these
guys.
The guy who wanted to impale him earlier comes across the clearing,
takes his leash, and tugs Goto Dengo to a standing position. "Patah," he
says.
He looks at the sky. It is getting late, but he does not relish trying
to explain to them that they should simply wait until tomorrow. He stumbles
across the clearing to the cooking fire and nods at a pan full of brain
stew. "Wok," he says.
It doesn't work. They think he wants to trade gold for the wok.
There follows about eighteen hours of misunderstandings and failed
attempts to communicate. Goto Dengo almost dies; at least he feels like he
might. Now that he is not on the move, the last few days are really catching
up with him. But finally, in the middle of the next morning, he gets to show
his magic. Squatting in the nearby stream, his elbows unbound, the wok in
his hands, surrounded by skeptical village fathers still keeping a tight
grip on his rustic noose, he begins to pan for gold. Within a few minutes he
has managed to summon a few flakes of the stuff out of the riverbed,
demonstrating the basic concept.
They want to learn it themselves. He was expecting this. He tries to
show one of them how it's done, but (as Goto Dengo himself learned long ago)
it is one of those harder than it looks deals.
Back to the village. He actually gets a place to sleep this night: they
stuff him into a long skinny sack of woven grass and tie it shut above his
head this is how they keep themselves from being eaten alive by insects
while they are asleep. Malaria hits him now: alternating waves of chill and
heat swamping his body with the force of riptides.
Time goes out of whack for a while. Later, he realizes he has been here
for a while now, because his broken forefinger is now solid and gnarled, and
the abrasions that he got from the coral head are now a field of fine,
parallel scars, like the grain in a piece of wood. His skin is covered with
mud and he smells of coconut oil and of the smoke that they fill their huts
with to chase away the bugs. His life is simple: when malaria has him
teetering on the brink of death, he sits in front of a felled palm tree and
chips away at it mindlessly for hours, slowly creating a heap of fibrous
white stuff that the women use to make starch. When he is feeling stronger,
he drags himself over to the river and pans for gold. In return they do what
they can to keep New Guinea from killing him. He's so weak they do not even
bother to send a chaperone with him when he goes out.
It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the
insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that
the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads
for decoration. The one thing that Goto Dengo thinks about, when he's
capable of thinking, is that there is a boy in this village who looks to be
about twelve years old. He remembers the twelve year old who was initiated
by driving a spear through his companion's heart, and wonders who's going to
be used for this boy's initiation rite.
From time to time the village elders pound on a hollow log for a while,
then stand around listening to other hollow logs being pounded in other
villages. One day there is an especially long episode of pounding, and it
would seem that the villagers are pleased by what they have heard. The next
day, they have visitors: four men and a child who speak a completely
different language; their word for gold is gabitisa. The child whom they
have brought with them is about six years old, and obviously retarded. There
is a negotiation. Some of the gold that Goto Dengo has panned out of the
stream is exchanged for the retarded child. The four visitors disappear into
the jungle with their gabitisa. Within a few hours, the retarded child has
been tied to a tree and the twelve year old boy has stabbed it to death and
become a man. After some parading around and dancing, the older men sit on
top of the younger man and cut long complicated gashes into his skin and
pack dirt into them so that they will heal as decorative welts.
Goto Dengo cannot do very much except gape in numb astonishment. Every
time he begins to think beyond the next fifteen minutes, tries to formulate
a plan of action, the malaria comes back, flattens him for a week or two,
scrambles his brain and forces him to start again from scratch. Despite all
of this he manages to extract a few hundred grams of gold dust from that
stream. From time to time the village is visited by relatively light skinned
traders who move up and down the coast in outrigger canoes and who speak yet
another different language. These traders begin to come more frequently, as
the village elders start trading the gold dust for betel nuts, which they
chew because it makes them feel good, and for the occasional bottle of rum.
One day, Goto Dengo is on his way back from the river, carrying a
teaspoon of gold dust in the wok, when he hears voices from the village
voices speaking in a cadence that used to be familiar.
All of the men of the village, some twenty in all, are standing up with
their backs to coconut trees, their arms secured behind the trees with
ropes. Several of these men are dead, with their intestines spilling down
onto the ground, already black with flies. The ones who are not dead yet are
being used for bayonet practice by a few dozen gaunt, raving Nipponese
soldiers. The women ought to be standing around screaming, but he doesn't
see them. They must be inside the huts.
A man in a lieutenant's uniform swaggers out of a hut, smiling broadly,
wiping blood off of his penis with a rag, and almost trips over a dead
child.
Goto Dengo drops the wok and puts his hands up in the air. "I am
Nipponese!" he shouts, even though all he wants to say at this moment is I
am not Nipponese.
The soldiers are startled, and several of them try to swing their
rifles around in his direction. But the Nipponese rifle is an awful thing,
nearly as long as the average soldier is tall, too heavy to maneuver even
when its owner is in perfect health. Luckily all of these men are clearly
starving to death and half crippled by malaria and bloody flux, and their
minds work quicker than their bodies. The lieutenant bellows, "Hold your
fire!" before anyone can get off a shot in the direction of Goto Dengo.
There follows a long interrogation in one of the huts. The lieutenant
has many questions, and asks most of them more than once. When he repeats a
question for the fifth or thirteenth time, he adopts a grand magnanimity, as
if giving Goto Dengo the opportunity to retract his earlier lies. Goto Dengo
tries to ignore the screams of the bayoneted men and the raped women, and
concentrate on giving the same answer each time without variation.
"You surrendered to these savages?"
"I was incapacitated and helpless. They found me in this condition."
"What efforts did you make to escape?"
"I have been building my strength and learning from them how to survive
in the jungle what foods I can eat.
"For six months?"
"Pardon me, sir?" He hasn't heard this question before.
"Your convoy was sunk six months ago."
"Impossible."
The lieutenant steps forward and slaps him across the face. Goto Dengo
feels nothing but tries to cringe anyway, so as not to humiliate the man.
"Your convoy was coming to reinforce our division!" bellows the
lieutenant. "You dare to question me?"
"I humbly apologize, sir!"
"Your failure to arrive forced us to make a retrograde maneuver!
(1) We are marching overland to rendezvous with our forces at
Wewak!"
"So, you are the advance guard for the division?" Goto Dengo has seen
perhaps two dozen men, a couple of squads at most.
"We are the division," the lieutenant says matter of factly. "So,
again, you surrendered to these savages?"
***
When they march out the following morning, no one remains alive in the
village; all of them have been used for bayonet practice or shot while
trying to run away.
He is a prisoner. The lieutenant had decided to execute him for the
crime of having surrendered to the enemy, and was in the act of drawing his
sword when one of the sergeants prevailed upon him to wait for a while.
Impossible as it might seem, Goto Dengo is in far better physical condition
than any of the others and therefore useful as a pack animal. He can always
be properly executed in front of a large audience when they reach a larger
outpost. So he marches in the middle of the group now, unfettered, the
jungle serving the purpose of chains and bars. They have loaded him down
with the one remaining Nambu light machine gun, which is too heavy for
anyone else to carry, and too powerful for them to fire; any man who pulled
the trigger on this thing would be shaken to pieces by it, the jungle rotted
flesh scattering from jittering bones.
After a few days have gone by, Goto Dengo requests permission to learn
how to operate the Nambu. The lieutenant's reply is to beat him up though he
does not have the strength to beat anyone up properly so Goto Dengo has to
help him, crying out and doubling over when the lieutenant thinks he has
landed a telling blow.
Every couple of days, when the sun comes up in the morning, this or
that soldier is found to have more bugs on him than any of the others. This
means that he is dead. Lacking shovels or the strength to dig, they leave
him where he lies and march onward. Sometimes they get lost, march back over
the same territory, and find these corpses all swollen and black; when they
begin to smell rotting human flesh, they know that they have just wasted a
day's effort. But in general they are gaining altitude now, and it is
cooler. Ahead of them, their route is blocked by a ridge of snow capped
peaks that runs directly to the sea. According to the lieutenant's maps,
they will have to climb up one side of it and down the other in order to
reach Nipponese controlled territory.
The birds and plants are different up here. One day, while the
lieutenant is urinating against a tree, the foliage shakes and an enormous
bird runs out. It looks vaguely like an ostrich, but more compact and more
colorful. It has a red neck, and a cobalt blue head with a giant helmetlike
bone sticking out of the top of its skull, like the nose of an artillery
shell. It prances straight up to the lieutenant and kicks him a couple of
times, knocking him flat on his ass, then bends his long neck down, shrieks
in his face, and runs back into the jungle, using its head bone as a kind of
battering ram to clear a path through the brush.
Even if the men were not dying on their feet, they would be too
startled to raise their weapons and take a shot at it. They laugh giddily.
Goto Dengo laughs until he cries. The bird must have delivered a powerful
kick, though, because the lieutenant lies there for a long time, clutching
his stomach.
Finally one of the sergeants regains his composure and walks over to
help the poor man. As he draws closer, he suddenly turns around to face the
rest of the group. His face has gone slack.
Blood is fountaining out of a couple of deep stab wounds in the
lieutenant's belly, and his body is already going limp when the rest of the
group gathers around him. They sit and watch until they are pretty sure he
is dead, and then they march onwards. That evening, the sergeant shows Goto
Dengo how to disassemble and clean the Nambu light machine gun.
They are down to nineteen. But it seems as though all of the men who
were susceptible to dying in this place have now died, because they go for
two, three, five, seven days without losing any more. This is in spite of,
or maybe because of, the fact that they are climbing up into the mountains.
It is brutal work, especially for the heavily laden Goto Dengo. But the cold
air seems to clear up their jungle rot and quench the ravenous internal
fires of malaria.
One day they break their march early at the edge of a snowfield, and
the sergeant orders double rations for everyone. Black stone peaks rise
above them, with an icy saddle in between. They sleep huddled together,
which does not prevent some of them waking up with frostbitten toes. They
eat most of what remains of their food supply and then set out towards the
pass.
