a war veteran, a technocrat with a high security clearance
and any number of high powered connections. He went more or less straight to
Kennedy's National Security Counsel from there, and the rest is history."
"Wow!" Randy says, kind of awed. "What a jerk!"
"No kidding," says Pontifex. "And now, his son well, don't get me
started on his son."
As Pontifex's voice trails off, Randy asks, "So, you are calling me now
for what purpose?"
Pontifex doesn't answer for a few moments, as if he's wrestling with
the question himself. But Randy doubts that's the case. Someone is trying to
send you a message. "I suppose that I am just appalled by the very idea of
more young bright men throwing themselves against Arethusa. Until I received
that call from a boat on Lake Washington, I had thought it was dead and
buried."
"But why should you care?"
"You've already been cheated out of a fortune in computer patents,"
Pontifex says. "It wouldn't be fair."
"So, it's pity, then."
"Furthermore as I said it is my friend's job to keep you under
surveillance. He's going to hear almost every word you say for the next few
months, or at least read transcripts. For you and Cantrell and those others
to spend that entire time yammering about Arethusa would be more than he
could bear. Hideous deja vu. Just intolerably Kafkaesque. So please, just
let it go."
"Well, thanks for the tip."
"You're welcome, Randy. And may I give you a word of advice?"
"That's what Pontifex is supposed to do."
"First a disclaimer: I've been out of circulation for a while. Have not
picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments."
"Okay, I am bracing myself."
"My advice: do try to build the best Crypt you possibly can. Your
clients some of them, anyway are, for all practical purposes, aborigines.
They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a
Joseph Campbell footnote."
"So you're talking about your basic Colombian drug lord types, here?"
"Yes, I am, but I'm also referring to certain white men in suits. It
only takes a single generation to revert to savagery."
"Well, we provide state of the art cryptographic services to all of our
clients even the ones with bones in their noses."
"Excellent! And now as much as I hate to sign off on a dark note I must
say good bye."
Randy hangs up, and the phone rings again almost immediately.
"Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane,
and I get a busy signal."
"I have a funny story to tell you," Randy says, "about a guy you ran
into once while skiing. But unfortunately it will have to wait."
Chapter 79 GLORY
Bare chested, camouflage painted, trench knife in hand, Colt .45 stuck
in the waistband of his khaki trousers, Bobby Shaftoe moves like a cloud of
mist through the jungle. He stops when he can get a clear view of the Nip
Army truck, framed between the hairy, cluttered trunks of a couple of date
palms. A skirmish line of ants crawls over the skin of his sandaled foot. He
ignores them.
It has all the earmarks of a piss stop. Two Nipponese privates climb
out of the truck and confer for a few moments. One of them wades into the
jungle. The other leans against the truck's fender and lights up a
cigarette. Its glowing tip echoes the light of the sunset behind him. The
one in the jungle drops his trousers, squats, leans back against a tree to
take a shit.
At this moment they are supremely vulnerable. The contrast between the
brightness of the sunset and the dimness of the jungle renders them nearly
blind. The shitter is helpless, and the smoker looks exhausted. Bobby
Shaftoe sheds his sandals. He emerges from the jungle onto the road behind
the truck, strides forward on ant bitten feet, crouches behind the truck's
bumper. The weapon comes out of his hip pocket silently. Without taking his
eyes off the smoker's feet visible beneath the truck's chassis he peels away
the backing and slaps the payload onto the truck's tailgate. Then, just to
rub it in, he slaps up another one. Mission accomplished! Take that, Tojo!
Moments later, he's back in the jungle, watching as the Nip truck
drives away, now sporting two red, white, and blue stickers reading: I SHALL
RETURN! Bobby congratulates himself on another successful mission.
Long after dark, he reaches the Hukbalahap camp up on the volcano. He
works his way in through the booby trapped perimeter and makes plenty of
noise as he approaches, so that the Huk sentries won't shoot at him in the
darkness. But he needn't have bothered. Discipline has broken down, they are
all drunk and getting drunker, because of something they heard on the radio:
MacArthur has returned. The General has landed on Leyte.
Bobby Shaftoe's response is to boil up some powerful coffee and begin
pouring it into their signal man, Pedro. While the caffeine works its magic,
Shaftoe grabs a message pad and the stub of a pencil, and writes out his
idea for the seventh time: OPPORTUNITY EXISTS TO CONTACT AND SUPPLY
FILAMERICAN ELEMENTS IN CONCEPCION STOP I VOLUNTEER FOR SAME STOP AWAIT
INSTRUCTIONS STOP SIGNED SHAFTOE.
He gets Pedro to encrypt it and send it off. After that, all he can do
is wait and pray. This shit with the stickers has to stop.
He has been tempted, a thousand times, to desert, and to go into
Concepcion himself. But just because he's out in the boondocks with a band
of Huk irregulars doesn't mean he's beyond the reach of military discipline.
Deserters can still get shot or hanged, and despite the fact that he was one
in Sweden, Bobby Shaftoe believes that they deserve to be.
Concepcion is down in the lowlands north of Manila. From the high
places of the Zambales Mountains you can actually see the town lying amid
the green rice paddies. Those lowlands are still totally Nip controlled. But
when the General lands, he's probably going to land north of here at
Lingayen Gulf, just like the Nips did when they invaded in '41, and then
Concepcion is going to lie right in the middle of his route to Manila. He's
going to need eyes there.
Sure enough, the order comes through a couple of days later: RENDEZVOUS
TARPON POINT GREEN 5 NOVEMBER STOP CONVEY TRANSMITTER CONCEPCION STOP AWAIT
FURTHER ORDERS STOP.
Tarpon is the submarine that has been bringing them ammunition, medical
supplies, I SHALL RETURN stickers, cartons of American cigarettes with I
SHALL RETURN inserts in each pack, I SHALL RETURN matchbooks, I SHALL RETURN
coasters, and I SHALL RETURN condoms. Shaftoe has been stockpiling the
condoms because he knows they won't go over well in a Catholic country. He
figures that when he finds Glory he'll go through a long ton of condoms in
about a week.
Three days later, he and a squad of Huks are on hand to meet Tarpon at
"Point Green," which is their code name for a tiny cove on the west coast of
Luzon, down beneath Mount Pinatubo, not all that far north of Subic Bay. The
submarine glides in at around midnight, running on its electric motors so it
won't make any sound, and the Huks pull up alongside in rubber boats and
outrigger canoes and unload the cargo. Sure enough, the transmitter's there.
And this time there's none of those goddamn stickers or matchbooks. The
cargo is ammunition and a few fighting men: some Filamerican commandoes
fresh from a debriefing with MacArthur's intelligence chief, and a couple of
Americans MacArthur's advance scouts.
Over the next several days, Shaftoe and a few hand picked Huks carry
the transmitter up one slope of the Zambales Mountains and down the other.
They stop when the foothills finally give way to low lying paddy land. The
main north south road, from Manila up towards Lingayen Gulf, lies directly
across their path.
After a few days of scrambling and scrounging, they are able to load
the transmitter on board a farm cart and bury it in manure. They harness the
cart to a pathetic carabao, loaned by a loyal but poor farmer, and set out
across Nip country, headed for Concepcion.
At this point they have to split up, though, because there's no way
that blue eyed Shaftoe can travel in the open. Two Huks, pretending to be
farmboys, take the manure cart while Shaftoe begins making his way cross
country, traveling at night, sleeping in ditches or in the homes of trusted
American sympathizers.
