Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key. "Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?"
Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed watching.
Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a clearing a few yards away. Behind him, he could hear the other men of Detachment 2702 jockeying for position in the doorway, trying to get a clear view of him.
The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.
Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung it up and around, and opened fire.
Now some might complain that the trench broom lacked penetrating power, but he was positive he could see pieces of crap flying out of the Henschel's motor. The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. It banked until its wings were vertical, veered, banked some more until it was upside down, shed what little altitude it had to begin with, and made an upside-down pancake landing in the olive trees no more than a hundred yards distant. It did not immediately burst into flame: something of a letdown there.
There was perfect silence from the other men. The only sound was the beepity-beep of Corporal Benjamin, his question now answered, sending out his little message. Shaftoe was able to follow the Morse code for once-this message was going out plaintext. "WE ARE DISCOVERED STOP EXECUTING PLAN TORUS."
As theirfirst contribution to Plan Torus, the other men climbed onto the truck, which pulled out from its hidey-hole in the barn and idled in the trees nearby. When Benjamin was finished, he abandoned his radio and joined them.
As hisfirst task of Plan Torus, Shaftoe walked around the premises in a neat crisscross pattern echoing that of the searching reconnaissance planes. He was carrying an upside-down gasoline can with no lid on it.
He left the can about one-third full, standing upright in the middle of the barn. He pulled the pin from a grenade, dropped it into the gasoline, and ran out of the building. The truck was already pulling away when he caught up with it and dove into the waiting arms of his unit, who pulled him on board. He got himself situated in the back of the truck just in time to see the building go up in a satisfying fireball.
"Okay," Shaftoe said to the men. "We got a few hours to kill."
All the men in the truck-except for the SAS blokes working on the Vickers-looked at each other like did he really just say that?
"Uh, Sarge," one of them finally said, "could you explain that part about killing some time?"
"The airplane's not going to be here for a while. Orders."
"Was there a problem or-"
"Nope. Everything's going fine. Orders.
Beyond that the men didn't want to gripe, but a lot more looks were exchanged across the bed of the truck. Finally, Enoch Root spoke up, "You men are probably wondering why we couldn't kill time for a few hours first,before alerting the Germans to our presence, and rendezvous with the plane just in the nick of time."
"Yeah!" said a whole bunch of guys and blokes, vigorously nodding.
"That's a good question," said Enoch Root. He said it like he already knew the answer, which made everyone in the truck want to slug him.
The Germans had deployed some ground units to secure the area's road intersections. When Detachment 2702 arrived at the first crossroads, all of the Germans were freshly dead, and all they had to do was to slow down momentarily so that some Marine Raiders could run out of hiding and jump on board.
The Germans at the second intersection had no idea what was going on. This was obviously the result of some kind of internal Wehrmacht communications fuckup, clearly recognizable as such even across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Detachment 2702 were able to simply open fire from underneath the tarp and tear them to pieces, or at least drive them into hiding.
The next Germans they ran into weren't having any of it; they had formed a roadblock out of a truck and two cars, and were lined up on the other side of it, pointing weapons at them. All of their weapons looked to be small arms. But by this time the Vickers had finally been put together, calibrated, fine-tuned, inspected, and loaded. The tarp came off Private Mikulski, a surly, brooding two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Polish-British SAS man, commenced operations with the Vickers at about the same time that the Germans did with their rifles.
Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he'd been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain amount of his time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal into smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure.It was the size of a car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. Its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn't seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.
In Shaftoe's post-high-school experience he had found that guns had much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled.It actually had a fucking radiatoron it. It had infrastructure,just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for daysas long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. After Private Mikulski opened fire with the Vickers, some of the other Detachment 2702 men, eager to pitch in and do their bit, took potshots at those Germans with their rifles, but doing so made them feel so small and pathetic that they soon gave up and just took cover in the ditch and lit up cigarettes and watched the slow progress of the Vickers' bullet-stream across the roadblock. Mikulski hosed down all of the German vehicles for a while, yawing the Vickers back and forth like a man playing a fire extinguisher against the base of a fire. Then he picked out a few bits of the roadblock that he suspected people might be standing behind and concentrated on them for a while, boring tunnels through the wreckage of the vehicles until he could see what was on the other side, sawing through their frames and breaking them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside trees behind which he suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.