The pass turns out to be almost disappointingly easy; the slope is so
gentle that they're not really aware that they've reached the summit until
they notice that the snow is sloping downwards beneath their feet. They are
above the clouds, and the clouds cover the world.
The gentle slope stops abruptly at the edge of a cliff that drops
almost vertically at least a thousand feet down then it passes through the
cloud layer, so there's no way of knowing its true height. They find the
memory of a trail traversing the slope. It seems to head down more
frequently than it heads up and so they follow it. It is new and exciting at
first, but then it grows just as brutally monotonous as every other
landscape where soldiers have ever marched. As the hours go by, the snow
gets patchier, the clouds get closer. One of the men falls asleep on his
feet, stumbles, and tumbles end over end down the slope, occasionally
bounding into free fall for several seconds. By the time he vanishes through
the cloud layer, he's too far away to see.
Finally the eighteen descend into a clammy mist. Each sees the one in
front of him only when very close, and then only as a grey, blurred form,
like an ice demon in a childhood nightmare. The landscape has become jagged
and dangerous and the lead man has to grope along practically on hands and
knees.
They are working their way around a protruding rib of fog slicked stone
when the lead man suddenly cries out: "Enemy!"
Some of the eighteen actually laugh, thinking it is a joke.
Goto Dengo distinctly hears a man speaking English, with an Australian
accent. The man says, "Fuck 'em."
Then a noise starts up that seems powerful enough to split the mountain
in half. He actually thinks it is a rock avalanche for awhile until his ears
adjust, and he realizes that it is a weapon: something big, and fully
automatic. The Australians are firing at them.
They try to retreat, but they can only move a few steps every minute.
Meanwhile, thick lead slugs are hurtling through the fog all around them,
splintering against the rock, sending stone shards into their necks and
faces. "The Nambu!" someone shouts. "Get the Nambu!" But Goto Dengo can't
fire the Nambu until he finds a decent place to stand.
Finally he gets to a ledge about the size of a large book, and unslings
the weapons. But all he can see is fog.
There is a lull of a few minutes. Goto Dengo calls out the names of his
comrades. The three behind him are accounted for. The others do not seem to
answer his calls. Finally, one man struggles back along the path. "The
others are all dead," he says, "you may fire at will."
So he begins to fire the Nambu into the fog. The recoil almost knocks
him off the mountain, so he learns to brace it against an outcropping. Then
he sweeps it back and forth. He can tell when he's hitting the rock because
it makes a different sound from hitting fog. He aims for the rock.
He spends several clips without getting any results. Then he begins
walking forward along the path again.
The wind gusts, the fog swirls and parts for a moment. He sees a blood
covered path leading directly to a tall Australian man with a red mustache,
carrying a tommy gun. Their eyes meet. Goto Dengo is in a better position
and fires first. The man with the tommy gun falls off the cliff.
Two other Australians, concealed on the other side of the rock rib, see
this happen, and begin cursing.
One of Goto Dengo's comrades scampers down the path, shouts, "Banzai!"
and disappears around the corner, carrying a fixed bayonet. There is a
shotgun blast and two men scream in unison. Then there is the now familiar
sound of bodies tumbling down the rock face. "God damn it!" hollers the one
remaining Aussie. "Fucking Nips."
Goto Dengo has only one honorable way out of this. He follows his
comrade around the corner and opens up with the Nambu, pouring it into the
fog, sweeping the rock face with lead. He stops when the magazine is empty.
Nothing happens after that. Either the Aussie retreated down the path or
else Goto Dengo shot him off the cliff.
By nightfall, Goto Dengo and his three surviving comrades are back down
in the jungle again.
Chapter 49 WRECK
To: root@eruditorum.org
From: randy@epiphyte.com
Subject: answer
That you are a retail level philosopher who just happens to have
buddies who are in the surveillance business is simply too big a coincidence
for me to accept.
So I'm not going to tell you why.
But in case you are worried, let me assure you that we have our reasons
for building the Crypt. And it's not just to make money though it will be
very good for our share holders. Did you think we were just a bunch of nerds
who stumbled into this and got in over our heads? We aren't.
P.S. What do you mean when you say that you "noodle around with novel
cryptosystems?" Give me an example.
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
Current meatspace coordinates, hot from the GPS receiver card in my
laptop:
8 degrees, 52.33 minutes N latitude 117 degrees, 42.75 minutes E
longitude
Nearest geographical feature: Palawan, the Philippines
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re: answer
Randy.
Thank you for your oddly defensive note. Very pleased you have a good
reason. Never thought otherwise. Of course you should not feel obligated to
share it with me.
My having friends in the world of electronic intelligence gathering is
not the big coincidence you make it out to be.
How did you come to be a founder of the Crypt? By being good at science
and math.
How did you come to be good at science and math? By standing on the
shoulders of the ones who came before you.
Who were those people?
We used to call them natural philosophers.
Likewise, my friends in the surveillance business owe their skills to
the practical application of philosophy. They have the wit to understand
this, and to give credit where credit is due.
P.S. You forgot to use the "dwarf@siblings.net" front address. I assume
this was deliberate?
P.P.S. You say you want an example of a novel cryptosystem that I am
working on. This sounds like a test. You and I both know, Randy, that the
history of crypto is strewn with the wreckage of cryptosystems invented by
arrogant dilettantes and soon demolished by clever codebreakers. You
probably suspect that I don't know this that I'm just another arrogant
dilettante. Quite cleverly, you ask me to stick my neck out, so that you and
Cantrell and his like minded friends can cut it off. You are testing me
trying to find my level
Very well. I'll send you another message in a few days. I'd love to
have the Secret Admirers take a crack at my scheme anyway.
In a narrow hulled double outrigger boat in the South China Sea,
America Shaftoe stands astride a thwart, her body pointing straight up at
the sun, despite the rollers, as if she is gyroscopically stabilized. She is
wearing a sleeveless diving vest that reveals strong, deeply tanned
shoulders, the walnut brown skin etched with a couple of black tattoos and
brilliantly jeweled with beads of water. The handle of a big knife projects
from a shoulder holster. The blade is that of a regular diving knife but the
handle is that of a kris, an ornate traditional weapon of Palawan. A tourist
can buy a kris at the duty free shop at NAIA, but this one appears to be
less flashy but better made than the tourist shop jobs, and worn from use.
She has a gold chain around her neck with a gnarled black pearl dangling
from it. She has just emerged from the water holding a tiny jeweler's
screwdriver between her teeth. Her mouth is open to breathe, displaying
crooked, bright white teeth with no fillings. For this brief moment she is
in her element, completely absorbed in what she is doing, totally unself
conscious. At this moment Randy thinks he understands her: why she spends
most of her time living here, why she didn't bother with going to college,
why she left behind her mother's family, who raised her, lovingly, in
Chicago, to be in business with her father, the wayward veteran who walked
out of the household when America was nine years old.
Then she turns to scan the approaching launch, and sees Randy on it
staring at her. She rolls her eyes, and the mask falls down over her face
again. She says something to the Filipino men who are squatting in the boat
around her and two of them go into action, scampering down the outrigger
poles, like balance beam artists, to stand on the outrigger pontoon. They
hold their arms out as shock absorbers to ease the contact between the
launch which Doug Shaftoe has cheerfully christened Mekong Memory –
and the much longer, much narrower pamboat.
One of the other Filipinos plants his bare foot against the top of a
small Honda portable generator and pulls on the ripcord, the tendons and
wiry muscles popping out of his arm and back for a moment like so many
ripcords themselves. The generator starts instantly, with a nearly inaudible
purr. It is good stuff, part of the capital improvements that Semper Marine
made as part of its contract with Epiphyte and Filitel. Now they are using
it, effectively, to defraud the Dentist.
"She lies one hundred and fifty four meters below that buoy," says Doug
Shaftoe, pointing to a gallon plastic milk jug bobbing on the swells. "She
was lucky, in a way."
"Lucky?"
Randy clambers off the launch and rests his weight on the outrigger,
shoving it down so that the warm water comes up to his knees. Holding out
his arms like a tightrope walker, he makes his way down an arm toward the
canoe hull in the center.
"Lucky for us," Shaftoe corrects himself. "We're on the flank of a
seamount. The Palawan Trough is nearby." He's following Randy, but without
all of the teetering and arm waving. "If she had sunk in that, she'd have
gone down so deep that she'd be hard to reach, and the pressure down there
would've crushed her. But at two hundred meters, there wouldn't've been such
an implosion." Reaching the boat's hull, he makes dramatic crushing motions
with his hands.
"Do we care?" Randy asks. "Gold and silver don't implode."
"If her hull is intact, getting the goods out is a hell of a lot
easier," says Doug Shaftoe.
Amy has vanished beneath the pamboat's canopy. Randy and Doug follow
her into its shade, and find her sitting crosslegged on a fiberglass
equipment case that is encrusted with airport baggage stickers. Her face is
socketed into the top of a black rubber pyramid whose base is the screen of
a ruggedized cathode ray tube. "How's the cable business?" she mutters.
Months ago, she gave up even trying to hide her scorn for the dull work of
cable laying. Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier mâché houses,
must be energetically maintained or they will dissolve. Another case in
point: some time ago, Randy gave up pretending that he was not completely
fascinated with Amy Shaftoe. This is not exactly the same thing as being in
love with her, but it has quite a few things in common with that. He has
always had a weird, sick fascination with women who smoked and drank a lot.
Amy does neither, but her complete disregard of modern skin cancer
precautions puts her in the same category: people too busy leading their
lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.
In any case, he has a desperate craving to know what Amy's dream is.
For a while he thought it was treasure hunting in the South China Sea. This
she definitely enjoys, but he is not sure if it gives her satisfaction
entire.
"Been adjusting the trim on those dive planes again," she explains. "I
don't think those pushrod things were engineered very well." She pulls her
head out of the black rubber cowl and gives Randy a quick sidelong look,
holding him responsible for the shortcomings of all engineers. "I hope it'll
run now without corkscrewing all over the place."
"Are you ready?" her father asks.
"Whenever you are," she answers, slamming the ball back into his court.
Doug rises to a crouch and duck walks out from under the low canopy.
