Cryptonomicon (64 page)

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. “Goddamn 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.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

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 shareholders. 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: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

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 “[email protected]” 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 al
most 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 everyone 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.”