Cryptonomicon (31 page)

“Good evening, sir. Can I help you?”

“Evening. Lawrence Waterhouse.”

“Harry Packard. Pleased to meet you.” But he has no idea who Waterhouse is; he is privy to Ultra, but not to Ultra Mega.

“Pleasure’s mine. I imagine you’ll want to have a look at this.” Waterhouse hands him the magic pass. Packard’s pale eyes travel over it carefully, then jump around to focus on a few sites of particular interest: the signature at the bottom, the smeared stamp. The war has turned Harry Packard into a machine for scanning and processing slips of paper and he goes about his work calmly and without fuss in this case. He excuses himself, works the crank on a telephone, and speaks to someone; his posture and facial expression suggest it is someone important. Waterhouse cannot hear the words above the clicking and thrumming of the massed typewriters, but he sees interest and bemusement on Packard’s young, open, pink face. Packard gives Waterhouse a sidelong glance or two while he is listening to the person at the other end of the line. Then he says something respectful and reassuring into the phone and rings off.

“Right. Well, what would you like to see?”

“I’m trying to get an overall sense of how the information flows.”

“Well, we are close to the beginning of it here—these are the headwaters. Our wellsprings are the Y Service—military and amateur radio operators who listen in on Jerry’s radio transmissions, and provide us with these.” Packard takes a slip from a motorcyclist’s pannier and hands it to Waterhouse.

It is a form with various boxes at the top in which someone has written in a date (today’s) and time (a couple of hours ago) and a few other data such as a radio frequency.
The body of the form is mostly occupied by a large open space in which the following has been printed in hasty block letters:

A  Y  W  B  P  

R  O  J  H  K  

D  H  A  O  B  

Q  T  M  D  L  

T  U  S  H  I  

Y  P  I  J  S  

L  L  E  N  J  

O  P  S  K  Y  

V  Z  P  D  L  

E  M  A  O  U  

T  A  M  O  G  

T  M  O  A  H  

E  C  

the whole thing preceded by two groups of three letters each:

Y  U  H   A  B  G

“This one came in from one of our stations in Kent,” Packard says. “It is a Chaffinch message.”

“So—one of Rommel’s?”

“Yes. This intercept came in from Cairo. Chaffinch gets top priority, which is why this message is on the top of the pile.”

Packard leads Waterhouse down the central aisle of the hut, between the rows of typists. He picks out one girl who is just finishing up with a message, and hands her the slip. She sets it up next to her machine and commences typing it in.

At first glance, Waterhouse had thought that the machines represented some British concept of how to build an electric typewriter—as big as a dinner table, wrapped up in two hundred pounds of cast-iron, a ten-horse motor turning over under the hood, surrounded by tall fences and armed guards. But now that he is closer he sees that it is something much more complicated. Instead of a platen, it has a large flat reel on it carrying a roll of narrow paper tape. This is not the same kind of tape he saw earlier, smoking through the big machine. This is narrower, and when it emerges from the machine, it does not have holes punched through it for a machine to read. Instead, every time the girl slams down one of the keys on the keyboard—copying the text printed on the slip—a new letter is printed on the tape. But not the same letter that she typed.

It does not take her long to type in all of the letters. Then
she tears the tape from her machine. It has a sticky backing which she uses to paste it directly onto the original intercept slip. She hands it to Packard, giving him a demure smile. He responds with something between a nod and a smart little bow, the kind of thing no American male could ever get away with. He glances at it and hands it to Waterhouse.

The letters on the tape say

EINUNDZWANZIGSTPANZERDIVISIONBERICHTETKEINEBESONDEREEREIGNISSE

“In order to obtain those settings, you have to break the code—which changes every day?”

Packard smiles in agreement. “At midnight. If you stay here—” he checks his watch “—for another four hours, you will see fresh intercepts coming in from the Y Service that will produce utter gibberish when we run them through the Typex, because the Jerries will have changed all their codes on the stroke of midnight. Rather like Cinderella’s magic carriage turning back into a pumpkin. We must then analyze the new intercepts using the bombes, and figure out the day’s new codes.”

