Cryptonomicon (87 page)

The mannequin swivels and aims its binoculars directly at Bobby Shaftoe, who freezes solid in his bird-flipping posture as if caught in the gaze of a basilisk. Down below, air-raid sirens begin to weep and wail.

The binoculars come away from the sunglasses. A puff of smoke blurts out of the pipe. The General snaps out a sarcastic salute. Shaftoe remembers to put his finger away, then stands there, rooted like a dead mahogany.

The General reaches up and removes the pipe from his mouth so he can say, “Magandang gabi.”

“You mean,
‘magandang umaga,’
“ Shaftoe says. “
Gabi
means
night
and
umaga
means
morning.
”

The drone of airplane engines is now getting quite noticeable. The press photographers decide to pack it in, and disappear into the house.

“When you’re headed north from Manila towards Lingayen and you get to the fork in the road at Tarlac and you take the right fork, there, and head across the cane breaks towards Urdaneta, what’s the first village you come to?”

“It’s a trick question,” Shaftoe says. “North of Tarlac there are no cane breaks, just rice paddies.”

“Hmm. Very good,” The General says grumpily. Down below, the antiaircraft guns open up with a fantastic clattering; from this distance it sounds as if the north coast of New Guinea is being jackhammered into the sea. The General ignores it. If he were only
pretending
to ignore it, he would at least
look
at the incoming Zeroes, so that he could
stop
pretending to ignore them when it got too dangerous. But he doesn’t even do so much as look. Shaftoe forces himself not to look either. The General asks him a big long question in Spanish. He has a beautiful voice. He sounds like he is standing in an anechoic sound booth in New York City or Hollywood, narrating a newsreel about how great he is.

“If you’re trying to find out if I
hablo Español,
the answer is,
un poquito,
” Shaftoe says.

The General cups a hand to his ear irritably. He can’t hear anything except for the pair of Zeroes converging on him and Shaftoe at three hundred odd miles per hour, liquefying tons of biomass with dense streams of 12.7-millimeter slugs. He keeps a sharp eye on Shaftoe as a trail of bullets thuds across the parking lot, spraying Shaftoe’s trouser legs with mud. The same line of bullets makes a sudden upwards right-angle turn when it reaches the wall of The General’s house, climbs straight up the wall, tears out a
chunk of the balcony’s railing about a foot away from where The General’s hand is resting, beats up a bunch of furniture back inside the house, and then clears the roof of the house and vanishes.

Now that the planes have passed overhead, Shaftoe can look at them without having to worry that he is giving The General the idea that he is some kind of lily-livered pansy. The meatballs on their wings broaden and glower as they bank sharply, sharper than any American plane, and come round for a second try.

“I said—” The General begins. But then the atmosphere’s riven by a series of bizarre whizzing noises. One of the house’s windows is suddenly punched out of its frame. Shaftoe hears a thud from inside and some crockery breaking. For the first time, The General shows some awareness that a military action is taking place. “Warm up my jeep, Shaftoe,” he says, “I have a bone to pick with my triple-A boys.” Then he turns around and Shaftoe gets a look at the back of his pink silk dressing gown. It is embroidered, in black thread, with a giant lizard, rampant.

The General suddenly turns around. “Is that you screaming down there, Shaftoe?”

“Sir, no sir!”

“I distinctly heard you scream.” MacArthur turns his back on Shaftoe again, giving him another look at the lizard (which on second thought might be some sort of Chinese dragon design) and goes inside the house, mumbling irritably to himself.

Shaftoe gets into the vehicle indicated and starts the engine.

The General emerges from the house and begins to plod across the lot cradling an unexploded antiaircraft shell in his arms. The wind makes his pink silk dressing gown billow all around him.

The Zeroes come back and strafe the parking lot again, cutting a truck nearly in half. Shaftoe feels as if his intestines have dissolved and are about to spurt from his body. He closes his eyes, puckers his anal sphincter, and clenches his teeth. The General takes a seat next to him. “Down the hill,” he orders. “Drive towards the sound of the guns.”

