other me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with
for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders
by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a
withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than
once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs
simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their
orders.
"This Lieutenant Reagan complained that you kept trying to tell him a
story about a lizard," the major says.
"Sir! Yes, sir! A giant lizard, sir! An interesting story, sir!"
Shaftoe says.
"I don't care," the major says. "The question is, was it an appropriate
story to tell in that circumstance?"
"Sir! We were making our way around the coast of the island, trying to
get between these Nips and a Tokyo Express landing site, sir!..." Shaftoe
begins.
"Shut up!"
"Sir! Yes sir!"
There is a sweaty silence that is finally broken by the colonel. "We
had the shrinks go over your statement, Sergeant Shaftoe."
''Sir! Yes, sir?''
"They are of the opinion that the whole giant lizard thing is a classic
case of projection."
"Sir! Could you please tell me what the hell that is, sir!"
The colonel flushes, turns his back, peers through blinds at sparse
traffic out on Eye Street. "Well, what they are saying is that there really
was no giant lizard. That you killed that Jap (2) in hand to hand
combat. And that your memory of the giant lizard is basically your id coming
out."
''Id, sir!''
"That there is this id thing inside your brain and that it took over
and got you fired up to kill that Jap bare handed. Then your imagination
dreamed up all this crap about the giant lizard afterwards, as a way of
explaining it."
"Sir! So you are saying that the lizard was just a metaphor, sir!"
"Yes."
"Sir! Then I would respectfully like to know how that Nip got chewed in
half, sir!"
The colonel screws up his face dismissively. "Well, by the time you
were rescued by that coastwatcher, Sergeant, you had been in that cove for
three days along with all of those dead bodies. And in that tropical heat
with all those bugs and scavengers, there was no way to tell from looking at
that Jap whether he had been chewed up by a giant lizard or run through a
brush chipper, if you know what I mean."
"Sir! Yes I do, sir!"
The major goes back to the report. "This Reagan fellow says that you
also repeatedly made disparaging comments about General MacArthur."
"Sir, yes sir! He is a son of a bitch who hates the Corps, sir! He is
trying to get us all killed, sir!"
The major and the colonel look at each other. It is clear that they
have, wordlessly, just arrived at some decision.
"Since you insist on reenlisting, the typical thing would be to have
you go around the country showing off your medals and recruiting young men
into the Corps. But this lizard story kind of rules that out."
"Sir! I do not understand, sir!"
"The Recruitment Office has reviewed your file. They have seen Reagan's
report. They are nervous that you are going to be in West Bumfuck, Arkansas,
riding in the Memorial Day parade in your shiny dress uniform, and suddenly
you are going to start spouting all kinds of nonsense about lizards and
scare everyone shitless and put a kink in the war effort."
"Sir! I respectfully "
"Permission to speak denied," the major says. "I won't even get into
your obsession with General MacArthur."
"Sir! The general is a murdering "
"Shut up!"
"Sir! Yes sir!"
"We have another job for you, Marine."
"Sir! Yes sir!"
"You're going to be part of something very special."
"Sir! The Marine Raiders are already a very special part of a very
special Corps, sir!"
"That's not what I mean. I mean that this assignment is . . . unusual."
The major looks over at the colonel. He is not sure how to proceed.
The colonel puts his hand in his pocket, jingles coins, then reaches up
and checks his shave.
"It is not exactly a Marine Corps assignment," he finally says. "You
will be part of a special international detachment. An American Marine
Raider platoon and a British Special Air Services squadron, operating
together under one command. A bunch of tough hombres who've shown they can
handle any assignment, under any conditions. Is that a fair description of
you, Marine?"
''Sir! Yes, sir!''
"It is a very unusual setup," the colonel muses, "not the kind of thing
that military men would ever dream up. Do you know what I'm saying,
Shaftoe?"
"Sir, no sir! But I do detect a strong odor of politics in the room
now, sir!"
The colonel gets a little twinkle in his eye, and glances out the
window towards the Capitol dome. "These politicians can be real picky about
how they get things done. Everything has to be just so. They don't like
excuses. Do you follow me, Shaftoe?"
''Sir! Yes, sir!''
"The Corps had to fight to get this. They were going to make it an Army
thing. We pulled a few strings with some former Naval persons in high
places. Now the assignment is ours. Some would say, it is ours to screw up.
"Sir! The assignment will not be screwed up, sir!"
"The reason that son of a bitch MacArthur is killing Marines like flies
down in the South Pacific is because sometimes we don't play the political
game that well. If you and your new unit do not perform brilliantly, that
situation will only worsen."
''Sir! You can rely on this Marine, sir!''
"Your commanding officer will be Lieutenant Ethridge. An Annapolis man.
Not much combat experience, but knows how to move in the right circles. He
can run interference for you at the political level. The responsibility for
getting things done on the ground will be entirely yours, Sergeant Shaftoe."
''Sir! Yes , sir!''
"You'll be working closely with British Special Air Service. Very good
men. But I want you and your men to outshine them."
"Sir! You can count on it, sir!"
"Well, get ready to ship out, then," the major says. "You're on your
way to North Africa, Sergeant Shaftoe."
Chapter 12 LONDINIUM
The massive British coinage clanks in his pocket like pewter dinner
plates. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse walks down a street wearing the
uniform of a commander in the United States Navy. This must not be taken to
imply that he is actually a commander, or indeed that he is even in the
Navy, though he is. The United States part is, however, a safe bet, because
every time he arrives at a curb, he either comes close to being run over by
a shooting brake or he falters in his stride; diverts his train of thought
onto a siding, much to the disturbance of its passengers and crew; and
throws some large part of his mental calculation circuitry into the job of
trying to reflect his surroundings through a large mirror. They drive on the
left side of the street here.
He knew about that before he came. He had seen pictures. And Alan had
complained of it in Princeton, always nearly being run over as, lost in
thought, he stepped off curbs looking the wrong way.
The curbs are sharp and perpendicular, not like the American smoothly
molded sigmoid cross section curves. The transition between the side walk
and the street is a crisp vertical. If you put a green lightbulb on
Waterhouse's head and watched him from the side during the blackout, his
trajectory would look just like a square wave traced out on the face of a
single beam oscilloscope: up, down, up, down. If he were doing this at home,
the curbs would be evenly spaced, about twelve to the mile, because his home
town is neatly laid out on a grid.
Here in London, the street pattern is irregular and so the transitions
in the square wave come at random seeming times, sometimes very close
together, sometimes very far apart.
A scientist watching the wave would probably despair of finding any
pattern; it would look like a random circuit, driven by noise, triggered
perhaps by the arrival of cosmic rays from deep space, or the decay of
radioactive isotopes.
But if he had depth and ingenuity, it would be a different matter.
Depth could be obtained by putting a green light bulb on the head of
every person in London and then recording their tracings for a few nights.
The result would be a thick pile of graph paper tracings, each one as
seemingly random as the others. The thicker the pile, the greater the depth.
Ingenuity is a completely different matter. There is no systematic way
to get it. One person could look at the pile of square wave tracings and see
nothing but noise. Another might find a source of fascination there, an
irrational feeling impossible to explain to anyone who did not share it.
Some deep part of the mind, adept at noticing patterns (or the existence of
a pattern) would stir awake and frantically signal the dull quotidian parts
of the brain to keep looking at the pile of graph paper. The signal is dim
and not always heeded, but it would instruct the recipient to stand there
for days if necessary, shuffling through the pile of graphs like an autist,
spreading them out over a large floor, stacking them in piles according to
some inscrutable system, pencilling numbers, and letters from dead
alphabets, into the corners, cross referencing them, finding patterns, cross
checking them against others.
One day this person would walk out of that room carrying a highly
accurate street map of London, reconstructed from the information in all of
those square wave plots.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is one of those people.
As a result, the authorities of his country, the United States of
America, have made him swear a mickle oath of secrecy, and keep supplying
him with new uniforms of various services and ranks, and now have sent him
to London.
He steps off a curb, glancing reflexively to the left. A jingling
sounds in his right ear, bicycle brakes trumpet. It is merely a Royal Marine
(Waterhouse is beginning to recognize the uniforms) off on some errand; but
he has reinforcements behind him in the form of a bus/coach painted olive
drab and stenciled all over with inscrutable code numbers.
"Pardon me, sir!" the Royal Marine says brightly, and swerves around
him, apparently reckoning that the coach can handle any mopping up work.
Waterhouse leaps forward, directly into the path of a black taxi coming the
other way.
After making it across that particular street, though, he arrives at
his Westminster destination without further life threatening incidents,
unless you count being a few minutes' airplane ride from a tightly organized
horde of murderous Germans with the best weapons in the world. He has found
himself in a part of town that seems almost like certain lightless, hemmed
in parts of Manhattan: narrow streets lined with buildings on the order of
ten stories high. Occasional glimpses of ancient and mighty gothic piles at
street ends clue him in to the fact that he is nigh unto Greatness. As in
Manhattan, the people walk fast, each with some clear purpose in mind.
The amended heels of the pedestrians' wartime shoes pop metallically.
Each pedestrian has a fairly consistent stride length and clicks with nearly
metronomic precision. A microphone in the sidewalk would provide an
eavesdropper with a cacophony of clicks, seemingly random like the noise
from a Geiger counter. But the right kind of person could abstract signal
from noise and count the pedestrians, provide a male/female break down and a
leg length histogram
He has to stop this. He would like to concentrate on the matter at
hand, but that is still a mystery.
A massive, blocky modern sculpture sits over the door of the St.
James's Park tube station, doing twenty four hour surveillance on the
Broadway Buildings, which is actually just a single building. Like every
other intelligence headquarters Waterhouse had seen, it is a great
disappointment.
It is, after all, just a building orange stone, ten or so stories, an
unreasonably high mansard roof accounting for the top three, some smidgens
of classical ornament above the windows, which like all windows in London
are divided into eight tight triangles by strips of masking tape. Waterhouse
finds that this look blends better with classical architecture than, say,
gothic.