By this time it had become evident that some Germans had retreated behind a gentle swell in the earth just off to one side of the road and were taking potshots from there, so Mikulski swung the muzzle of the Vickers up into the air at a steep angle and shot the bullet-stream into the sky so that the bullets plunged down like mortar shells on the other side of the rise. It took him a while to get the angle just right, but then he patiently distributed bullets over the entire field, like a man watering his lawn. One of the SAS blokes actually did some calculations on his knee, figuring out how long Mikulski should keep doing this to make sure that bullets were distributed over the ground in question at the right density-say, one per square foot. When the territory had been properly sown with lead slugs, Mikulski turned back to the roadblock and made sure that the truck pulled across the pavement was in small enough pieces that it could be shoved out of the way by hand.
Then he ceased firing at last. Shaftoe felt like he should make an entry in a log book, the way ships' captains do when they pull a man-of-war into port. When they drove past the wreckage, they slowed down for a bit to gawk. The brittle grey iron of the German vehicles' engine blocks had shattered like glass and you could look into the engines all neatly cross-sectioned and see the gleaming pistons and crankshafts exposed to the sun, bleeding oil and coolant.
They passed through what was left of the roadblock and drove onwards into a sparsely populated inland area that made excellent strafing territory for the Luftwaffe. The first two fighters that came around were torn apart in midair by Mikulski and his Vickers. The next pair managed to destroy the truck, the big gun, and Private Mikulski in one pass. No one else was hurt; they were all in the ditch, watching as Mikulski sat placidly behind the controls of his weapon, playing chicken with two Messerschmidts and eventually losing.
By now it was getting dark. The detachment began to make its way cross-country on foot, carrying Mikulski's remains on a stretcher. They ran into a German patrol and fought it out with them; two of the SAS men were wounded, and one of these had to be carried the rest of the way. Finally they reached their rendezvous point, a wheat field where they laid down road flares to outline a landing strip for a U.S. Army DC-3, which executed a deft landing, took them all on board, and flew them to Malta without further incident.
And that was where they were introduced to Lieutenant Monkberg for the first time.
No sooner had they been debriefed than they were on another submarine, bound for parts unknown or at least unspecified. But when they turned in their warm-weather gear for ten-pound oiled-wool sweaters, they started to get an idea. A few claustrophobic days later, they had been transferred onto this freighter.
The vessel itself is such a pathetic heap that they have been amusing themselves by substituting the word "shit" for "ship" in various nautical expressions, e.g.: let's get this cabin shit-shape! Where in hell does the shit's master think he's taking us? And so on.
Now, in the shit's hold, an impassioned Bobby Shaftoe is doing his best to create a ransacked effect. He strews rifles and tommy guns around the deck. He opens boxes of .45 cartridges and flings them all over the place. He finds some skis, too-they'll be needing skis, right? He plants mines here and there, just to throw a scare into whatever German happens along to investigate this shitwreck. He opens crates of grenades. These do not look very ransacked, sitting there full, so he pulls out dozens of them, carries them abovedecks, and throws them overboard. He tosses out some skis also-maybe they will wash up on shore somewhere and contribute to the overall sense of chaos that is so important to Lieutenant Monkberg.
He is on his way across the upper deck, carrying an armload of skis, when something catches his eye out there in the fog. He flinches, of course. Many strafings have turned Bobby Shaftoe into a big flincher. He flinches so hard that he drops all of those skis on the deck and comes this close to throwing himself down among them. But he holds his ground long enough to focus in on this thing in the fog. It is directly in front of them, and somewhat higher than the bridge of the freighter, and (unlike plunging Zeros or Messerschmidts) it is not moving fast-just hanging there. Like a cloud in the sky. As if the fog had coagulated into a dense clump, like his mother's mashed potatoes. It gets brighter and brighter as he stands there watching it, and the edges get more and more sharply defined, and he starts to see other stuff around it.
The other stuff is green.
Hey, wait a minute! He is looking at a green mountainside with a big white snowfield in the middle of it.
"Heads up!" he screams, and throws himself down on the deck.
He is hoping to be surprised by the gradualness, the gentleness of their collision with the earth's crust. He has in mind the kind of deal where you run a little motorboat at a sandy beach, cut the motor and tilt it out of the water at the last minute, and glide up gently onto the cushioning sand.
This turns out to be a very poor analogy for what happens next. The freighter is actually going a lot faster than your typical putt-putt fishing boat. And instead of gliding up onto a sandy beach, they have a nearly head-on collision with a vertical granite wall. There is a really impressive noise, the prow of the vessel actually bends upwards, and suddenly, Bobby Shaftoe finds that he is sliding on his belly across the ice-glazed deck at a high speed.