Randy follows him, wanting to see the ROV for himself.
It rests in the water alongside the pamboat's center hull: a stubby
yellow torpedo with a glass dome for a nose, held in place by a Filipino
crewman who leans over the gunwale to grip it with both hands. Pairs of
stunted wings are mounted at the nose and at the tail, each wing supporting
a miniature propeller mounted in a cowl. Randy is reminded of a dirigible
with its outlying engine gondolas.
Noting Randy's interest, Doug Shaftoe squats alongside it to point out
the features. "It's neutrally buoyant, so when we have it alongside like
this, we have it in this foam cradle, which we will now take off." He begins
jerking loose some quick release bungee cords, and molded segments of foam
peel away from the ROV's hull. It drops lower in the water, nearly pulling
the crewman over the side with it, and he lets go, keeping his arms extended
so he can prevent it from bumping into them with each swell. "You'll notice
there's no umbilical," Doug says. "Normally that is mandatory for an ROV.
You need the umbilical for three reasons."
Randy grins, because he knows that Doug Shaftoe is about to enumerate
the three reasons. Randy has spent almost no time around military people,
but he is finding that he gets along with them surprisingly well.
His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate every
one around them, all the time. Randy does not need to know anything about
the ROV, but Doug Shaftoe is going to give him a short course anyway. Randy
supposes that when you are in a war, practical knowledge is a good thing to
spread around.
"One," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, "to provide power to the ROV.
But this ROV carries its own power source an oxygen/natural gas swash plate
motor, adapted from torpedo technology, and part of our peace dividend"
(that is the other thing Randy likes about military people their mastery of
deadpan humor) "that generates enough electricity to run all of the
thrusters. Two, for communications and control. But this unit uses blue
green lasers to communicate with the control console which Amy is manning.
Three, for emergency recovery in the event of total systems failure. But if
this unit fails, it is smart enough, supposedly, to inflate a bladder and
float up to the surface where it will activate a strobe light so that we can
go recover it."
"Jeez," Randy says, "isn't this thing incredibly expensive?"
"It is incredibly expensive," Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe says, "but the
guy who runs the company that makes it is an old buddy of mine we were at
the Naval Academy together he loans it to me sometimes, when I have a
pressing need."
"Does your friend know what the pressing need is in this case?"
"He does not know specifically," says Doug Shaftoe, mildly offended,
"but I suppose he is not a stupid man either."
"Clear!" shouts Amy Shaftoe, sounding rather impatient.
Her father takes a good look at each of the thrusters in turn. "Clear,"
he responds. A moment later, something begins to thrum inside the ROV, and a
stream of bubbles spurts from an orifice on its tail, and then the thrusters
begin to spin around. They swivel on the ends of their stubby wings until
they are facing downwards, throwing fountains into the air, and the ROV
sinks rapidly. The fountains diminish and become slight upwellings in the
sea. Seen through the water's rough surface, the ROV is a yellow splatter.
It shortens as the vehicle's nose pitches down, then rapidly disappears as
the thrusters drive it straight down. "Always kinda takes my breath away to
see something that costs so much going off to who knows where," Doug Shaftoe
says meditatively.
The water around the boat has begun to emit a kind of dreadful, sickly
light, like radiation in a low budget horror film. "Jeez! The laser?" Randy
says.
"Mounted to the bottom of the hull, in a little dome," Doug says.
"Punches through even turbid water with ease."
"What kind of bandwidth can you transmit on it?"
"Amy is seeing decent monochrome video on her little screen right now,
if that is what you mean. It is all digital. All packetized. So if some of
the data doesn't make it through, the image gets a little choppy, but we do
not lose visuals altogether."
"Cool."
"Yes, it is cool," Doug Shaftoe allows. "Let us go and watch TV."
They crouch beneath the canopy. Doug turns on a small Sony portable
television, a ruggedized waterproof model encased in yellow plastic, and
patches its input cable into a spare output jack on the back of Amy's rig.
He turns it on and they begin to see a bit of what Amy is seeing. They do
not have the benefit of the dark cowl that Amy is using, and so the glare of
the sun washes out everything but a straight white line emerging from the
dark center of the picture and expanding towards the edge. It is moving.
"I am following the buoy line down," she explains. "Kind of boring."
Randy's calculator watch beeps twice. He checks the time; it is three
in the afternoon.
"Randy?" Amy says, in a velvet voice.
"Yes?"
"Could you give me the square root of three thousand eight hundred
twenty three on that thing?"
"Why do you want that?"
"Just do it."
Randy holds his wrist up so that he can see the watch's digital
display, takes a pencil out of his pocket, and begins using its eraser to
press the tiny little buttons. He hears a metallic snicking noise, but pays
it no mind.
Something cool and smooth glides along the underside of his wrist.
"Hold still," Amy says. She bites her lip and pulls. The watch falls off,
and comes away in her left hand, its vinyl band neatly severed. She's
holding the kris in her right, the edge of its blade still decorated with a
few of Randy's arm hairs. "Huh. Sixty one point eight three oh four. I
would've guessed higher." She tosses the watch over her shoulder and it
disappears into the South China Sea. "Square roots are tricky that way."
"Amy, you're losing the rope!" says her father impatiently, focused
entirely on the screen of the TV.
Amy jams the kris back into its sheath, smiles sweetly at Randy, and
plugs her face back into the rig. Randy is speechless for a while.
The question of whether or not she is a lesbian is rapidly becoming
more than purely academic. He performs a quick mental review of all of the
lesbians he has known. Usually they are mid level, nine to five city
dwellers with sensible haircuts. In other words, they are just like most of
the other people Randy knows. Amy is too flagrantly exotic, too much like a
horny film director's idea of what a lesbian would be. So maybe there is
some hope here.
"If you're gonna stare at my daughter that way," Doug Shaftoe says,
"you'd better start boning up on your ballroom dancing."
"Is he starin' at me? I can never tell when I have my face stuck in
this thing," Amy says.
"He was in love with his watch. Now he has no object for his
affections," Doug says. "So, hold on to your hats!"
Randy can tell when someone is trying to rattle him. "What is it that
offended you so much about my watch? The alarm?"
"The whole package was pretty annoying," Amy says, "but the alarm is
what made me psychotic."
"You should have said something. Being a true geek, I actually know how
to turn that alarm off."
"Then why didn't you?"
"I don't want to lose track of time."
"Why? Got a cake in the oven?"
"The Dentist's due diligence people will be all over me."
Doug shifts position and screws up his face curiously. "You mentioned
that before. What is due diligence?"
"It's like this. Alfred has some money that he wants to invest."
"Who's Alfred?"
"A hypothetical person whose name begins with A."
"I don't understand."
"In the crypto world, when you are explaining a cryptographic protocol,
you use hypothetical people. Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Evan, Fred, Greg, and
so on."
"Okay."
"Alfred invests his money in a company that is run by Barney. When I
say 'run by' what I mean is that Barney has ultimate responsibility for what
that company does. So, perhaps Barney is the chairman of the board of
directors in this case. He's been chosen, by Alfred, Alice, Agnes, Andrew,
and the other investors, to look after the company. He and the other
directors hire corporate officers such as Chuck, who is the president. Chuck
and the other officers hire Drew to run one of the company's divisions. Drew
hires Edgar, the engineer, and so on and so forth. So, in military terms,
there is a whole chain of command that extends down to the guys in the
trenches, like Edgar."
"And Barney's the man at the top of the chain of the command," Doug
says.
"Right. So, just like a general, he is ultimately responsible for
everything that is done below him. Alfred has personally entrusted Barney
with that money. Barney is legally required to exercise due diligence in
seeing that the money is spent responsibly. If Barney fails to show due
diligence, he is in major legal trouble."
"Ah."
"Yeah. That gets Barney's attention. Alfred's lawyers might show up at
any moment and demand proof that due diligence is being exercised. Barney
needs to stay on his toes, make sure that his ass is covered at all times."
"Barney in this case is the Dentist?"
"Yeah. Alfred, Agnes, and the others are all of the people in his
investment club half of the orthodontists in Orange County."
"And you are Edgar the Engineer."
"No, you are Edgar the Engineer. I am a corporate officer of Epiphyte.
I am more like Chuck or Drew."
Amy breaks in. "But what does the Dentist have over you? You don't work
for him."
"I'm sorry to tell you that is no longer the case, as of yesterday."
This gets the Shaftoes' attention.
"The Dentist now owns ten percent of Epiphyte."
"How did that come about? Last I was informed of anything," Doug says
accusingly, "the son of a bitch was suing you."
"He was suing us," Randy says, "because he wanted in. None of our stock
was for sale, and we were not planning to go public anytime soon, so the
only way he could get in was by essentially blackmailing us with a lawsuit."
"You said it was a bogus lawsuit!" Amy exclaims, the only person here
who is bothering to show, or feel, any moral outrage.
"It was. But it would have cost so much to litigate it that it would
have bankrupted us. On the other hand, when we offered to sell the Dentist
some stock, he dropped the suit. We got our hands on some of his money,
which is always useful."
"But now you are beholden to his due diligence people."
"Yeah. They are on the cable ship even as we speak they came out on a
tender this morning."
"What do they think you are doing?"
"I told them that the sidescan sonar revealed some fresh anchor scars
near the cable route, which needed to be assessed."
"Very routine."
"Yeah. Due diligence people are easy to manipulate. You just have to
act really diligent. They eat it up."
"We're there," Amy says, and hauls back on a joystick, twisting her
body to put a little English on the maneuver.
Doug and Randy look at the TV screen. It is completely dark. Digits
along the bottom state that the pitch is five degrees and the roll is eight,
which means that the ROV is nearly level. The yaw number is spinning around
rapidly, meaning that the ROV is rotating around its vertical axis like a
fishtailing car. "Should come into view at around fifty degrees," Amy
mutters.
The yaw numbers slow down, dropping through a hundred degrees, ninety,
eighty. At around seventy degrees, something rotates into view at the edge
of the screen. It looks like a rugged, particolored sugarloaf rising from
the seafloor. Amy gooses the controls a couple of times and the rotation
drops to a crawl. The sugarloaf glides into the center of the screen and
then stops. "Locking in the gyros," Amy says, whacking a button. "All
forward." The sugarloaf slowly begins to get bigger. The ROV is moving
towards it, its direction automatically stabilized by its built in
gyroscopes.