“How long does that take?”

“Sometimes we are lucky and have broken the day’s codes by two or three o’clock in the morning. Typically it does not happen until afternoon or evening. Sometimes we do not succeed at all.”

“Okay, this is a stupid question, but I want to be clear. These Typex machines—which merely do a mechanical deciphering operation—are a completely different thing from the bombes, which actually break the codes.”

“The bombes, compared to these, are of a completely different, enormously higher order of sophistication,” Packard agrees. “They are almost like mechanical thinking machines.”

“Where are they located?”

“Hut 11. But they won’t be running just now.”

“Right,” Waterhouse says, “not until after midnight when the carriage turns back into a pumpkin, and you need to break tomorrow’s Enigma settings.”

“Precisely.”

Packard steps over to a small wooden hatch set low into one of the hut’s exterior walls. Next to it sits an office tray with a cup hook screwed into each end, and a string tied to each cup hook. One of the strings is piled up loose on the floor. The wall hatch has been slid shut on the other string. Packard puts the message slip on top of a pile of similar ones that has accumulated in the tray, then slides the hatch open, revealing a narrow tunnel leading away from the hut.

“Okay, your pull!” he shouts.

“Okay, my pull!” comes an answering voice a moment later. The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.

“On its way to Hut 3,” Packard explains.

“Then so am I,” Waterhouse says.

Hut 3 is only a few yards away, on the other side of the inevitable blast wall. GERMAN MILITARY SECTION has been scrawled on the door in cursive; Waterhouse presumes that this is as opposed to “NAVAL” which is in Hut 4. The ratio of men to women seems higher here. During wartime it is startling to see so many hale young men in one room together. Some are in Army or RAF uniforms, some in civvies, and there is even one Naval officer.

A large horseshoe-shaped table dominates the center of the building, with a rectangular table off to the side. Each chair at each table is occupied by intent workers. The intercept slips are pulled into the hut on the wooden tray and then move from chair to chair according to some highly organized scheme that Waterhouse can only vaguely grasp at this point. Someone explains to him that the bombes just broke the day’s codes around sundown, and so the entire day’s load of intercepts has just come down the tunnel from Hut 6 during the last couple of hours.

He decides to think of the hut as a mathematical black box for the time being—that is, he’ll concentrate only on its inputs and outputs of information and ignore the internal details. Bletchley Park, taken in its entirety, is a black box
of sorts: random letters stream into it, strategic intelligence streams out, and the internal particulars are of no interest to most of the people on the Ultra distribution list. The question that Waterhouse is here to figure out is: is there another vector of information coming out of this place, hidden subliminally in the teletype signals and the behaviors of the Allied commanders? And does it point to Rudolf von Hacklheber, Ph.D.?

W
HOEVER LAID OUT THE FLIGHT PATHS INTO THE
Sultan’s new airport must have been in cahoots with the Kinakuta Chamber of Commerce. If you’re lucky enough to be in a window seat on the left side of the plane, as Randy Waterhouse is, the view during the final approach looks like a propaganda flyby.

Kinakuta’s matted green slopes surge out of a mostly calm blue sea, and eventually soar high enough to be dusted with snow at the summits, even though the island is only seven degrees north of the equator. Randy sees right away what Avi meant when he said that the place was Muslim around the edges and animist in the middle. The only places you could hope to build anything like a modern city are along the coast, where there’s an intermittent fringe of nearly flat land—a beige rind clinging to a giant emerald. The biggest and best flat place is on the northeastern corner of the island, where the main river, several miles inland, bottoms out into a flood plain that broadens to an alluvial delta that reaches out into the Sulu Sea for a mile or two.

Randy gives up counting the oil rigs ten minutes before Kinakuta City even comes into sight. From high above they look like flaming tank traps scattered in the surf to deter incoming Marines. As the plane sheds altitude they begin to look more like factories on stilts, topped with high stacks where troublesome natural gas is flamed off. This gets more alarming as the plane gets closer to the water, and it begins
to seem as if the pilot is threading his way between pillars of fire that would roast the 777 like a pigeon on the wing.

