ack, "I said I wouldn't be willing to
die. So "
"Don't give me that golden rule shit," Doug says. "If someone broke
into your house in the middle of the night and threatened your family, and
you had a shotgun in your hands, would you use it?"
Randy involuntarily looks towards Amy. Because this is not only an
ethical conundrum. It's also a test to determine whether Randy is fit to be
Doug's daughter's husband, and the father of his grandchildren. "Well, I
should hope so," Randy says. Amy's pretending not to listen.
The water all around them makes a spattering, searing noise. Everyone
cringes. Then they realize that a handful of small pebbles was tossed into
the water from above. They look up at the rim of the overhang, and see a
tiny, reciprocating movement: Jackie Woo, standing on the top of the bank,
waving his hand at them.
"My eyes are going," Doug says. "Does he look intact to you?"
"Yes!" Amy says. She beams her pearlies are very white in the sun and
waves back.
Jackie's grinning. He's carrying a long, muddy rod in one hand: his
mine probe. In the other, he's got a dirty canister about the size of a clay
pigeon. He holds it up and waggles it in the air. "Nip mine!" he shouts
gleefully.
"Well, put it the fuck down, you asshole!" Doug hollers, "after all
these years it's going to be incredibly unstable." Then he gets a look of
incredulous confusion. "Who the hell set off the other mine if it wasn't
you? Someone was screaming up there."
"I haven't found him," Jackie Woo says. "He stopped screaming."
"Do you think he's dead?"
"No."
"Did you hear any other voices?"
"No."
"Jesus Christ," Doug says, "someone's been shadowing us the whole way."
He turns around and looks up at the opposite bank, where John Wayne has now
probed his way to the edge and is taking this all in. Some kind of hand
gesture passes between them (they brought walkie talkies, but Doug scorns
them as a crutch for lightweights and wannabes). John Wayne settles down
onto his belly and gets out a pair of binoculars with objective lenses as
big as saucers and begins scanning Jackie Woo's side.
The group in the riverbed probes onwards in silence for a while. None
of them can figure out what is going on, and so it's good that they have
this mine probing thing to keep their hands and minds busy. Randy's probe
hits something flexible, buried a couple of inches deep in silt and gravel.
He flinches so hard he almost topples back on his ass, and spends a minute
or two trying to get his composure back. The silt gives everything the blank
but suggestive look of sheet covered corpses. Trying to identify the shapes
makes his mind tired. He clears some gravel aside and runs his hand lightly
over this thing. Dead leaves tumble through the water and tickle his
forearms. "Got an old tire down here," he says. "Big. Truck sized. And bald
as an egg."
Every so often a colored bird will descend from the shade of the
overhanging jungle and flash into the sun, never failing to scare the shit
out of them. The sun is brutal. Randy was only a few yards away from the
shade of the bank when all of this started, and now he's pretty sure that
he's going to pass out from sunstroke before he gets there.
Enoch Root starts muttering in Latin at one point. Randy looks over at
him and sees that he's holding up a dripping, muddy human skull.
An irridescent bright blue bird with a yellow scimitar beak mounted in
a black and orange head shoots out of the jungle, seizes control of a nearby
rock, and cocks its head at him. The earth shakes again; Randy flinches and
a bead curtain of sweat falls out of his eyebrows.
"Down under the rocks and mud there's reinforced concrete," Doug says.
"I can see the rebar sticking out."
Another bird or something flashes out of the shadows, headed nearly
straight down toward the water at tremendous speed. Amy makes a funny
grunting sound. Randy's just turning to look her way when a tremendous,
hammering racket opens up from above. He looks up to see a blossom of flame
strobing out of the slotted flash arrestor on the muzzle of John Wayne's
assault rifle. Seems like he's shooting directly across the river. Jackie
Woo gets off a few shots too. Randy, who's squatting, loses his balance from
all of this head turning and has to put out a hand to steady himself, which
fortunately doesn't come down on top of a mine. He looks over at Amy; only
her head and shoulders are showing out of the water, and she's staring at
nothing in particular, with a look in her eyes that Randy doesn't like at
all. He rises to his feet and takes a step towards her.
"Randy, don't do that," says Doug Shaftoe. Doug has already reached the
shade, and is only a couple of paces from the curtain of vegetation that
hangs over the riverbank.
There is a piece of debris riding on the surface of the river not far
from Amy's face, but it is not being moved by the current. It moves when Amy
moves. Randy takes another step towards her, putting his foot down on a big
silt covered boulder whose top he can make out through the milky water. He
squats on that boulder like a bird and focuses again on Amy, who is maybe
fifteen feet away from him. John Wayne fires a series of individual shots
from his rifle. Randy realizes that the piece of debris is made of feathers,
bound to the butt of a narrow stick.
"Amy's been shot with an arrow," Randy says.
"Well that's just fucking great," Doug mutters.
"Amy, where are you hit?" says Enoch Root.
Amy still can't seem to speak. She stands up awkwardly, doing all the
work with her left leg, and as she rises the arrow emerges from the water
and turns out to be lodged squarely in the middle of her right thigh. The
wound is washed clean at first but then blood wells out from around the
arrow's shaft and begins to patrol down her leg in bifurcating streams.
Doug's engaged in some furious exchange of hand signals with the men up
above. "You know," he whispers, "I can tell that this is one of those
classic deals where what was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance suddenly
turns into the actual battle."
Amy grabs the shaft of the arrow with both hands and tries to snap it,
but the wood is green, and won't break cleanly. "I dropped my knife
somewhere," she says. Her voice sounds calm, putting some effort into making
it that way. "I think I can deal with this level of pain for a little," she
says. "But I don't like it at all."
Near Amy, Randy can see another silt covered boulder near the surface,
maybe six feet away. He gathers himself and leaps towards it. But it topples
under the impact of his foot and sends him splashing full length into the
streambed. When he sits up and gets a look at it, the boulder turns out to
be a squat cylindrical object about as big around as a dinner plate and
several inches thick.
"Randy, what you're looking at is a Nip anti tank mine," Doug says. "It
is highly unstable with age, and it contains enough high explosive to
essentially decapitate everyone in our little group here. So if you could
just stop being a complete asshole for a little bit, I'm sure that we would
all appreciate it very much."
Amy shows Randy the palm of one hand. "I'm not looking for you to prove
anything," she says. "If you're trying to say you love me, send me a fucking
valentine."
"I love you," Randy says. "I want you to be okay. I want you to marry
me."
"Well, that's very romantic," Amy says, sarcastically, and then starts
crying.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," Doug Shaftoe says. "You guys can do this later!
Will you ease up? Whoever fired that arrow is long gone. The Huks are
guerrillas. They know how to make themselves scarce."
"It wasn't fired by a Huk," Randy says. "Huks have guns. Even I know
that."
"Who fired it, then?" Amy asks, working hard to get her composure back.
"It looks like a Cayuse arrow," Randy says.
"Cayuse? You think it was fired by a Cayuse?" Doug demands. Randy
admires that Doug, while skeptical, is essentially open to the idea.
"No," Randy says, taking another step towards Amy, and straddling the
antitank mine. "The Cayuse are extinct. Measles. So it was made by a white
man who is an expert in the hunting practices of Northwest Indian tribes.
What else do we know about him? That's he's really good at sneaking around
in the jungle. And that he's so totally fucking crazy that even when he's
been injured by a land mine, he's still crawling around in the undergrowth
taking shots at people." Randy's probing the riverbed as he's talking, and
now he takes another step. Only six feet away from Amy now. "Not just anyone
he took a shot at Amy. Why? Because he's been watching. He saw Amy sitting
next to me when we took that break, resting her head on my shoulder. He
knows that if he wants to hurt me, the best thing he could possibly do is
take a shot at her."
"Why does he want to hurt you?" Enoch asks.
"Because he's evil."
Enoch looks tremendously impressed.
"Well, who the hell is it?" Amy hisses. She's irritated now, which he
takes to be a good sign.
"His name is Andrew Loeb," Randy says. "And Jackie Woo and John Wayne
are never going to find him."
"Jackie and John are very good," Doug demurs.
Another step. He can almost reach out and touch Amy. "That's the
problem," Randy says. "They're way too smart to run around in a minefield
without probing every step. But Andrew Loeb doesn't give a shit. Andrew's
totally out of his fucking mind, Doug. He's going to run around up there at
will. Or crawl, or hop, or whatever. I'd wager that Andy with one foot blown
off, and not caring whether he lives or dies, can move through a minefield
faster than Jackie, when Jackie does care."