"Swing wide around it to starboard," Doug says. "I want a different
angle on this." He pays some attention to a VCR that's supposed to be
recording this feed.
Amy lets the joystick come back to neutral, then executes a series of
moves that causes them to lose the image of the wreck for a minute. All they
can see are coral formations passing beneath the ROV's cameras. Then she
yaws it around to the left and there it is again: the same streamlined
projectile shape. But from this angle, they can see it's actually projecting
from the seafloor at a forty five degree angle.
"It looks like the nose of an airplane. A bomber," Randy says. "Like a
B 29."
Doug shakes his head. "Bombers had to have a circular cross section
because they were pressurized. This thing does not have a circular cross
section. It is more eliptical."
"But I don't see all of the railings and guns and, and "
"Crap that a classic German U boat would have hanging off of it. This
is a more modern streamlined shape," Doug says. He shouts something in
Tagalog at one of his crew, over on Glory IV.
"Looks pretty crusty," Randy says.
"There will be plenty of crap growing on her," Doug says, "but she's
still recognizable. There was not a catastrophic implosion."
A crew member runs onto the pamboat carrying an old picture book from
Glory IV's small but idiosyncratic library: a pictorial history of German U
boats. Doug flips past the first three quarters of the book and stops at a
photograph of a sub whose lines are strikingly familiar.
"God, that looks just like the Beatles' Yellow Submarine," Randy says.
Amy pulls her head out of the viewer and crowds him out of the way to look.
"Except it's not yellow," Doug says. "This was the new generation.
Hitler could've won the war if he'd made a few dozen of these." He flips
forward a few pages. There are pictures of more U boats with similar lines,
but much larger.
A cross sectional diagram shows a thin walled, elliptical outer hull
enclosing a thick walled, perfectly circular inner hull. "The circle is the
pressure hull. Always kept at one atmosphere and full of air, for the crew.
Outside of it, an outer hull, smooth and streamlined, with room for fuel and
hydrogen peroxide tanks "
"It carried its own oxidizer? Like a rocket?"
"Sure for running submerged. Any interstices in this outer hull would
have been filled with seawater, pressurized to match the external pressure
of the ocean, to keep it from collapsing."
Doug holds the book up beneath the television monitor and rotates it,
comparing the lines of a U boat to the shape on the screen. The latter is
rugged and furry with coral and other growths, but the similarity is
obvious.
"Why isn't it lying flat on the bottom, I wonder?" Randy says.
Doug grabs a plastic water bottle, which is still mostly full, and
tosses it overboard. It floats upside down.
"Why isn't it lying flat, Randy?"
"Because there's an air bubble trapped in one end," Randy says
sheepishly.
"She suffered damage at the stern. The bow pitched up. There was a
partial collapse. Seawater, rushing into the breach at the stern, forced all
of the air into the bow. The depth is a hundred and fifty four meters,
Randy. That's fifteen atmospheres of pressure. What does Boyle's Law tell
you?"
"That the volume of the air must have been reduced by a factor of
fifteen."
"Bingo. Suddenly, fourteen fifteenths of the boat is full of water, and
the other fifteenth is a pocket of compressed air, capable of supporting
life briefly. Most of her crew dead, she fell fast and settled hard onto the
bottom, breaking her back and leaving the bow section pointing upwards, as
you see her. If anyone was still alive in the bubble, they died a long, slow
death. May God have mercy on their souls."
In other circumstances, the religious reference would make Randy
uncomfortable, but here it seems like the only appropriate thing to say.
Think what you will about religious people, they always have something to
say at times like this. What would an atheist come up with? Yes, the
organisms inhabiting that submarine must have lost their higher neural
functions over a prolonged period of time and eventually turned into pieces
of rotten meat. So what?
"Closing in on what passes for the conning tower," Amy says. According
to the book, this U boat isn't going to have the traditional high vertical
tower rising out of its back: just a low streamlined bulge. Amy has piloted
the ROV very close to the U boat now, and once again she brings it to a stop
and yaws it around. The hull pans into the screen, a variegated mountain of
coral growths, completely unrecognizable as a man made object until
something dark enters the screen. It turns into a perfectly circular hole.
An eel comes snaking out of it and snaps angrily at the camera for a moment,
its teeth and gullet filling the screen. When it swims away, they can see a
dome shaped hatch cover hanging from its hinges next to the hole.
"Someone opened the hatch," Amy says.
"My god," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe. "My god." He leans away from
the TV as if he can't handle the image any more. He crawls out from under
the canopy and stands up, staring out across the South China Sea. "Someone
got out of that U boat."
Amy is still fascinated, and one with her joysticks, like a thirteen
year old boy in a video arcade. Randy rubs the strange empty place on his
wrist and stares at the screen, but he is not seeing anything now except
that perfect round hole.
After a minute or so, he goes out to join Doug, who is ritualistically
lighting up a cigar. "This is a good time to smoke," he mumbles. "Want one?"
"Sure. Thanks." Randy pulls out a folding multipurpose tool and cuts
the end from the cigar, a pretty impressive looking Cuban number. "Why do
you say it's a good time to smoke?"
"To fix it in your memory. To mark it." Doug tears his gaze from the
horizon and looks at Randy searchingly, almost beseeching him to understand.
"This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever
be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an
adventure, or learn something. But we have been changed. We are standing
close to the Heracitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces." He produces a
flaring safety match from his cupped palms like a magician, and holds it up
before Randy's eyes, and Randy puffs the cigar alive, staring into the
flame.
"Well, here's to it," Randy says.
"And here's to whoever got out," replies Doug.
Chapter 50 SANTA MONICA
The United States Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and
foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a
stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another,
and last and least a fighting organization. For the last couple of weeks he
has been owned by the second group. They put him on a luxury liner too swift
to be caught by U boats though this is a moot point since, as Waterhouse and
a few other people know, Dönitz has declared defeat in the Battle of the
Atlantic, and pulled his U boats off the map until he can build the new
generation, which will run on rocket fuel and need never come to the
surface. In this way Waterhouse got to New York. From Penn Station he took
trains to the Midwest, where he spent a week with his family and reassured
them for the ten thousandth time that, because of what he knew, he could
never be sent into actual combat.
Then it was trains again to Los Angeles, and now he waits for what
sounds like it will be a killing series of airplane flights halfway round
the world to Brisbane. He is one of about a million young men and women in
uniform and on leave, wandering around Los Angeles looking for some
entertainment.
Now, they say that this city is the entertainment capital and so
entertainment shouldn't be hard to find. Indeed you can hardly walk down a
city block without bumping into half a dozen prostitutes and passing an
equal number of night spots, movie theaters, and pool halls. Waterhouse
samples all of these during his four day layover, and is distressed to find
that he is no longer entertained by any of them. Not even the whores!
Maybe this is why he is walking along the bluff north of the Santa
Monica Pier, looking for a way down to the beach, which is completely empty
the only thing in Los Angeles that isn't generating commissions and
residuals for someone. The beach lures but does not pander. The plants up
here, standing watch over the Pacific, are like something from another
planet. No, they do not even look like real plants from any conceivable
planet. They are too geometric and perfect. They are schematic diagrams for
plants sketched out by some impossibly modern designer with a strong eye for
geometry but who has never been out in a woods and seen a real plant. They
don't even grow out of any recognizable organic matrix, they are embedded in
the sterile ochre dust that passes for soil in this part of the country.
Waterhouse knows that this is just the beginning, that it will only get
weirder from here on out. He heard enough from Bobby Shaftoe to know that
the other side of the Pacific is going to be indescribably strange.
The sun is preparing to go down and the pier, down the beach to his
left, is alight, a gaudy galaxy; the zoot suits of the carnival barkers
stand out from a mile away, like emergency flares. But Waterhouse is in no
hurry to reach it. He can see ignorant armies of soldiers, sailors, marines
milling around, distinguishable by the hues of their uniforms.
The last time he was in California, before Pearl Harbor, he was no
different from all of those guys on the pier just a little smarter, with a
knack for numbers and music. But now he understands the war in a way that
they never will. He is still wearing the same uniform, but only as a
disguise. He believes now that the war, as those guys understand it, is
every bit as fictional as the war movies being turned out across town in
Hollywood.
They say that Patton and MacArthur are daring generals; the world
watches in anticipation of their next intrepid sortie behind enemy lines.
Waterhouse knows that Patton and MacArthur, more than anything else, are
intelligent consumers of Ultra/Magic. They use it to figure out where the
enemy has concentrated his forces, then loop around them and strike where he
is weakest. That's all.
They say that Montgomery is a steady hand, cagey and insightful.
Waterhouse has no use for Monty; Monty's an idiot; Monty doesn't read his
Ultra; he ignores it, in fact, to the detriment of his men and of the war
effort.
They say that Yamamoto was killed by a lucky accident when some roving
P 38s just happened across an anonymous flight of Nipponese planes and shot
them down. Waterhouse knows that Yamamoto's death warrant was hammered out
by an Electrical Till Corporation line printer in a Hawaiian cryptanalysis
factory, and that the admiral was the victim of a straightforward political
assassination.
Even his concept of geography has changed. When he was home, he sat
down with his grandparents and they looked at the globe, spinning it around
until all they saw was blue, tracing his route across the Pacific, from one
lonely volcano to the next godforsaken atoll. Waterhouse knows that those
little islands, before the war, had only one economic function: information
processing. The dots and dashes traveling along the undersea cable are
swallowed up by the earth currents after a few thousand miles, like ripples
in heavy surf. The European powers colonized those islands at about the same
time as the long cables were being laid, and constructed power stations
where the dots and dashes coming down the line were picked up, amplified,
and sent on to the next chain of islands.
Some of those cables must plunge into the deep not far from this beach.
Waterhouse is about to follow the dots and dashes over the western horizon,
where the world ends.