It takes him a week and a half to cover the fifty kilometers, but in
time, with patience and perseverance, he reaches the town of Concepcion, and
knocks on the door of their local contact around midnight. The contact is a
prominent local citizen the manager of the town's only bank. Mr. Calagua is
astonished to see an American standing at his back door. This tells Shaftoe
that something must have gone wrong the boys with the transmitter should
have arrived a week ago. But the manager tells him that no one has shown up
though rumor has it that the Nips recently caught some boys trying to
smuggle contraband in a farm cart and executed them on the spot.
So Shaftoe is marooned in Concepcion with no way to get orders or to
send messages. He feels bad for the boys who died, but in a way, this isn't
such a bad situation for him. The only reason he wanted to be in Concepcion
is that the Altamira family comes from here. Half of the local farmers are
related to Glory in some way.
Shaftoe breaks into the Calaguas' stables and improvises a bed. They
would put him up in a spare bedroom if he asked, but he tells them that the
stables are safer if he gets caught, the Calaguas can at least claim
ignorance. He recuperates on a pile of straw for a day or two, then starts
trying to learn something about the Altamiras. He can't go out nosing around
by himself, but the Calaguas know everyone in town, and they have a good
sense of who can be trusted. So inquiries go out, and within a couple of
days, information has come back in.
Mr. Calagua explains it to him over glasses of bourbon in his study.
Wracked by guilt over the fact that his honored guest is sleeping on a pile
of hay in an outbuilding, he pushes bourbon at him all the time, which is
fine with Bobby Shaftoe.
"Some of the information is reliable, some is er farfetched," Mr.
Calagua says. "Here is the reliable part. First of all, your guess was
correct. When the Japanese took over Manila, many members of the Altamira
family came back to this area to stay with relatives. They believed it would
be safer."
"Are you telling me Glory is up here?"
"No," Mr. Calagua says sadly, "she is not up here. But she was
definitely here on September 13th, 1942."
"How do you know?"
"Because she gave birth to a baby boy on that day the birth certificate
is on file at the town hall. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe."
"Well, I'll be fucked sideways," Shaftoe says. He starts calculating
dates in his head.
"Many of the Altamiras who fled here have since gone back to the city
supposedly to obtain work. But some of them are also serving as eyes and
ears for the resistance."
"I knew they would do the right thing," Shaftoe says.
Mr. Calagua smiles cautiously. "Manila is full of people who claim to
be the eyes and ears of the resistance. It is easy to be eyes and ears. It
is harder to be fists and feet. But some of the Altamiras are fighting, too
they have gone into the mountains to join the Huks."
"Which mountains? I didn't run across any of them up in the Zambales."
"South of Manila and Laguna de Bay are many volcanoes and heavy jungle.
This is where some of Glory's family are fighting."
"Is that where Glory is? And the baby? Or are they in the city?"
Mr. Calagua is nervous. "This is the part that may be far fetched. It
is said that Glory is a famous heroine of the fight against the Nips."
"Are you telling me she's dead? If she's dead, just tell me."
"No, I have no information that she is dead. But she is a heroine. This
is for certain."
The next day, Bobby Shaftoe's malaria comes back and keeps him laid up
for about a week. The Calaguas move him right into their house and bring in
the town doctor to look after him. It's the same doctor who delivered
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe two years ago.
When he's feeling a little stronger, he lights out for the south. It
takes him three weeks to reach the northern outskirts of Manila, hitching
rides on trains and trucks, or sloshing through paddies in the middle of the
night. He kills two Nipponese soldiers stealthily, and three of them in a
firefight at an intersection. Each time, he has to go to ground for a few
days to avoid capture. But get to Manila he does.
He can't go into the heart of the city in addition to being really
stupid, it would just slow him down. Instead he skirts it, taking advantage
of the thriving resistance network. He is passed from one barangay to the
next, all the way around the outskirts of Manila, until he has reached the
coastal plain between Laguna de Bay and Manila Bay. At this point nothing is
left to the south except for a few miles of rice paddies and then the
volcanic mountains where Altamiras are making names for themselves as
guerilla fighters. During his trip he has heard a thousand rumors about
them. Most of them are patently false people telling him what he obviously
wants to hear. But several times he has heard what sounds like a genuine
scrap of information about Glory.
They say that she has a healthy young son, living in the apartment in
the Malate neighborhood of Manila, being cared for by the extended family
while his mother serves in the war.
They say that she has put her nursing skills to work, acting as a sort
of Florence Nightingale for the Huks.
They say that she is a messenger for the Fil American forces, that no
one surpasses her daring in crossing through Nipponese checkpoints carrying
secret messages and other contraband.
The last part doesn't make much sense to Shaftoe. Which is she, a nurse
or a messenger? Maybe they have her confused with someone else. Or maybe
she's both maybe she's smuggling medicine through the checkpoints.
The farther south he gets, the more information he hears. The same
rumors and anecdotes pop up over and over again, differing only in their
small details. He runs into half a dozen people who are dead certain that
Glory is south of here, working as a messenger for a brigade of Huk
guerillas in the mountains above Calamba.
He spends Christmas Day in a fisherman's hut on the shores of the big
lake, Laguna de Bay. There are plenty of mosquitoes. Another bout of malaria
strikes him then; he spends a couple of weeks wracked with fever dreams,
having bizarre nightmares about Glory.
Finally he gets well enough to move again, and hitches a boat ride into
the lakeside town of Calamba. The black volcanoes that loom above it are a
welcome sight. They look nice and cool, and they remind him of the ancestral
Shaftoe territory. According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to
come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields,
raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in
sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed
uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way away from the
malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. His journey's almost over.
But he gets stuck in Calamba, forced to hide in a boathouse, when the
city's Nipponese Air Force troops begin gathering their forces for some kind
of a move. Those Huks up on the mountain have been giving them a hard time,
and the Nips are getting crazed and vicious.
The leader of the local Huks finally sends an emissary to get Shaftoe's
story. The emissary goes away and several days pass. Finally a Fil American
lieutenant returns bearing two pieces of good news: the Americans have
landed in force at Lingayen Gulf, and Glory is alive and working with the
Huks only a few miles away.
"Help me get out of this town," Shaftoe pleads. "Take me out in a boat
on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move."
"Move where?" says the lieutenant, playing stupid.
"To the high ground! To join those Huks!"
"You would be killed. The ground is booby trapped. The Huks are
extremely vigilant."
"But "
"Why don't you go the other way?" the lieutenant asks. "Go to Manila."
"Why would I want to go there?"
"Your son is there. And that is where you are needed. Soon the big
battle will be in Manila."
"Okay," Shaftoe says, "I'll go to Manila. But first I want to see
Glory."
"Ah," the lieutenant says, as if light has finally dawned. "You say you
want to see Glory."
"I'm not just saying it. I do want to see Glory."
The lieutenant exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and shakes his head.
"No you don't," he says flatly.
"What?"
"You don't want to see Glory."
"How can you say that? Are you fucking out of your mind?"
The lieutenant's face goes stony. "Very well," he says, "I will make
inquiries. Perhaps Glory will come here and visit you."
"That's crazy. It's much too dangerous."
The lieutenant laughs. "No, you don't understand," he says. "You are a
white man in a provincial city in the Philippines occupied by starving,
berserk Nips. It is impossible for you to show your face outside.
Impossible. Glory, on the other hand, is free to move."