Kinakuta City looks more modern than anything in the States. He has been trying to read about the place but has found precious little: a couple of encyclopedia entries, a few fleeting mentions in World War II histories, some puckish but basically glowing articles in the
Economist.
Putting his rusty interlibrary loan skills to work, he paid the Library of Congress to make him a photocopy of the one book he could find specifically about Kinakuta: one of about a million out-of-print World War II memoirs that must have been penned by G.I.s during the late forties and fifties. So far, he hasn’t had time to read it, and so the two-inch stack of pages is just dead weight in his luggage.

In any case, none of the maps he has seen tallies with the reality of the modern Kinakuta City. Anything that was there during the war has been torn down and replaced with new. The river has been dredged into a new channel. An inconvenient mountain called Eliza Peak has been dynamited, and the rubble shoved into the ocean to make several new square miles of real estate, most of which has been gobbled by the new airport. The dynamitings were so loud that they prompted complaints from the governments of the Philippines and of Borneo, hundreds of miles away. They also brought down the wrath of Greenpeace, which was afraid that the sultan was scaring whales in the central Pacific. So Randy expects half of Kinakuta City to be a smoking crater, but of course it’s not. The stump of Eliza Peak has been neatly paved over and used as the foundation of the sultan’s new Technology City. All of the glass-walled skyscrapers there, and in the rest of the city, have pointy tops, recalling a traditional architecture that has long since been bulldozed and used to fill in the harbor. The only building Randy can see that looks to be more than ten years old is the sultan’s palace, which is ancient. Surrounded by miles of blue glass skyscrapers, it’s like a reddish-beige mote frozen in a tray of ice.

Once Randy fixes on that, everything snaps into its proper orientation. He bends forward, risks the censure of the cabin crew by pulling his bag out from under the seat
ahead of him, and pulls out his photocopied G.I. memoir. One of its first pages is a map of Kinakuta City as it appeared in 1945, and dead center is the Sultan’s Palace. Randy rotates it before his face in the way of a panicky driver with a steering wheel, and gets it to line up with his view. There’s the river. There’s Eliza Peak, where the Nipponese used to have a signals intelligence detachment and a radar station, all built with slave labor. There’s the former site of the Japanese Naval Air Force field, which became the Kinakuta Airport until the new one was built. Now it is a flock of yellow cranes above a blue nebula of rebar, lit from within by a constellation of flickering white stars—arc-welders at work.

Next to it is something that doesn’t belong: a patch of emerald green, maybe a couple of city blocks, surrounded by a stone wall. Inside, there’s a placid pond toward one end—the 777 is now so low that Randy can count the lily pads—a tiny Shinto temple hewn from black stone, and a little bamboo teahouse. Randy presses his face to the window and keeps turning his head to follow it, until suddenly his view is blocked by a high-rise apartment building just off the wingtip. Through an open kitchen window, he gets a microsecond’s glimpse of a slender lady swinging a hatchet towards a coconut.

That garden looked like it belonged a thousand miles farther north—in Nippon. When Randy finally realizes what it was, the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

Randy got on this plane a couple of hours ago at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. The flight was delayed and so he had plenty of time to look at the other passengers: three Westerners including himself, a couple of dozen Malay types (either Kinakutan or Filipino), and everyone else Nipponese. Some of the latter looked like businessmen, traveling on their own or in twos and threes, but most belonged to some kind of an organized tour group that marched into the boarding lounge precisely forty-five minutes before scheduled takeoff, queued behind a young woman in a navy blue skirt suit holding up a neat little logo on a stick. Retirees.

Their destination is not the Technology City, or any of
the peculiar pointy-topped skyscrapers in the financial district. They are all going to that walled Nipponese garden, which is built on top of a mass grave containing the bodies of three and a half thousand Nipponese soldiers, who all died on August 23, 1945.