Cryptonomicon (24 page)

“The tall girls,” he explains. “The problem is this notch.” He points to the valley between the main peak and the bump. Then he draws a new peak high and wide enough to cover both:

“We can do that by planting fake personnel records in Rudy’s channel, giving heights that are taller than the overall average, but shorter than the bombe girls.”

“But now you’ve dug yourself another hole,” Chattan says. He is leaning back in his officer’s swivel chair, holding
the cigarette in front of his face, regarding Waterhouse through a motionless cloud of smoke.

Waterhouse says, “The new curve looks a little better because I filled in that gap, but it’s not really bell-shaped. It doesn’t tail off right, out here at the edges. Dr. von Hacklheber will notice that. He’ll realize that someone’s been tampering with his channel. To prevent that from happening I would have to plant more fake records, giving some unusually large and small values.”

“Invent some fake girls who were exceptionally short or tall,” Chattan says.

“Yes. That would make the curve tail off in the way that it should.”

Chattan continues to look at him expectantly.

Waterhouse says, “So, the addition of a small number of what would otherwise be bizarre anomalies makes it all look perfectly normal.”

“As I said,” Chattan says, “our squad is in North Africa—even as we speak—widening the bell curve. Making it all look perfectly normal.”

O
KAY, SO
P
RIVATE
F
IRST
C
LASS
G
ERALD
H
OTT, LATE
of Chicago, Illinois, did not exactly shoot up through the ranks during his fifteen-year tenure in the
United States Army. He did, however, carve a bitchin’ loin roast. He was as deft with a boning knife as Bobby Shaftoe is with a bayonet. And who is to say that a military butcher, by conserving the limited resources of a steer’s carcass and by scrupulously observing the mandated sanitary practices, might not save as many lives as a steely-eyed warrior? The military is not just about killing Nips, Krauts, and Dagoes. It is also about killing livestock—and eating them. Gerald Hott was a front-line warrior who kept his freezer locker as clean as an operating room and so it is only fitting that he has ended up there.

Bobby Shaftoe makes this little elegy up in his head as he is shivering in the sub-Arctic chill of a formerly French, and now U.S. Army, meat locker the size and temperature of Greenland, surrounded by the earthly remains of several herds of cattle and one butcher. He has attended more than a few military funerals during his brief time in the service, and has always been bowled over by the skill of the chaplains in coming up with moving elegies for the departed. He has heard rumors that when the military inducts 4-Fs who are discovered to have brains, it teaches them to type and assigns them to sit at desks and type these things out, day after day. Nice duty if you can get it.

The frozen carcasses dangle from meathooks in long rows. Bobby Shaftoe gets tenser and tenser as he works his way up and down the aisles, steeling himself for the bad thing he is about to see. It is almost preferable when your buddy’s head suddenly explodes just as he is puffing his cigarette into life—buildup like this can drive you nuts.

Finally he rounds the end of a row and discovers a man slumbering on the floor, locked in embrace with a pork carcass, which he was apparently about to butcher at the time of his death. He has been there for about twelve hours now and his body temp is hovering around minus ten degrees Fahrenheit.

Bobby Shaftoe squares himself to face the body and draws a deep breath of frosty, meat-scented air. He clasps his cyanotic hands in front of his chest in a manner that is both prayerful and good for warming them up. “Dear Lord,” he says out loud. His voice does not echo; the carcasses soak it
up. “Forgive this marine for these, his duties, which he is about to perform, and while you are at it, by all means forgive this marine’s superiors whom You in Your infinite wisdom have seen fit to bless him with, and forgive their superiors for getting the whole deal together.”

He considers going on at some length but finally decides that this is no worse than bayonetting Nips and so let’s get on with it. He goes to the locked bodies of PFC Gerald Hott and Frosty the Pig and tries to separate them without success. He squats by them and gives the former a good look. Hott is blond. His eyes are half-closed, and when Shaftoe shines a flashlight into the slit, he can see a glint of blue. Hott is a big man, easily two-twenty-five in fighting trim, easily two-fifty now. Life in a military kitchen does not make it easy for a fellow to keep his weight down, or (unfortunately for Hott) his cardiovascular system in any kind of dependable working order.