"You said they're inspecting people almost every block."
"They will not bother Glory."
"Do the Nips ever you know. Molest women?"
"Ah. You are worried about Glory being raped." The lieutenant takes
another long draw on his cigarette. "I can assure you that this will not
happen." He rises to his feet, tired of the conversation. "Wait here," he
says. "Gather your strength for the Battle of Manila."
He walks out, leaving Shaftoe more frustrated than ever.
Two days later, the owner of the boathouse, who speaks very little
English, shakes Shaftoe awake before sunrise. He beckons Shaftoe into a
small boat and rows him out into the lake, then half a mile up the shore
toward a sandbar. The dawn is just breaking over the other side of the big
lake, illuminating planet sized cumulus clouds. It's as if the biggest fuel
dump in the whole world is being blown up in a sky diced into vast
trapezoids by the linear contrails of American planes on dawn patrol.
Glory is strolling out on the sandbar. He can't see her face because
she is wrapped in a silk scarf, but he would know the shape of her body
anywhere. She walks back and forth along the shore, letting the warm water
of the lake lap against her bare feet. She is really loving that sunrise she
keeps her back turned to Shaftoe so that she can enjoy it. What a flirt.
Shaftoe gets as hard as an oar. He pats his back pocket, making sure he's
well stocked with I SHALL RETURN condoms. It will be tricky, bedding down
with Glory on a sandbar with this old codger here, but maybe he can pay the
guy to go out and exercise his back for an hour.
The guy keeps looking over his shoulder to judge the distance to the
sandbar. When they are about a stone's throw away, he sits up and ships the
oars. They coast for a few yards and then come to a stop.
"What are you doing?" Shaftoe asks. Then he heaves a sigh. "You want
money?" He rubs his thumb and fingertips together. "Huh? Like that?"
But the guy is just staring into his face, with an expression as tough
and stony as anything that Shaftoe has seen on a hundred battlefields around
the world. He waits for Shaftoe to shut up, then cocks his head and jerks it
back in the direction of Glory.
Shaftoe looks up at Glory, just as she's turning around to face him.
She reaches up with clublike hands, all wrapped up in long strips of cloth
like a mummy's, and paws the scarf away from her face.
Or what used to be a face. Now it's just the front of her skull.
Bobby Shaftoe breathes in deep, and lets out a scream that can probably
be heard in downtown Manila.
The boatman casts an anxious look toward the town, then stands up,
blocking Shaftoe's view as he's drawing in another breath. One of the oars
is in his hands. Shaftoe is just cutting loose with another scream when the
oar clocks him in the side of the head.
Chapter 80 THE PRIMARY
The sun has made a long, skidding crash landing along the Malay
Peninsula a few hundred kilometers west, breaking open and spilling its
thermonuclear fuel over about half of the horizon, trailing out a wall of
salmon and magenta clouds that have blown a gash all the way through the
shell of the atmosphere and erupted into space. The mountain containing the
Crypt is just a charcoal shard against that backdrop. Randy is annoyed with
the sunset for making it difficult to see the construction site. By now the
scar in the cloud forest has mostly healed over, or, at least, some kind of
green stuff has taken over the bare, lipstick colored mud. A few GOTO
ENGINEERING containers still glower in the color distorting light of the
mercury vapor lamps around the entrance, but most of them have either moved
inside the Crypt or gone back to Nippon. Randy can make out the headlights
of one house sized Goto truck winding down the road, probably filled with
debris for another one of the sultan's land reclamation projects.
Seated up in the plane's nose, Randy can actually look forward out his
window and see that they are landing on the new runway, built partly on such
fill. The buildings of downtown are streaks of blue green light on either
side of the plane, tiny black human figures frozen in them: a man with a
phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, a woman in a skirt hugging a
pile of books to her chest but thinking about something far away. The view
turns empty and indigo as the plane's nose tilts up for the landing, and
then Randy's looking out over the Sulu Sea at dusk, where the badjaos' kite
sailed boats are scuttling into port from a day's fishing, hung all about
with gutted stingrays, flying fresh sharks' tails like flags. Not long ago
it was ridiculously exotic to him, but now he feels more at home here then
he did in California.
For Sultan Class passengers, everything happens with cinematic, quick
cut speed. The plane lands, a beautiful woman hands you your jacket, and you
get off. The planes used by Asian airlines must have special chutes in the
tail where flight attendants are ejected into the stratosphere on their
twenty eighth birthdays.
Usually there's someone waiting for a Sultan Class passenger. This
evening it's John Cantrell, still ponytailed but now clean shaven;
eventually the heat has its way with everyone. He's even taken to shaving
the back of his neck, a good trick for shedding a couple of extra BTUs.
Cantrell greets Randy with an awkward simultaneous handshake and one armed
hug/body check maneuver.
"Good to see you, John," Randy says.
"You too, Randy," John says, and each man averts his eyes shyly.
"Who's where?"
"You and I are here in the airport. Avi checked into a hotel in
downtown San Francisco for the duration."
"Good. I didn't think he was safe in that house by himself."
Cantrell looks provoked. "Any particular reason? Have there been
threats?"
"None that I know of. But it's hard to ignore the high number of
vaguely terrifying people wrapped up in this."
"No victim Avi. Beryl's flying back to S.F. from Amsterdam actually
she's probably there by now."
"I heard she was in Europe. Why?"
"Strange government shit is going on there. I'll tell you later."
"Where's Eb?"
"Eb has been holed up in the Crypt for a week with his team, doing this
kind of incredible D Day like push to finalize the biometric identification
system. We won't bother him. Tom's been drifting back and forth between his
house and the Crypt, running various kinds of torture tests on the internal
Crypt network systems. Probing the inner trust boundaries. That's where
we're going now."
"To the inner trust boundaries?"
"No! Sorry. His house." Cantrell shakes his head. "It's ... well. It's
not the house I would build."
"I want to see it."
"His paranoia is getting just a little out of hand."
"Hey speaking of that.. ." Randy stops. He was about to tell Cantrell
about Pontifex, but they are very close to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, and
people are looking at them. There's no way of telling who might be
listening. "I'll tell you later."
Cantrell looks momentarily baffled and then grins wickedly. "Good one."
"We have a car?"
"I borrowed Tom's car. His Humvee. Not one of those cushy civilian
models. A real military one."
"Oh, that's great," Randy says. "Does it come complete with big machine
gun on the back?"
"He looked into it he could certainly get a license to own one in
Kinakuta but his wife drew the line at having an actual heavy machine gun in
their domicile."
"How about you? Where do you stand on this gun stuff?"
"I own them and know how to use them, as you are aware," Cantrell says.
They are winding their way down a gauntlet of duty free shops, really
more of a duty free shopping mall. Randy cannot figure out who actually buys
all of these large bottles of liquor and expensive belts. What kind of
blandly orgiastic lifestyle demands this particular selection of goods?
In the time that's thus passed Cantrell has evidently decided that a
more thorough answer to Randy's gun question is merited. "But the more I
practiced with them the more scared I got. Or maybe depressed."
"What do you mean?" This is Randy in unaccustomed sounding board mode,
psychotherapeutically prompting Cantrell for his feelings. It must have been
a weird day for John Cantrell, and no doubt there are some feelings that
need to be addressed.
"Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and
shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face to face with what a
desperate, last ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the
point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have
completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in
making sure we could do without them."
"And hence the Crypt?" Randy asks.