He has some grounding in physics and finds it implausible that, when a
few hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene are set off in the neighborhood and
the resulting shock wave propagates through a large pane of glass the people
on the other side of it will derive any benefit from an asterisk of paper
tape. It is a superstitious gesture, like hexes on Pennsylvania Dutch
farmhouses. The sight of it probably helps keep people's minds focused on
the war.
Which doesn't seem to be working for Waterhouse. He makes his way
carefully across the street, thinking very hard about the direction of the
traffic, on the assumption that someone inside will be watching him. He goes
inside, holding the door for a fearsomely brisk young woman in a
quasimilitary outfit who makes it clear that Waterhouse had better not
expect to Get Anywhere just because he's holding the door for her and then
for a tired looking septuagenarian gent with a white mustache.
The lobby is well guarded and there is some business with Waterhouse's
credentials and his orders. Then he makes the obligatory mistake of going to
the wrong floor because they are numbered differently here. This would be a
lot funnier if this were not a military intelligence headquarters in the
thick of the greatest war in the history of the world.
When he does get to the right floor, though, it is a bit posher than
the wrong one was. Of course, the underlying structure of everything in
England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk
a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if
the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some
time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.
None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three ton hand built
beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable there
are certain procedures that have to be followed, Mt. Ford, such as the hand
brazing of radiators, the traditional whittling of the tyres from solid
blocks of cahoutchouc.
Meetings are all the same. Waterhouse is always the Guest; he has never
actually hosted a meeting. The Guest arrives at an unfamiliar building, sits
in a waiting area declining offers of caffeinated beverages from a
personable but chaste female, and is, in time, ushered to the Room, where
the Main Guy and the Other Guys are awaiting him. There is a system of
introductions which the Guest need not concern himself with because he is
operating in a passive mode and need only respond to stimuli, shaking all
hands that are offered, declining all further offers of caffeinated and
(now) alcoholic beverages, sitting down when and where invited. In this
case, the Main Guy and all but one of the Other Guys happen to be British,
the selection of beverages is slightly different, the room, being British,
is thrown together from blocks of stone like a Pharaoh's inner tomb, and the
windows have the usual unconvincing strips of tape on them. The Predictable
Humor Phase is much shorter than in America, the Chitchat Phase longer.
Waterhouse has forgotten all of their names. He always immediately
forgets the names. Even if he remembered them, he would not know their
significance, as he does not actually have the organization chart of the
Foreign Ministry (which runs Intelligence) and the Military laid out in
front of him. They keep saying "woe to hice!" but just as he actually begins
to feel sorry for this Hice fellow, whoever he is, he figures out that this
is how they pronounce "Waterhouse." Other than that, the one remark that
actually penetrates his brain is when one of the Other Guys says something
about the Prime Minister that implies considerable familiarity. And he's not
even the Main Guy. The Main Guy is much older and more distinguished. So it
seems to Waterhouse (though he has completely stopped listening to what all
of these people are saying to him) that a good half of the people in the
room have recently had conversations with Winston Churchill.
Then, suddenly, certain words come into the conversation. Water house
was not paying attention, but he is pretty sure that within the last ten
seconds, the word Ultra was uttered. He blinks and sits up straighter.
The Main Guy looks bemused. The Other Guys look startled.
"Was something said, a few minutes ago, about the availability of
coffee?" Waterhouse says.
"Miss Stanhope, coffee for Captain Woe To Hice," says the Main Guy into
an electrical intercom. It is one of only half a dozen office intercoms in
the British Empire. However, it is cast in a solid ingot from a hundred
pounds of iron and fed by 420 volt cables as thick as Waterhouse's index
finger. "And if you would be so good as to bring tea."
So, now Waterhouse knows the name of the Main Guy's secretary. That's a
start. From that, with a bit of research he might be able to recover the
memory of the Main Guy's name.
This seems to have thrown them back into the Chitchat Phase, and though
American important guys would be fuming and frustrated, the Brits seem
enormously relieved. Even more beverages are ordered from Miss Stanhope.
"Have you seen Dr. Shehrrrn recently?" the Main Guy inquires of
Waterhouse. He has a touch of concern in his voice.
"Who?" Then Waterhouse realizes that the person in question is
Commander Schoen, and that here in London the name is apt to be pronounced
correctly, Shehrrn instead of Shane.
"Commander Waterhouse?" the Main Guy says, several minutes later. On
the fly, Waterhouse has been trying to invent a new cryptosystem based upon
alternative systems of pronouncing words and hasn't said anything in quite a
while.
"Oh, yeah! Well, I stopped in briefly and paid my respects to Schoen
before getting on the ship. Of course, when he's, uh, feeling under the
weather, everyone's under strict orders not to talk cryptology with him."
"Of course."
"The problem is that when your whole relationship with the fellow is
built around cryptology, you can't even really poke your head in the door
without violating that order."
"Yes, it is most awkward."
"I guess he's doing okay." Waterhouse does not say this very
convincingly and there is an appropriate silence around the table.
"When he was in better spirits, he wrote glowingly of your work on the
Cryptonomicon," says one of the Other Guys, who has not spoken very much
until now. Waterhouse pegs him as some kind of unspecified mover and shaker
in the world of machine cryptology.
"He's a heck of a fella," Waterhouse says.
The Main Guy uses this as an opening. "Because of your work with Dr.
Schoen's Indigo machine, you are, by definition, on the Magic list. Now that
this country and yours have agreed at least in principle to cooperate in the
field of cryptanalysis, this automatically puts you on the Ultra list."
"I understand, sir," Waterhouse says.
"Ultra and Magic are more symmetrical than not. In each case, a
belligerent Power has developed a machine cypher which it considers to be
perfectly unbreakable. In each case, an allied Power has in fact broken that
cypher. In America, Dr. Schoen and his team broke Indigo and devised the
Magic machine. Here, it was Dr. Knox's team that broke Enigma and devised
the Bombe. The leading light here seems to have been Dr. Turing. The leading
light with you chaps was Dr. Schoen, who is, as you said, under the weather.
But he holds you up as comparable to Turing, Commander Waterhouse."
"That's pretty darn generous," Waterhouse says.
"But you studied with Turing at Princeton, did you not?"
"We were there at the same time, if that's what you mean. We rode
bikes. His work was a lot more advanced."
"But Turing was pursuing graduate studies. You were merely an
undergraduate."
"Sure. But even allowing for that, he's way smarter than me."
"You are too modest, Captain Waterhouse. How many undergraduates have
published papers in international journals?"
"We just rode bikes," Waterhouse insists. "Einstein wouldn't give me
the time of day."
"Dr. Turing has shown himself to be rather handy with information
theory," says a prematurely haggard guy with long limp grey hair, whom
Waterhouse now pegs as some sort of Oxbridge don. "You must have discussed
this with him.
The don turns to the others and says, donnishly, "Information Theory
would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid
dynamics would inform the hull of a ship." Then he turns back to Waterhouse
and says, somewhat less formally: "Dr. Turing has continued to develop his
work on the subject since he vanished, from your point of view, into the
realm of the Classified. Of particular interest has been the subject of just
how much information can be extracted from seemingly random data."
Suddenly all of the other people in the room are exchanging those
amused looks again. "I gather from your reaction," says the Main Guy, "that
this has been of continuing interest to you as well."
Waterhouse wonders what his reaction was. Did he grow fangs? Drool into
his coffee?
"That's good," says the Main Guy before Waterhouse can answer, "because
it is of the highest interest to us as well. You see, now that we are making
efforts and I must emphasize the preliminary and unsatisfactory level of
these efforts to this point to coordinate intelligence between America and
Britain, we find ourselves in the oddest situation that has ever faced a
pair of allies in a war. We know everything, Commander Waterhouse. We
receive Hitler's personal communications to his theater commanders,
frequently before the commanders do! This knowledge is obviously a powerful
tool. But just as obviously, it cannot help us win the war unless we allow
it to change our actions. That is, if, through Ultra, we become aware of a
convoy sailing from Taranto to supply Rommel in North Africa, the knowledge
does us no good unless we go out and sink that convoy."
"Clearly," Waterhouse says.
"Now, if ten convoys are sent out and all of them are sunk, even those
under cover of clouds and darkness, the Germans will ask themselves how we
knew where those convoys could be found. They will realize that we have
penetrated the Enigma cypher, and change it, and then this tool will be lost
to us. It is safe to say that Mr. Churchill will be displeased by such an
outcome." The Main Guy looks at all of the others, who nod knowingly.
Waterhouse gets the feeling that Mr. Churchill has been bearing down rather
hard on this particular point.
"Let us recast this in information theory terms," says the don.
"Information flows from Germany to us, through the Ultra system at Bletchley
Park. That information comes to us as seemingly random Morse code
transmissions on the wireless. But because we have very bright people who
can discover order in what is seemingly random, we can extract information
that is crucial to our endeavors. Now, the Germans have not broken our
important cyphers. But they can observe our actions the routing of our
convoys in the North Atlantic, the deployment of our air forces. If the
convoys always avoid the U boats, if the air forces always go straight to
the German convoys, then it is clear to the Germans I'm speaking of a very
bright sort of German here, a German of the professor type that there is not
randomness here. This German can find correlations. He can see that we know
more than we should. In other words, there is a certain point at which
information begins to flow from us back to the Germans."
"We need to know where that point is," says the Main Guy. "Exactly
where it is. We need then to stay on the right side of it. To develop the
appearance of randomness."
"Yes," Waterhouse says, "and it has to be a kind of randomness that
would convince someone like Rudolf von Hacklheber."
"Exactly the fellow we had in mind," the don says. "Dr. von Hacklheber,
as of last year."
"Oh!" Waterhouse says. "Rudy got his Ph.D.?" Since Rudy got called back
into the embrace of the Thousand Year Reich, Waterhouse has assumed the
worst: imagining him out there in a greatcoat, sleeping in drifts and
besieging Leningrad or something. But apparently the Nazis, with their sharp
eye for talent (as long as it isn't Jewish talent) have given him a desk
job.