Finally, Randy's there. He crouches down before Amy, who leans forward,
places a hand on each of his shoulders, and rests her weight on him, which
feels good. The end of her ponytail paints the back of his neck with warm
river water. The arrow's practically in his face. Randy takes his
multipurpose tool out and turns it into a saw and cuts through the shaft of
the arrow while Amy holds it steady with one fist. Then Amy splays her hand
out, winds up, screams in Randy's ear, and slams the butt of the shaft. It
disappears into her leg. She collapses over Randy's back and sobs. Randy
reaches around behind her leg, cuts his hand on the edge of the arrowhead,
grabs the shaft and yanks it out.
"I don't see evidence of arterial bleeding," says Enoch Root, who has a
good view of her from behind.
Randy rises to his feet, lifting Amy into the air, collapsed over his
shoulder like a sack of rice. He's embarrassed that Amy's body is basically
shielding his from any further arrow attacks now. But she's making it clear
that she's in no mood for walking.
The shade is only four steps away: shade, and shelter from above. "A
land mine just takes a leg or a foot, right?" Randy says. "If I step on one,
it won't kill Amy."
"Not one of your better ideas, Randy!" Doug shouts, almost
contemptuously. "Just calm down and take your time."
"I just want to know my options," Randy says. "I can't poke around for
mines while I'm carrying her."
"Then I'll work my way over to you," says Enoch Root. "Oh, to hell with
it!" Enoch stands up and just walks over to them in half a dozen strides.
"Fucking amateurs!" Doug bellows. Enoch Root ignores him, squats down
at Randy's feet and begins probing.
Doug rises up out of the stream onto a few boulders strewn along the
bank. "I'm going to ascend the wall here," he says, "and go up and reinforce
Jackie. He and I'll find this Andrew Loeb together." It's clear that "find"
here is a euphemism for probably a long list of unpleasant operations. The
bank is made of soft eroded stone with lumps of hard black volcanic rock
jutting out of it frequently, and by clambering from one outcropping to the
next, Doug is able to make his way halfway up the bank in the time it takes
Enoch Root to locate one safe place to plant their feet. Randy wouldn't want
to be the guy who just shot an arrow into Doug Shaftoe's daughter. Doug is
stymied for a moment by the overhang; but by traversing the bank a short
distance he's able to reach a tangle of tree roots that's almost as good as
a ladder to the top.
"She's shivering," Randy announces. "Amy's shivering."
"She's in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high," says Enoch Root.
Randy shifts Amy around, nearly losing his grip on a blood greased leg.
One of the things that Goto Dengo spoke of during their dinner in Tokyo
was the Nipponese practice of tuning streams in gardens by moving rocks from
place to place. The sound of a brook is made by patterns in the flow of
water, and those patterns encode the presence of rocks on the streambed.
Randy found in this an echo of the Palouse winds thing, and said so, and
Goto Dengo either thought it was terribly insightful or else was being
polite. In any case, several minutes later there is a change in the sound of
the water that is flowing around them, and so Randy naturally looks upstream
to see that a man is standing in the water about a dozen feet away from
them. The man has a shaved head that is sunburned as red as a three ball.
He's wearing what used to be a decent enough business suit, which has
practically become one with the jungle now: it is impregnated with red mud,
which has made it so heavy that it pulls itself all out of shape as he
totters to a standing position. He's got a great big pole, a wizard's staff.
He has planted it in the riverbed and is sort of climbing up it hand over
hand. When he gets fully upright, Randy can see that his right leg
terminates just below the knee, although the bare tibia and fibula stick out
for a few inches. The bones are scorched and splintered. Andrew Loeb has
fashioned a tourniquet from sticks and a hundred dollar silk necktie that
Randy's pretty sure he has seen in the windows of airport duty free shops.
This has throttled back the flow of blood from the end of his leg to a rate
comparable to what you would see coming out a Mr. Coffee during its brew
cycle. Once Andy has gotten himself fully upright, he smiles brightly and
begins to move towards Randy and Amy and Enoch, hopping on his intact leg
and using the wizard's staff to keep from falling down. In his free hand he
is carrying a great big knife: Bowie sized, but with all of the extra
spikes, saw blades, blood grooves, and other features that go into a really
top of the line fighting and survival knife.
Neither Enoch nor Amy sees Andrew. Randy has this insight now that Doug
pointed him in the direction of earlier, namely that the ability to kill
someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means;
a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more
dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. Randy feels certain, all of a
sudden, that he's got the mental stance now. But he doesn't have the means.
And that is the problem right there in a nutshell. The bad guys tend to
have the means.
Andy's looking him right in the eye and smiling at him, precisely the
same smile you would see on the face of some old acquaintance you had just
accidentally run into on an airport concourse. As he approaches, he's kind
of shifting the big knife around in his hand, getting it into the right grip
for whatever kind of attack he's about to make. It is this detail that
finally breaks Randy out of his trance and causes him to shrug Amy off and
drop her into the water behind him. Andrew Loeb takes another step forward
and plants his wizard's staff, which suddenly flies into the air like a
rocket, leaving a steaming crater behind in the water, which instantly fills
in, of course. Now Andy's standing there like a stork, having miraculously
kept his balance. He bends his one remaining knee and hops towards Randy,
then does it again. Then he is dead and toppling backwards and Randy is
deaf, or maybe it happens in some other order. Enoch Root has become a
column of smoke with a barking, spitting white fire in the center. Andrew
Loeb has become a red, comet shaped disturbance in the stream, marked by a
single arm thrust out of the water, a French cuff that is still uncannily
white, a cuff link shaped like a little honey bee, and a spindly fist
gripping the huge knife.
Randy turns around and looks at Amy. She's levered herself up on one
arm. In her opposite hand she's got a sensible, handy sort of revolver which
she is aiming in the direction of where Andrew Loeb fell.
Something's moving in the corner of Randy's eye. He turns his head
quickly. A coherent, wraith shaped cloud of smoke is drifting away from
Enoch over the surface of the river, just coming into the sun where it is
suddenly brilliant. Enoch is just standing there holding a great big old .45
and moving his lips in the unsettled cadences of some dead language.
Andrew's fingers loosen, the knife falls, and the arm relaxes, but does
not disappear. An insect lands on his thumb and starts to eat it.
Chapter 100 BLACK CHAMBER
"Well," Waterhouse says, "I know a thing or two about keeping secrets."
"I know that perfectly well," says Colonel Earl Comstock. "It is a fine
quality. It is why we want you. After the war."
A formation of bombers flies over the building, rattling its
shellshocked walls with a drone that penetrates into their sinuses. They
take this opportunity to heave their massive Buffalo china coffee cups off
their massive Buffalo china saucers and sip weak, greenish Army coffee.
"Don't let that kind of thing fool you," Comstock hollers over the
noise, glancing up toward the bombers, which bank majestically to the north,
going up to blast hell out of the incredibly tenacious Tiger of Malaya.
"People in the know think that the Nips are on their last legs. It's not too
early to think about what you will be doing after the war."
"I told you, sir. Getting married, and "
"Yeah, teaching math at some little school out west." Comstock sips
coffee and grimaces. The grimace is as tightly coupled to the sip as recoil
is to the pull of a trigger. "Sounds delightful, Waterhouse, it really does.
Oh, there's all kinds of fantasies that sound great to us, sitting here on
the outskirts of what used to be Manila, breathing gasoline fumes and
swatting mosquitoes. I've heard a hundred guys mostly enlisted men
rhapsodize about mowing the lawn. That's all those guys can talk about, is
mowing the lawn. But when they get back home, will they want to mow the
lawn?"
"No."
"Right. They only talk like that because mowing the lawn sounds great
when you're sitting in a foxhole picking lice off your nuts."
One of the useful things about military service is that it gets you
acclimatized to having loud, blustery men say rude things to you. Waterhouse
shrugs it off. "Could be I'll hate it," he concedes.
At this point Comstock sheds a few decibels, scoots closer, and gets
fatherly with him. "It's not just you," he says. "Your wife might not be
crazy about it either."
"Oh, she loves the open countryside. Doesn't care for cities."
"You wouldn't have to live in a city. With the kind of salary we are
talking about here, Waterhouse " Comstock pauses for effect, sips, grimaces,
and lowers his voice another notch " you could buy a nice little Ford or a
Chevy." He stops to let that sink in. "With a V 8 that would give you power
to burn! You could live ten, twenty miles away, and drive in every morning
at a mile a minute!"