"My involvement in the Crypt is arguably a direct result of a few very
bad dreams that I had about guns."
It is wonderfully healthy to be talking like this, but it is a
portentous departure from their usual hard core technical mode. They are
wondering about whether it is even worth it for them to be mixed up in this
stuff. Heedless certainty sure is easier.
"Well, what about those Secret Admirers who were hanging around outside
Ordo?" Randy asks.
"What about them? You're asking me about their state of mind?"
"Yeah. That is what we are talking about. States of mind."
Cantrell shrugs. "I don't know specifically who they were. I'd guess
there are one or two honest to god scary fanatics. Setting them aside, maybe
a third of them are just too young and immature to understand what's going
on. It was just a lark for them. The other two thirds probably had very
sweaty palms."
"They looked like they were trying awfully hard to keep up a cheerful
front."
"They were probably happy to get out of there, and to go sit in a dark
cool room and drink beer afterwards. Certainly a lot of them have been
sending me e mail about the Crypt since then."
"As an alternative to violent resistance to the United States
Government, I assume and hope you mean."
"Exactly. Sure. I mean, that's what the Crypt is becoming. Right?"
The question sounds a little querulous to Randy. "Right," he says. He
wonders why he feels so much more settled about this stuff than John
Cantrell does, and then recalls, that he has nothing left to lose.
Randy takes one last breath of dry, machine cooled air and holds it
refreshingly in his lungs as they step out into the heat of the evening. He
has learned to relax into the climate; you can't fight it. There is a
humming logjam of black Mercedes Benzes waiting to pick up the Sultan–
and Vizier Class passengers. Very few Wallah Class passengers get off at
Kinakuta; most of them are in transit to India. Because this is the kind of
place where everything works just perfectly, Randy and John are in the
Humvee about twenty seconds later, and twenty seconds after that driving at
a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour down a long horizontal shaft of
ghastly blue green freeway light.
"We have been assuming that this Humvee is not bugged," Cantrell says,
"so, if you were holding back on something, you can speak freely now."
Randy writes, Let's stop assuming anything of the kind on a notepad and
holds it up. Cantrell raises his eyebrows one notch but of course does not
seem especially surprised he spends all of his time around people trying to
outdo each other in paranoia. Randy writes We have been under srv'nce by a
former NSA hondo gone private. Then he adds, Prob. Working for 1 or more
Crypt clients.
How do you know? Cantrell mouths.
Randy sighs, then writes: I was contacted by a Wizard.
Then, as long as John's preoccupied with working his way around a left
lane fender bender, he adds, Think of it as due diligence, underworld style.
Cantrell says out loud, "Tom has been pretty scrupulous about making
sure his house is bug free. I mean, he built the thing, or had it built,
from the ground up." He veers off onto an exit ramp and plunges into the
jungle.
"Good. We can talk there," Randy says, then writes, Remember the new
U.S. Embassy in Moscow bugs mixed into the concrete by KGB had to be torn
down.
Cantrell grabs the pad and scribbles blind on the dashboard while
maneuvering the Humvee up a curving mountain road into the cloud forest.
What do you want to talk about that is so secret? Arethusa? Give me agenda
pls.
Randy: (1) Lawsuit & whether Epiphyte can continue to exist. (2)
That NSA tapper, and Wizard, exist. (3) Maybe Arethusa.
Cantrell grins and writes, I have good news re: Tombstone's /.
"/" in this context is UNIX for the root of the file system, which in
the case of Tombstone is synonymous with the hard drive that Randy tried to
wipe. Randy raises his eyebrows skeptically and Cantrell grins, nods, and
draws his thumb across his throat.
Chez Howard is a flat roofed concrete structure that from certain
angles looks like a very large drainage culvert set vertically in a mound of
grout on the top of a foothill. It becomes visible from one of those angles
about ten minutes before they actually arrive, because the road must make
several switchbacks across the broad slope of that foothill, which has been
involuted and fractalized by relentless drainage. Even when it's not raining
here, the mere condensation of moisture from the South Seas breezes gathers
on leaves and rains from their drip tips all the time. Between the rain and
the plant life, erosion must be a violent and ravenous force here, which
makes Randy a little uneasy about all of these mountains, because mountains
could only exist in such an environment if the underlying tectonic forces
were thrusting rock into the air at a rate that would make your ears pop
standing still. But then again, having just lost a house to a temblor, he is
naturally inclined to a conservative view.
Cantrell is now drawing an elaborate diagram, and has even slowed down,
almost to a stop, the better to draw it. It begins with a tall rectangle.
Set within that is a parallelogram, the same size, but skewed a little bit
downwards, and with a little circle drawn in the middle of one edge. Randy
realizes he's looking at a perspective view of a door frame with its door
hanging slightly ajar, the little circle being its knob. STEEL FRAME,
Cantrell writes, hollow metal channels. Quick meandering scribbles suggest
the matrix of wall surrounding it, and the floor underneath. Where the
uprights of the doorframe are planted in the floor, Cantrell draws small,
carefully foreshortened circles. Holes in the floor. Then he encircles the
doorframe in a continuous hoop, beginning at one of those circles and
climbing up one side of the doorframe, across the top, down the other side,
through the other hole in the floor, and then horizontally beneath the door,
then up through the first hole again, completing the loop. He draws one or
two careful iterations of this and then numerous sloppy ones until the whole
thing is surrounded in a vague, elongated tornado. Many turns of fine wire.
Finally he draws two leads away from this huge door sized coil and connects
them to a sandwich of alternating long and short horizontal lines, which
Randy recognizes as the symbol for a battery. The diagram is completed with
a huge arrow drawn vigorously through the center of the doorway, like an
airborne battering ram, labeled B which means a magnetic field. Ordo
computer room door.
"Wow," Randy says. Cantrell has drawn a classic elementary school
electromagnet, the kind of thing young Randy made by winding a wire around a
nail and hooking it up to a lantern battery. Except that this one is wound
around the outside of a doorframe and, Randy guesses, hidden inside the
walls and beneath the floor so that no one would know it was there unless
they tore the building apart. Magnetic fields are the styli of the modern
world, they are what writes bits onto disks, or wipes them away. The
read/write heads of Tombstone's hard drive are exactly the same thing, but a
lot smaller. If they are fine pointed draftsman's pens, then what Cantrell's
drawn here is a firehose spraying India ink. It probably would have no
effect on a disk drive that was a few meters away from it, but anything that
was actually carried through that doorway would be wiped clean. Between the
pulse gun fired into the building from outside (destroying every chip within
range) and this doorframe hack (losing every bit on every disk) the Ordo
raid must have been purely a scrap hauling run for whoever organized it
Andrew Loeb or (according to the Secret Admirers) Attorney General
Comstock's sinister Fed forces who were using Andy as a cat's paw. The only
thing that would have made it through that doorway intact would have been
information stored on CD ROM or other nonmagnetic media, and Tombstone had
none of that.
