Cryptonomicon (42 page)

“Nice job, sir!” Shaftoe says, not knowing what else to say. Then he follows the sound of an argument into the signals cabin.

The dramatis personae are Corporal Benjamin, holding up a large Book, in a pose that recalls an exasperated preacher sarcastically acquainting his wayward parishioners with the unfamiliar sight of the Bible; Lieutenant Monkberg, semireclined in a chair, his damaged Limb up on a table; and Lieutenant Root, doing some needle-and-thread work on same.

“It is my sworn duty—” Benjamin begins.

Monkberg interrupts him. “It is your sworn duty, Corporal, to follow my orders!”

Root’s medical supplies are scattered all over the deck because of the collision. Shaftoe begins to pick them up and sort them out, keeping an especially sharp eye out for any small bottles that may have gone astray.

Benjamin is very excited. Clearly, he is not getting through to Monkberg, and so he opens up the hefty Book at random and holds it up above his head. It contains line after line, column after column, of random letters. “This,” Benjamin says, “is the Allied MERCHANT SHIPPING CODE! A copy of THIS BOOK is on EVERY SHIP of
EVERY CONVOY in the North Atlantic! It is used by those ships to BROADCAST THEIR POSITIONS! Do you UNDERSTAND what is going to HAPPEN if THIS BOOK falls into the hands of THE GERMANS?!”

“I have given you my order,” Lieutenant Monkberg says.

They go on in this vein for a couple of minutes as Shaftoe scours the deck for medical debris. Finally he sees what he’s looking for: it has rolled beneath a storage cabinet and appears to be miraculously unscathed.

“Sergeant Shaftoe!” says Root peremptorily. It is the closest he has ever come to sounding like a military officer. Shaftoe straightens up reflexively.

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Lieutenant Monkberg’s dose of morphine may wear off pretty soon. I need you to find my morphine bottle and bring it to me right away.”

“Sir! Yes, sir!” Shaftoe is a Marine, which means he’s really good at following orders even when his body is telling him not to. Even so, his fingers do not want to release their grip on the little bottle, and Root almost has to pry it loose.

Benjamin and Monkberg, locked in their dispute, are oblivious to this little exchange. “Lieutenant Root!” Benjamin says, his voice now high and trembly.

“Yes, Corporal,” Root says absent-mindedly.

“I have reason to believe that Lieutenant Monkberg is a German spy and that he should be relieved of his command of this mission and placed under arrest!”

“You son of a bitch!” Monkberg shouts. As well he might, since Benjamin has just accused him of treason, for which he could face a firing squad. But Root has Monkberg’s leg clamped in place up there on the table, and he can’t move.

Root is completely unruffled. He seems to welcome this unbelievably serious accusation. It is an opportunity to talk about something with more substance than, for example, finding ways to substitute the word “shit” for “ship” in nautical expressions.

“I’ll see you court-martialed for this, you bastard!” Monkberg hollers.

“Corporal Benjamin, what grounds do you have for this accusation?” says Enoch Root in a lullaby voice.

“The lieutenant has refused to allow me to destroy the codebooks, which it is my sworn duty to do!” Benjamin shouts. He has completely lost his temper.

“I am under very specific and clear orders from Colonel Chattan!” Monkberg says, addressing Root. Shaftoe is startled by this. Monkberg seems to be recognizing Root’s authority in the matter. Or maybe he’s scared, and looking for an ally. The officers closing ranks against the enlisted men. As usual.

“Do you have a written copy of those orders I could examine?” Root says.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to be having this discussion here and now,” Monkberg says, still pleading and defensive.

“How would you suggest that we handle it?” Root says, drawing a length of silk through Monkberg’s numbed flesh. “We are aground. The Germans will be here soon. We either leave the code books or we don’t. We have to decide now.”

Monkberg goes limp and passive in his chair.

“Can you show me written orders?” Root asks.

“No. They were given verbally,” Monkberg says.

“And did these orders specifically mention the code books?” Root asks.