"Ten or twenty miles away from where? I'm not clear, yet, on whether I
would be working in New York for Electrical Till, or in Fort Meade for this,
uh, this new thing "
"We're thinking of calling it the National Security Agency," Comstock
says. "Of course, even that name is secret."
"I understand."
"There was a similar thing, between the wars, called the Black Chamber.
Which has a nice ring to it. But a bit old fashioned."
"That was disbanded."
"Yes. Secretary of State Stimson did away with it, he said 'Gentlemen
do not read one another's mail.' " Comstock laughs out loud at this. He
laughs for a long time. "Ahh, the world has changed, hasn't it, Waterhouse?
Without reading Hitler's and Tojo's mail, where would we be now?"
"We would be in a heck of a fix," Waterhouse concedes.
"You have seen Bletchley Park. You have seen Central Bureau in
Brisbane. Those places are nothing less than factories. Mail reading on an
industrial scale." Comstock's eyes glitter at the idea, he is staring
through the walls of the building now like Superman with his X ray vision.
"It is the way of the future, Lawrence. War will never be the same. Hitler
is gone. The Third Reich is history. Nippon is soon to fall. But this only
sets the stage for the struggle with Communism. To build a Bletchley Park
big enough for that job, why, hell! We'd have to take over the whole state
of Utah or something. That is, if we did it the old fashioned way, with
girls sitting in front of Typex machines."
For the first time, now, Waterhouse gets it. "The digital computer," he
says.
"The digital computer," Comstock echoes. He sips and grimaces. "A few
roomfuls of that equipment would replace an acre of girls sitting in front
of Typex machines." Comstock now gets a naughty, conspiratorial grin on his
face, and leans forward. A drop of sweat rolls off the point of his chin and
plonks into Waterhouse's coffee. "It would also replace a lot of the stuff
that Electrical Till manufactures. So, you see, there is a confluence of
interests here." Comstock sets his cup down. Perhaps he is finally convinced
that there is no deep stratum of good coffee concealed underneath the bad;
perhaps coffee is a frivolous thing compared to the importance of what he is
about to divulge. "I have been in constant touch with my higher ups at
Electrical Till, and there is intense interest in this digital computer
business. Intense interest. The machinery has already been set in motion for
a business deal and, Waterhouse, I only tell you this because, as we have
established, you are good at keeping secrets."
"I understand, sir."
"A business deal that would bring Electrical Till, the world's
mightiest manufacturer of business machines, together with the government of
the United States to construct a machine room of titanic proportions at Fort
Meade, Maryland, under the aegis of this new Black Chamber: the National
Security Agency. It is an installation that will be the Bletchley Park of
our upcoming war against the Communist threat a threat both internal and
external."
"And you would like me to get mixed up in this somehow?"
Comstock blinks. He draws back. He is suddenly cool and remote. "To be
absolutely frank, Waterhouse, this thing will go forward with or without
you."
Waterhouse chuckles. "I figured that."
"All I'm doing is giving you a greased path, as it were. Because I
respect your skills, and I have a certain, I don't know, fatherly affection
for you as the result of our work together. I hope you don't mind my saying
so.
"Not at all."
"Say! And speaking of that " Comstock stands up, walking around behind
his terrifyingly neat desk, and plucks a single piece of typing paper off
the blotter. "How are you coming with Arethusa?"
"Still archiving the intercepts as they come in. Still haven't broken
it."
"I have some interesting news about Arethusa."
"You do?"
"Yes. Something you're not aware of." Comstock scans the paper. "After
we took Berlin, we scooped up all of Hitler's crypto people and flew thirty
five of them back to London. Our boys there have been interrogating them in
detail. Filling in a lot of blanks for us. What do you know about this
Rudolf von Hacklheber fellow?"
All traces of moisture have disappeared from Waterhouse's mouth. He
sips and does not grimace. "Knew him a little at Princeton. Dr. Turing and I
thought we saw his handiwork in Azure/Pufferfish."
"You were right," Comstock says, rattling the paper. "But did you know
that he was very likely a Communist?"
"I had no knowledge of his political leanings."
"Well, he is a homo, for one thing, and Hitler hated homos, so that
might have pushed him into the arms of the Reds. Also, he was working under
a couple of Russians at Hauptgruppe B. Supposedly they were Czarists, and
pro Hitler, but you never know. Well, anyway, in the middle of the war,
sometime in late '43, he apparently fled to Sweden. Isn't that funny?"
"Why's it funny?"
"If you have the wherewithal to escape from Germany, why not go to
England, and fight for the good guys? No, he went to the east coast of
Sweden directly across the water," Comstock says portentously, "from
Finland. Which borders on the Soviet Union." He slaps the page down on his
desk. "Seems pretty clear cut to me."
"So . . ."
"And now, we have these goddamn Arethusa messages bouncing around. Some
of them emanating from right here in Manila! Some coming from a mysterious
submarine. Not a Nip submarine, evidently. It seems very much like a secret
espionage ring of some description. Wouldn't you say so?"
Waterhouse shrugs. "Interpretation isn't my department."
"It is mine," Comstock says, "and I say it's espionage. Probably
directed from the Kremlin. Why? Because they are using a cryptosystem that,
according to you, is based on Azure/Pufferfish, which was invented by the
Communist homo Rudolf von Hacklheber. I hypothesize that von Hacklheber only
stayed in Sweden long enough to get some shuteye and maybe cornhole some
nice blond boy and then scooted right over to Finland and from there to the
waiting arms of Lavrenti Beria."
"Well, gosh!" Waterhouse says, "what do you think we should do?"
"I have taken this Arethusa thing off the back burner. We have become
lazy and complacent. More than once, our huffduff people observed Arethusa
messages emanating from this general area." Comstock raises his index finger
to a map of Luzon. Then he catches himself, realizing that this would be
more dignified if he used a pointer. He bends down and grabs a long pointer.
Then he realizes he is too close, and has to back up a couple of steps in
order to get the business end of the pointer on the part of the map that his
index finger was touching a moment earlier. Finally situated, he vigorously
circles a coastal region south of Manila, along the strait that separates
Luzon from Mindoro. "South of all these volcanoes, along the coast here.
This is where that submarine has been skulking around. We haven't gotten a
good fix on the bastards yet, because all of our huffduff stations have been
way up north here." The pointer swoops up for a lightning raid on the
Cordillera Central, where Yamashita has gone to ground. "But not anymore."
Down swoops the pointer, vengefully. "I have ordered several huffduff units
to set up in this area, and at the northern end of Mindoro. Next time that
submarine transmits an Arethusa message, we'll have Catalinas overhead
within fifteen minutes."
"Well," Waterhouse volunteers, "maybe I should get cracking on breaking
that darn code, then."
"If you could accomplish that, Waterhouse, it would be brilliant. It
would mean victory in this, our first cryptological skirmish with the
Communists. It would be a splendid kick off for your relationship with
Electrical Till and the NSA. We could set your new bride up with a nice
house in the horse country, a gas stove, and a Hoover that would make her
forget all about the Palouse Hills."
"Sounds pretty darn inviting," Waterhouse says. "I just can't hold
myself back!" And with that, he's out the door.
***
In a stone room in a half ruined church, Enoch Root looks out of a
busted window and grimaces. "I am not a mathematician," he says. "I only did
the calculations that Dengo asked me to do. You will have to ask him to
encrypt the message."
"Find another place for your transmitter," Waterhouse says, "and be
ready to use it on short notice."
***
Goto Dengo is right where he said he would be, sitting on the bleachers
above third base. The ballfield has been repaired, but no one is playing
now. He and Waterhouse have the place to themselves, except for a couple of
poor Filipino peasants, driven down to Manila by the war up north,
scavenging for dropped popcorn.
"What you ask is very dangerous," he says.
"It will be totally secret," Waterhouse says.
"Think into the future," says Goto Dengo. "One day, these digital
computers you speak of will break the Arethusa code. Is this not so?"
"It is so. Not for many years."
"Say ten years. Say twenty years. The code is broken. Then they will go
back and find all of the old Arethusa messages including the message that
you want to send to your friends and read them. So?"
"Yes. It is true."
"And then they will see this message that says, 'Warning, warning,
Comstock has laid a trap, the huffduff stations are waiting for you, do not
transmit.' Then they will know that there was a spy in Comstock's office.
Certainly they will know it was you."
"You're right. You're right. I didn't think of that," Waterhouse says.
Then he realizes something else. "They'll know about you too."
Goto Dengo blanches. "Please. I am so tired."