Finally they have made it up to the top of the hill, which Tom Howard
has shaved to the bedrock in a kind of monk's tonsure. Not because he hates
living things, though he probably has no particular affection for them, but
to hold at bay the forces of erosion and to create a defensive glacis across
which the movements of incredibly poisonous snakes, squirrel sized insects,
opportunistic lower primates, and villainous upper primates will be visible
on the array of video cameras he has built into fairly subtle recesses and
crevices up on the walls. Seen up close, the house is surprisingly not as
dour and fortresslike as it looked at first. It is not just a single large
culvert but a bundle of them in different diameters and lengths, like a
faggot of bamboo. There is a decent number of windows, particularly on the
north side where there's a view, down the slope that John and Randy have
just climbed, to a crescent shaped beach. The windows are set deeply into
the walls, partly to back them out of the nearly vertical rays of the sun
and partly because each one has a retractable steel shutter, hidden in the
wall, that can be dropped down in front of it. It is an okay house, and
Randy wonders if Tom Howard would be willing to deed it over to the Dentist
and hock his colossal suite of Gomer Bolstrood furniture and move his family
into a crowded apartment building just in order to retain control of
Epiphyte Corporation. But maybe that won't even be necessary.
John and Randy climb out of the Humvee to the sound of gunfire.
Artificial light radiates upwards from a slot neatly dissected out of the
jungle nearby. Humidity and clouds of insects make light a nearly solid and
palpable thing here. John Cantrell leads Randy across the perfectly sterile
parking slab and into a screened and fenced tunnel that has been stabbed
into the black vegetation. Underfoot is some kind of black plastic grid that
keeps the nude soil from becoming a glue trap. They walk down the tunnel,
until twenty or thirty paces later it opens up into an extremely long,
narrow clearing: the source of the light. At the far end of it, the ground
rises abruptly in a sort of berm, partly natural, Randy thinks, and partly
enhanced with fill dirt excavated from the house's foundation. Two large
paper targets in the shape of human silhouettes are clipped to a rack there.
At the near end, two men with ear protectors pulled down around their necks
are examining a gun. One of these men is Tom Howard. Randy is struck but not
really astonished by the fact that the other one is Douglas MacArthur
Shaftoe, evidently fresh in from Manila. The gun looks like exactly the same
model that some of the black hatted and bandanna masked posse were carrying
yesterday in Los Altos: a long pipe with a sickle shaped clip curving away
from one side, and a very simple stock made of a few bare metal parts bolted
together.
Doug is in the middle of saying something, and is not the type to
interrupt his train of thought and fall all over himself being friendly just
because Randy has recently traversed the Pacific Ocean. "I never knew my
father," he says, "but my Filipino uncles used to tell me stories that he
had told. When he was on Guadalcanal, they the Marines were still using
their Springfields, the ought three model, so four decades old when finally
the M 1 rifle began to show up. So they took one of each rifle and tossed it
into the water and rolled it around in the sand for a while and did God
knows what else to it but nothing that would be unusual in a real combat
situation, for a Marine and then tried to operate them and found that the
ought three still worked and the M 1 didn't. So they stuck to their
Springfields. And I would say that some testing along those lines would be
in order if you think you are really designing an insurgency weapon, as you
say. Good evening, Randy."
"Doug, how are you?"
"I am just fine, thank you!" Doug is one of these guys who always
interprets "how are you" as a literal request for information, not just an
empty formality, and always seems slightly touched that someone would care
enough to ask. "Mr. Howard here says that when you were sitting on top of
that car typing you were actually doing something clever. And dangerous. At
least from a legal point of view."
"Were you monitoring that?" Randy asks Tom.
"I saw packets moving through the Crypt, and later saw you on
television. I put two and two together," Tom says. "Nice job, Randy." He
lumbers forward and shakes Randy's hand. This is an almost embarrassing
outpouring of emotion by Tom Howard standards.
"What I did there probably failed," Randy says. "If Tombstone's disk
was blanked, it was blanked by the doorframe coil, and not by what I did."
"Well, you deserve recognition anyway, which is what your friend is
trying to give you," Doug says, mildly irked at Randy's obtuseness.
"I should offer you a drink, and a chance to relax, and all of that,"
Tom says, looking towards his house, "but on the other hand Doug says you
were flying Sultan Class."
"Let's talk out here," Randy says. "But actually there is one thing you
could get me."
"What's that?" Tom asks.
Randy pulls the little disembodied hard drive out of his pocket and
holds it up in the light, the wire ribbon adangle. "A laptop computer and a
screwdriver."
"Done," Tom says, and disappears down the tunnel. Doug meanwhile begins
dismantling the weapon, as if just to keep his hands busy. He takes the
parts out one by one and regards them curiously.
"What do you think of the HEAP gun?" Cantrell asks.
"I don't think it's as crazy as when I first heard of it," Doug says,
"but if your friend Avi thinks that people are going to be able to
manufacture rifled gun barrels in their basements to protect themselves
against ethnic cleansing, he's got another thing coming."
"Rifled barrels are hard," Cantrell says. "There's no way around it.
They'd have to be stockpiled and smuggled. But the idea is that anyone who
downloaded the HEAP, and who had access to some basic machine tools, could
build the rest of the weapon."
"I need to sit down with you sometime and explain everything else
that's wrong with the idea," Doug says.
Randy changes the subject. "How's Amy?"
Doug looks up and eyes Randy carefully. "You want my opinion? I think
she is lonely, and in need of reliable support and companionship."
Now that Doug has totally alienated both Randy and John, the gun range
is completely silent for a while, which is probably how Doug likes it. Tom
comes out with a laptop in one hand and, in the other, half a dozen blue
plastic water bottles all shrink wrapped together, already dribbling a trail
of condensation.
"I have an agenda," Cantrell says, holding up the notepad.
"Wow! You guys are organized," Tom says.
"Item the first: Lawsuit and whether Epiphyte can continue to exist."
Randy lays the laptop out on the same table where Doug is working with the
HEAP gun and begins to remove screws. "I assume you guys know of the lawsuit
and have worked out the implications of it yourself," he says. "If the
Dentist can prove that Doug discovered the wreck as a byproduct of work he
did for us, and if the value of that wreck is high enough compared to the
value of the company, then the Dentist owns us, and for all practical
purposes owns the Crypt."
"Whoa! Wait a minute. The Sultan owns the Crypt," Tom says. "If the
Dentist controls Epiphyte, all he gets out of it is a contract to provide
certain technical services in the Crypt."
Randy senses everyone's looking at him. He twirls screws out of the
computer, refusing to agree with this.
"Unless there's something here I'm not getting," Tom says.
"I guess I'm just being paranoid and sort of assuming that the Dentist
is somehow collaborating with forces in the U.S. government that are anti
privacy and anti crypto," Randy says.
"Attorney General Comstock's cabal, in other words," Tom says.
"Yeah. For which I have never actually seen any evidence at all. But in
the wake of the Ordo raid everyone seems to be assuming it. If that is the
case, and the Dentist ends up providing technical services to the Crypt,
then the Crypt is compromised. We have to assume, in that case, that
Comstock has a man on the inside."
"Not just Comstock," Cantrell says.
"Okay, the U.S. government."
"Not just the U.S. government," Cantrell says. "The Black Chamber."
"What the hell do you mean by that?" Doug asks.
"There was a high level conference a couple of weeks ago in Brussels.
Hastily organized we think. Chaired by Attorney General Comstock.
Representatives of all the G7 countries and a few others. We know people
from the NSA were there. People from Internal Revenue. Treasury people
Secret Service. Their counterparts in the other countries. And a lot of
mathematicians known to have been co opted by the government. The U.S. vice
president was there. Basically we think that they are planning to form some
kind of international body to clamp down on crypto and particularly on
digital money."
"The International Data Transfer Regulatory Organization," Tom Howard
says.
"The Black Chamber is a nickname for that?" Doug asks.