Still, it's touch and go for a while after Waterhouse shows pleasure
that Rudy's okay. One of the Other Guys, trying to break the ice, jokes that
if someone had had the foresight to lock Rudy up in New Jersey for the
duration, there would be no need for the new category of secret known as
Ultra Mega. No one seems to think it's funny, so Waterhouse assumes it's
true.
They show him the organizational chart for RAE Special Detachment No.
2701, which contains the names of all of the twenty four people in the world
who are on to Ultra Mega. The top is cluttered with names such as Winston
Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then come some other names that
seem oddly familiar to Waterhouse perhaps the names of these very gents here
in this room. Below them, one Chattan, a youngish RAF colonel who
(Waterhouse is assured) accomplished some very fine things during the Battle
of Britain.
In the next rank of the chart is the name Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse. There are two other names: one is an RAF captain and the other
is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. There is also a dotted line
veering off to one side, leading to the name Dr. Alan Mathison Turing. Taken
as a whole, this chart may be the most irregular and bizarre ad hocracy ever
grafted onto a military organization.
In the bottom row of the chart are two groups of half a dozen names,
clustered beneath the names of the RAF captain and the Marine captain
respectively. These are the squads that represent the executive wing of the
organization: as one of the guys at the Broadway Building puts it, "the men
at the coal face," and as the one American Guy translates it for him, "this
is where the rubber meets the road."
"Do you have any questions?" the Main Guy asks.
"Did Alan choose the number?"
"You mean Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. Did he choose the number 2701?"
This level of detail is clearly several ranks beneath the station of
the men in the Broadway Buildings. They look startled and almost offended,
as if Waterhouse has suddenly asked them to take dictation.
"Possibly," says the Main Guy. "Why do you ask?"
"Because," Waterhouse says, "the number 2701 is the product of two
primes, and those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation,
are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other."
All heads swivel toward the don, who looks put out. "We'd best change
that," he says, "it is the sort of thing that Dr. von Hacklheber would
notice." He stands up, withdraws a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket,
and amends the organizational chart so that it reads 2702 instead of 2701.
As he is doing this, Waterhouse looks at the other men in the room and
thinks that they look satisfied. Clearly, this is just the sort of parlor
trick they have hired Waterhouse to perform.
Chapter 13 CORREGIDOR
There is no fixed boundary between the water of Manila Bay and the
humid air above it, only a featureless blue grey shroud hanging a couple of
miles away. Glory IV maneuvers cautiously through an immense strewing of
anchored cargo ships for about half an hour, then picks up speed and heads
out into the center of the bay. The air thins a bit, allowing Randy a good
view of Bata'an off to starboard: black mountains mostly veiled in haze and
speckled by the mushroom cap shaped clouds of ascending thermals. For the
most part, it has no beaches, just red cliffs plummeting the last few yards
into the sea. But as they work their way out to the end of the peninsula,
the land tails off more gently and supports a few pale green fields. At the
very tip of Bata'an are a couple of stabbing limestone crags that Randy
recognizes from Avi's video. But by this point he has eyes mostly for
Corregidor itself, which lies a few miles off the end of the peninsula.
America Shaftoe, or Amy as she likes to be called, spends most of the
voyage bustling around on the deck, engaging the Filipino and American
divers in bursts of serious conversation, sometimes sitting cross legged on
the deck plates to go over papers or charts. She has donned a frayed straw
cowboy hat to protect her head from solar radiation. Randy's in no hurry to
expose himself. He ambles around the air conditioned cabin, sipping his
coffee and looking at the photographs on the walls.
He is naively expecting to see pictures of divers landing submarine
cables on beaches. Semper Marine Services does a fair amount of cable work
and does it well, he checked their references before hiring them but they
apparently do not consider that kind of work interesting enough to
photograph. Most of these pictures are of undersea salvage operations:
divers, with enormous grins on their leathery faces, triumphantly holding up
barnacle encrusted vases, like hockey players brandishing the Stanley Cup.
From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the
water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows
that it is really a sperm shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this
angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying
to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.
Amy storms past and throws the cabin door open. "Come to the bridge,"
she says, "you should see this."
Randy follow's her. "Who's the guy in most of those pictures?" he asks.
"Scary, crew cut?"
"Yeah."
"That's my father," she says. "Doug."
"Would that be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe?" Randy asks. He's seen the
name on some of the documents that he's exchanged with Semper Marine.
"The same."
"The ex SEAL?"
"Yeah. But he doesn't like to be referred to that way. It is such a
cliche."
"Why does he seem familiar to me?"
Amy sighs. "He had his fifteen minutes of fame back in 1975."
''I'm having trouble remembering."
"You know Comstock?"
"Attorney General Paul Comstock? Hates crypto?"
"I'm talking about his father. Earl Comstock."
"Cold War policy guy the brains behind the Vietnam War right?"
"I've never heard him described that way, but yeah, we're talking about
the same guy. You might remember that back in 1975, Earl Comstock fell, or
was pushed, off a ski lift in Colorado, and broke his arms."
"Oh, yeah. It's sort of coming back to me.
"My pop " Amy does a little head fake towards one of the photographs "
happened to be seated right next to him at the time."
"By accident, or "
"Total chance. Not planned."
"That's one way to look at it," Randy says, "but on the other hand, if
Earl Comstock went skiing frequently, the probability was actually rather
high that sooner or later he'd find himself sitting, fifty feet off the
ground, next to a Vietnam combat veteran."
"Whatever. All I'm saying is I don't want to talk about it, actually."
"Am I going to get to meet this character?" Randy asks, looking at the
photograph.
Amy bites her lip and squints at the horizon. "Ninety percent of the
time his presence is a sign that something really weird is going on." She
opens the hatch to the bridge and holds it for him, pointing out the high
step.
"The other ten percent?"
"He's bored, or on the outs with his girlfriend."
Glory's pilot is concentrating intensely and ignores them, which Randy
takes to be a sign of professionalism. The bridge has many counters
fashioned from doors or thick plywood, and all of the available space is
covered with electronic gear: a fax, a smaller machine that spews out
weather bulletins, three computers, a satellite phone, a few GSM phones
socketed into their chargers, depth sounding gear. Amy leads him over to a
machine with a big screen that is showing what looks like a black and white
photo of rugged terrain. "Sidescan sonar," she explains, "one of our best
tools for this kind of work. Shows us what's on the bottom." She checks one
of the computer screens for their current coordinates and then runs a quick
calculation in her head. "Ernesto, change course five degrees to starboard
please."
"Yes ma'am," Ernesto says, and makes it happen.
"What are you looking for?"
"This is a freebie like the cigarettes at the hotel," Amy explains.
"Just an extra added bonus for doing business with us. Sometimes we like to
play tour guide. See? Check that out." She uses her pinkie to point out
something that is just becoming visible on the screen. Randy hunches over
and peers at it. It is clearly a manmade shape: a jumble of straight lines
and right angles.
"Looks like a heap of debris," he says.
"It is now," Amy says, "but it used to be a good chunk of the Filipino
treasury."
"What?"
"During the war," Amy says, "after Pearl Harbor, but before the
Japanese took Manila, the government emptied out the treasury. They put all
the gold and silver into crates and shipped it to Corregidor for safekeeping
supposedly."
"What do you mean, supposedly?"
She shrugs. "This is the Philippines," she says. "I have the feeling a
lot of it ended up elsewhere. But a lot of the silver ended up there." She
straightens up and nods out the window at Corregidor. "At the time they
thought Corregidor was impregnable."
"When was this, roughly?"
"December '41 or January '42. Anyway, it became obvious that Corregidor
was going to fall. A submarine came and took away the gold at the beginning
of February. Then another sub came and took off guys they couldn't allow to
be captured, like codebreakers. But they didn't have enough subs to carry
away all the silver. MacArthur left in March. They started taking the silver
out, in crates, in the middle of the night, and dropping it into the water."
"You're shitting me!"
"They could always come back later and try to recover it," Amy says.
"Better to lose it all than let the Japanese take it, right?"
"I guess so."
"The Japanese recovered a lot of that silver they captured a bunch of
American divers on Bata'an and Corregidor, and made them go down, right down
below where we are at this moment, and recover it. But those same divers
managed to hide a lot of silver from their guards and get it to Filipinos,
who smuggled it into Manila, where it became so common that it totally
debased the Japanese occupation currency.
"So what are we seeing right now?"
"The remains of old crates that burst open when they hit the seafloor,"
Amy says.
"Was there any of that silver left when the war ended?"
"Oh, sure," Amy says breezily. "Most of it was dumped here, and those
divers got it, but some was dumped in other areas. My dad recovered some of
it as late as the 1970s."
"Wow. That doesn't make any sense!"
"Why not?"
"I can't believe that piles of silver just sat on the bottom of the
ocean for thirty years, free for the taking."
"You don't know the Philippines very well," Amy says.
"I know that it's a poor country. Why didn't someone come out and get
that silver?"
"Most of the treasure hunters in this part of the world are looking for
much bigger game," Amy says, "or easier."
Randy's nonplussed. "A pile of silver on the bottom of the bay seems
big and easy to me.
"It's not. Silver's not worth that much. A Sung Dynasty vase, cleaned
up, can go for more than its weight in gold. Gold. And it's easier to find
the vase you just scan the seafloor, looking for something shaped like a
junk. A sunken junk makes a distinctive image on sonar. Whereas an old
crate, all busted up and covered with coral and barnacles, tends to look
like a rock."
As they draw closer to Corregidor, Randy can see that the tail of the
island is lumpy, with big stacks of rock protruding from it here and there.
The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green
and then a sere reddish brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the
island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer. Randy's gaze is fixed on
one of those rocky crags, which is surmounted by a new steel tower. Atop the
tower is a microwave horn aimed east, toward Epiphyte's building in
Intramuros.
"See those caves along the waterline?" Amy says. She seems to regret
having mentioned sunken treasure in the first place, and now wants to get
off the subject.
Randy tears himself away from the microwave antenna, of which he is
part owner, and looks in the direction Amy's pointing. The limestock flank
of the island, which drops vertically the last few meters into the water, is
riddled with holes.
"Yeah."
"Built by Americans to house beach defense guns. Enlarged by the
Japanese as launch sites for suicide boats."