"One of the Arethusa messages spoke of a person named GD." Goto Dengo
puts his head in his hands and is perfectly motionless for a long time. He
does not have to say it. He and Waterhouse are imagining the same thing:
twenty years in the future, Nipponese police burst into the office of Goto
Dengo, prosperous businessman, and arrest him for being a Communist spy.
"Only if they decrypt those old messages," Waterhouse says.
"But they will. You said that they will decrypt them."
"Only if they have them," Waterhouse says.
"But they do have them."
"They are in my office."
Goto Dengo is shocked, horrified. "You are not thinking to steal the
messages?"
"That's exactly what I'm thinking."
"But this will be noticed."
"No! I will replace them with others."
***
The voice of Alan Mathison Turing shouts above the buzz of the Project
X synchronization tone. The long playing record, filled with noise, spins on
its turntable. "You want the latest in random numbers?"
"Yeah. Some mathematical function that will give me nearly perfect
randomness. I know you've been working on this."
"Oh yes," Turing says. "I can provide a much higher degree of
randomness than what is on these idiotic phonograph records that you and I
are staring at."
"How do you do it?"
"I have in mind a zeta function that is simple to understand, extremely
tedious to calculate. I hope you have laid in a good stock of valves."
"Don't worry about that, Alan."
"Do you have a pencil?"
"Of course."
"Very well then," Turing says, and begins to call out the symbols of
the function.
***
The Basement is suffocatingly hot because Waterhouse shares it with a
coworker who generates thousands of watts of body heat. The coworker both
eats and shits ETC cards. What it does in between is Waterhouse's business.
He spends about twenty four hours sitting there, stripped to the waist,
his undershirt wrapped around his head like a turban so he won't drop sweat
into the works and cause short circuits, flicking switches on the digital
computer's front panel, swapping patch cords on the back, replacing burned
out tubes and bulbs, probing malfunctioning circuits with an oscilloscope.
In order to make the computer execute Alan's random number function, he even
has to design a new circuit board on the fly, and solder it together. The
entire time, he knows, Goto Dengo and Enoch Root are at work somewhere in
Manila with scratch paper and pencils, encrypting the final Arethusa
message.
He doesn't have to wonder whether they've transmitted it. He will be
told.
Indeed, a lieutenant from the Intercept section comes in at about five
in the evening, looking triumphant.
"You got an Arethusa message?"
"Two of them," the lieutenant says, holding up two separate sheets with
grids of letters on them. "A collision!"
"A collision?"
"A transmitter opened up down south first."
"On land, or ?"
"At sea off the northeast end of Palawan. They transmitted this." He
waves one of the sheets. "Then, almost immediately, a transmitter in Manila
came on the air, and sent this." He waves the other sheet.
"Does Colonel Comstock know about this?"
"Oh, yes sir! He was just leaving for the day when the messages came
through. He's been on the horn to his huffduff people, the Air Force, the
whole bit. He thinks we've got the bastards!"
"Well, before you get carried away celebrating, could you do me a
favor?"
"Yes, sir!"
"What did you do with all of the original intercept sheets for the
archived Arethusa messages?"
"They're filed, sir. Do you want to see them?"
"Yes. All of them. I need to check them against the versions on the ETC
cards. If Arethusa works the way I think it does, then even a single
mistranscribed letter could render all of my calculations useless."
"I'll go and fetch them, sir! I'm not going home anyway.
"You're not?"
"Why, no sir! I want to wait around and see how it all comes out with
that darned submarine."
Waterhouse goes to the oven and takes out a brick of hot, blank ETC
cards. He has learned that he has to keep the cards hot, or else they will
soak up the tropical humidity and jam the machinery; so before he moved the
digital computer into this room, he insisted that a whole bank of ovens be
installed.
He drops the hot cards into the hopper of a card punching machine, sits
down at the keyboard, and clips the first intercept sheet up in front of
him. He begins to punch the letters into it, one by one. It is a short
message; it fits onto three cards. Then he begins punching in the second
message.
The lieutenant comes in carrying a cardboard box. "All of the original
Arethusa intercept sheets."
"Thank you, Lieutenant."
The lieutenant looks over his shoulder. "Can I help you transcribing
those messages?"
"No. The best way for you to help me would be to refill my water
pitcher and then don't bother me for the rest of the night. I have a bee in
my bonnet about this Arethusa business."
"Yes, sir!" says the lieutenant, insufferably cheerful about the fact
that the mystery submarine is, even now, on the run from Catalina bombers.
Waterhouse finishes punching in the second message, though he already
knows what it would say if it were decrypted: "TRAP REPEAT TRAP DO NOT
TRANSMIT STOP HUFFDUFF UNITS NEARBY."
He takes those cards out of the puncher's output tray and places them
neatly in the box along with the cards containing all of the previous
Arethusa messages. He then takes the entire contents of this box a brick of
messages about a foot thick and puts them into his attache case.
He unclips the two fresh intercept slips from the card puncher and puts
them on top of the stack of older slips. The brick of cards in his attache
case, and the pile of slips in his hand, contain exactly the same
information. They are the only copies in all the world. He flips through
them to make sure that they contain all of the critical intercepts such as
the long message giving the location of Golgotha, and the one that mentions
Goto Dengo's initials. He puts the whole stack of slips on top of one of the
ovens.
He dumps a foot thick stack of hot blank cards into the input hopper of
the card punch. He connects the punch's control cable up to the digital
computer, so that the computer can control it.
Then he starts the program he has written, the one that generates
random numbers according to Turing's function. Lights flash, and the card
reader whirrs, as the program is loaded into the computer's RAM. Then it
pauses, waiting for input: the function needs a seed. A stream of bits that
will get it going. Any seed will do. Waterhouse thinks about it for a
moment, and then types in COMSTOCK.
The card punch rumbles into action. The stack of blanks begins to get
shorter. Punched cards skitter into the output tray. When it's finished,
Waterhouse pulls one of them out, holds it up to the light, and looks at the
pattern of tiny rectangular holes punched out of the manila. A constellation
of doorways.
"It'll look like any other encrypted message," he explained to Goto
Dengo, up on the bleachers, "but the, uh, the crypto boys" (he almost said
the NSA) "can run their computers on them forever and never break the code
because there is no code."
He puts this stack of freshly punched cards into the box labeled
ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS, and puts it back in its place on the shelf.
Finally, before leaving the lab, he goes back over to that oven, and
slides the corner of that stack of intercept sheets very close to a pilot
light. It is reluctant to catch, so he gives it some help with a flick of
his Zippo. He stands back and watches the pile burn for a while, until he's
sure that all of the strange information on those sheets has been destroyed.
Then he goes out into the hallway in search of a fire extinguisher.
Upstairs, he can hear Comstock's boys, gathered around the radio, baying
like hounds.
Chapter 101 PASSAGE
When he has picked himself up off the deck, and his ears have stopped
ringing, Bischoff says, "Take her down to seventy five meters."
The dial that tells their depth says twenty. Somewhere, perhaps a
hundred meters above them, crewmen of a circling bomber are setting their
depth charges to explode when they have sunk to a depth of twenty, and so
twenty is a bad place to be for a while.
The dial does not move, though, and Bischoff has to repeat the command.
Everyone on the boat must be deaf.
Either that, or the V Million has sustained damage to her dive planes.
Bischoff presses his skull against a bulkhead, and even though his ears
don't work so well anymore, he can feel the whine of the turbines. At least
they have power. They can move.
But Catalinas can move faster.
Say what you want about those old, clanking diesel U boats, they at
least had guns on them. You could surface, and go out on the decks in the
sun and the air, and fight back. But in the V Million, this swimming rocket,
the only weapon is secrecy. In the Baltic, fine. But this is the Mindoro
Strait, which is an ocean of window glass. V Million might as well be
suspended in midair from piano wires, searchlights crossing on it.
The needle on the dial is moving now, passing down through twenty five
meters. The deck twists under Bischoff's feet as she recoils from another
depth charge. But he can tell from the way it twists that this one has
detonated too high to deal serious damage. From habit he glances at the dial
that tells their speed, and notes it down along with the time: 1746 hours.
The sun must be lower and lower in the sky, its light glancing off the tops
of the waves, forcing the pilots of the Catalinas to peer down through a
screen of bright noise. Another hour and V Million will be completely
invisible. Then, if Bischoff has kept careful records of their speed and
course, dead reckoning will tell them approximately where they are, and
enable them to run down the Palawan Passage in the night, or to cut west
across the South China Sea if that seems like a good idea. But really he is
hoping to find some nice pirate cove on the north coast of Borneo, marry a
nice orangutan, and raise a little family.