Hott and his uniform were both dry when the heart attack happened, so thank god the fabric is not frozen onto the skin. Shaftoe is able to cut most of it off with several long strokes of his exquisitely sharpened V-44 “Gung Ho” knife. But the V-44’s machetelike nine-and-a-half-inch blade is completely inappropriate for close infighting—viz., the denuding of the armpits and groin—and he was told to be careful about inflicting scratches, so there he has to break out the USMC Marine Raider stiletto, whose slender double-edged seven-and-a-quarter-inch blade might have been designed for exactly this sort of procedure, though the fish-shaped handle, which is made of solid metal, begins freezing to the sweaty palm of Shaftoe’s hand after a while.

Lieutenant Ethridge is hovering outside the locker’s tomblike door. Shaftoe barges past him and heads straight for the building’s exit, ignoring Ethridge’s queries: “Shaftoe? How ’bout it?”

He does not stop until he is out of the shade of the building. The North African sunshine breaks over his body like a washtub of morphine. He closes his eyes and turns his face into it, holds his frozen hands up to cup the warmth and let it trickle down his forearms, drip from his elbows.

“How ’bout it?” Ethridge says again.

Shaftoe opens his eyes and looks around.

The harbor’s a blue crescent with miles of sere jetties snaking around each other like diagrams of dance steps. One of them’s covered with worn stumps of ancient bastions and next to it a French battleship lies half-sunk, still piping smoke and steam into the air. All around it, the ships of Operation Torch are unloading shit faster than you can believe. Cargo nets rise from the holds of the transports and splat onto the quays like giant loogies. Longshoremen haul, trucks carry, troops march, French girls smoke Yankee cigarettes, Algerians propose joint ventures.

Between those ships, and the Army’s meat operation, up here on this rock, is what Bobby Shaftoe takes to be the City of Algiers. To his discriminating Wisconsinan eye it does not appear to have been
built
so much as swept up on the hillside by a tidal wave. A lot of acreage has been devoted to keeping the fucking sun off, so from above, it has a shuttered-up look about it—lots of red tile, decorated with flowers and Arabs. Looks like a few modern concrete structures (e.g. this meat locker) have been thrown up by the French in the wake of some kind of vigorous slum-clearing offensive. Still, there’s a lot of slums left to be cleared—target number one being this human beehive or anthill just off to Shaftoe’s left, the Casbah, they call it. Maybe it’s a neighborhood. Maybe it’s a single poorly organized building. Has to be seen to be believed. Arabs packed into the place like fraternity pledges into a telephone booth.

Shaftoe turns around and looks again at the meat locker, which is dangerously exposed to enemy air attack here, but no one gives a fuck because who cares if the Krauts blow up a bunch of meat?

Lieutenant Ethridge, almost as desperately sunburned as Bobby Shaftoe, squints.

“Blond,” Shaftoe says.

“Okay.”

“Blue-eyed.”

“Good.”

“Anteater—not mushroom.”

“Huh?”

“He’s not circumcised, sir!”

“Excellent! How ’bout the other thing?”

“One tattoo, sir!”

Shaftoe is enjoying the slow buildup of tension in Ethridge’s voice: “Describe the tattoo, Sergeant!”

“Sir! It is a commonly seen military design, sir! Consisting of a heart with a female’s name in it.”

“What is that name, Sergeant?” Ethridge is on the verge of pissing his pants.

“Sir! The name inscribed on the tattoo is the following name: Griselda. Sir!”

“Aaaah!” Lieutenant Ethridge lets loose deep from the diaphragm. Veiled women turn and look. Over in that Casbah, starved-looking, shave-needing ragheads lean out of spindly towers yodeling out of key.

Ethridge shuts up and contents himself with clenching his fists until they go white. When he speaks again, his voice is hushed with emotion. “Battles have hinged on lesser strokes of luck than this one, Sergeant!”

“You’re telling me!?” Shaftoe says. “When I was on Guadalcanal, sir, we got trapped in this little cove and pinned down—”

“I don’t want to hear the lizard story, Sergeant!”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

Once when Bobby Shaftoe was still in Oconomowoc, he had to help his brother move a mattress up a stairway and learned new respect for the difficulty of manipulating heavy but floppy objects. Hott, may God have mercy on his soul, is a heavy S.O.B., and so it is excellent luck that he is frozen solid. After the Mediterranean sun has its way with him, he is sure enough going to be floppy. And then some.

All of Shaftoe’s men are down in the detachment’s staging area. This is a cave built into a sheer artificial cliff that rises from the Mediterranean, just above the docks. These caves go on for miles and there is a boulevard running over the top of them. But even the approaches to their particular cave have been covered with tents and tarps so that no one, not even Allied troops, can see what they are up to: namely, looking for any equipment with 2701 painted on it, painting over the last
digit, and changing it to 2. The first operation is handled by men with green paint and the second by men with white or black paint.