"Wow."
Randy notices a deep gargling noise, and looks over to see that a boat
has fallen in alongside them. It is a canoe shaped affair maybe forty feet
long, with long outriggers on either side. A couple of ragged flags fly from
a short mast, and bright laundry flaps gaily from various lines strung here
and there. A big, naked diesel engine sits in the middle of the hull
flailing the atmosphere with black smoke. Forward of that, several
Filipinos, including women and children, are gathered in the shade of a
bright blue tarpaulin, eating. Aft, a couple of men are fiddling with diving
equipment. One of them is holding something up to his mouth: a microphone. A
voice blares from Glory's radio, speaking Tagalog. Ernesto stifles a laugh,
picks up the mike, and answers briefly. Randy doesn't know what they are
saying, but he suspects it is something like "Let's horse around later, our
client is on the bridge right now."
"Business associates," Amy explains dryly. Her body language says that
she wants to get away from Randy and back to work.
"Thanks for the tour," Randy says. "One question."
Amy raises her eyebrows, trying to look patient.
"How much of Semper Marine's revenue derives from treasure hunting?"
"This month? This year? The last ten years? Over the lifetime of the
company?" Amy says.
"Whatever."
"That kind of income is sporadic," Amy says. "Glory was paid for, and
then some, by pottery that we recovered from a junk. But some years we get
all of our revenue from jobs like this one."
"In other words, boring jobs that suck?" Randy says. He just blurts it
out. Normally he controls his tongue a little better. But shaving off his
beard has blurred his ego boundaries, or something.
He's expecting her to laugh or at least wink a him, but she takes it
very seriously. She has a pretty good poker face. "Think of it as making
license plates," she says.
"So you guys are basically a bunch of treasure hunters," Randy says.
"You just make license plates to stabilize your cash flow."
"Call us treasure hunters if you like," Amy says. "Why are you in
business, Randy?" She turns around and stalks out of the place.
Randy's still watching her go when he hears Ernesto cursing under his
breath, not so much angry as astonished. Glory is swinging around the tip of
Corregidor's tail now and the entire southern side of the island is becoming
visible for the first time. The last mile or so of the tail curves around to
form a semicircular bay. Anchored in the center of this bay is a white ship
that Randy identifies, at first, as a small ocean liner with rakish and
wicked lines. Then he sees the name painted on its stern: RUI FALEIRO SANTA
MONICA, CALIFORNIA
Randy goes and stands next to Ernesto and they stare at the white ship
for a while. Randy has heard about it, and Ernesto, like everyone else in
the Philippines, knows about it. But seeing it is another thing entirely. A
helicopter sits on its afterdeck like a toy. A dagger shaped muscle boat
hangs from a davit, ready for use as a dinghy. A brown skinned man in a
gleaming white uniform can be seen polishing a brass rail.
"Rui Faleiro was Magellan's cosmographer," Randy says.
"Cosmographer?"
"The brains of the operation," Randy says, tapping his head.
"He came here with Magellan?" Ernesto asks.
In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went
around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan
Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.
"When Magellan set out on his ship, Faleiro stayed behind in Seville,"
Randy says. "He went crazy."
"You know a lot about Magallanes, eh?" Ernesto says. "No," Randy says,
"I know a lot about the Dentist."
***
"Don't talk to the Dentist. Ever. Not about anything. Not even tech
stuff. Any technical question he asks you is just a stalking horse for some
business tactic that is as far beyond your comprehension as Gödel's Proof
would be to Daffy Duck."
Avi told Randy this spontaneously one evening, as they were tucking
into dinner at a restaurant in downtown Makati. Avi refuses to discuss
anything important within a mile of the Manila Hotel because he thinks every
room, and every table, is under surveillance.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Randy said.
"Hey," Avi said, "I'm just trying to stake out my turf here justify my
existence in this project. I'll handle the business stuff."
"You're not being a little paranoid?"
"Listen. The Dentist has at least a billion dollars of his own, and
another ten billion under management half the fucking orthodontists in
Southern California retired at age forty because he dectupled their IRAs in
the space of two or three years. You don't achieve those kinds of results by
being a nice guy."
"Maybe he just got lucky."
"He did get lucky. But that doesn't mean he's a nice guy. My point is
that he put that money into investments that were extremely risky. He played
Russian roulette with his investors' life savings, keeping them in the dark.
I mean, this guy would invest in a Mindanao kidnapping ring if it gave a
good rate of return."
"Does he understand that he was lucky, I wonder?"
"That's my question. I'm guessing no. I think he considers himself to
be an instrument of Divine Providence, like Douglas MacArthur."
***
Rui Faleiro is the pride of Seattle's superyacht industry, which has
been burgeoning, ever so discreetly, of late. Randy gleaned a few facts
about it from a marketing brochure that was published before the Dentist
actually bought the ship. So he knows that the helicopter and the speedboat
came included in the purchase price, which has never been divulged. The
vessel contains, among other things, ten tons of marble. The master bedroom
suite contains full his and hers bathrooms lined with black marble and pink
marble respectively, so that the Dentist and the Diva don't have to fight
over sink space when they are primping for a big event in the yacht's grand
ballroom.
"The Dentist?" Ernesto says.
"Kepler. Doctor Kepler," Randy says. "In the States, some people call
him the Dentist." People in the high tech industry.
Ernesto nods knowingly. "A man like that could have had any woman in
the world," he says. "But he picked a Filipina."
"Yes," Randy says cautiously.
"In the States, do people know the story of Victoria Vigo?"
"I must tell you that she is not as famous in the States as she is
here."
"Of course."
"But some of her songs were very popular. Many people know that she
came from great poverty."
"Do people in the States know about Smoky Mountain? The garbage dump in
Tondo, where children hunt for food?"
"Some of them do. It will be very famous when the movie about Victoria
Vigo's life shows on television."
Ernesto nods, seemingly satisfied. Everyone here knows that a movie
about the Diva's life is being made, starring herself. They generally don't
know that it's a vanity project, financed by the Dentist, and that it will
be aired only on cable television in the middle of the night.
But they probably know that it will leave out all the good parts.
***
"As far as the Dentist is concerned," Avi said, "our advantage is that,
when it comes to the Philippines, he will be predictable. Tame. Even
docile." He smiles cryptically.
"How so?"
"Victoria Vigo whored her way up out of Smoky Mountain, right?"
"Well, there seems to be a lot of nudging and winking to that effect,
but I've never heard anyone come out and say it before," Randy said,
glancing around nervously.
"Believe me, it's the only way she could have gotten out of there.
Pimping arrangements were handled by the Bolobolos. This is a group from
Northern Luzon that was brought into power along with Marcos. They run that
part of town police, organized crime, local politics, you name it.
Consequently, they own her they have photographs, videos from the days when
she was an underage prostitute and porn film starlet."
Randy shook his head in disgust and amazement. "How the hell do you get
this information?"
"Never mind. Believe me, in some circles it's as well known as the
value of pi."
"Not my circles."
"Anyway, the point is that her interests are aligned with the Bolobolos
and always will be. And the Dentist is always going to obediently do
whatever his wife tells him to."
"Can you really assume that?" Randy said. "He's a tough guy. He
probably has a lot more money and power than the Bolobolos. He can do
whatever he wants."
"But he won't," Avi says, smiling that little smile again. "He'll do
what his wife tells him to.
"How do you know that?"
"Look," Avi said, "Kepler is a major control freak just like most
powerful, rich men. Right?"
"Right."
"If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does
that translate into?"
"I hope I'll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman.
"Wrong!" Avi said. "Sex is more complicated than that, Randy. Sex is a
place where people's repressed desires come out. People get most turned on
when their innermost secrets are revealed "
"Shit! Kepler's a masochist?"
"He is such a fucking masochist that he was famous for it. At least in
the Southeast Asian sex industry. Pimps and Madams in Hong Kong, Bangkok,
Shenzhen, Manila, they all had files on him they knew exactly what he
wanted. And that's how he met Victoria Vigo. He was in Manila, see, working
on the FiliTel deal. Spent a lot of time here, staying in a hotel that's
owned, and bugged, by the Bolobolos. They studied his mating habits like
entomologists watching the reproductive habits of ants. They groomed
Victoria Vigo their ace, their bombshell, their sexual Terminator to give
Kepler exactly what Kepler wanted. Then they sent her into his life like a
guided fucking missile and pow! true love."
"You'd think he would have been suspicious, or something. I'm surprised
he'd get that involved with a whore."
"He didn't know she was a whore! That's the beauty of the plan! The
Bolobolos set her up with a fake identity as a concierge at Kepler's hotel!
A demure Catholic school girl! It starts with her getting him tickets to a
play, and inside of a year. he's chained to his bed on that fucking mega
yacht of his with strap marks on his ass, and she's standing over him with a
wedding ring on her finger the size of a headlamp, the hundred and thirty
eighth richest woman in the world."
"Hundred and twenty fifth," Randy corrected him, "FiliTel stock has
been on a bull run lately."
***
Randy spends the next days trying not to run into the Dentist. He stays
at a small private inn up on the top of the island, eating continental
breakfast every morning with an assortment of American and Nipponese war
veterans who have come here with their wives to (Randy supposes) deal with
emotional issues a million times more profound than anything Randy's ever
had to contend with. The Rui Faleiro is nothing if not conspicuous, and
Randy can get a pretty good idea of whether the Dentist is aboard it by
watching the movements of the helicopter and the speedboat.
When he thinks it's safe, he goes down to the beach below the microwave
antenna and watches Amy's divers work on the cable installation. Some of
them are working out in the surf zone, bolting sections of cast iron pipe
around the cable. Some are working a couple of miles offshore coordinating
with a barge that is injecting the cable directly into the muddy seafloor
with a giant, cleaver like appendage.
The shore end of the cable runs into a new reinforced concrete building
set back about a hundred meters from the high tide level. It is basically
just a big room filled with batteries, generators, air conditioning units,
and racks of electronic equipment. The software running on that equipment is
Randy's responsibility, and so he spends most of his time in that building,
staring into a computer screen and typing. From there, transmission lines
run up the hill to the microwave tower.