He finds a ramp that leads down to the beach and lets gravity draw him
towards sea level, gazing to the south and west. The water is pacific and
colorless beneath a hazy sky, the horizon line is barely discernable.
The fine dry sand plumps under his feet in fat circular waves that
crest around his ankles, so he has to stop and unlace his hard leather
shoes. Sand has become trapped in the matrix of his black socks and he pulls
them off too and stuffs them in his pockets. He walks towards the water
carrying one shoe in each hand. He sees others who have tied their shoes
together through belt loops, leaving their hands free. But the asymmetry of
this offends him, so he carries his shoes as if preparing to invert himself
and wade on his hands with his head dangling into the water.
The low sun shines flatly across the sand, grazing the chaos and
creating a knife sharp terminator at the crest of each dunelet. The curves
flirt and osculate with one another in some pattern that is, Waterhouse
guesses, deeply fascinating and significant but too challenging for his
tired mind to attack. Some areas have been stomped level by seagulls.
The sand at the surf line has been washed flat. A small child's
footprints wander across it, splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts.
The sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it. Then
small imperfections are betrayed by swirls in the water. Those swirls in
turn carve the sand. The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape;
the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and some
times carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to
the marks. Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the
wet sand that are read by the ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but
in the process its state has been changed, the pattern of its swirls has
been altered. Waterhouse imagines that the disturbance might somehow
propagate across the Pacific and into some super secret Nipponese
surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves; Nip
listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water
swirling around Waterhouse's feet carries information about Nip propeller
design and the deployment of their fleets if only he had the wit to read it.
The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.
The land war is over for Waterhouse. Now he is gone, gone to the sea.
This is the first time he's taken a good look at it the sea, that is since
he reached Los Angeles. It looks big to him. Before, when he was at Pearl,
it was just a blank, a nothing. Now it looks like an active participant and
a vector of information. Fighting a war out on that thing could turn you
into some kind of a maniac, make you deranged. What must it be like to be
the General? To live for years among volcanoes and alien trees, to forget
about oaks and cornfields and snowstorms and football games? To fight the
terrible Nipponese in the jungle, burning them out of caves, driving them
off cliffs into the sea? To be an oriental potentate the supreme authority
over millions of square miles, hundreds of millions of people. Your only
tether to the real world a slender copper fiber rambling across the ocean
floor, a faint bleating of dots and dashes in the night? What kind of man
would this make you?
Chapter 51 OUTPOST
When their sergeant was aerosolized by the Australian with the tommy
gun, Goto Dengo and his surviving comrades were left mapless, and mapless in
the jungles of New Guinea during a war is bad, bad, bad.
In another country, they might have been able to keep walking downhill
until they reached the ocean, and then follow the coastline to their
destination. But travel along the coast is even more nearly impossible than
travel in the interior, because the coast is a chain of pestilential
headhunter infested marshes.
In the end, they find a Nipponese outpost by simply following the sound
of the explosions. They may not have maps, but the American Fifth Air Force
does.
The relentless bombing is reassuring, in a way, to Goto Dengo. After
their encounter with the Australians, he entertains an idea that he dare not
voice: that by the time they reach their destination, it might already have
been overrun by the enemy. That he can even conceive of such a possibility
proves beyond all doubt that he is no longer fit to be a soldier of the
emperor.
In any case, the drone of the bombers' engines, the tympanic thuds of
the explosions, the flashes on the night horizon give them plenty of helpful
hints as to where the Nipponese people are located. One of Goto Dengo's
comrades is a farmboy from Kyushu who seems to be capable of substituting
enthusiasm for food, water, sleep, medicine, and any other bodily needs. As
they trudge onwards through the jungle, this boy keeps his spirits up by
looking forward to the day when they draw close enough to hear the sound of
the antiaircraft batteries and see the American planes, torn open by
shellfire, spiraling into the sea.
That day never arrives. As they get closer, though, they can find the
outpost with their eyes closed, simply by following the reek of dysentery
and decaying flesh. Just as the stench draws close enough to be
overpowering, the enthusiastic boy makes an odd grunting sound. Goto Dengo
turns to see a peculiar, small, oval shaped entrance wound in the center of
the boy's forehead. The boy falls down and lies on the ground quivering.
"We are Nipponese!" Goto Dengo says.
***
The tendency of bombs to fall out of the sky and blow up among them
whenever then sun is up dictates that bunkers and foxholes be dug.
Unfortunately ground coincides with water table. Footprints fill up with
water before the foot has even been worried loose from the clutching mud.
Bomb craters are neat, circular ponds. Slit trenches are zigzagging canals.
There are no wheeled vehicles and no beasts of burden, no livestock, no
buildings. Those pieces of charred aluminum must have been parts of
airplanes once. There are a few heavy weapons, but their barrels are cracked
and warped from explosions, and pocked with small craters. Palm trees are
squat stumps crowned with a few jagged splinters radiating away from the
site of the most recent explosion. The expanse of red mud is flecked with
random clutches of gulls tearing at bits of food; Goto Dengo suspects
already what they're eating, and confirms this when he cuts his bare foot on
an excerpt of a human jawbone. The sheer volume of high explosive that has
detonated here has suffused every molecule of the air, water, and earth with
the chemical smell of TNT residue. This smell reminds Goto Dengo of home;
the same stuff is good for pulverizing any rock that is standing between you
and a vein of ore.
A corporal escorts Goto Dengo and his one surviving comrade from the
perimeter to a tent that has been pitched out on the mud, its ropes tied not
to stakes but to jagged segments of tree trunks, or heavy fragments of
ruined weapons. Inside, the mud is paved with the lids of wooden crates. A
shirtless man of perhaps fifty sits crosslegged on top of an empty
ammunition box. His eyelids are so heavy and swollen that it is difficult to
tell whether he is awake. He breathes erratically. When he inhales, his skin
retracts into the interstices between ribs, producing the illusion that his
skeleton is trying to burst free from his doomed body. He has not shaved in
a long time, but doesn't have enough whiskers to muster a real beard. He is
mumbling to a clerk, who squats on his haunches atop a crate lid stenciled
MANILA and copies down his words.
Goto Dengo and his comrade stand there for perhaps half an hour,
desperately trying to master their disappointment. He expected to be lying
in a hospital bed drinking miso soup by now. But these people are in worse
shape than he is; he is afraid that they might ask him for help.
Still, it is good just to be under canvas, and standing in the presence
of someone who has authority, who is taking charge. Clerks enter the tent
carrying message decrypts, which means that somewhere around here is a
functioning radio station, and a staff with codebooks. They are not totally
cut off.
"What do you know how to do?" says the officer, when Goto Dengo is
finally granted the opportunity to introduce himself.
"I am an engineer," says Goto Dengo.
"Ah. You know how to build bridges? Airstrips?"
The officer is engaging in a bit of whimsy here; bridges and airstrips
are as far beyond their grasp as intergalactic starships. All of his teeth
have fallen out and so he gums his words, and sometimes must pause to draw
breath two or three times in the course of a sentence.
"I will build such things if it is my commander's wish, though for such
things, others have skill far better than mine. My specialty is underground
works."
"Bunkers?"
A wasp stings him on the back of the neck and he inhales sharply. "I
will build bunkers if it is my commander's wish. My specialty is tunnels, in
earth or in rock, but especially in rock."
The officer stares at Goto Dengo fixedly for a few moments, then
directs a glance at his clerk, who nods a little bow and takes it down.
"Your skills are useless here," he says offhandedly, as if this is true of
just about everyone.
"Sir! Also, I am proficient with the Nambu light machine gun."
"The Nambu is a poor weapon. Not as good as what the Americans and
Australians have. Still, useful in jungle defense."
"Sir! I will defend our perimeter to my last breath "
"Unfortunately they will not attack us from the jungle. They bomb us.
But the Nambu cannot hit a plane. When they come, they will come from the
ocean. The Nambu is useless against an amphibious assault."
"Sir! I have lived in the jungle for six months."
"Oh?" For the first time, the officer seems interested. "What have you
been eating?"
"Grubs and bats, sir!"
"Go and find me some."
"At once, sir!"
***
He untwists some old rope to make twine, and knots the twine into nets,
and hangs the nets in trees. Once that is done, his life is simple: every
morning he climbs up into the trees to collect bats from the nets. Then he
spends the afternoon digging grubs out of rotten logs with a bayonet. The
sun goes down and he stands in a foxhole full of sewage until it comes up
again. When bombs go off nearby, the concussion puts him into a state of
shock so profound as to separate mind from body entirely; for several hours
afterwards, his body goes around doing things without his telling it to.
Stripped of its connections to the physical world, his mind runs in circles
like an engine that has sheared its driveshaft and is screaming along at
full throttle, doing no useful work while burning itself up. He usually does
not emerge from this state until someone speaks to him. Then more bombs
fall.
***
One night he notices that there is sand beneath his feet. Strange.
The air smells clean and fresh. Unheard of.
Others are walking on the sand with him.
They are being escorted by a couple of shambling privates, and a
corporal bent under the weight of a Nambu. The corporal is peering into Goto
Dengo's face strangely. "Hiroshima," he says.
"Did you say something to me?"
"Hiroshima."
"But what did you say before you said 'Hiroshima'?"
"In?"
"In Hiroshima."
"What did you say before you said 'in Hiroshima'?"
"Aunt."
"You were talking to me about your aunt in Hiroshima?"
"Yes. Her too."
"What do you mean, her too?"
"The same message."
"What message?"
"The message that you memorized for me. Give her the same message."
"Oh," Goto Dengo says.
"You remember the whole list?"
"The list of people I'm supposed to give the message to?"
"Yes. Recite the list again."
The corporal has an accent from Yamaguchi, which is where most of the
soldiers posted here came from. He seems more rural than urban. "Uh, your
mother and father back on the farm in Yamaguchi."
"Yes!"
"And your brother, who is in the Navy?"
"Yes!"
"And your sister, who is "
"A schoolteacher in Hiroshima, very good!"
"As well as your aunt who is also in Hiroshima."
"And don't forget my uncle in Kure."