They have barely gotten onto the road when their progress is blocked by the two jeeps that had been carrying all the brass up from the airfield. They now sit empty on the road, their doors hanging open, engines still running. The General reaches across in front of Shaftoe and honks the horn.

Colonels and brigadier generals begin to emerge from the shadows of the jungle, like some especially bizarre native tribe, clutching their attache cases talismanically. They salute The General, who ignores them testily. “Move my vehicles!” he intones, jabbing at them with the stem of his pipe. “This is the
road.
The
parking lot
is
that
way.”

The Zeroes come back for a third pass. Shaftoe now realizes (as perhaps The General has) that these pilots are not the best; it is late in the war and all the good pilots are dead. Consequently they do not line their trajectories up properly with the road; the strafing trails cut across it diagonally. Still, a bullet bores through the engine block of one of the jeeps. Hot oil and steam spray out of it.

“Come on, push it out of the way!” The General says. Shaftoe instinctively begins to climb out of the jeep, but The General yanks him back with a word: “Shaftoe! I need you to drive this vehicle.”

Wielding his pipestem like a conductor’s baton, The General gets his staff back out on the road and they begin shoving the ruined jeep into the jungle. Shaftoe makes the mistake of inhaling through his nose and gets a strong diarrheal whiff—at least one of these officers has shit his pants. Shaftoe’s still trying hard not to do the same, and probably would have if he’d pushed the jeep. The Zeroes are trying to line up for another strafing run, but a few American fighter planes have now appeared on the scene, which complicates matters.

Shaftoe maneuvers them through a gap between the remaining jeep and a huge tree, then guns it down the road. The General hums to himself for a while, then says, “What’s your wife’s name?”

“Gory.”

“What!?”

“I mean, Glory.”

“Ah. Good. Good Filipina name. Filipinas are the most beautiful women in the world, don’t you think?”

Experienced world traveler Bobby Shaftoe screws up his face and begins to review his experiences in a systematic way. Then he realizes that The General probably does not actually want his considered opinion.

Of course, The General’s wife is American, so this could be tricky. “I guess the woman you love is always the most beautiful,” Shaftoe finally says.

The General looks mildly pissed off. “Of course, but…”

“But if you don’t really give a shit about them, the Filipinas are the most beautiful, sir!” Shaftoe says.

The General nods. “Now, your boy. What’s his name, then?”

Shaftoe swallows hard and thinks fast. He doesn’t even know if he
has
a kid—he fabricated that to make his line sound better—and even if he does, the chances are only fifty-fifty that it’s a boy. But if he does have a boy, he knows already what the name will be. “His name—well, sir, his name—and I hope you don’t mind this—but his name is Douglas.”

The General grins delightedly and cackles, slapping the antiaircraft shell in his lap for emphasis. Shaftoe flinches.

When they arrive at the airfield, a full-fledged dogfight is in progress overhead. The place is deserted because everyone except them is hiding behind sandbags. The General has Shaftoe drive up and down the length of the field, stopping at each gun emplacement so that he can peer over the barrier.

“There’s the fellow!” The General finally says, pointing his swagger stick at a gun on the opposite side of the runway. “I just saw him poking his head out, yammering on the telephone.”

Shaftoe guns it across the runway. A flaming Zero, traveling at about half the speed of sound, impacts the runway a few hundred feet away and disintegrates into a howling cloud of burning spare parts that comes skittering and rolling and bounding across the runway in their general direction. Shaftoe falters. The General yells at him. Reckoning that he can’t avoid what he can’t see, Shaftoe turns into the storm. Having seen this kind of thing happen before, he knows that the first thing to come their way will be the
engine block, a red-hot tombstone of fine Mitsubishi iron. And indeed there it is, one of its exhaust manifolds still dangling from it like a broken wing, spinning end-over-end and spading huge divots out of the runway with each bounce. Shaftoe swings wide around it. He identifies the fuselage and sees that it has plowed to a stop already. He looks for the wings; they broke up into a few large pieces that are slowing down rapidly, but the tires broke loose from the landing gear and are bounding along towards them, burning wheels of red fire. Shaftoe maneuvers the jeep between them, guns it across a small patch of flaming oil, then makes another hard turn and continues towards their objective.