The other end is being extended out towards a buoy that is bobbing in
the South China Sea a few kilometers away. Attached to that buoy is the end
of the North Luzon Coastal Festoon, a cable, owned by FiliTel, that runs up
the coast of the island. If you follow it far enough you reach a building at
the northern tip of the island, where a big cable from Taiwan comes in.
Taiwan, in turn, is heavily webbed into the world submarine cable network;
it is easy and cheap to get data into or out of Taiwan.
There is only one gap left in the private chain of transmission that
Epiphyte and FiliTel are trying to establish from Taiwan to downtown Manila,
and that gap gets narrower by the day, as the cable barge grinds its way
towards the buoy.
***
When it finally gets there, Rui Faleiro weighs anchor and glides out to
meet it. The helicopter and the speedboat, and a flotilla of hired boats, go
into action ferrying dignitaries and media crews out from Manila. Avi shows
up carrying two fresh tuxedos from a tailor shop in Shanghai ("All those
famous Hong Kong tailors were refugees from Shanghai"). He and Randy tear
off the tissue paper, put them on, and then ride in an un air conditioned
jeepney down the hill to the dock, where Glory awaits them.
Two hours later, Randy gets to lay eyes on the Dentist and the Diva for
the first time ever in the grand ballroom of the Rui Faleiro. To Randy the
party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their
names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in
blissful solitude.
The one thing that is special about this party is that two tar covered
cables, each about the thickness of a baseball bat, are running up onto the
quarterdeck. If you go to the rail and look down you can see them disappear
into the brine. The cable ends meet on a tabletop in the middle of the deck,
where a technician, flown in from Hong Kong and duded up in a tuxedo, sits
with a box of tools, working on the splice. He is also working on a big
hangover, but that is fine with Randy since he knows that it's all fake the
cables are just scraps, their loose ends trailing in the water alongside the
yacht. The real splice was performed yesterday and is already lying on the
bottom of the sea with bits running through it.
There is another man on the quarterdeck, mostly staring at Bata'an and
Corregidor but also keeping an eye on Randy. The moment Randy notices him,
this man nods as if checking something off a list in his head, stands up,
walks over, and joins him. He is wearing a very ornate uniform, the U.S.
Navy equivalent of black tie. He is mostly bald, and what hair he does have
is battleship grey, and shorn to a length of perhaps five millimeters. As he
walks toward Randy, several Filipinos watch him with obvious curiosity.
"Randy," he says. Medals clink together as he grips Randy's right hand
and shakes it. He looks to be around fifty, but he has the skin of an eighty
year old Bedouin. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest, and many of them are
red and yellow, which are colors that Randy vaguely associates with Vietnam.
Above his pocket is a little plastic nameplate reading, SHAFTOE. "Don't be
deceived, Randy," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, "I'm not on active duty.
Retired eons ago. But I'm still entitled to wear this uniform. And it's a
hell of a lot easier than going out and trying to find a tuxedo that fits
me."
"Pleased to meet you."
"Pleasure's mine. Where'd you get yours, by the way?"
"My tuxedo?"
"Yeah."
"My partner had it made."
"Your business partner, or your sexual partner?"
"My business partner. At the moment, I am without a sexual partner."
Doug Shaftoe nods impassively. "It is telling that you have not obtained one
in Manila. As our host did, for example."
Randy looks into the ballroom at Victoria Vigo, who, if she were any
more radiant, would cause paint to peel from the walls and windowpanes to
sag like caramel.
"I guess I'm just shy, or something," Randy says.
"Are you too shy to listen to a business proposition?"
"Not at all."
"My daughter asserts that you and our host might lay some more cables
around here in coming years."
"In business, people rarely plan to do a thing only once," Randy says.
"It messes up the spreadsheets."
"You are aware, by now, that the water in this area is shallow."
"Yeah."
"You know that cables cannot be laid in shallow water without extremely
detailed, high resolution sidescan sonar surveys."
"Yes."
"I would like to perform those surveys for you, Randy."
"I see."
"No, I don't think you do see. But I want you to see, and so I'm going
to explain it."
"Okay," Randy says. "Should I bring my partner out?"
"The concept I am about to convey to you is very simple and does not
require two first rate minds in order to process it," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Okay. What is the concept?"
"The detailed survey will be just chock full of new information about
what is on the floor of the ocean in this part of the world. Some of that
information might be valuable. More valuable than you imagine."
"Ah," Randy says. "You mean that it might be the kind of thing that
your company knows how to capitalize on."
"That's right," says Doug Shaftoe. "Now, if you hire one of my
competitors to perform your survey, and they stumble on this kind of
information, they will not tell you about it. They will exploit it
themselves. You will not know that they have found anything and you will not
profit from it. But if you hire Semper Marine Services, I will tell you
about whatever I find, and I will cut you and your company in on a share of
any proceeds."
"Hmmmm," Randy says. He is trying to figure out how to do a poker face,
but he knows that Shaftoe sees right through him.
"On one condition," Doug Shaftoe says.
"I suspected there might be a condition."
"Every hook that's worth a damn has a barb. This is the barb."
"What is it?" Randy asks.
"We keep it a secret from that son of a bitch," Doug Shaftoe says,
jerking his thumb at Hubert Kepler. "Because if the Dentist finds out, then
he and the Bolobolos will just split the entire thing up between them and
we'll see nothing. There's even a chance we would end up dead."
"Well, the being dead part is something that we will certainly have to
think about," Randy says, "but I will convey your proposal to my partner."
Chapter 14 TUBE
Waterhouse and a few dozen strangers are standing and sitting in an
extraordinarily long, narrow room that rocks from side to side. The room is
lined with windows but no light comes into them, only sound: a great deal of
rumbling, rattling, and screeching. Everyone is pensive and silent, as if
they were sitting in church waiting for the service to kick off.
Waterhouse is standing up gripping a ceiling mounted protuberance that
keeps him from being rocked right onto his can. For the last couple of
minutes he has been staring at a nearby poster providing instructions on how
to put on a gas mask. Waterhouse, like everyone else, is carrying one such
device with him in a small dun canvas shoulder bag. Waterhouse's looks
different from everyone else's because it is American and military. It has
drawn a stare or two from the others.
On the poster is a lovely and stylish woman with white skin, and auburn
hair which appears to have been chemically melted and reset into its current
shape at a quality salon. She stands upright, her spine like a flagpole,
chin in the air, elbows bent, hands ritualistically posed: fingers splayed,
thumbs sticking straight up in the air just in front of her face. A sinister
lump dangles between her hands, held in a cat's cradle of khaki strapping.
Her upthrust thumbs are the linchpins of this tidy web.
Waterhouse has been in London for a couple of days now and so he knows
the next part of the story. He would know this pose anywhere. This woman is
poised for the chin thrust. If gas ever falls on the capital, the gas
rattles will sound and the tops of the massive mailboxes, which have all
been treated with special paint, will turn black. Twenty million thumbs will
point into the greenish, poison sky, ten million gas masks will dangle from
them, ten million chins will thrust. He can just imagine the crisp luscious
sound of this woman's soft white skin forcing itself into the confining
black rubber.
Once the chin thrust is complete, all is well. You have to get the
straps neatly arranged atop your auburn permanent and get indoors, but the
worst danger is past. The British gas masks have a squat round fitting on
the front to allow exhalation, which looks exactly like the snout of a pig,
and no woman would be caught dead in such a thing if the models in the gas
mask posters were not such paragons of high caste beauty.
Something catches his eye out in the darkness beyond the window. The
train has reached one of those parts of the Underground where dim gun barrel
colored light sifts down, betraying the stygian secrets of the Tube.
Everyone in the car blinks, glances, and draws breath. The World has
rematerialized around them for a moment. Fragments of wall, encrusted
trusses, bundles of cable hang in space out there, revolving slowly, like
astronomical bodies, as the train works its way past.
The cables catch Waterhouse's eye: neatly bracketed to the stone walls
in parallel courses. They are like the creepers of some plutonic ivy that
spreads through the darkness of the Tube when the maintenance men aren't
paying attention, seeking a place to break out and up into the light.
When you walk along the street, up there in the Overground, you see the
first tendrils making their way up the ancient walls of the buildings.
Neoprene jacketed vines that grow in straight lines up sheer stone and
masonry and inject themselves through holes in windowframes, homing in
particularly on offices. Sometimes they are sheathed in metal tubes.
Sometimes the owners have painted them over. But all of them share a common
root system that flourishes in the unused channels and crevices of the
Underground, converging on giant switching stations in deep bomb proof
vaults.
The train invades a cathedral of dingy yellow light, and groans to a
stop, hogging the aisle. Lurid icons of national paranoia glow in the niches
and grottoes. An angelic chin thrusting woman anchors one end of the moral
continuum. At the opposite we have a succubus in a tight skirt, sprawled on
a davenport in the midst of a party. smirking through her false eyelashes as
she eavesdrops on the naive young servicemen gabbing away behind her.
Signs on the wall identify this as Euston in a tasteful sans serif that
screams official credibility. Waterhouse and most of the other people get
off the train. After fifteen minutes or so of ricocheting around the
station's precincts, asking directions and puzzling out timetables,
Waterhouse finds himself sitting aboard an intercity train bound for
Birmingham. Along the way, it is promised, it will stop at a place called
Bletchley.
Part of the reason for the confusion is that there is another train
about to leave from an adjacent siding, which goes straight to Bletchley,
its final destination, with no stops in between. Everyone on that train, it
seems, is a female in a quasimilitary uniform.
The RAF men with the Sten guns, standing watch by each door of that
train, checking papers and passes, will not let him aboard. Waterhouse looks
through the yellowing influence of the windows at the Bletchley girls in the
train, facing each other in klatsches of four and five, getting their
knitting out of their bags, turning balls of Scottish wool into balaclavas
and mittens for convoy crews in the North Atlantic, writing letters to their
brothers in the service and their mums and dads at home. The RAF gunmen
remain by the doors until all of them are closed and the train has begun to
move out of the station. As it builds speed, the rows and rows of girls,
knitting and writing and chatting, blur together into something that
probably looks a good deal like what sailors and soldiers the world over are
commonly seeing in their dreams. Waterhouse will never be one of those
soldiers, out on the front line, out in contact with the enemy. He has
tasted the apple of forbidden knowledge. He is forbidden to go anywhere in
the world where he might be captured by the enemy.