“They did,” Monkberg says, as if he’s a witness in a courtroom.

“And did these orders state that the code books were to be allowed to fall into the hands of the Germans?”

“They did.”

There is silence for a moment as Root ties off a suture and begins another one. Then he says, “A skeptic, such as Corporal Benjamin, might think that this business of the code books is an invention of yours.”

“If I falsified my own orders,” Monkberg says, “I could be shot.”

“Only if you, and some witnesses to the event, all made their way back to friendly territory, and compared notes with Colonel Chattan,” says Enoch Root, coolly and patiently.

“What the fuck is going on!?” says one of the SAS blokes, bursting in through a hatch down below and charging up the gangway. “We’re all waiting in the fucking lifeboats!” He bursts into the room, his face red with cold and anxiety, and looks around wildly.

“Fuck off,” Shaftoe says.

The SAS bloke pulls up short. “Okay, Sarge!”

“Go down and tell the men in the boats to fuck off too,” Shaftoe says.

“Right away, Sarge!” the SAS man says, and makes himself scarce.

“As those anxious men in the lifeboats will attest,” Enoch Root continues, “the likelihood of you and several witnesses making it back to friendly territory is diminishing by the minute. And the fact that you
just happened
to suffer a grievous
self-inflected
leg wound, just a few minutes ago, complicates our escape tremendously. Either we will all be captured together, or else you will volunteer to be left behind and captured. Either way, you are saved—assuming that you are a German spy—from the court-martial and the firing squad.”

Monkberg can’t believe his ears. “But—but it was an accident, Lieutenant Root! I hit myself in the leg with a fucking ax—you don’t think I did that deliberately!?”

“It is very difficult for us to know,” Root says regretfully.

“Why don’t we just destroy the code books? It’s the safest thing to do,” Benjamin says. “I’d just be following a standing order—nothing wrong with that. No court-martial there.”

“But that would ruin the mission!” Monkberg says.

Root thinks this one over for a moment. “Has anyone ever died,” he says, “because the enemy stole one of our secret codes and read our messages?”

“Absolutely,” Shaftoe says.

“Has anyone on our side ever died,” Root continues, “because the enemy
didn’t
have one of our secret codes?”

This is quite a poser. Corporate Benjamin makes his mind up soonest, but even he has to think about it. “Of course not!” he says.

“Sergeant Shaftoe? Do you have an opinion?” Root asks, fixing Shaftoe with a sober and serious gaze.

Shaftoe says, “This code business is some tricky shit.”

Monkberg’s turn. “I… I think… I believe I could come up with a hypothetical situation in which someone could die, yes.”

“How about you, Lieutenant Root?” Shaftoe asks.

Root does not say anything for a long time now. He just works with his silk and his needles. It seems like several minutes go by. Perhaps it’s not that long. Everyone is nervous about the Germans.

“Lieutenant Monkberg asks me to believe that it will prevent Allied soldiers from dying if we turn over the Allied merchant shipping code books to the Germans today,” Root finally says. Everyone jumps nervously at the sound of his voice. “Actually, since we must use a sort of calculus of death in these situations, the real question is, will this somehow save
more
lives than it will lose?”

“You lost me there, padre,” says Shaftoe. “I didn’t even make it through algebra.”

“Then let’s start with what we know: turning over the codes will lose lives because it will enable the Germans to figure out where our convoys are, and sink them. Right?”

“Right!” Corporal Benjamin says. Root seems to be leaning his way.

“That will be true,” Root continues, “until such time as the Allies change the code systems—which they will probably do as soon as possible. So, on the negative side of the calculus of death, we have some convoy sinkings in the short term. What about the positive side?” Root asks, raising his eyebrows in contemplation even as he stares down into Monkberg’s wound. “How might turning over the codes save some lives? Well, that is an imponderable.”

“A what?” Shaftoe says.