"Oh, yeah. Sorry."
"That's okay! Now tell me the message again, just to make sure you
won't forget it."
"Okay," says Goto Dengo, and draws a deep breath. He is really starting
to come around now. They are trudging down to the sea: he and half a dozen
others, all unarmed and carrying small bundles, accompanied by the corporal
and privates. Below, in the gentle surf, a rubber boat awaits them.
"We're almost there! Tell me the message! Tell it back to me!"
"My beloved family," Goto Dengo begins.
"Very good perfect so far!" says the corporal.
"My thoughts are with you as always," Goto Dengo guesses.
The corporal looks a bit crestfallen. "Close enough keep going."
They have reached the boat. The crew shoves it out into the surf a few
paces. Goto Dengo stops talking for a few moments as he watches the others
wade out to it and climb in. Then the corporal prods him in the back. Goto
Dengo staggers out into the ocean. No one has started yelling at him yet in
fact they reach for him, pulling him in. He tumbles into the bottom of the
boat and clambers up to a kneeling position as the crew begin to row it out
into the surf. He locks eyes with the corporal, back on the beach.
"This is the last message you will receive from me, for by now I have
long since gone to my rest on the sacred soil of the Yasukuni Shrine."
"No! No! That's totally wrong!" hollers the corporal.
"I know that you will visit me there and remember me fondly, as I
remember you."
The corporal splashes into the surf, trying to chase the boat, and the
privates plunge in after him and grab him by the arms. The corporal shouts,
"Soon we will deal the Americans a smashing defeat and then I will march
home through the streets of Hiroshima in triumph along with my comrades!" He
recites it like a schoolboy doing his lessons.
"Know that I died bravely, in a magnificent battle, and never for one
moment shirked my duty!" Goto Dengo shouts back.
"Please send me some strong thread so that I can mend my boots!" the
corporal cries.
"The Army has looked after us well, and we have lived the last months
of our lives in such comfort and cleanliness that you would hardly guess we
had ever left the Home Islands!" Goto Dengo shouts, knowing that he must be
difficult to hear now above the surf. "When the final battle came, it came
quickly, and we went to our deaths in the full flower of our youth, like the
cherry blossoms spoken of in the emperor's rescript, which we all carry
against our breasts! Our departure from this world is a small price to pay
for the peace and prosperity that we have brought to the people of New
Guinea!"
"No, that's totally wrong!" wails the corporal. But his comrades are
dragging him up the beach now, back towards the jungle, where his voice is
lost in an eternal cacophony of hoots, screeches, twitters and eerie cries.
Goto Dengo smells diesel and stale sewage. He turns around. The stars
behind them are blocked out by something long and black and shaped kind of
like a submarine.
"Your message is much better," someone mumbles. It is a young fellow
carrying a toolbox: an airplane mechanic who has not seen a Nipponese
airplane in half a year.
"Yes," says another man also a mechanic, apparently. "His family will
find your message much more comforting."
"Thank you," Goto Dengo says. "Unfortunately I have no idea what the
kid's name is."
"Then go to Yamaguchi," says the first mechanic, "and pick some old
couple at random."
Chapter 52 METEOR
"You sure don't fuck like a smart girl," says Bobby Shaftoe, his voice
suffused with awe.
The wood stove glows in the corner, even though it's only September for
crissakes, in Sweden, where Shaftoe has spent the last six months.
Julieta is dark and lanky. She reaches one long arm far across the bed,
gropes on the nightstand for a cigarette.
"Could you reach that jiz rag?" Shaftoe says, eyeing a neatly folded
United States Marine Corps handkerchief next to the cigarettes. His arm is
too short.
"Why?" Julieta speaks great English like all the other Finns. Shaftoe
sighs in exasperation and buries his face in her black hair. The Gulf of
Bothnia whooshes and foams down below them, like a badly tuned radio pulling
in strange information.
Julieta is given to asking big questions.
"I just don't want there to be a big mess when I execute my withdrawal,
ma'am," he says.
He hears the flint of Julieta's lighter itching once, twice, thrice
behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.
"Take your time," she purrs, her vocal cords syrupy with condensed tar.
"What are you going to do, go for a swim? Invade Russia?"
Somewhere out there, across the Gulf, is Finland. There are Russians
there, and Germans.
"See, even when you mention going for a swim, my dick gets smaller,"
Shaftoe says. "So it's going to come out. Inevitably." He thinks he
pronounces this last word correctly.
"Then what will happen?" Julieta says.
"We'll get a wet spot."
"So? It's natural. People have been sleeping on wet spots as long as
beds have existed."
"God damn it," Shaftoe says, and lunges heroically for the Semper Fi
handkerchief Julieta digs her fingernails into one of the sensitive spots
that she has located during her exhaustive cartographic survey of his body.
He squirms to no avail; all the Finns are great athletes. He pops out. Too
late! He knocks his wallet onto the floor while grabbing the hanky, then
rolls off Julieta and wraps it around himself, a flag on a broken pole, the
only flag of surrender Bobby Shaftoe will ever wave.
Then he just lies there for a while, listening to the surf, and the
popping of the wood in the stove. Julieta rolls away from him and lies
curled up on her side, avoiding the wet spot, even though it is natural, and
enjoying her cigarette, even though it isn't.
Julieta smells like coffee. Shaftoe likes to nuzzle and smell her
coffee scented flesh.
"The weather is not too bad. Uncle Otto should be back before night,"
she says. She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like
a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath. Its
eastern border, with Russia, no longer bears any resemblance to reality.
This illusive frontier is furiously crosshatched with pencil marks, the axes
of Stalin's repeated efforts to castrate Scandinavia, obsessively recorded
and annotated by Julieta's uncle, who like all Finns is an expert skier,
crack shot, and indomitable warrior.
Still they despise themselves. Shaftoe thinks it's because they
eventually farmed out the defense of their country to the Germans. Finns
excelled at an old fashioned, personalized, retail style of Russian killing,
but when they started to run low on Finns, they had to call in the Germans,
who are more numerous and who have perfected a wholesale Russian
slaughtering operation.
Julieta scoffs at this simple minded theory: the Finns are a million
times more complex than Bobby Shaftoe can ever understand. Even if the war
had never happened, there would be an infinity of reasons for them to be
depressed all the time. There is no point even in trying to explain it all.
She can only provide him with the haziest glimpses into Finnish psychology
by fucking his brains out once every couple of weeks.
He has been lying there for too long. Soon the left over jism in his
tract will harden like epoxy. This peril spurs him to action. He slides out
of bed, cringes from the chill, hops across cold planks to the rug, scurries
instinctively toward the warmth of the stove.
Julieta rolls over onto her back to watch this. She looks at him
appraisingly. "Be a man," she says. "Make me some coffee."
Shaftoe snatches the cabin's cast iron kettle, which could double as a
ship anchor if need arose. He throws a blanket over his shoulders and runs
outside. He stops at the brink of the seawall, knowing that the splintery
pier will not be kind to his bare feet, and pisses down onto the beach. The
yellow arc is veiled in steam, redolent of coffee. He squints across the
gulf and sees a tug pulling a boom of logs down the coast, and a couple of
sails, but not Uncle Otto's.
Behind the cabin is a standpipe that is fed from a spring in the hills.
Shaftoe fills the kettle, snatches a couple of hunks of firewood and
scampers back inside, maneuvering between stacked bricks of foil packed java
and crates of Suomi machine pistol ammunition. He sets the kettle on the
iron stove and then stokes it up with the wood.
"You use too much wood," Julieta says, "Uncle Otto will be noticing."
"I'll chop more," Shaftoe says. "This whole fucking country is full of
nothing but wood."
"You'll be chopping wood all day if Uncle Otto gets angry at you."
"So it's okay for me to sleep with Otto's niece, but burning a couple
of sticks of wood to make her coffee is grounds for dismissal?"
"Grounds," Julieta says. "Coffee grounds."
The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged
into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The
usual antidotes have been exhausted: self flagellation with steeped birch
twigs, mordant humor, week long drinking bouts. The only thing to save
Finland now is coffee. Unfortunately the government of that country has been
short sighted enough to raise taxes and customs duties through the roof.
Supposedly it is to pay for killing Russians, and for resettling the
hundreds of thousands of Finns who have to pull up stakes and move whenever
Stalin, in a drunken lunge, or Hitler, in a psychotic fit, attacks a map
with a red Crayola. It just has the effect of making coffee harder to
obtain. According to Otto, Finland is a nation of unproductive zombies,
except in areas that have been penetrated by the distribution networks of
coffee smugglers. Finns are generally strangers to the entire concept of
good fortune, however they are lucky enough to live right across the Gulf of
Bothnia from a neutral, reasonably prosperous country famous for its coffee.
With this background, the existence of a small Finnish colony in
Norrsbruck becomes pretty much self explanatory. The only thing that is
missing is muscle to load the coffee onto the boat, and to unload whatever
swag Otto brings back. Needed: one muscular lunkhead willing to be paid off
the record in whatever specie Otto comes up with.
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and
starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the
coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an
egg to settle the grounds.
Chopping wood, fucking Julieta, grinding coffee, fucking Julieta,
pissing on the beach, fucking Julieta, loading and unloading Otto's ketch.
This has been pretty much it for Bobby Shaftoe during the last half year. In
Sweden he has found the calm, grey green eye of the blood hurricane that is
the world.
Julieta Kivistik is the central mystery. They do not have a love
affair; they have a series of love affairs. At the beginning of each affair,
they are not even speaking to each other, they do not even know each other,
Shaftoe is just a drifter who loads for her uncle. At the end of each affair
they are in bed fucking. In between, there is anywhere from one to three
weeks of tactical maneuver, false starts, and arduous cut and thrust
flirtation.
Other than that, each affair is completely different, like a whole new
relationship between two entirely different people. It is crazy. Probably
because Julieta is crazy much crazier than Bobby Shaftoe. But there's no
reason for Shaftoe not to be crazy, here and now.
He boils the coffee, does the trick with the egg, pours her a mug. This
is nothing more than a courtesy: their affair just ended and the new one
hasn't started yet.