***
The train climbs up out of the night and into a red brick arroyo,
headed northwards out of the city. It is about three in the afternoon; that
special BP train must have been carrying swing shift gals.
Waterhouse has the feeling he will not be working anything like a
regular shift. His duffel bag which was packed for him is pregnant with
sartorial possibilities: thick oiled wool sweaters, tropical weight Navy and
Army uniforms, black ski mask, condoms.
The train slowly pulls free of the city and passes into a territory
patched with small residential towns. Waterhouse feels heavy in his seat,
and suspects a slight uphill tendency. They pass through a cleft that has
been made across a low range of hills, like a kerf in the top of a log, and
enter into a lovely territory of subtly swelling emerald green fields strewn
randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep.
Of course, their distribution is probably not random at all it probably
reflects local variations in soil chemistry producing grass that the sheep
find more or less desirable. From aerial reconnaissance, the Germans could
draw up a map of British soil chemistry based upon analysis of sheep
distribution.
The fields are enclosed by old hedges, stone fences, or, especially in
the uplands, long swaths of forest. After an hour or so, the forest comes
right up along the left side of the train, covering a bank that rises up
gently from the railway siding. The train's brakes come on gassily, and the
train grumbles to a stop in a whistle stop station. But the line has forked
and ramified quite a bit, more than is warranted by the size of the station.
Waterhouse stands, plants his feet squarely, squats down in a sumo
wrestler's stance, and engages his duffel bag. Duffel appears to be winning
as it seemingly pushes Waterhouse out the door of the train and onto the
platform.
There is a stronger than usual smell of coal, and a good deal of noise
coming from not far away. Waterhouse looks up the line and discovers a heavy
industrial works unfurled across the many sidings. He stands and stares for
a couple of minutes, as his train pulls away, headed for points north, and
sees that they are in the business of repairing steam locomotives here at
Bletchley Depot. Waterhouse likes trains.
But that is not why he got a free suit of clothes and a ticket to
Bletchley, and so once again Waterhouse engages Duffel and gets it up the
stairs to the enclosed bridge that flies over all of the parallel lines.
Looking toward the station, he sees more Bletchley girls, WAAFs and WRENs,
coming towards him; the day shift, finished with their work, which consists
of the processing of ostensibly random letters and digits on a heavy
industrial scale. Not wanting to appear ridiculous in their sight, he
finally gets Duffel maneuvered onto his back, gets his arms through the
shoulder straps, and allows its weight to throw him forward across the
bridge.
The WAAFs and WRENs are only moderately interested in the sight of a
newly arriving American officer. Or perhaps they are only being demure. In
any case, Waterhouse knows he is one of the few, but not the first. Duffel
shoves him through the one room station like a fat cop chivvying a
hammerlocked drunk across the lobby of a two star hotel. Waterhouse is
ejected into a strip of open territory running along the north south road.
Directly across from him the woods rise up. Any notion that they might be
woods of the inviting sort is quickly dissolved by a dense spray of gelid
light glinting from the border of the wood as the low sun betrays that the
place is saturated with sharpened metal. There is an orifice in the woods,
spewing WAAFs and WRENs like the narrow outlet of a giant yellowjacket nest.
Waterhouse must either move forward or be pulled onto his back by
Duffel and left squirming helplessly in the parking lot like a flipped
beetle, so he staggers forward, across the street and onto the wide footpath
into the woods. The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the
end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily
cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all
of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts. A florid and cloying
scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War.
Waterhouse has not even been given the full tour of BP yet, but he
knows the gist of it. He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling
reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day,
have killed more men than Napoleon.
He makes slow and apologetic progress against the tide of the departing
day shift. At one point he simply gives up, steps aside, body slams Duffel
into the ivy, lights up a cigarette, and waits for a burst of a hundred or
so girls to go by him. Something pokes at his ankle: a wild raspberry cane,
furious with thorns. It supports an uncannily small and tidy spider web
whose geodesic strands gleam in a beam of low afternoon light. The spider in
the center is an imperturbable British sort, perfectly unruffled by
Waterhouse's clumsy Yank antics.
Waterhouse reaches out and catches a yellow brown elm leaf that happens
to fall through the air before him. He hunkers down, plants his cigarette in
his mouth, and, using both hands for steadiness, draws the sawtooth rim of
the elm leaf across one of the web's radial strands, which, he knows, will
not have any sticky stuff on it. Like a fiddle bow on a string, the leaf
sets up a fairly regular vibration in the web. The spider spins to face it,
rotating instantly, like a character in a badly spliced movie. Waterhouse is
so startled by the speed of the move that he starts back just a bit, then he
draws the leaf across the web again. The spider tenses, feeling the
vibrations.
Eventually it returns to its original position and carries on as
before, ignoring Waterhouse completely.
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have
caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and
the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an
extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer
and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing
machine. Waterhouse has tried many different tricks, but he has never been
able to spoof a spider. Not a good omen!
The rush hour seems to have ended during Waterhouse's science
experiment. He engages Duffel once more. The struggle takes them another
hundred yards down the path, which finally empties out into a road just at
the point where it is barred by an iron gate slung between stupid obelisks
of red brick. The guards are, again, RAF men with Sten guns, and right now
they are examining the papers of a man in a canvas greatcoat and goggles,
who has just ridden up on an Army green motorcycle with panniers slung over
the rear wheel. The panniers are not especially full, but they have been
carefully secured; they contain the ammunition that the girls feed into the
chattering teeth of their ravenous weapons.
The motorcyclist is waved through, and makes an immediate left turn
down a narrow lane. Attention falls upon Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who
after a suitable exchange of salutes, presents his credentials.
He has to choose among his several sets, which he doesn't manage to
hide from the guards. But the guards do not seem alarmed or even curious
about this, which sets them distinctly apart from most whom Waterhouse has
dealt with. Naturally, these men are not on the Ultra Mega list, and so it
would be a grave breach of security to tell them that he was here on Ultra
Mega business. They appear to have greeted many other men who can't state
their real business, however, and don't bat an eyelash when Lawrence
pretends to be one of the naval intelligence liaisons in Hut 4 or Hut 8.
Hut 8 is where they decrypt naval Enigma transmissions. Hut 4 accepts
the decrypts from Hut 8 and analyzes them. If Waterhouse pretends to be a
Hut 4 man the disguise will not last for long, because those fellows have to
actually know something about the Navy. He perfectly fits the profile of a
Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math.
One of the RAF men peruses his papers, then steps into a small
guardhouse and stirs the crank on a telephone. Waterhouse stands there
awkwardly, marveling at the weapons slung from the shoulders of the RAP men.
They are, as far as he can tell, nothing more than steel pipes with a
trigger mounted toward one end. A small window cut through the pipe provides
a view of a coil spring nested inside. A few handles and fittings bolted on
from place to place do not make the Sten gun look any less like an ill
conceived high school metal shop project.
"Captain Waterhouse? You are to proceed to the Mansion," says the guard
who had spoken on the telephone. "You can't miss it."
Waterhouse walks for about fifty feet and finds that the Mansion is,
indeed, tragically unmissable. He stands and stares at it for a minute,
trying to fathom what the architect had been thinking. It is a busy piece of
work, with an excessive number of gables. He can only suppose that the
designer wanted to build what was really a large, single dwelling, but
sought to camouflage it as a line of at least half a dozen wildly mismatched
urban row houses inexplicably crammed together in the middle of six hundred
acres of Buckinghamshire farmland.
The place has been well looked after, but as Waterhouse draws closer,
he can see black lianas climbing up the brickwork. The root system that he
glimpsed in the Underground has spread beneath forest and pasture even to
this place and has begun to throw its neoprene creepers upwards. But this
organism is not phototropic it does not grow towards the light, always
questing towards the sun. It is infotropic. And it has spread to this place
for the same reason that infotropic humans like Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse and Dr. Alan Mathison Turing have come here, because Bletchley
Park has roughly the same situation in the info world as the sun does in the
solar system. Armies, nations, prime ministers, presidents and geniuses fall
around it, not in steady planetlike orbits but in the crazy careening
ellipses and hyperbolae of comets and stray asteroids.
Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber can't see Bletchley Park, because it is the
second best kept secret in the world, after Ultra Mega. But from his office
in Berlin, sifting through dispatches from the Beobachtung Dienst, he can
glimpse fragments of those trajectories, and dream up hypotheses to explain
why they are just so. If the only logical hypothesis is that the Allies have
broken Enigma, then Detachment 2702 will have failed.
Lawrence displays further credentials and enters between a pair of
weathered gryphons. The mansion is nicer once you can no longer see its
exterior. Its faux rowhouse design provides many opportunities for bay
windows, providing sorely needed light. The hall is held up by gothic arches
and pillars made of a conspicuously low grade of brown marble that looks
like vitrified sewage.
The place is startlingly noisy; there is a rushing, clattering noise,
like rabid applause, permeating walls and doors, carried on a draft of hot
air with a stinging, oily scent. It is the peculiar scent of electric
teletypes or teleprinters, as the Brits call them. The noise and the heat
suggest there must be dozens of them in one of the mansion's lower rooms.
Waterhouse climbs a paneled stairway to what the Brits call the first
floor, and find it quieter and cooler. The high panjandrums of Bletchley
have their offices here. If the organization is run true to bureaucratic
form, Waterhouse will never see this place again once his initial interview
is finished. He finds his way to the office of Colonel Chattan, who
(Waterhouse's memory jogged by the sight of the name on the door) is the
fellow at the top of the chart of Detachment 2702.