Shaftoe picks one man from each color group so that the operation as a whole will not be disrupted. The sun is stunningly powerful here, but in that cavern, with a cool maritime breeze easing through, it’s not really that bad. The sharp smell of petroleum distillates comes off all of those warm painted surfaces. To Bobby Shaftoe, it is a comforting smell, because you never paint stuff when you’re in combat. But the smell also makes him a little tingly, because you frequently paint stuff just
before
you go into combat.

Shaftoe is about to brief his three handpicked Marines on what is to come when the private with black paint on his hands, Daniels, looks past him and smirks. “What’s the lieutenant looking for now do you suppose, Sarge?” he says.

Shaftoe and Privates Nathan (green paint) and Branph (white) look over to see that Ethridge has gotten sidetracked. He is going through the wastebaskets again.

“We have all noticed that Lieutenant Ethridge seems to think it is his mission in life to go through wastebaskets,” Sergeant Shaftoe says in a low, authoritative voice. “He is an Annapolis graduate.”

Ethridge straightens up and, in the most accusatory way possible, holds up a fistful of pierced and perforated oaktag. “Sergeant! Would you identify this material?”

“Sir! It is general issue military stencils, Sir!”

“Sergeant! How many letters are there in the alphabet?”

“Twenty-six, sir!” responds Shaftoe crisply.

Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Branph whistle coolly at each other—this Sergeant Shaftoe is sharp as a tack.

“Now, how many numerals?”

“Ten, sir!”

“And of the thirty-six letters and numerals, how many of them are represented by unused stencils in this wastebasket?”

“Thirty-five, sir! All except for the numeral 2, which is the only one we need to carry out your orders, sir!”

“Have you forgotten the second part of my order, Sergeant?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” No point in lying about it. Officers actually like it when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter they are than you. It makes them feel needed.

“The second part of my order was to take strict measures to leave behind no trace of the changeover!”

“Sir, yes, I do remember that now, sir!”

Lieutenant Ethridge, who was just a bit huffy first, has now calmed down quite a bit, which speaks well of him and is duly, silently noted by all of the men, who have known him for less than six hours. He is now speaking calmly and conversationally, like a friendly high school teacher. He is wearing the heavy-rimmed black military eyeglasses known in the trade as RPGs, or Rape Prevention Glasses. They are strapped to his head by a hunk of black elastic. They make him look like a mental retard. “If some enemy agent were to go through the contents of this wastebasket, as enemy agents have been known to do, what would he find?”

“Stencils, sir!”

“And if he were to count the numerals and letters, would he notice anything unusual?”

“Sir! All of them would be clean except for the numeral twos which would be missing or covered with paint, sir!”

Lieutenant Ethridge says nothing for a few minutes, allowing his message to sink in. In reality no one knows what the fuck he is talking about. The atmosphere becomes tinderlike until finally, Sergeant Shaftoe makes a desperate stab. He turns away from Ethridge and towards the men. “I want you Marines to get paint on all of those goddamn stencils!” he barks.

The Marines charge the wastebaskets as if they were Nip pillboxes, and Lieutenant Ethridge seems mollified. Bobby Shaftoe, having scored massive points, leads Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Branph out into the street before Lieutenant Ethridge figures out that he was just guessing. They head for the meat locker up on the ridge, double-time.

These Marines are all lethal combat veterans or else they never would have gotten into a mess this bad—trapped on a gratuitously dangerous continent (Africa) surrounded by
the enemy (United States Army troops). Still, when they get into that locker and take their first gander at PFC Hott, a hush comes over them.

Private Branph clasps his hands, rubbing them together surreptitiously. “Dear Lord—”

“Shut up, Private!” Shaftoe says, “I already did that.”

“Okay, Sarge.”

“Go find a meat saw!” Shaftoe says to Private Nathan.

The privates all gasp.

“For the fucking pig!” Shaftoe clarifies. Then he turns to Private Daniels, who is carrying a featureless bundle, and says, “Open it up!”

The bundle (which was issued by Ethridge to Shaftoe) turns out to contain a black wetsuit. Nothing GI; some kind of European model. Shaftoe unfolds it and examines its various parts while Privates Nathan and Branph dismember Frosty the Pig with vigorous strokes of an enormous bucksaw.