The face of the depth dial says Tiefenmesser in that old fashioned
Gothic lettering that the Nazis loved so much. Messer means a gauge or
meter, but it also means knife. Das Messer sitzt mir an der Kehle. The knife
is at my throat; I am face to face with doom. When the knife is at your
throat, you don't want it to move the way the needle on the Tiefenmesser is
moving now. Every tick on the dial's face is another meter of water between
Bischoff and the sun and the air.
"I would like to be a Messerschmidt," Bischoff mutters. A man who
smashes Messers with a hammer, but also a beautiful thing that flies.
"You will see light, and breathe fresh air again, Günter," says Rudolf
von Hacklheber, a civilian mathematician who really has no place on the
bridge of a U boat during a fight to the death. But there's no good place
for him to be, and so here he is.
Now this is a fine thing for Rudy to say, a lovely show of support for
Günter. But saving the life of everyone on the U boat, and getting its cargo
of gold to safety, now depends on Günter's emotional stability, and
especially on his confidence. Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe
tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap
of faith faith in your U boat, and your crew beside which the saints'
religious epiphanies amount to nothing.
So Rudy's promise is soon forgotten or at least it is forgotten by
Bischoff. Bischoff derives strength from having heard it, and from similar
things that members of his crew say to him, and from their grins and thumbs
up and slaps on the shoulder, and their displays of pluck and initiative,
the clever repairs that they make to broken plumbing and overtaxed engines.
Strength gives him faith, and faith makes him into a good U boat skipper.
Some would say the best who ever lived. But Bischoff knows many others,
better than him, whose bodies are trapped in knuckles of imploded metal on
the floor of the North Atlantic.
It comes together like this: the sun has gone down, as it can be relied
on to do every day, even when you are a beleaguered U boat. The V Million
has reamed a tunnel through the Palawan Passage, screaming along, for
several hours, at the completely unreasonable speed of twenty nine knots
four times as fast as U boats are supposed to be capable of going.
The Americans will have drawn a small circle around the point in the
ocean where the mysterious U boat was last sighted. But the speed of the V
Million is four times as great as they think it is. The real circle is four
times as wide as the one they've drawn. The Yanks won't expect them to
surface where they are.
But they have to surface because the V Million wasn't made to run at
twenty nine knots forever; she burns fuel, and hydrogen peroxide, at a
ridiculous rate when both of her six thousand horsepower turbines are
spinning. There is plenty of fuel remaining. But she runs out of hydrogen
peroxide at about midnight. She has a few miserable batteries, and electric
motors, that just barely suffice to get her up to the surface. But then she
has to breathe air for a while, and run her diesels.
So the V Million, and a few crew members, get to enjoy some fresh air.
Bischoff doesn't, because he is dealing with new complexities that have
arisen in the engine room. This probably saves his life, because he doesn't
even know they're being strafed until he hears the cannon rounds drumming
against the outer hull.
Then it is the same old drill, the crash dive, which was so exciting
when he was a young man practicing it in the Baltic, and has become so
tedious for him now. Looking up through a hatch he gets a moment's glimpse
of a single star in the sky before the view is blocked by a mutilated
crewman being fed down from above.
Only five minutes later the depth charge scores a direct hit on the
stern of the V Million and tears a hole through both the outer and the
pressure hull. The deck angles beneath Bischoff's feet, and his ears begin
to pop. On a submarine, both of these are bad omens. He can hear hatches
clanging shut as the crew try to stem the advance of the water towards the
bow; each one seals the fate of whomever happens to be aft of it. But
they're all dead anyway, it is just a question of timing now. Those hatches
are not meant to stem five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten atmospheres of
pressure. They give way, the pressure spikes upwards as the bubble of air in
the front of the V Million suddenly halves its volume, then halves it again,
and again. Each wave of pressure comes as sudden crushing pressure on
Bischoff's thorax, driving all the air out of his lungs.
Because the bow is pointed straight up, like a needle on a meter,
there's no deck to stand on, and every time a bulkhead yields, and the water
level shoots up towards the bow, it leaves them suddenly submerged, with
crushed and evacuated lungs, and they must swim up and find the air bubble
again.
But finally the mangled stern of the boat spikes into the seafloor and
the V Million settles down, the forwardmost cabin rotating around them,
tremendous rock crushing noises all around as a coral reef is destroyed by
the boat's falling hull. And then it's finished. Günter Bischoff and Rudolf
von Hacklheber are together in a safe cozy bubble of compressed air, all of
the air that used to be in the V Million reduced to a pocket the size of a
car. It's dark.
He hears Rudy undoing the latches on his aluminum briefcase.
"Don't strike a match," Bischoff says. "This air is compressed, it will
burn like a flare."
"That would be terrible," Rudy says, and instead turns on a flashlight.
The light comes on and immediately dims and goes brown and shrinks to a tiny
red speck: the glowing remains of the filament in the bulb.
"Your light bulb has imploded," Bischoff explains. "But at least I got
a little glimpse of you, with that silly look on your face."
"You too have looked better," Rudy says. Bischoff can hear him closing
up the briefcase, snapping the latches into place. "Do you think my
briefcase will float here forever?"
"Eventually the pressure hull above us will corrode. The air will
escape from it in a thin line of bubbles that will grow into gyrating
nebulas of foul air as they rush towards the surface. The water level will
rise and press your briefcase up against what is left of the pressure hull's
forward dome, and it will fill with water. But still there will be a little
pocket of air in one corner of your briefcase, perhaps."
"I was thinking of leaving a note in it."
"If you do, better address it to the United States government."
"Department of the Navy, you think?"
"Department of Spying. What do they call it? The OSS."
"Why do you say this?"
"They knew where we were, Rudy. The Catalinas were waiting for us."
"Maybe they found us with radar."
"I allowed for radar. Those planes came even faster. You know what it
means?"
"Tell me."
"It means that those who were hunting us knew how fast the V Million
could go."
"Ah . . . so that is why you think of spies."
"I gave Bobby the plans, Rudy."
"The plans for the V Million?"
"Yes . . so that he could buy forgiveness from the Americans."
"Well, in retrospect maybe you shouldn't have done that. But I do not
blame you for it, Günter. It was a magnificent gesture."
"Now they will come down and find us."
"After we're dead, you mean.
"Yes. The whole plan is ruined. Ah well, it was a nice conspiracy while
it lasted. Perhaps Enoch Root will display some adaptability."
"You really think spies will come down to go through this wreck?"
"Who knows?" Bischoff says. "Why are you worrying about it?"
"I have the coordinates of Golgotha here in my briefcase," Rudy says.
"But I know for certain that they are not written down anywhere else in V
Million."
"You know that because you're the one who decrypted that message."
"Yes. Maybe I should burn the message now."
"It would kill us," Bischoff says, "but at least we would die with some
warmth and some light."
"You are going to be on a sandy beach, sunning yourself, in a few
hours, Günter," Rudy says.
"Stop it!"
"I made a promise which I intend to keep," Rudy says. There is a
movement in the water, the strangled splash of a kicking foot being drawn
under the surface.
"Rudy? Rudy?" Bischoff says. But he is alone in a black dome of
silence.
A minute later a hand grips his ankle.
Rudy climbs up his body like a ladder and thrusts his head above the
surface and howls for air. But this air is the good stuff, sixteen times as
much oxygen in a single lungful. He feels better quickly. Bischoff holds him
while he calms down.
"The hatch is open," Rudy says. "I saw light through it. The sun is up,
Günter!"
"Let's go, then!"
"You go. I'll stay and burn the message." Rudy's opening his briefcase
again, feeling through papers with his hands, taking something out, closing
the briefcase again.
Bischoff cannot move.
"I strike the match in thirty seconds," Rudy says.
Bischoff launches himself towards Rudy's voice and wraps his arms
around him in the dark.
"I'll find the others," Bischoff says. "I'll tell them that some
fucking American spy is onto us. And we'll get that gold first, and we'll
keep it out of their hands."
"Go!" Rudy cries. "I want everything to happen fast now."
Bischoff kisses him once on each cheek and then dives.
Ahead of him is faint blue green light, coming from no particular
direction.
Rudy swam to the hatch, opened it, and swam back, and was almost dead
when he returned. Bischoff has to find that hatch and then swim all the way
to the surface. He knows that it will be impossible.
But then much brighter, warmer light floods the interior of the V
Million. Bischoff looks back and up, and sees the forward end of the
pressure hull turned into a dome of orange fire, the silhouette of a man
centered in it, lines of welds and rivets spreading away from that center
like the meridians of a globe. It's bright as day. He turns around and swims
easily away down the gangway, into the control room, and finds the hatch: a
disk of cyan light.