Chattan rises to shake his hand. He's strawberry blond, blue eyed, and
probably would be rosy cheeked if he didn't have such a deep desert tan at
the moment. He is wearing a dress uniform; British officers have their
uniforms tailor made, it is the only way to obtain them. Waterhouse is
hardly a clothes horse, but he can see at a glance that Chattan's uniform
was not thrown together by Mummy in a few evenings in front of a flickering
coal grate. No, Chattan has himself an honest to god tailor somewhere. Yet,
when he speaks Waterhouse's name, he does not say "woe to hice" like the
Broadway Buildings crowd. The R comes through hard and crackling and the
"house" part is elongated into some thing like "hoos." He has some kind of a
wild ass accent on him, this Chattan.
With Chattan is a smaller man in British fatigues tight at the wrists
and ankles, otherwise blousy, of thick khaki flannel that would be
intolerably hot if these people couldn't rely on a steady ambient
temperature, indoors and out, of about fifty five degrees. The overall
effect always reminds Waterhouse of Dr. Dentons. This fellow is introduced
as Leftenant Robson, and he is the leader of one of 2702's two squads the
RAE one. He has a bristly mustache, trimmed very short, of silver and auburn
whiskers. He is a cheerful sort, at least in the presence of higher ranks,
and smiles frequently. His teeth splay out radially from the gumline so that
each mandible has the appearance of a coffee can in which a small grenade
has been detonated.
"This the fellow we've been waiting for," Chattan says to Robson. "The
one we could've used in Algiers."
"Yes!" Robson says. "Welcome to Detachment 2701, Captain Waterhouse."
"2702," Waterhouse says.
Chattan and Robson look ever so mildly startled.
"We can't use 2701 because it is the product of two primes."
"I beg your pardon?" Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't
know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the
possibility that it might be their fault. Robson has the look of a man who
has come up through the ranks. A Yank of that type would already be scornful
and blustery.
"Which ones?" Chattan says. That is encouraging; he at least knows what
a prime number is.
"73 and 37," Waterhouse says.
This makes a profound impression on Chattan. "Ah, yes, I see." He
shakes his head. "I shall have to give the Prof a good chaffing about this."
Robson has cocked his head far to one side so that it is almost resting
upon the thick woolly beret chucked into his epaulet. He is squinting, and
has an aghast look about him. His hypothetical Yank counterpart would
probably demand, at this point, a complete explanation of prime number
theory, and when it was finished, denounce it as horseshit. But Robson just
lets it go by. "Am I to understand that we are changing the number of our
Detachment?"
Waterhouse swallows. It seems clear from Robson's reaction that this is
going to involve a great deal of busy work for Robson and his men: weeks of
painting and stenciling and of trying to propagate the new number throughout
the military bureaucracy. It will be a miserable pain in the ass.
"2702 it is," Chattan says breezily. Unlike Waterhouse, he has no
difficulty issuing difficult, unpopular commands.
"Right then, I must see to some things. Pleasure making your
acquaintance, Captain Waterhouse."
"Pleasure's mine."
Robson shakes Waterhouse's hand again and excuses himself.
"We have a billet for you in one of the huts to the south of the
canteen," Chattan says. "Bletchley Park is our nominal headquarters, but we
anticipate that we will spend most of our time in those theaters where
heaviest use is being made of Ultra."
"I take it you've been in North Africa," Waterhouse says.
"Yes." Chattan raises his eyebrows, or rather the ridges of skin where
his eyebrows are presumably located; the hairs are colorless and
transparent, like nylon monofilament line. "Just got out by the skin of our
teeth there, I'm afraid."
"Had a close shave, did you?"
"Oh, I don't mean it that way," Chattan says. "I'm talking about the
integrity of the Ultra secret. We are still not sure whether we have
survived it. But the Prof has done some calculations suggesting that we may
be out of the woods."
"The Prof is what you call Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. He recommended you personally, you know."
"When the orders came through, I speculated as much."
"Turing is presently engaged on at least two other fronts of the
information war, and could not be part of our happy few."
"What happened in North Africa, Colonel Chattan?"
"It's still happening," Chattan says bemusedly. "Our Marine squad is
still in theater, widening the bell curve.
"Widening the bell curve?"
"Well, you know better than I do that random things typically have a
bell shaped distribution. Heights, for example. Come over to this window,
Captain Waterhouse."
Waterhouse joins Chattan at a bay window, where there is a view across
acres of what used to be gently undulating farmland. Looking beyond the
wooded belt to the uplands miles away, he can see what Bletchley Park
probably used to look like: green fields dotted with clusters of small
buildings.
But that is not what it looks like now. There is hardly a piece of land
within half a mile that has not been recently paved or built upon. Once you
get beyond the Mansion and its quaint little outbuildings, the park consists
of one story brick structures, nothing more than long corridors with
multiple transepts: +++++++, and new +'s being added as fast as the masons
can slap bricks on mud (Waterhouse wonders, idly, whether Rudy has seen
aerial reconnaissance photos of this place, and deduced from all of those
+'s the mathematical nature of the enterprise). The tortuous channels
between buildings are narrow, and each is made twice as narrow by an eight
foot high blast wall running down the middle of it, so that the Jerries will
have to spend at least one bomb for each building.
"In that building there," Chattan says, pointing to a small building
not far away a truly wretched looking brick hovel "are the Turing Bombes.
That's 'bombe' with an 'e' on the end. They are calculating machines
invented by your friend the Prof."
"Are they true universal Turing machines?" Waterhouse blurts. He is in
the grip of a stunning vision of what Bletchley Park might, in fact, be: a
secret kingdom in which Alan has somehow found the resources needed to
realize his great vision. A kingdom ruled not by men but by information,
where humble buildings made of + signs house Universal Machines that can be
configured to perform any computable operation.
"No," Chattan says, with a gentle, sad smile.
Waterhouse exhales for a long time. "Ah."
"Perhaps that will come next year, or the next."
"Perhaps."
"The bombes were adapted, by Turing and Welchman and others, from a
design dreamed up by Polish cryptanalysts. They consist of rotating drums
that test many possible Enigma keys with great speed. I'm sure the Prof will
explain it to you. But the point is that they have these vast pegboards in
the back, like telephone switchboards, and some of our girls have the job of
putting the right pegs into the right holes and wiring the things up every
day. Requires good eyesight, careful attention, and height."
"Height?"
"You'll notice that the girls who are assigned to that particular duty
are unusually tall. If the Germans were to somehow get their hands on the
personnel records for all of the people who work at Bletchley Park, and
graph their heights on a histogram, they would see a normal bell shaped
curve, representing most of the workers, with an abnormal bump on it
representing the unusual population of tall girls whom we have brought in to
work the plug boards."
"Yes, I see," Waterhouse says, "and someone like Rudy Dr. von
Hacklheber would notice the anomaly, and wonder about it."
"Precisely," Chattan says. "And it would then be the job of Detachment
2702 the Ultra Mega Group to plant false information that would throw your
friend Rudy off the scent." Chattan turns away from the window, strolls over
to his desk, and opens a large cigarette box, neatly stacked with fresh
ammunition. He offers one to Waterhouse with a deft hand gesture, and
Waterhouse accepts it, just to be social. As Chattan is giving him a light,
he gazes through the flame into Waterhouse's eye and says, 'I put it to you
now. How would you go about concealing from your friend Rudy that we had a
lot of tall girls here?'
"Assuming that he already had the personnel records?"
"Yes."
"Then it would be too late to conceal anything."
"Granted. Let us instead assume that he has some channel of information
that is bringing him these records, a few at a time. This channel is still
open and functioning. We cannot shut it down. Or perhaps we choose not to
shut it down, because even the absence of this channel will tell Rudy
something important."
"Well, there you go then," Waterhouse says. "We gin up some false
personnel records and plant them in the channel."
There is a small chalkboard on the wall of Chattan's office. It is a
palimpsest, not very well erased; the housekeeping detail here must have a
standing order never to clean it, lest something important be lost. As
Waterhouse approaches it, he can see older calculations layered atop each
other, fading off into the blackness like transmissions of white light
propagating into deep space.
He recognizes Alan's handwriting all over the place. It takes a
physical effort not to stand there and try to reconstruct Alan's
calculations from the ghosts lingering on the slate. He draws over them only
with reluctance.
Waterhouse slashes an abscissa and an ordinate onto the board, then
sweeps out a bell shaped curve. On top of the curve, to the right of the
peak, he adds a little hump.
"The tall girls," he explains. "The problem is this notch." He points
to the valley between the main peak and the bump. Then he draws a new peak
high and wide enough to cover both:
"We can do that by planting fake personnel records in Rudy's channel,
giving heights that are taller than the overall average, but shorter than
the bombe girls."
"But now you've dug yourself another hole," Chattan says. He is leaning
back in his officer's swivel chair, holding the cigarette in front of his
face, regarding Waterhouse through a motionless cloud of smoke.
Waterhouse says, "The new curve looks a little better because I filled
in that gap, but it's not really bell shaped. It doesn't tail off right, out
here at the edges. Dr. von Hacklheber will notice that. He'll realize that
someone's been tampering with his channel. To prevent that from happening I
would have to plant more fake records, giving some unusually large and small
values."
"Invent some fake girls who were exceptionally short or tall," Chattan
says.
"Yes. That would make the curve tail off in the way that it should.'
Chattan continues to look at him expectantly.
Waterhouse says, "So, the addition of a small number of what would
otherwise be bizarre anomalies makes it all look perfectly normal."
"As I said," Chattan says, "our squad is in North Africa even as we
speak widening the bell curve. Making it all look perfectly normal."
Chapter 15 MEAT
Okay, so Private First Class Gerald Hott, late of Chicago, Illinois,
did not exactly shoot up through the ranks during his fifteen year tenure in
the United States Army. He did, how ever, carve a bitchin' loin roast. He
was as deft with a boning knife as Bobby Shaftoe is with a bayonet. And who
is to say that a military butcher, by conserving the limited resources of a
steer's carcass and by scrupulously observing the mandated sanitary
practices, might not save as many lives as a steely eyed warrior? The
military is not just about killing Nips, Krauts, and Dagoes. It is also
about killing livestock and eating them. Gerald Hott was a front line
warrior who kept his freezer locker as clean as an operating room and so it
is only fitting that he has ended up there.