When he brings her the mug, she is sitting up in bed, smoking another
cigarette, and (just like a woman) cleaning out his wallet, which is
something that he has not done since well, since he first made it, ten years
ago, in Oconomowoc, in fulfillment of the requirements for the
Leatherworking merit badge. Julieta has pulled the stuffing out of the thing
and is going through it as if it were a paperback book. Much of the stuff in
there has been ruined by seawater. But she is looking, analytically, at a
snapshot of Glory.
"Gimme that!" he says, and snatches it from her.
If she were his lover, she would try to play keep away with him, there
would be silliness and, perhaps, more sex at the end of it. But she is a
stranger now and she lets him have the wallet.
She watches him set down the coffee, as if he's a waiter in a cafe.
"You have a girlfriend where? In Mexico?"
"Manila," Bobby Shaftoe says, "if she's even still alive."
Julieta nods, completely impassive. She is neither jealous of Glory,
nor worried about Glory's fate at the hands of the Nips. What's happening in
the Philippines can't be any worse than what she's seen in Finland. And why
should she care, anyway, about the past romantic entanglements of her
uncle's stevedore, young what's his name?
Shaftoe pulls on boxers, wool pants, a shirt and a sweater. "I'm going
into town," he says. "Tell Otto I'll be back to unload the boat."
Julieta says nothing.
As a last, polite gesture, Shaftoe stops at the door, reaches behind a
stack of crates, hauls out the Suomi machine pistol (1) and
checks it: clean, loaded, ready for action, just like it was about an hour
ago, the last time he checked it. He puts it back in its place, turns
around, locks eyes with Julieta for a moment. Then he goes out and pulls the
door shut. Behind him, he can hear her naked feet on the cold floor, and the
satisfying sound of the door's bolts being rammed home.
He steps into a pair of tall rubber boots and then begins to trudge
south along the beach. The boots are Otto's and are a couple of sizes too
big for his feet. They make him feel like a little boy, splashing through
puddles in Wisconsin. This is what a boy of his age ought to be doing:
working, hard and honest, at a simple job. Kissing girls. Walking into town
to buy some smokes and maybe have a beer. The idea of flying around on
heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of
foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate.
He slows down every few hundred yards to look at a steel drum, or other
war debris, cast up by the waves, half buried in sand, stenciled cryptically
in Cyrillic or Finnish or German. They remind him of the Nipponese drums on
that Guadalcanal beach.
Moon lifts sea, but not the ones who sleep on the beach Each wave a
shovel
A lot of stuff gets wasted in a war not just stuff that comes in crates
and drums. It frequently happens, for example, that men are called upon to
die willingly that others may live. Shaftoe learned on Guadalcanal that you
can never tell when circumstances will make you into that guy. You can go
into battle with the clearest, simplest, smartest plan ever devised, worked
out by Annapolis trained, battle hardened Marine officers, and based upon
tons of intelligence. But ten seconds after the first trigger has been
pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like
maniacs. The battle plan that was genius a minute ago suddenly looks as
sweetly naive as the inscriptions in your high school year book. Guys are
dying. Some of them are dying because a shell happens to fall on them, but
surprisingly often, they are dying because they are ordered to.
It was like that with U 691. That whole thing with the Trinidadian
steamer was probably a brilliant plan (Waterhouse's, he suspects) at some
point. But then it all went wrong, and some Allied commander gave the order
that Shaftoe and Root, along with the crew of U 691, were to die.
He should have died on the beach on Guadalcanal, along with his
buddies, and he didn't. Everything between then and U 691 was just sort of
an extra bonus life. He got a chance to go home and see his family, sort of
like Jesus after the Resurrection.
Now Bobby Shaftoe is dead for sure. This is why he walks so slowly down
the beach, and takes such a brotherly interest in these items, because Bobby
Shaftoe is, too, a corpse washed up on the beach in Sweden.
He is thinking about this when he sees the Heavenly Apparition.
The sky here is like a freshly galvanized bucket that has been inverted
over the world to block out inconvenient sunlight; if someone lights up a
cigarette half a mile away, it blazes like a nova. By those standards, the
Heavenly Apparition looks like a whole galaxy falling out of orbit to graze
the surface of the world. You could almost mistake it for an air plane,
except that it does not make the requisite chesty, droning thrum. This thing
emits a screaming whine and a long trail of fire. Besides, it goes too fast
for an airplane. It comes streaking in from the Gulf of Bothnia and crosses
the shoreline a couple of miles north of Otto's cabin, gradually losing
altitude and slowing down. But as it slows down, the flames burgeon, and
claw their way forward up the thing's black body, which resembles the
crumpled, curling wick at the root of a candle flame.
It disappears behind trees. Around here, everything disappears behind
trees sooner or later. A ball of fire erupts from those trees, and Bobby
Shaftoe says, "One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one
thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six, one thousand seven" and
then stops, hearing the explosion. Then he turns around and walks into
Norrsbruck, going faster now.
Chapter 53 LAVENDER ROSE
Randy wants to go down and look at the U boat in person. Doug says
evenly that Randy is welcome to do so, but he needs to draw up a valid dive
plan first, and reminds him that the depth of the wreck is one hundred and
fifty four meters. Randy nods as if he had, of course, expected to draw up a
dive plan.
He wants everything to be like driving cars, where you just hop in and
go. He knows a couple of guys who fly airplanes, and he can still remember
how he felt when he learned that you can't just get in a plane (even a small
one) and take off you have to have a flight plan, and it takes a whole
briefcase full of books and tables and specialized calculators, and access
to weather forecasts above and beyond the normal consumer grade weather
forecasts, to come up with even a bad, wrong flight plan that will surely
kill you. Once Randy had gotten used to this idea, he grudgingly admitted it
made sense.
Now Doug Shaftoe's telling him he needs a plan just to strap some tanks
on his back and swim a hundred and fifty four meters (straight down,
admittedly) and back. So Randy yanks a couple of diving books off the
bungeed shelves of Glory IV and tries to come up with even a vague idea of
what Doug's talking about. Randy has never gone scuba diving in his life,
but he's seen them doing it on Jacques Cousteau and it seems straightforward
enough.
The first three books he consults contain more than enough detail to
perfectly reproduce the crestfallenness that Randy experienced when he
learned about flight plans. Before he'd opened the books Randy had gotten
out his mechanical pencil and his graph paper in preparation for making
marks on the page; half an hour later he's still trying to get a handle on
the contents of the tables, and he hasn't made any marks at all. He notes
that the depths in these tables only go down as far as a hundred and thirty,
and at that level they only talk in terms of staying down there five or ten
minutes. And yet he knows that Amy, and the Shaftoe's colorful and ever
enlarging cast of polyethnic scuba divers, are spending much longer at this
depth, and are in fact beginning to come up to the surface with artifacts
from the wreck. There is, for example, an aluminum briefcase wherein Doug
hopes to find clues as to who was on this U boat and why it was on the wrong
side of the planet.
Randy begins to fear that the entire wreck is going to be stripped bare
before he even makes any marks on his piece of graph paper. The divers show
up, one or two each day, on speedboats or outrigger canoes from Palawan.
Blond surf boys, taciturn galoots, cigarette smoking Frenchmen, Nintendo
playing Asians, beer can crumpling ex Navy guys, blue collar hillbillies.
They all have diving plans. Why doesn't Randy have a diving plan?
He starts sketching one out based on the depth of one hundred and
thirty, which seems reasonably close to one hundred and fifty four. After
working on it for about an hour (long enough to imagine all sorts of
specious details) he happens to notice that the table he's been using is in
feet, not meters, which means that all of these divers have been going down
to a depth that is way more than three times as deep as the maximum that is
even talked about on these tables.
Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a
while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the covers. He
picked them off the shelf because (getting introspective here) he is a
computer guy, and in the computer world any book printed more than two
months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds
that all three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by
the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one
to Amy. The one to Amy has obviously been written by a man who is
desperately in love with her. Reading it is like moisturizing with Tabasco.
He concludes that these are all consumer grade diving books written for
rum drenched tourists, and furthermore that the publishers probably had
teams of lawyers go over them one word at a time to make sure there would
not be liability trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore,
probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually
know about diving, but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors
don't even mention that.
Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That
explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit
hackers.
Doug Shaftoe is not going down to the wreck himself. As a matter of
fact he looked surprised, bordering on contemptuous, when Randy asked him
whether he would go down. Instead, he's going over the stuff that is brought
up from the wreck by the younger divers. They began by doing a photographic
survey, using digital cameras, and Doug's been printing out blowups of the
inside of the U boat on his laser printer and pasting them up around the
walls of his personal wardroom on Glory IV.
Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores
anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been published
within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on the back cover
containing the words stunning, superb, user friendly, or, worst of all, easy
to understand. He looks for old, thick books with worn out bindings and
block lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes
written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Pontifex
Randy,
For now, let's use "Pontifex" as the working title of this
cryptosystem. It is a post war system. What I mean by that is that, after
seeing what Turing and company did to Enigma, I came to the (now obvious)
conclusion that any modern system had better be resistant to machine
cryptanalysis. Pontifex uses a 54 element permutation as its key one key per
message, mind you! and it uses that permutation (which we will denote as T)
to generate a keystream which is added, modulo 26, to the plaintext (P), as
in a one time pad. The process of generating each character in the keystream
alters T in a reversible but more or less "random" fashion.
At this point, a diver comes up with a piece of actual gold, but it's
not a bar: it's a sheet of hammered gold, maybe eight inches on a side and
about a quarter of a millimeter thick, with a pattern of tiny neat holes
punched through it, like a computer card. Randy spends a couple of days
obsessing over this artifact. He learns that it came out of a crate stored
in the hold of the U boat, and that there are thousands more of them.