A life ring is pressed up against what is now the ceiling of this room.
He grabs it and wrestles it down into the middle of the cabin, then shoves
it before him through the hatch, and kicks his way through.
There's coral all around him, and it's beautiful. He'd love to stay and
sightsee, but he's got responsibilities above. He keeps a grip on the life
preserver, and although he doesn't feel himself moving, he sees the coral
dropping away below. There's a big grey thing lying on it, bubbling and
bleeding, and this gets smaller and smaller, like a rocket flying away into
the sky.
He looks up into the water that is streaming over his face. Both of
Bischoff's arms are above his head, gripping the rim of the life ring, and
he sees a disk of sunlight through it, getting brighter and redder as he
ascends.
His knees begin to hurt.
Chapter 102 LIQUIDITY
The rest of it all seems like history to Randall Lawrence Waterhouse.
He knows that technically speaking it is the present, and all of the really
important stuff is future. But what's important to him is finished and
settled. He would like to get on with his life, now that he's got one.
They carry Amy back to the missionary compound and the doctor who is
there does some work on her leg, but they can't get her out to the hospital
in Manila because Wing has blockaded them in there. This ought to seem
threatening, but actually just seems stupid and annoying to them after
they've had a little while to get used to it. The people who are doing it
are Chinese Communist geronto apparatchiks backed up by a few bootlicking
cronies within the local government, and none of them has the slightest
appreciation of things like encrypted spread spectrum packet radio, which
makes it easy for people like Doug and Randy to communicate with the outside
world and explain precisely what is going on. Randy's blood type is
compatible with Amy's and so he lets the doctor suck him nearly dry. The
lack of blood seemingly halves his IQ for a day or two, but even so, when he
sees Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe drawing up the shopping list of men and gear
that they need to dig up Golgotha, he has enough presence of mind to say:
strike all of that stuff. Forget the trucks and jackhammers and dynamite,
the end loaders and excavators and tunnel boring machines, and just give me
a drill, a couple of pumps, and a few thousand gallons of fuel oil. Doug
gets it right away, as indeed how could he not, since he basically gave
Randy the idea by telling him old war legends about his father. They get the
shopping list out to Avi and Goto Dengo with no trouble at all.
Wing keeps them blockaded in the compound for a week; the subterranean
explosions continue to shake the earth; Amy's leg gets infected and the
doctor comes this close to sawing it off to save her life. Enoch Root spends
some time alone with her and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains
that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about
it.
Meanwhile the rest of them kill time by clearing mines from around
Golgotha, and trying to localize those explosions. The verdict seems to be
that Wing still has most of a kilometer of hard rock to tunnel through in
order to get access to Golgotha, and he's only making a few dozen meters per
day.
They know that all hell is breaking loose in the outside world because
media and military helicopters keep flying over the place. One day a Goto
Engineering chopper lands in the compound. It's got earth imaging sonar
gear, and more importantly it's got antibiotics, which have a nearly magical
impact on the jungle bugs in Amy's leg, which have never even met
penicillin, much less this state of the art stuff that makes penicillin look
like chicken noodle soup. Amy's fever breaks in a couple of hours and she's
hobbling within a day. The road gets opened up again and then their problem
becomes trying to keep people out it is jammed with media, opportunistic
gold seekers, and nerds. All of them apparently think they are present at
some kind of radical societal watershed, as if global society has gotten so
screwed up that the only thing to do is shut down and reboot it.
Randy sees people holding up banners with his name on them, and tries
not to think about what this implies. The truckloads of equipment almost
cannot make it through this traffic jam, but they do, and there's another
really frustrating and tedious week of hauling all of the shit through the
jungle. Randy spends most of his time hanging around with the earth imaging
sonar crew; they have this very cool gear that Goto Engineering uses to do
CAT scans of the earth that they are about to dig into. By the time all of
the heavy equipment is in place, Randy's got the entirety of Golgotha imaged
down to a resolution of about a meter; he could fly through it in virtual
reality if he were into that kind of thing. As it is, all he needs is to
decide where to drill his three holes: two from the top down into the main
vault, and then one from the side, coming in almost horizontally from the
riverbank, but at a gentle upward angle, until it enters what he thinks is
the lowest sump in the main chamber. The drain hole.
Someone arrives from the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the
cover of both Time and Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news.
He knows that he's got a new life. He had a particular mental image of what
that new life is: mostly, being married to Amy and minding his own business
until he dies of old age. It did not enter his calculations that being on
the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners
with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he never
wants to leave the jungle.
The pumps are mighty, house sized things; they have to be to fight the
back pressure that they are going to engender. Goto Dengo's young engineers
see to it that they are mated into the two vertical holes on top: one to
supply compressed air, the other pressurized fuel oil. Doug Shaftoe would
like to be involved in this, but he knows it's over his head technically,
and he's got other duties: securing the defensive perimeter against gold
seekers and whatever creepy crawly individuals Wing might have sent out to
harass and sabotage them. But Doug has put the Word out, and a whole lot of
Doug's very interesting and well traveled friends have converged on Golgotha
from all over the world and are now camped out in foxholes in the jungle,
guarding a defensive perimeter strung with monofilament tripwires and other
stuff that Randy doesn't even want to know about. Doug just tells him to
stay away from the perimeter, and he does. But Randy can sense Doug's
interest in the central project here, and so when the big day comes, he lets
Doug be the one to throw the switch.
There is a lot of praying first: Avi's brought in a rabbi from Israel,
and Enoch Root has brought in the Archbishop of Manila, and Goto Dengo has
flown in some Shinto priests, and various Southeast Asian countries have
gotten in on the act too. All of them pray or chant for the memory of their
departed, though the prayers are practically drowned out by the choppers
overhead. A lot of people don't want them disturbing Golgotha at all, and
Randy thinks they are basically right. But he's gone out and earth imaged
Wing's tunnel, this subterranean tentacle of air reaching towards the hoard,
and released three dimensional maps of everything to the media, and made the
case reasonably well, he thinks that it's better to do something
constructive than to let it get ripped off by the likes of Wing. Some people
have come around to his side and some haven't, but none of the latter group
is on the cover of Time and Newsweek.
Doug Shaftoe is the last guy to take the floor. He removes his mesh
back cap, puts it over his heart, and with tears streaming down his face
says something about his father, whom he just barely remembers. He speaks of
the Battle of Manila and of how he saw his father for the first time in the
wreckage of the Church of San Agustin, and how his father carried him up and
down the stairway there before going off to bring hellfire down upon the
Nipponese. He speaks about forgiveness and certain other abstractions, and
the words are all chopped up and blurred by the helicopters overhead, which
only makes it more powerful as far as Randy's concerned, since it's
basically all about a bunch of memories that are all chopped up and blurred
in Doug's memory to begin with. Finally Doug works his way around to some
kind of resolution that is very clear in his heart and mind but poorly
articulated, and hits the switch.
The pumps take a few minutes to pressurize Golgotha with a highly
combustible mixture of air and fuel oil, and then Doug hits another switch
that sets off a small detonation down below. Then the world shudders and
rumbles before settling down into a kind of suppressed throbbing howl. A jet
of white hot flame shoots out of the drain hole down below, digs itself into
the river very close to where Andrew Loeb came to rest, and throws up a
cloud of steam that forces all of the choppers to gain altitude. Randy
crawls down under the cover of that steam cloud, sensing it's the last
privacy he'll ever have, and sits down by the edge of the river to watch.
After half an hour the jet of hot gas is joined by a rivulet of incandescent
fluid that sinks to the bottom of the stream as soon as it emerges, clothed
in a fuzz of wildly boiling water. For a long time there is really nothing
to be seen except steam; but after Golgotha's been burning for an hour or
two, it becomes possible to see that underneath the shallow water, spreading
down the valley floor, indeed right around the isolated boulder where
Randy's perched, is a bright, thick river of gold.
APPENDIX: THE SOLITAIRE ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM
by Bruce Schneier
Author, Applied Cryptography
President, Counterpane Systems
http://www.counterpane.com
In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, The character Enoch Root
describes a cryptosystem code named "Pontifex" to another character named
Randy Waterhouse, and later reveals that the steps of the algorithm are
intended to be carried out using a deck of playing cards. These two
characters go on to exchange several encrypted messages using this system.
The system is called "Solitaire" (in the novel, "Pontifex" is a code name
intended to temporarily conceal the fact that it employs a deck of cards)
and I designed it to allow field agents to communicate securely without
having to rely on electronics or having to carry incriminating tools. An
agent might be in a situation where he just does not have access to a
computer, or may be prosecuted if he has tools for secret communication. But
a deck of cards . . . what harm is that?