“Suppose, for example, that there is a secret convoy about to cross over from New York, and it contains thousands of troops, and some new weapon that will turn the tide in the war and save thousands of lives. And suppose that it is using a different code system, so that even after the Germans get our code books today they will not know about it. The Germans will focus their energies on sinking the convoys that they do know about—killing, perhaps, a few hundred
crew members. But while their attention is on those convoys, the secret convoy will slip through and deliver its precious cargo and save thousands of lives.”

Another long silence. They can hear the rest of Detachment 2702 shouting now, down in the lifeboats, probably having a detailed discussion of their own: if we leave all of the fucking officers behind on a grounded ship, does it qualify as mutiny?

“That’s just hypothetical,” Root says. “But it demonstrates that it is at least theoretically possible that there might be a positive side to the calculus of death. And now that I think about it, there might not even be a negative side.”

“What do you mean?” Benjamin says. “Of course there’s a negative side!”

“You are assuming that the Germans have not already broken that code,” Root says, pointing a bloody and accusing finger at Benjamin’s big tome of gibberish. “But maybe they have. They’ve been sinking our convoys left and right, you know. If that’s the case, then there is no negative in letting it fall into their hands.”

“But that contradicts your theory about the secret convoy!” Benjamin says.

“The secret convoy was just a
Gedankenexperiment,
” Root says.

Corporal Benjamin rolls his eyes; apparently, he actually knows what that means. “If they’ve already broken it, then why are we going to all of this trouble, and risking our lives to GIVE IT TO THEM!?”

Root ponders that one for a while. “I don’t know.”

“Well, what do you think, Lieutenant Root?” Bobby Shaftoe asks a few excruciatingly silent minutes later.

“I think that in spite of my
Gedankenexperiment,
that Corporal Benjamin’s explanation—i.e., that Lieutenant Monkberg is a German spy—is more plausible.”

Benjamin lets out a sigh of relief. Monkberg stares up into Root’s face, paralyzed with horror.

“But implausible things happen all the time,” Root continues.

“Oh, for pete’s sake!” Benjamin shouts, and slams his hand down on the book.

“Lieutenant Root?” Shaftoe says.

“Yes, Sergeant Shaftoe?”

“Lieutenant Monkberg’s injury was an accident. I seen it happen.”

Root looks up into Shaftoe’s eyes. He finds this interesting. “Really?”

“Yes, sir. It was an accident all the way.”

Root breaks open a package of sterile gauze and begins to wind it around Monkberg’s leg; the blood soaks through immediately, faster than he can wind new layers around it. But gradually, Root starts to get the better of it, and the gauze stays white and clean. “Guess it’s time to make a command decision,” he says. “I say we leave the code books behind, just like Lieutenant Monkberg says.”

“But if he’s a German spy—” Benjamin begins.

“Then his ass is grass when we get back on friendly soil,” Root says.

“But you said yourself the chances of that were slim.”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Enoch Root says apologetically. “It was not a wise or a thoughtful comment. It did not reflect the true spirit of Detachment 2702. I am convinced that we will prevail in the face of our little problem here. I am convinced that we will make it to Sweden and that we will bring Lieutenant Monkberg along with us.”

“That’s the spirit!” Monkberg says.

“If at any point, Lieutenant Monkberg shows signs of malingering, or volunteers to be left behind, or in any way behaves so as to increase our risk of capture by the Germans, then we can all safely assume that he is a German spy.”

Monkberg seems completely unfazed. “Well, let’s get the fuck out of here, then!” he blurts, and gets to his feet, somewhat unsteady from blood loss.

“Wait!” Sergeant Shaftoe says.

“What is it now, Shaftoe?” Monkberg shouts, back in command again.

“How are we going to know if he’s increasing our risk of capture?”

“What do you mean, Sergeant Shaftoe?” Root says.

“Maybe it won’t be obvious,” Shaftoe says. “Maybe there’s a German detachment waiting to capture us at a cer
tain location in the woods. And maybe Lieutenant Monkberg is going to lead us directly to the trap.”