"That's what people on the Secret Admirers mailing list have started
calling it," Cantrell says.
"Why form this organization now?" Randy wonders.
"Because the Crypt is about to go hot, and they know it," Cantrell
says.
"They are scared shitless about their ability to collect taxes when
everyone is using systems like the Crypt," Tom explains to Doug.
"This has been the talk of the Secret Admirers mailing list for the
last week. And so when Ordo was raided, it really hit a raw nerve.
"Okay," Randy says, "I've been wondering why people showed up there
almost immediately with guns and stranger things." He has got the laptop
opened up now and disconnected its hard drive.
"You have wandered off the agenda," Doug says, pulling an oily rag down
the barrel of the HEAP gun. "The question is, does the Dentist have you guys
by the balls, or only by the short hairs? And that question basically
revolves around yours truly. Right?"
"Right!" Randy says, a little too forcefully he's feeling desperate for
a change in subject. The whole Kepler/Epiphyte/Semper Marine thing is
stressful enough all by itself, and the last thing he needs is to be hanging
around with people who believe it is nothing more than a skirmish in a war
to decide the fate of the Free World a preliminary round of the Apocalypse.
Avi's obsession with the Holocaust seemed fine to Randy as long as
Holocausts were things that happened long ago or far away being personally
involved in one is something Randy can do without. He should have stayed in
Seattle. But he didn't, and so the next best thing for him is to limit the
conversation to straightforward things like bars of gold.
"In order for him to have a claim, the Dentist needs to prove that
Semper Marine found that wreck when it was doing the cable survey. Right?"
Doug asks.
"Right," Cantrell says, before Randy can step in and say that it's a
bit more complicated than that.
"Well, I have been kicking around this part of the world for half of my
life, and I can always testify that I found the wreck on an earlier survey.
That son of a bitch can never prove that I'm lying," Doug says.
"Andrew Loeb his lawyer is smart enough to know that. He will not put
you on the stand," Randy says, screwing his own hard drive into place.
"Fine. Then all he's got is circumstantial evidence. Namely, the
proximity of the wreck to the cable survey corridor."
"Right. Which implies a correlation," Cantrell says.
"Well, it is not that damn close," Doug says. "I was cutting a very
wide swath at the time."
"I have bad news," Randy says. "First of all, it is a civil case and so
circumstantial evidence is all he needs to win. Secondly, I just heard from
Avi, on the plane, that Andrew Loeb is filing a second suit, for breach of
contract."
"What goddamn contract?" Doug demands.
"He has anticipated everything you just said," Randy says. "He still
doesn't know where the wreck is. But if it turns out to be miles and miles
away from the survey corridor, he will claim that by surveying such a wide
swath you were basically risking the Dentist's money in order to go
prospecting, and that thus the Dentist still deserves a share of the
proceeds."
"Why does the Dentist want a beef with me?" Doug says.
"Because then he can pressure you into testifying against Epiphyte. You
get to keep all the gold. That gold becomes damages which the Dentist
leverages into control of Epiphyte."
"Jesus fuckin' Christ!" Doug exclaims. "He can kiss my ass."
"I know that," Randy says, "but if he gets wind of that attitude, he'll
just come up with another tactic and file another suit."
Doug begins, "Well that's kind of defeatist "
"Where I'm headed with this," Randy says, "is that we cannot fight the
Dentist on his turf which is the courtroom any more than the Viet Cong could
have fought a pitched battle in the open against the U.S. Army. So there are
some really good reasons to get that gold out of the wreck surreptitiously,
before the Dentist can prove it's there."
Doug looks outraged. "Randy, have you ever tried to swim while holding
a gold bar in one hand?"
"There's got to be a way to do it. Little submarines or something."
Doug laughs out loud and mercifully decides not to debunk the concept
of little submarines. "Supposing it was possible. What do I do with the gold
then? If I deposit it in a bank account, or spend it on something, what's to
keep this Andrew Loeb guy from taking that as circumstantial evidence that
the wreck had a ton of money in it? You're saying I have to sit on this
money for the rest of my life in order to protect you from this lawsuit."
"Doug. You can do this," Randy says. "You get the gold. You put it on a
boat. My friends here can explain the rest." Randy fits the laptop's plastic
case back together and begins maneuvering the little screws back into their
recesses.
Cantrell says, "You bring the boat here."
Tom continues, "To that beach, right down the hill. I'll be waiting for
you with the Humvee."
"And you and Tom can drive it downtown and deposit that bullion in the
vaults of the Central Bank of Kinakuta." Cantrell concludes.
Someone has finally said something that actually knocked Doug Shaftoe
off balance. "And get what in return?" he asks suspiciously.
"Electronic cash from the Crypt. Anonymous. Untraceable. And
untaxable."
Doug's regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs.
"What'll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?"
"Soon enough, it'll buy you anything that money can buy," Tom says. "I
would have to know a little more about it," Doug says. "But once again we
are straying from the agenda. Let's leave it at this: you guys need me to
strip that wreck bare, quickly and secretly."
"It's not just what we need. It might be in your best interests, too,"
Randy says, groping on the back of the laptop for the power switch.
"Item the second: A former NSA hondo is surveilling us and something
about a Wizard?" John says.
"Yeah."
Doug's giving Randy a queer look and so Randy launches into a brief
summary of his classification system of Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men not
to mention Gollums, which makes practically no sense to Doug, who hasn't
read Lord of the Rings. Randy goes on to tell them about his conversation
with Pontifex on the airplane phone. John Cantrell and Tom Howard are
interested in this, as Randy would expect them to be, but what surprises him
is how intently Doug Shaftoe listens.
"Randy!" Doug almost shouts. "Didn't you at any point ask this guy why
Old Man Comstock was so interested in the Arethusa messages?"
"Coincidentally, this is the third item on the agenda," Cantrell says.
"Why didn't you ask him on the ski lift?" Randy jokes.
"I was giving him a very closely reasoned explanation of why I was
about to sever the linkage between his ugly and perfumed corporeal self and
his eternally condemned soul," Doug says. "Seriously! You got the messages
from your grandpa's old war souvenirs. Right?"
"Right."
"And your grandpa Waterhouse picked them up where?"
"Judging from the dates, he must have been in Manila."
"Well, what do you imagine could have happened in Manila around that
time that would be so damned important to Earl Comstock?"
"I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code."
"But that's bullshit!" Doug says. "Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any
time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't
you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to
be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your
head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'? Now. What do you think is
the real reason Comstock wanted to crack Arethusa?"
"I have no idea," Randy says.
"The reason is gold," Doug says.
Randy snorts. "You have got gold on the brain."
"Did I or did I not take you out into the jungle and show you
something?" Doug demands.
"You did. Sorry."
"Gold is the only thing that could account for it. Because otherwise,
the Philippines just were not that important during the fifties, to justify
such an effort at the NSA."
"There was an ongoing Huk insurrection," Tom says. "But you're right.
The real focus around here anyway was Vietnam."
"You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war which
was Old Man Comstock's brainchild the American military presence in the
Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling
over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking
for something. I think they were looking for the Primary."
"As in primary gold repository?"
"You got it."
"Is that what Marcos eventually found?"
"Opinions differ," Doug says. "A lot of people think that the Primary
is still waiting to be discovered."