Now all of a sudden he's reading stuff by guys whose names are preceded
by naval ranks and succeeded by M.D.s and Ph.D.s and they are going on for
dozens of pages about the physics of nitrogen bubble formation in the knee,
for example. There are photographs of cats strapped down in benchtop
pressure chambers. Randy learns that the reason Doug Shaftoe doesn't dive to
one hundred and fifty four meters is that certain age related changes in the
joints tend to increase the likelihood of bubble formation during the
decompression process. He comes to terms with the fact that the pressure at
the depth of the wreck is going to be fifteen or sixteen atmospheres,
meaning that as he ascends to the surface, any nitrogen bubbles that happen
to be rattling around in his body are going to get fifteen or sixteen times
as large as they were to begin with and that this is true whether those
bubbles happen to be in his brain, his knee, the little blood vessels of the
eyeball, or trapped underneath his fillings. He develops a sophisticated
layman's understanding of dive medicine, which amounts to little because
everyone's body is different hence the need for each diver to have a
completely different dive plan. Randy will need to figure out his body fat
percentage before he can even begin marking up his sheet of graph paper.
It is also path dependent. These divers' bodies get partly saturated
with nitrogen every time they go down, and not all of it goes out of their
bodies when they come back up all of them, sitting around Glory IV playing
cards, drinking beer, talking to their girlfriends on their GSM phones, are
all outgassing all the time nitrogen is seeping out of their bodies into the
atmosphere, and each one of them knows more or less how much nitrogen's
stuffed into his body at any given moment and understands, in a deep and
nearly intuitive way, just exactly how that information propagates through
any dive plan that he might be cooking up inside the powerful dive planning
supercomputer that each of these guys apparently carries around in his
nitrogen saturated brain.
One of the divers comes up with a plank from the crate that contained
the stacks of gold sheets. It is in very bad shape, and it's still fizzing
as gas comes out of it. Fizzing in a way that Randy has no trouble imagining
his bones would do if he made any errors in working out his dive plan. There
is some stenciled lettering just barely visible on the wood: NIZ ARCH.
Glory IV has compressors for pumping air up to insanely high pressures
to fill the scuba tanks. Randy develops an awareness that the pressure has
to be insanely high or it won't even emerge from the tanks while these guys
are down at depth. The divers are all being suffused with this pressurized
gas; he half expects that one of these divers is going to bump into
something and explode into a pink mushroom cloud.
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: cantrell@epiphyte.com
Subject: Pontifex
You forwarded me a message about a cryptosystem called Pontifex. Was
this invented by a friend of yours? In its general outlines (viz, an n
element permutation that is used to generate a keystream, and that slowly
evolves) it is similar to a commercial system called RC4, which enjoys a
complicated reputation among Secret Admirers it seems secure, and has not
been broken, but it makes us nervous because it is basically a single rotor
system, albeit a rotor that evolves. Pontifex evolves in a much more
complicated & asymmetrical way than RC4 and so might be more secure.
Some things about Pontifex are slightly peculiar.
(1) He talks about generating "characters" in the key stream and then
adding them, modulo 26, to the plaintext. This is how people talked 50 years
ago when ciphers were worked out using pencil and paper. Today we talk in
terms of generating bytes and adding them modulo 256. Is your friend pretty
old?
(2) He speaks of T as a 54 element permutation. There is nothing wrong
with that but Pontifex would work just as well with 64 or 73 or 699
elements, so it makes more sense to describe it as an n element permutation
where n could be 54 or any other integer. I can't figure out why he settled
on 54. Possibly because it is twice the number of letters in the alphabet
but this makes no particular sense.
Conclusion: the author of Pontifex is cryptologically sophisticated but
shows possible signs of being an elderly crank. I need more details in order
to deliver a verdict.
– Cantrell
"Randy?" says Doug Shaftoe, and beckons him into his wardroom.
The inside of the wardroom door is decorated with a big color
photograph of a massive stone staircase in a dusty church. They stand in
front of it. "Are there a lot of Waterhouses?" Doug asks. "Is it a common
name?"
"Uh, well, it's not a rare name."
"Is there anything you'd like to share with me about your family
history?"
Randy knows that as a possible suitor to Amy, he will be undergoing
thorough scrutiny at all times. The Shaftoes are doing due diligence on him.
"What kind of thing are you looking for? Something terrible? I don't think
there's anything worth hiding from you."
Doug stares at him distractedly for a while, then turns to face the now
open aluminum briefcase from the U boat. Randy supposes that merely opening
it required coming up with a detailed plan. Doug has spread out
miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex
Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a
sort of librarian.
Randy sees a pair of gold rimmed spectacles, a fountain pen, a few
rusty paper clips. But it looks as though a lot of sodden paper was taken
out of that briefcase too, and Doug Shaftoe has been carefully drying it out
and trying to read it. "Most wartime paper was crap," he says. "It probably
dissolved into mush within days of the sinking. The paper in this briefcase
was at least protected from marine critters, but most of it's gone. However,
the owner of this briefcase was apparently some sort of aristocrat. Check
out the glasses, the pen."
Randy checks them out. The divers have found teeth and fillings in the
wreck, but nothing that qualifies as a body. The places where people died
are marked by these trails of hard, inert remains, such as eyeglasses. Like
the debris footprint of an exploded airliner.
"So what I'm getting at is that he had a few scraps of good paper in
his briefcase," Doug continues. "Personal stationery. So we suspect his name
was Rudolf von Hacklheber. Does that name ring any bells with you?"
"No. But I could do a web search . . ."
"I tried that," Doug says. "Turned up just a few hits. There was a man
by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties.
And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use
the name: a hotel, a theater, a defunct reinsurance company. That's about
it."
"Well, if he was a mathematician, he might have had some connection
with my grandfather. Is that why you were asking about my family?"
"Check this out," Doug says, and pings one fingernail against a glass
tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is
floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written
on the back in pencil, but it's impossible to read because the flaps of the
envelope have been spread apart. "May I?" he asks. Doug nods and hands him a
couple of latex surgical gloves. "I don't have to file a diving plan for
this, do I?" Randy asks, wiggling his fingers into the gloves.
Doug is not amused. "It is deeper than it looks," he says.
Randy flips the envelope over, then folds the flaps back together,
reassembling the inscription. It says:
WATERHOUSE LAVENDER ROSE.
Chapter 54 BRISBANE
Through a small dusty window Xed with masking tape, Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse gazes out at downtown Brisbane. Bustling it ain't. A taxi limps
down the street and pulls into the drive of the nearby Canberra Hotel, which
is home to many mid ranking officers. The taxi smokes and reeks it is
powered by a charcoal burner in the trunk. Marching feet can be heard
through the window. It's not the tromp, tromp of combat boots, but the
whack, whack of sensible shoes worn by sensible women: local volunteers.
Waterhouse instinctively leans closer to the window to get a look at them,
but he's wasting his time. Dressed in those uniforms, you could march a
regiment of pinup girls through all the cabins and gangways of an active
battleship and not draw a single wolf whistle, lewd suggestion, or butt
grab.
A delivery truck creeps out of a side street and backfires alarmingly
as it tries to accelerate onto the main drag. Brisbane is still worried
about attack from the air, and no one likes sudden loud noises. The truck
looks like it is being attacked by an amoeba: on its back is a billowing
rubberized canvas balloon full of natural gas.
He's on the third floor of a commercial building so nondescript that
the most interesting observation one can make about it is that it has four
stories. There is a tobacconist on the ground floor. The rest of the place
must have been empty until The General beaten like a red headed stepchild by
those Nips came to Brisbane from Corregidor, and made this city into the
capital of the Southwest Pacific Theater. There must have been an incredible
amount of surplus office space around here before The General showed up,
because a lot of Brisbaners had fled south, expecting an invasion.
Waterhouse has had plenty of time to familiarize himself with Brisbane
and its environs. He's been here for four weeks, and he's been given nothing
to do. When he was in Britain, they couldn't shuffle him around fast enough.
Whatever his job was at the moment, he did it feverishly until he received
top secret, highest priority orders to rush, by any available means of
transportation, to his next assignment.
Then they brought him here. The Navy flew him across the Pacific,
hopping from one island base to the next in an assortment of flying boats
and transports. He crossed the equator and the international date line on
the same day. But when he reached the boundary between Nimitz's Pacific
Theater and The General's Southwest Pacific Theater, it was like he'd glided
into a stone wall. It was all he could do to talk himself onboard a troop
transport to New Zealand, and then to Fremantle. The transports were almost
unbelievably hellish: steel ovens packed with men, baked by the sun, no one
allowed to go abovedecks for fear they'd be sighted, and marked for
slaughter, by a Nip submarine. Even at night they couldn't get a breeze
through there, because all openings had to be covered with blackout
curtains. Waterhouse couldn't really complain; some of the men had traveled
this way all the way from the East Coast of the United States.
The important thing was that he made it to Brisbane, as per his orders,
and reported to the right officer, who told him to await further orders.
Which he's been doing until this morning, when he was told to show up at
this office upstairs of the tobacconist. It is a room full of enlisted men
typing up forms, trundling them around in wire baskets, and filing them. In
Waterhouse's experience with the military, he has found that it's not a good
sign when one is ordered to report to a place like this.
Finally he is allowed into the presence of an Army major who has
several other conversations, and various pieces of important paperwork going
on at the same time. That is okay; Waterhouse doesn't need to be a
cryptanalyst to get the message loud and clear, which is that he is not
wanted here.
"Marshall sent you here because he thinks that The General is sloppy
with Ultra," the major says.
Waterhouse flinches to hear this word spoken aloud, in an office where
enlisted men and women volunteers are coming and going. It's almost as if
the major wishes to make it clear that The General is, in fact, quite sloppy
with Ultra, and rather likes it that way, thank you very much.
"Marshall's afraid that the Nips will get wise to us and change their
codes. It's all because of Churchill." The major refers to General George C.
Marshall and Sir Winston Churchill as if they were bullpen staff for a farm
league baseball team. He pauses to light a cigarette. "Ultra is Churchill's
baby. Oh yeah, Winnie just luuuuuves his Ultra. He thinks we're going to
blow his secret and ruin it for him because he thinks we're idiots." The
major takes a very deep lungful of smoke, sits back in his chair, and
carefully puffs out a couple of smoke rings. It is a convincing display of
insouciance. "So he's always nagging Marsh