Solitaire gets its security from the inherent randomness in a shuffled
deck of cards. By manipulating this deck, a communicant can create a string
of "random" letters that he then combines with his message. Of course
Solitaire can be simulated on a computer, but it is designed to be
implemented by hand.
Solitaire may be low tech, but its security is intended to be high
tech. I designed Solitaire to be secure even against the most well funded
military adversaries with the biggest computers and the smartest
cryptanalysts. Of course there is no guarantee that someone won't find a
clever attack against Solitaire (watch my web page for updates), but the
algorithm is certainly better than any other pencil and paper cipher I've
ever seen.
It's not fast, though. It can take an evening to encrypt or decrypt a
reasonably long message. In David Kahn's book Kahn on Codes, he describes a
real pencil and paper cipher used by a Soviet spy. Both the Soviet algorithm
and Solitaire take about the same amount of time to encrypt a message.
ENCRYPTING WITH SOLITAIRE
Solitaire is an output feedback mode stream cipher. Sometimes this is
called a key generator (KG in U.S. military speak). The basic idea is that
Solitaire generates a stream, often called a "keystream," of numbers between
1 and 26. To encrypt, generate the same number of keystream letters as
plaintext letters. Then add them modulo 26 to plaintext letters, one at a
time, to create the ciphertext. To decrypt, generate the same keystream and
subtract modulo 26 from the ciphertext to recover the plaintext.
For example, to encrypt the first Solitaire message mentioned in
Stephenson's novel, "DO NOT USE PC":
1. Split the plaintext message into five character groups. (There is
nothing magical about five character groups; it's just tradition.) Use X's
to fill in the last group. So if the message is "DO NOT USE PC" then the
plaintext is:
DONOT USEPC
2. Use Solitaire to generate ten keystream letters. (Details are
below.) Assume they are:
KDWUP ONOWT
3. Convert the plaintext message from letters into numbers: A = 1, B =
2, etc:
4 15 14 15 20 21 19 5 16 3
4. Convert the keystream letters similarly:
11 4 23 21 16 15 14 15 23 20
5. Add the plaintext number stream to the keystream numbers, modulo 26.
(All this means is, if the sum is more than 26, subtract 26 from the
result.) For example, 1 + 1 = 2, 26 + 1 = 27, and 27 – 26 = 1, so 26 +
1 = 1.
15 19 11 10 10 10 7 20 13 23
6. Convert the numbers back to letters.
OSKJJ JGTMW
If you are really good at this, you can learn to add letters in your
head, and just add the letters from steps (1) and (2). It just takes
practice. It's easy to remember that A + A = B; remembering that T + Q = K
is harder.
DECRYPTING WITH SOLITAIRE
The basic idea is that the receiver generates the same keystream, and
then subtracts the keystream letters from the ciphertext letters.
1. Take the ciphertext message and put it in five character groups. (It
should already be in this form.)
OSKJJ JGTMW
2. Use Solitaire to generate ten keystream letters. If the receiver
uses the same key as the sender, the keystream letters will be the same:
KDWUP ONOWT
3. Convert the ciphertext message from letters into numbers:
15 19 11 10 10 10 7 20 13 23
4. Convert the keystream letters similarly:
11 4 23 21 16 15 14 15 23 20
5. Subtract the keystream numbers from the ciphertext numbers, modulo
26. For example, 22 – 1 = 20, 1 – 22 = 5. (It's easy. If the
first number is less than the second number, add 26 to the first number
before subtracting. So 1 – 22 = ? becomes 27 – 22 = 5.)
4 15 14 15 20 21 19 5 16 3
6. Convert the numbers back to letters.
DONOT USEPC
Decryption is the same as encryption, except that you subtract the
keystream from the ciphertext message.
GENERATING THE KEYSTREAM LETTERS
This is the heart of Solitaire. The above descriptions of encryption
and decryption work for any output feedback mode stream cipher. This section
explains how Solitaire works.
Solitaire generates a keystream using a deck of cards. You can think of
a 54 card deck (remember the jokers) as a 54 element permutation. There are
54!, or about 2.31 x 10^71, possible different orderings of a deck. Even
better, there are 52 cards in a deck (without the jokers), and 26 letters in
the alphabet. That kind of coincidence is just too good to pass up.
To be used for Solitaire, a deck needs a full set of 52 cards and two
jokers. The jokers must be different in some way. (This is common. The deck
I'm looking at as I write this has stars on its jokers: one has a little
star and the other has a big star.) Call one joker A and the other B.
Generally, there is a graphical element on the jokers that is the same, but
different size. Make the "B" joker the one that is "bigger." If it's easier,
you can write a big "A" and "B" on the two jokers, but remember that you
will have to explain that to the secret police if you ever get caught.
To initialize the deck, take the deck in your hand, face up. Then
arrange the cards in the initial configuration that is the key. (I'll talk
about the key later, but it's different than the keystream.) Now you're
ready to produce a string of keystream letters.
This is Solitaire:
1. Find the A joker. Move it one card down. (That is, swap it with the
card beneath it.) If the joker is the bottom card of the deck, move it just
below the top card.
2. Find the B joker. Move it two cards down. If the joker is the bottom
card of the deck, move it just below the second card. If the joker is one up
from the bottom card, move it just below the top card. (Basically, assume
the deck is a loop . . . you get the idea.)
It's important to do these two steps in order. It's tempting to get
lazy and just move the jokers as you find them. This is okay, unless they
are very close to each other.
So if the deck looks like this before step 1:
3AB89
at the end of step 2 it should look like:
3A8B9
If you have any doubt, remember to move the A joker before the B joker.
And be careful when the jokers are at the bottom of the deck.
3. Perform a triple cut. That is, swap the cards above the first joker
with the cards below the second joker. If the deck used to look like:
246B4871A39
then after the triple cut operation it will look like:
39B4871A246
"First" and "second" jokers refer to whatever joker is nearest to, and
furthest from, the top of the deck. Ignore the "A" and "B" designations for
this step.
Remember that the jokers and the cards between them don't move; the
other cards move around them. This is easy to do in your hands. If there are
no cards in one of the three sections (either the jokers are adjacent, or
one is on top or the bottom), just treat that section as empty and move it
anyway.
4. Perform a count cut. Look at the bottom card. Convert it into a
number from 1 through 53. (Use the bridge order of suits: clubs, diamonds,
hearts, and spades. If the card is a (club), it is the value shown. If the
card is a (diamond), it is the value plus 13. If it is a (heart), it is the
value plus 26. If it is a (spade), it is the value plus 39. Either joker is
a 53.) Count down from the top card that number. (I generally count 1
through 13 again and again if I have to; it's easier than counting to high
numbers sequentially.) Cut after the card that you counted down to, leaving
the bottom card on the bottom. If the deck used to look like:
7 ... cards ... 45 ... cards ... 89
and the ninth card was the 4, the cut would result in:
5 ... cards ... 87 ... cards ... 49
The reason the last card is left in place is to make the step
reversible. This is important for mathematical analysis of its security.
5. Find the output card. Look at the top card. Convert it into a number
from 1 through 53, in the same manner as above. Count down that many cards.
(Count the top card as number one.) Write the card after the one you counted
to on a piece of paper. (If you hit a joker, don't write anything down and
start over again with step 1.) This is the first output card. Note that this
step does not modify the state of the deck.
915
6. Convert the card to a number. As before, use the bridge suits to
order them: From lowest to highest, we have clubs, diamonds, hearts, and
spades. Hence, A(clubs) through K(clubs) is 1 through 13, A(diamonds)
through K(diamonds) is 14 through 26, A(hearts) through K(hearts) is 1
through 13, and A(spades) through K(spades) is 14 through 26.
That's Solitaire. You can use it create as many keystream numbers as
you need.
I know that there are regional differences in decks of cards, depending
on the country. In general, it does not matter what suit ordering you use,
or how you convert cards to numbers. What matters is that the sender and the
receiver agree on the rules. If you're not consistent you won't be able to
communicate.
KEYING THE DECK
Solitaire is only as secure as the key. That is, the easiest way to
break Solitaire is to figure out what key the communicants are using. If you
don't have a good key, none of the rest this matters. Here are some
suggestions for exchanging a key.