The explosion of the Zero sent everyone back down behind their sandbags. The General has to climb out of the jeep and peer over the top of the barrier. He holds the antiaircraft shell up above his head. “Say, Captain,” he says in his perfect radio-announcer voice, “this arrived on my end table with no return address, but I believe it came from your unit.” The captain’s helmeted head pops into view over the top of the sandbags as he jumps to attention. He is gaping at the shell. “Would you please look after it, and make sure that it has been properly defused?” The General tosses the shell at him sideways, like a watermelon, and the captain barely has the presence of mind to catch it. “Carry on,” The General says, “let’s see if we can actually shoot down some Nips next time.” He waves disparagingly at the burning wreckage of the Zero and climbs into the jeep with Shaftoe. “All right, back up the hill, Shaftoe!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Now, I know that you hate me because you are a Marine.”

Officers like it when you pretend to be straight with them. “Yes, sir, I do hate you, sir, but I do not feel that this need be an impediment to our killing some Nips together, sir!”

“We agree. But in the mission I have in mind for you, Shaftoe, killing Nips will not be the primary objective.”

Shaftoe’s a bit off balance now. “Sir, with all due respect, I believe that killing Nips is my strong point.”

“I don’t doubt it. And that is a fine skill for a Marine. Because in this war, a Marine is a first-rate fighting man under the command of admirals who don’t know the first thing about ground warfare, and who think that the way to win an island is to hurl their men directly into the teeth of the Nips’ prepared defenses.”

The General pauses here, as if giving Shaftoe an opportunity to respond. But Shaftoe says nothing. He is remembering the stories that his brothers told him on Kwajalein, about all the battles they had fought on small Pacific islands, precisely as The General describes.

“Consequently, a Marine must be very good at killing Nips, as I have no doubt you are. But now, Shaftoe, you are in the Army, and in the Army we actually have certain wonderful innovations, such as strategy and tactics, which certain admirals would be well-advised to acquaint themselves with. And so your new job, Shaftoe, is not simply to kill Nips, but to use your head.”

“Well, I know that you probably think I am a stupid jarhead, General, but I do think that I have a good head on my shoulders.”

“And on your shoulders is exactly where I would like it to stay!” The General says, slapping him heartily on the back. “What we are trying to do now is to create a tactical situation that is favorable to us. Once that is accomplished, the actual killing of Nips can be handled by more efficient means such as aerial bombardment, mass starvation, and the like. It will not be necessary for you to personally cut the throat of every Nip you run into, as eminently qualified as you might be for such an operation.”

“Thank you, General, sir.”

“We have millions of Filipino guerillas, and hundreds of thousands of troops, to handle the essentially quotidian business of turning live Nips into dead, or at least captive, Nips. But in order to coordinate their activities, I need intelligence. That will be one of your missions. But the country is already crawling with my spies, and so it will be a secondary mission.”

“And the primary mission, sir?”

“Those Filipinos need leadership. They need coordination. And perhaps most of all, they need fighting spirit.”

“Fighting spirit, sir?”

“There are many reasons for the Filipinos to be down in the dumps. The Nips have not been kind to them. And although I have been very busy, here in New Guinea, preparing the springboard for my return, the Filipinos don’t know about any of this, and many of them probably think I have forgotten about them entirely. Now it is time to let them know I’m coming. That I shall return—but soon!”

Shaftoe snickers, thinking that The General is engaging in some self-mocking humor here—yes, a bit of
irony
—but then he notes that The General does not seem especially amused. “Stop the vehicle!” he shouts.