"Well, there isn't any information about the Primary, or anything else,
in these messages," Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode,
with a torrent of error messages triggered by its inability to find various
pieces of hardware that were present on Randy's laptop (which is in a Ford
dealership's dumpster in Los Altos) but are not on Tom's. And yet the basic
kernel works to the point that Randy can look at the file system and makes
sure it's intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its long list
of short files, each file the result of running a different stack of cards
through Chester's card reader. Randy opens up the first one and finds
several lines of random capital letters.
"How do you know there's no information about the primary in those
messages, Randy?" Doug asks.
"The NSA couldn't decrypt these messages in ten years," Randy says. "It
all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator."
Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types
grep AADAA *
and hits the return key. It is a command to find the opening letter
group in the ETC card messages, the famous one to which Pontifex had
alluded. The machine answers back almost immediately with an empty prompt,
meaning that the search failed.
"Ho ly shit," Randy says.
"What?" everyone says at once.
Randy takes a long, deep breath. "These are not the same messages that
Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break."
Chapter 81 DELUGE
It takes Goto Dengo about half a minute to waddle up the narrow
entrance of the tunnel. He is trailing the fingers of one hand along the
stone ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of the drills. Behind
him he can hear the four members of his crew making their way along,
muttering to each other calmly.
His fingers slide over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he's
into the main drift now. He stands up and wades forward. Perfect blackness
is cozy and reassuring to him in it, he can always pretend that he is still
a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that the last few years of his
life have never happened.
But in fact he is a grownup and he is trapped in a hole in the
Philippines and surrounded by armies of demons. He opens the valves on an
acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this
point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but his crew is not,
and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar
that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.
"Is everything okay, Lieutenant?" says one of his crew, fifty meters
behind him.
"Fine," Goto Dengo says, loudly and clearly. "You four be careful you
do not break your toes on this bar."
So now, Wing and Rodolfo and their men, waiting up ahead, know the
number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.
"Where are the last few workers?" one of the crew shouts.
"In the fool's vault."
It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault,
because it is packed with treasure. The starry core of a galaxy must look
like this. They clamber up the shaft in its ceiling and make their way to
the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric
light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at
the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.
"Shut off your headlamps," Goto Dengo says, "to conserve fuel. I will
leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power."
He pulls a fistful of white cotton from a sterile box. It is the
cleanest whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into
smaller wads, like Father Ferdinand breaking the bread of the mass, and
passes them out to the men, who stuff it ritualistically into their ears.
"There is no more time to waste," he hollers, "Captain Noda must be growing
impatient out there."
"Sir!" one of the men says, standing at attention and handing him a
pair of wires marked MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION.
"Very well," Goto Dengo says, and screws the wires down to a pair of
terminals on a wooden switch box.
It seems as though he should say something ceremonious, but nothing
comes to mind. Nipponese men are dying all over the Pacific without first
getting to make speeches.
He clenches his teeth together, shuts his eyes, and twists the switch
handle.
The shock wave comes through the floor first, whacking the soles of
their feet like a flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and
strikes them like a moving wall of stone. The cotton in the ears seems to
accomplish nothing. Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce off the backs of their
sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have been crisply sheared off
at the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his lungs.
They are empty for the first time since the moment of his birth. Like
newborn infants, he and the other men can only writhe and look around
themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.
One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass
around the jagged bottom of the bottle, each man taking a gulp of what
remains. Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that
the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely
shouts: "Check your watches." They all do. "In two hours, Captain Noda will
demolish the plug on the bottom of the lake and flood the water traps. In
the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs get to work!"
They all hai, turn on their heels, and go their separate ways. It is
the first time that Goto Dengo has actually sent men off to their deaths.
But they are all dead men anyway, and so he doesn't know how to feel about
it.
If he still believed in the emperor still believed in the war he would
think nothing of it. But if he still believed, he wouldn't be doing what he
is about to do.
It is important to keep up the appearance that this is a normal
operation, and so he descends to the vault to perform his next scheduled
duty: inspect what used to be the main drift. The vault is filled with a fog
of rock dust around which his windpipe clenches like a fist grabbing a rope.
His acetylene lamp only makes the dust glow, giving him a visibility of
perhaps six inches. All he can see is the bullion right in front of his
face, which still glimmers beneath a film of dust and smoke. The shock wave
has deranged his formerly neat stacks of crates and bricks and turned the
entire hoard into a rude mound that is still shedding avalanches, seeking
its angle of repose. A 75 kilogram gold brick slides down the pile like a
runaway boxcar, emerging suddenly from the cloud of dust, and he jumps out
of its way. Bits of rock are still sifting down from the crazed ceiling and
plinking against his helmet.
He scrambles carefully over the heap, breathing through a wad of
cotton, until he can see what used to be the main drift. The dynamite has
done the right thing: shattered the roof of the drift into billions of
shards. Collapsed on the floor, they occupy a larger volume than the same
mass of stone did when it was all in one piece. The drift is filled with
tons of loose stone, all the way down to the entrance along the Tojo River,
where Captain Noda's men are at work even now, concealing the tiny puncture
wound behind river rocks.
He feels, rather than hears, a small explosion, and knows that some
thing is going wrong. No one should be setting off explosions now.
Movement in this place is agonizingly slow, like a nightmare when you
are trying to run away from a demon. It takes him so long to get back to the
Hall of Glory that there is almost no point in doing it; whatever was
happening is over when he arrives.
What he sees, when he arrives, is a group of three men waiting for him:
Wing, Rodolfo, and the Filipino named Bong.
"The soldiers?"
"All dead," Rodolfo says flatly, irritated by the stupidity of the
question.
"The others?"
"One soldier set off a grenade. Killed himself and my two men, Wing
says.
"Another soldier heard the grenade and had a knife ready when Agustin
came for him," Bong says. He shakes his head sorrowfully. "I think that
Agustin was not ready to kill a man. He hesitated."
Goto Dengo stares at Bong, fascinated. "And you?"
Bong doesn't understand the question for a moment. Then light dawns.
"Oh, no, I did not hesitate, Lieutenant Goto. A Nipponese soldier hurt my
sister one time, in a very inappropriate way."
Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the
other men are all looking at him expectantly. Then he checks his watch. He
is shocked to see that only half an hour has gone by since he set off the
dynamite.
"We have an hour and a half before the water traps are flooded. If we
are not in the Bubble by then, we will be sealed off, with no escape
possible," says Goto Dengo.
"We go there and wait," Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.
"No. Captain Noda listens, outside, for more explosions," Goto Dengo
says, also in Chinese; then, in English, tells the Filipinos, "We have to
set off the demolition charges at certain times or Noda san will grow
suspicious."
"Whoever sets them off will be trapped forever in this chamber,"
Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.
"We will not set them off from here," says Goto Dengo, pulling the lid
from a crate. Inside are several long coils of two stranded telephone wire.
He hands the coils out to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. They understand, and
begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.
They retreat through Golgotha in stages, lugging battery packs with
them and unrolling the wires as they go, dynamiting the tunnel sections
behind them one by one. As they do this, certain oddities of the tunnel
system finally become clear to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. It becomes fully
evident to them, for the first time, that the entire complex was carefully
designed by Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes. To a
loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like precisely what he
was ordered to build: a vault laced with booby traps. But to the four men
sealed inside, Golgotha has a second function. It is an escape machine. As
the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and other features suddenly become
clear, they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at Goto Dengo, with
the same expressions as the soldiers wore, weeks ago, when they discovered
the Buddha in the Mercedes.
Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve
out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who
asked, that it was a water reservoir, put there to increase the deadliness
of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four meters in diameter,
that begins in the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a
few meters, then dead ends. Ladders still cling to its walls, and by
ascending, they can reach a rock ledge big enough to sit on. Canteens of
water and boxes of biscuits have already been stocked here by Wing and his
men.
By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the
others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses
this. It fills him with unutterable misery.
They have fifteen minutes to wait. The others spend it sipping water
and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills it with self recrimination. "I am a
loathsome worm," he says, "a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy
to clean out the latrines of true soldiers of Nippon. I am bereft totally
cut off from the nation I've betrayed. I am now part of a world of people
who hate Nippon and who therefore hate me but at the same time I am hateful
to my own kind. I will stay here and die."
"You are alive," Rodolfo says. "You have saved our lives. And you are
rich."
"Rich?"
Wing and Rodolfo and Bong look at each other, confused. "Yes, of
course!" Bong says.
Goto Dengo is still looking nonplussed. Reckoning that he has merely
gone deaf or daft from the explosions, Bong reaches into his trousers and
pulls out a hand sewn pouch, teases it open, and displays a healthy double
handful of diamonds. Wing and Rodolfo scarcely take note.
Goto Dengo looks away despondently. He himself has saved no treasure
except these men's lives. But that's not why he feels so bad. He had hoped
that being thus saved they would all be noble, and not think of the
treasure. But maybe that was too much to hope for.
A distant thump lifts them slightly off the ledge, just for a moment.
Goto Dengo feels a strange sensation in his head: the air pressure is
beginning to rise. The column of air trapped in the diagonal is being
compressed by a piston of water rushing down it from the lake. Captain Noda
has dynamited the plug.
Goto Dengo is so excited that he forgets to die.
He is an engineer, trapped inside one of his own machines. The machine
was designed to keep him alive, and he will never know whether it worked
unless it works. After he has achieved that satisfaction, he supposes, he
can always kill himself at leisure.
He pinches his nose shut, presses his lips together, and begins to blow
air into his Eustachian tubes, equalizing the pressure. The others follow
his lead.
All of Golgotha's traps are basically the same. All of them derive
their killing power from the pressure of the water communicated down to this
level from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. In any number of places in the
complex, false walls have been constructed, designed to be pierced by greedy
thieves, or to collapse of their own accord when thieves dig out the sand
that holds them up. Then the water will rush in with explosive force and
probably crush them before they have a chance to drown.
At its Golgotha end, the diagonal tunnel forks again and again, like a
river breaking up into distributaries. Goto Dengo explained it to inspecting
officers by likening it to the plumbing inside a modern hotel, which is
supplied by a single main that is pressurized by a distant water tower, but
which divides into many different pipes that supply pressurized water to
taps all over the structure.
Golgotha seethes, hisses, and moans as every pipe in its ramified
system is pressurized by the deluge unleashed by Captain Noda's dynamite
charge. The bubbles of air trapped at the ends of those pipes are seeking
escape: some are leaking out through cracks in the walls and others are
bubbling away into the diagonal. The surface of Lake Yamamoto must be
boiling like a cauldron, and Captain Noda must be standing above it,
watching the air flee Golgotha, grinning with satisfaction. In moments, the
floors of the tunnels are obscured by whirling lagoons of dirty water, and
the barrels and railcars that were left there have begun to rise, bobbing
like corks and clanging together.
Most of the air trapped in the Golgotha does not, however, come
bubbling up out of Lake Yamamoto. Most of it rises towards the Bubble,
because that is how Goto Dengo planned it. He knows it's working because his
ears begin to pop.
Eventually the water rises up into the Bubble itself, but it rises
slowly, because the pressure of the air in here has become quite high
already. As the water climbs, it further pressurizes the bubble of air in
which Goto Dengo and the others are trapped. The pressure of the air rises
steadily until it becomes equal to the pressure of the water. Then balance
is achieved, and the water cannot rise any more. Another kind of balance is
being reached within their bodies, as the compressed air floods into their
chests, and the nitrogen in that air seeps through the membranes of their
lungs and dissolves into their bloodstreams.
"Now we wait," says Goto Dengo, and shuts off his acetylene lamp,
leaving them in darkness. "As long as we do not burn lamps, there is enough
air in this chamber to keep us alive for several days. Captain Noda and his
men will spend at least that long tidying up the Bundok site, erasing all
traces of our work, and killing themselves. So we must wait, or else his men
will only kill us when we appear on the shores of Lake Yamamoto. I would
like to spend the time educating you on the subject of caisson disease, also
known as the bends."
***
Two days later they set off one last, relatively small dynamite charge,
blowing a hole through the wall of the Bubble that is large enough to admit
a human being. On the other side, the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto begins.
Rodolfo is more terrified than anyone else, and so they send him first.
Then goes Bong, and then Wing. Finally Goto Dengo leaves the foul, used up
air of the Bubble behind. Within a few moments they have found their way
into the ascending diagonal tunnel. They begin to swim uphill through total
darkness. All of them are trailing their hands against the tunnel ceiling,
feeling for the opening of the first vertical shaft. Rodolfo is supposed to
stop when he feels it, but the others must also be alert in case Rodolfo
misses.
They thud into one another in the darkness like a loosely connected
train bumping to a halt. Rodolfo has stopped with any luck, he has found the
first vertical shaft. Wing finally moves forward, and Goto Dengo follows
straight up the vertical shaft and finally into a bulb at its top where a
bubble of air has been trapped. The bulb is just barely wide enough to
accommodate four men. They pause there, all jammed together in a cluster of
bodies, heaving as they exhale the nitrogen– and carbon dioxide
tainted air that they've been living on for the last sixty seconds, and
breathe in fresh lungfuls. Goto Dengo feels his ears popping as pressure is
relieved.
They have covered only a small fraction of the four hundred and fifty
meters that separate Golgotha from the lake horizontally. But half of the
hundred meter vertical distance has already been covered. That is, the
pressure of the air they are breathing in this chamber is only half of what
it was in the Bubble.
Goto Dengo is not a diver, and knows very little of diving medicine.
But his father used to speak of how caissons were used to send workers deep
underwater, to build things or to mine. That is how he learned about caisson
disease, and how he learned the rule of thumb that most men will not suffer
its symptoms if you have them decompress for a while at half the original
air pressure. If they stop and breathe for a while, the nitrogen will come
out of the tissues. Once this is done, the air pressure may be halved again.
In the Bubble, the air pressure was nine or ten atmospheres. Here in
the first chamber, it's more like five. But there's not much air in this one
just enough to let them breathe for fifteen or twenty minutes, and bleed
nitrogen out of their tissues, and get lungfuls of air for the next leg of
the swim.
"Okay," Goto Dengo says, "we go." He finds Rodolfo in the darkness and
slaps him encouragingly on the shoulder. Rodolfo takes a series of deep
breaths, getting ready, and Goto Dengo recites the numbers that they all
know by heart: "Twenty five strokes straight. Then the tunnel bends up.
Forty strokes up a steep hill. Where the tunnel bends again, you go straight
up to the next air chamber."
Rodolfo nods, crosses himself, and then does a somersault in the water
and kicks himself downwards. Then goes Bong, then Wing, and finally Goto
Dengo.
This leg is very long. The last fifteen meters is a vertical ascent
into the air chamber. Goto Dengo had hoped that the natural buoyancy of
their bodies would make this easy, even if they were on the verge of
drowning. But as he is kic