1. Shuffle the deck. A random key is the best. One of the communicants
can shuffle up a random leck and then create another, identical deck. One
goes to the sender and the other to the receiver. Most people are not good
shufflers, so shuffle the deck at least ten times, and try to use a deck
that has been played with instead of a fresh deck out of the box. Remember
to keep a spare deck in the keyed order, otherwise if you make a mistake
you'll never be able to decrypt the message. Also remember that the key is
at risk as long as it exists; the secret police could find the deck and copy
down its order.
2. Use a bridge ordering. A description of a set of bridge hands that
you might see in a newspaper or a bridge book is about a 95 bit key. If the
communicants can agree on a way to convert that to a deck ordering and a way
to set the jokers (perhaps after the first two cards that are mentioned in
the discussion of the game), this can work. Be warned: the secret police can
find your bridge column and copy down the order. You can try setting up some
repeatable convention for which bridge column to use; for example, "use the
bridge column in your home town newspaper for the day on which you encrypt
the message," or something like that. Or use a list of keywords to search
the New York Times website, and use the bridge column for the day of the
article that comes up when you search on those words. If the keywords are
found or intercepted, they look like a passphrase. And pick your own
convention; remember that the secret police read Neal Stephenson's books,
too.
3. Use a passphrase to order the deck. This method uses the Solitaire
algorithm to create an initial deck ordering. Both the sender and receiver
share a passphrase. (For example, "SECRET KEY.") Start with the deck in a
fixed order; lowest card to highest card, in bridge suits. Perform the
Solitaire operation, but instead of Step 5, do another count cut based on
the first character of the passphrase (19, in this example). (Remember to
put the top cards just above the bottom card in the deck, as before.) Do
this once for each character. Use another two characters to set the
positions of the jokers. Remember, though, that there are only about 1.4
bits of randomness per character in standard English. You're going to want
at least an 80 character passphrase to make this secure; I recommend at
least 120 characters. (Sorry, but you just can't get good security with a
shorter key.)
SAMPLE OUTPUT
Here's some sample data to practice your Solitaire skills with:
Sample 1: Start with an unkeyed deck: A(clubs) through K(clubs),
A(hearts) through K(hearts), A(diamonds) through K(diamonds), A(spades)
through K(spades), A joker, B joker (you can think of this as 1 52, A, B).
The first ten outputs are:
4 49 10 (53) 24 8 51 44 6 33
The 53 is skipped, of course. I just put it there for demonstration. If
the plain text is:
AAAAA AAAAA
then the cipher text is:
EXKYI ZSGEH
Sample 2: Using keying method 3 and the key "FOO," the first fifteen
outputs are:
8 19 7 25 20 (53) 9 8 22 32 43 5 26 17 (53) 38 48
If the plain text is all As, the cipher text is:
ITHZU JIWGR FARMW
Sample 3: Using keying method 3 and the key "CRYPTONOMICON," the
message "SOLITAIRE" encrypts to:
KIRAK SFJAN
Of course, you should use a longer key. These samples are for test
purposes only. There are more samples on the website, and you can use the
book's PERL script to create your own.
SECURITY THROUGH OBSCURITY
Solitaire is designed to be secure even if the enemy knows how the
algorithm works. I have assumed that Cryptonomicon will be a best seller,
and that copies will be available everywhere. I assume that the NSA and
everyone else will study the algorithm and will watch for it. I assume that
the only secret is the key.
That's why keeping the key secret is so important. If you have a deck
of cards in a safe place, you should assume the enemy will at least
entertain the thought that you are using Solitaire. If you have a bridge
column in your safe deposit box, you should expect to raise a few eyebrows.
If any group is known to be using the algorithm, expect the secret police to
maintain a database of bridge columns to use in cracking attempts. Solitaire
is strong even if the enemy knows you are using it, and a simple deck of
playing cards is still much less incriminating than a software encryption
program running on your laptop, but the algorithm is no substitute for
street smarts.
OPERATIONAL NOTES
The first rule of an output feedback mode stream cipher, any of them,
is that you should never use the same key to encrypt two different messages.
Repeat after me: NEVER USE THE SAME KEY TO ENCRYPT TWO DIFFERENT MESSAGES.
If you do, you completely break the security of the system. Here's why: if
you have two ciphertext streams, A + K and B + K, and you subtract one from
the other, you get (A + K) – (B + K) = A + K – B – K = A
– B. That's two plaintext streams combined with each other, and is
very easy to break. Trust me on this one: you might not be able to recover A
and B from A – B, but a professional cryptanalyst can. This is vitally
important: never use the same key to encrypt two different messages.
Keep your messages short. This algorithm is designed to be used with
small messages: a couple of thousand characters. If you have to encrypt a
100,000 word novel, use a computer algorithm. Use shorthand, abbreviations,
and slang in your messages. Don't be chatty.
For maximum security, try to do everything in your head. If the secret
police starts breaking down your door, just calmly shuffle the deck. (Don't
throw it up in the air; you'd be surprised how much of the deck ordering is
maintained during the game of 52 Pickup.) Remember to shuffle the backup
deck, if you have one.
SECURITY ANALYSIS
There's quite a lot of it, but it's far too complicated to reproduce
here. See http://www.counterpane.com, or write to
Counterpane Systems
1711 North Ave #16
Oak Park, IL 60302
LEARNING MORE
I recommend my own book, Applied Cryptography (John Wiley & Sons,
1996), as a good place to start. Then read The Codebreakers, by David Kahn
(Scribner, 1996). After that, there are several books on computer
cryptography, and a few others on manual cryptography. You can subscribe to
my free e mail newsletter at http://www.counterpane.com/cryptogram.html or
by sending a blank e mail message to crypto gram subscribe@
chaparraltree.com. It's a fun field; good luck.
1. 1940 being a good year to begin experimenting with venereal diseases
in that the new injectable penicillin was just becoming available.
2. As the Nipponese were invariably called by Marines, who never used a
three syllable word where a three letter one would do.
3. "Hypo" is a military way of saying the letter H. Bright boy
Waterhouse infers that there must be at least seven others: Alpha, Bravo,
Charlie. etc.
4. Assuming, provisionally, that Alan is wrong and that human brains
are not machines.
5. An evident paradox, but nothing out of the ordinary being out of
America has just made this kind of thing more obvious to Randy.
6. A deprecatory term for a fighting man not good enough to be in the
Corps.
7. Men with experience in Asia use the word "Nip." The Colonel's use of
"Jap" suggests that his career has been spent in the Atlantic and/or
Caribbean.
8. He has no hard data to back this up; it just seems like a cool idea.
9. He has made up his mind that he will use the English words rather
than making a spectacle of himself by trying to pronounce the Qwghlmian
ones.
10. According to the E.Q., derived from lichen.
11. Cantrell alludes to the fact that Plan One brought them a couple of
million dollars in seed money from a venture capital outfit in San Mateo
called the Springboard Group.
12. Shaftoe had had nothing to do for the last couple of weeks except
play Hearts using KNOW YOUR ENEMY cards, so he could now peg model numbers
of obscure Kraut observation planes.
13. The first one, mì, meaning "secret" and the second one, fú, having
a dual connotation meaning, on the one hand, a symbol or mark, and on the
other hand, Taoist magic.
14. Ever since the four wheel Enigma was broken.
15. Baudot code is what teletypes use. Each of the 32 characters in the
teletype alphabet has a unique number assigned to it. This number can be
represented as a five digit binary number, that is, five ones or zeroes, or
(more useful) five holes, or absences of holes, across a strip of paper
tape. Such numbers can also be represented as patterns of electrical
voltages, which can be sent down a wire, or over the radio waves, and
printed out at the other end. Lately, the Germans have been using encrypted
Baudot code messages for communications between high level command posts;
e.g., between Berlin and the various Army group headquarters. At Bletchley
Park, this category of encryption schemes is called Fish, and the Colossus
machine is being built specifically to break it.
16. Half an hour ago, as Epiphyte Corp. was gathering in the lobby, a
big black Mercedes came in, fresh from the airport. 747s come into Kinakuta
four times a day, and from the time that a person presents himself at the
registration desk of his luxury hotel, you can figure out which city he flew
in from. These guys came in from Los Angeles. Three Latino men: a middle
aged fellow of great importance, a somewhat younger assistant, and a
palooka. They were met in the lobby by the solitary fellow who showed up
late yesterday with the cellphone.
17. This is dry humor, and is received as such by everyone in the room;
at this point in the war, a U boat could no more run up the English Channel
than it could travel up the Mississippi, sink a few barges in Dubuque, and
make its escape.
18. Nipponese Army speak for "retreat."
19. It goes without saying that the Finns have to have their own sui
generis brand of automatic weapon.
20. This phrase is a Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe parody.