Bobby Shaftoe makes this little elegy up in his head as he is shivering
in the sub Arctic chill of a formerly French, and now U.S. Army, meat locker
the size and temperature of Greenland, surrounded by the earthly remains of
several herds of cattle and one butcher. He has attended more than a few
military funerals during his brief time in the service, and has always been
bowled over by the skill of the chaplains in coming up with moving elegies
for the departed. He has heard rumors that when the military inducts 4 Fs
who are discovered to have brains, it teaches them to type and assigns them
to sit at desks and type these things out, day after day. Nice duty if you
can get it.
The frozen carcasses dangle from meathooks in long rows. Bobby Shaftoe
gets tenser and tenser as he works his way up and down the aisles, steeling
himself for the bad thing he is about to see. It is almost preferable when
your buddy's head suddenly explodes just as he is puffing his cigarette into
life buildup like this can drive you nuts.
Finally he rounds the end of a row and discovers a man slumbering on
the floor, locked in embrace with a pork carcass, which he was apparently
about to butcher at the time of his death. He has been there for about
twelve hours now and his body temp is hovering around minus ten degrees
Fahrenheit.
Bobby Shaftoe squares himself to face the body and draws a deep breath
of frosty, meat scented air. He clasps his cyanotic hands in front of his
chest in a manner that is both prayerful and good for warming them up. "Dear
Lord," he says out loud. His voice does not echo; the carcasses soak it up.
"Forgive this marine for these, his duties, which he is about to perform,
and while you are at it, by all means forgive this marine's superiors whom
You in Your infinite wisdom have seen fit to bless him with, and forgive
their superiors for getting the whole deal together."
He considers going on at some length but finally decides that this is
no worse than bayonetting Nips and so let's get on with it. He goes to the
locked bodies of PFC Gerald Hott and Frosty the Pig and tries to separate
them without success. He squats by them and gives the former a good look.
Hott is blond. His eyes are half closed, and when Shaftoe shines a
flashlight into the slit, he can see a glint of blue. Hott is a big man,
easily two twenty five in fighting trim, easily two fifty now. Life in a
military kitchen does not make it easy for a fellow to keep his weight down,
or (unfortunately for Hott) his cardiovascular system in any kind of
dependable working order.
Hott and his uniform were both dry when the heart attack happened, so
thank god the fabric is not frozen onto the skin. Shaftoe is able to cut
most of it off with several long strokes of his exquisitely sharpened V 44
"Gung Ho" knife. But the V 44's machetelike nine and a half inch blade is
completely inappropriate for close infighting viz., the denuding of the
armpits and groin and he was told to be careful about inflicting scratches,
so there he has to break out the USMC Marine Raider stiletto, whose slender
double edged seven and a quarter inch blade might have been designed for
exactly this sort of procedure, though the fish shaped handle, which is made
of solid metal, begins freezing to the sweaty palm of Shaftoe's hand after a
while.
Lieutenant Ethridge is hovering outside the locker's tomblike door.
Shaftoe barges past him and heads straight for the building's exit, ignoring
Ethridge's queries: "Shaftoe? How 'bout it?"
He does not stop until he is out of the shade of the building. The
North African sunshine breaks over his body like a washtub of morphine. He
closes his eyes and turns his face into it, holds his frozen hands up to cup
the warmth and let it trickle down his forearms, drip from his elbows.
"How 'bout it?" Ethridge says again.
Shaftoe opens his eyes and looks around.
The harbor's a blue crescent with miles of sere jetties snaking around
each other like diagrams of dance steps. One of them's covered with worn
stumps of ancient bastions and next to it a French battleship lies half
sunk, still piping smoke and steam into the air. All around it, the ships of
Operation Torch are unloading shit faster than you can believe. Cargo nets
rise from the holds of the transports and splat onto the quays like giant
loogies. Longshoremen haul, trucks carry, troops march, French girls smoke
Yankee cigarettes, Algerians propose joint ventures.
Between those ships, and the Army's meat operation, up here on this
rock, is what Bobby Shaftoe takes to be the City of Algiers. To his
discriminating Wisconsinan eye it does not appear to have been built so much
as swept up on the hillside by a tidal wave. A lot of acreage has been
devoted to keeping the fucking sun off, so from above, it has a shuttered up
look about it lots of red tile, decorated with flowers and Arabs. Looks like
a few modern concrete structures (e.g. this meat locker) have been thrown up
by the French in the wake of some kind of vigorous slum clearing offensive.
Still, there's a lot of slums left to be cleared target number one being
this human beehive or anthill just off to Shaftoe's left, the Casbah, they
call it. Maybe it's a neighborhood. Maybe it's a single poorly organized
building. Has to be seen to be believed. Arabs packed into the place like
fraternity pledges into a telephone booth.
Shaftoe turns around and looks again at the meat locker, which is
dangerously exposed to enemy air attack here, but no one gives a fuck
because who cares if the Krauts blow up a bunch of meat?
Lieutenant Ethridge, almost as desperately sunburned as Bobby Shaftoe,
squints.
"Blond," Shaftoe says.
"Okay."
"Blue eyed."
"Good."
"Anteater not mushroom."
"Huh?"
"He's not circumcised, sir!"
"Excellent! How 'bout the other thing?"
"One tattoo, sir!"
Shaftoe is enjoying the slow buildup of tension in Ethridge's voice:
"Describe the tattoo, Sergeant!"
"Sir! It is a commonly seen military design, sir! Consisting of a heart
with a female's name in it."
"What is that name, Sergeant?" Ethridge is on the verge of pissing his
pants.
"Sir! The name inscribed on the tattoo is the following name: Griselda.
Sir!"
"Aaaah!" Lieutenant Ethridge lets loose deep from the diaphragm. Veiled
women turn and look. Over in that Casbah, starved looking, shave needing
ragheads lean out of spindly towers yodeling out of key.
Ethridge shuts up and contents himself with clenching his fists until
they go white. When he speaks again, his voice is hushed with emotion.
"Battles have hinged on lesser strokes of luck than this one, Sergeant!"
"You're telling me!?" Shaftoe says. "When I was on Guadalcanal, sir, we
got trapped in this little cove and pinned down "
"I don't want to hear the lizard story, Sergeant!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
***
Once when Bobby Shaftoe was still in Oconomowoc, he had to help his
brother move a mattress up a stairway and learned new respect for the
difficulty of manipulating heavy but floppy objects. Hott, may God have
mercy on his soul, is a heavy S.O.B., and so it is excellent luck that he is
frozen solid. After the Mediterranean sun has its way with him, he is sure
enough going to be floppy. And then some.
All of Shaftoe's men are down in the detachment's staging area. This is
a cave built into a sheer artificial cliff that rises from the
Mediterranean, just above the docks. These caves go on for miles and there
is a boulevard running over the top of them. But even the approaches to
their particular cave have been covered with tents and tarps so that no one,
not even Allied troops, can see what they are up to: namely, looking for any
equipment with 2701 painted on it, painting over the last digit, and
changing it to 2. The first operation is handled by men with green paint and
the second by men with white or black paint.
Shaftoe picks one man from each color group so that the operation as a
whole will not be disrupted. The sun is stunningly powerful here, but in
that cavern, with a cool maritime breeze easing through, it's not really
that bad. The sharp smell of petroleum distillates comes off all of those
warm painted surfaces. To Bobby Shaftoe, it is a comforting smell, because
you never paint stuff when you're in combat. But the smell also makes him a
little tingly, because you frequently paint stuff just before you go into
combat.
Shaftoe is about to brief his three handpicked Marines on what is to
come when the private with black paint on his hands, Daniels, looks past him
and smirks. "What's the lieutenant looking for now do you suppose, Sarge?"
he says.
Shaftoe and Privates Nathan (green paint) and Branph (white) look over
to see that Ethridge has gotten sidetracked. He is going through the
wastebaskets again.
"We have all noticed that Lieutenant Ethridge seems to think it is his
mission in life to go through wastebaskets," Sergeant Shaftoe says in a low,
authoritative voice. "He is an Annapolis graduate."
Ethridge straightens up and, in the most accusatory way possible, holds
up a fistful of pierced and perforated oaktag. "Sergeant! Would you identify
this material?"
"Sir! It is general issue military stencils, Sir!"
"Sergeant! How many letters are there in the alphabet?"
"Twenty six, sir!" responds Shaftoe crisply.
Privates Daniels, Nathan and Branph whistle coolly at each other this
Sergeant Shaftoe is sharp as a tack.
"Now, how many numerals?"
"Ten, sir!"
"And of the thirty six letters and numerals, how many of them are
represented by unused stencils in this wastebasket?"
"Thirty five, sir! All except for the numeral 2, which is the only one
we need to carry out your orders, sir!"
"Have you forgotten the second part of my order, Sergeant?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" No point in lying about it. Officers actually like it
when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter
they are than you. It makes them feel needed.
"The second part of my order was to take strict measures to leave
behind no trace of the changeover!"
"Sir, yes, I do remember that now, sir!"
Lieutenant Ethridge, who was just a bit huffy first, has now calmed
down quite a bit, which speaks well of him and is duly, silently noted by
all of the men, who have known him for less than six hours. He is now
speaking calmly and conversationally, like a friendly high school teacher.
He is wearing the heavy rimmed black military eyeglasses known in the trade
as RPGs, or Rape Prevention Glasses. They are strapped to his head by a hunk
of black elastic. They make him look like a mental retard. "If some enemy
agent were to go through the contents of this wastebasket, as enemy agents
have been known to do, what would he find?"
"Stencils sir!"
"And if he were to count the numerals and letters, would he notice
anything unusual?"
"Sir! All of them would be clean except for the numeral twos which
would be missing or covered with paint, sir!"
Lieutenant Ethridge says nothing for a few minutes, allowing his
message to sink in. In reality no one knows what the fuck he is talking
about. The atmosphere becomes tinderlike until finally, Sergeant Shaftoe
makes a desperate stab. He turns away from Ethridge and towards the men. "I
want you Marines to get paint on all of those goddamn stencils!" he barks.
The Marines charge the wasteb