He is terrified, for a moment, that he's going to slide right off the deck and go flying into the drink, but he manages to steer himself into an anchor chain, which proves an effective stopper. Down below, he can hear approximately ten thousand other small and large objects finding their own obstacles to slam into.
There follows a brief and almost peaceful interlude of near-total silence. Then a hue and cry rises up from the extremely sparse crew of the freighter: "ABANDON SHIT! ABANDON SHIT!"
The men of Detachment 2702 head for the lifeboats. Shaftoe knows that they can take care of themselves, so he heads for the bridge, looking for the few oddballs who always find a way to make things interesting:
Lieutenants Root and Monkberg, and Corporal Benjamin.
The first person he sees is the skipper, slumped in a chair, pouring himself a drink and looking like a guy who just bled to death. This poor son of a bitch is a Navy lifer who got detached from his regular unit solely for the purpose of doing what he just did. It clearly does not sit well with him.
"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 happenedto suffer a grievous self inflictedleg 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'thave 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 some how save morelives 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 certain location in the woods. And maybe Lieutenant Monkberg is going to lead us directly to the trap."
"Atta boy, Sarge!" Corporal Benjamin says.
"Lieutenant Monkberg," says Enoch Root, "as the closest thing we have to a ship's doctor, I am relieving you of your command on medical grounds."
"What medical grounds!?" Monkberg shouts, horrified.
"You are short on blood, and what blood you do have is tainted with morphine," says Lieutenant Enoch Root. "So the second-in-command will have to take over for you and make all decisions as to which direction we will take."
"But you're the only other officer!" Shaftoe says. "Except for the skipper, and hecan't be a skipper without a boat."
"Sergeant Shaftoe!" Root barks, doing such an effective impersonation of a Marine that Shaftoe and Benjamin both stiffen to attention.
"Sir! Yes sir!" Shaftoe returns.
"This is the first and last order I am going to give you, so listen carefully!" Root insists.
"Sir! Yes sir!"
"Sergeant Shaftoe, take me and the rest of this unit to Sweden!"
"Sir! Yes sir!" Shaftoe hollers, and marches out of the cabin, practically knocking Monkberg aside. The others soon follow, leaving the code books behind.
After about half an hour of screwing around with lifeboats, Detachment 2702 finds itself on the ground again, in Norway. The snowline is about fifty feet above sea level; it is fortunate that Bobby Shaftoe knows what to do with a pair of skis. The SAS blokes also know this particular drill, and they even know how to rig up a sort of sled arrangement that they can use to pull Lieutenant Monkberg. Within a few hours, they are deep in the woods, headed east, not having seen a single human being, German or Norwegian, since they ran aground. Snow begins to fall, filling in their tracks. Monkberg is behaving himself-not demanding to be left behind, not sending up flares. Shaftoe begins to think that making it out to Sweden might be one of Detachment 2702's easier missions. The only hard part, as usual, is understanding what the fuck is going on.
Chapter 31 DILIGENCE
Maps of Southeast Asia are up on the walls, and even covering the windows, lending a bunkerlike ambience to Avi's hotel room. Epiphyte Corp. has assembled for its first full-on shareholder's meeting in two months. Avi Halaby, Randy Waterhouse, Tom Howard, Eberhard F
Randy thinks for a minute that Avi may have fallen asleep in the unorthodox standing position. But "Look at that map," Avi says suddenly, in a quiet voice. He opens his eyes and swivels them in their sockets towards same, not wasting precious energy by turning his head. "Singapore, the southern tip of Taiwan, and the northernmost point of Australia form a triangle."
"Avi," says Eb solemnly, "any three points form a triangle." Generally they don't look to Eberhard to leaven the proceedings with humor, but a chuckle passes around the room, and Avi grins-not so much because it's funny as because it's evidence of good morale.
"What's in the middle of the triangle?"
Everyone looks again. The correct answer is a point in the middle of the Sulu Sea,but it's clear what Avi is getting at. "We are," Randy says.
"That's correct," Avi says. "Kinakuta is ideally situated to act as an electronic crossroads. The perfect place to put big routers."
"You're talking shareholderese," Randy warns.
Avi ignores him. "Really it makes a lot more sense this way."
"What way?" Eb asks sharply.
"I've become aware that there are other cable people here. There is a group from Singapore and a consortium from Australia and New Zealand. In other words: we used to be the sole carriers into the Crypt. As of later today, I suspect we will be one of three."
Tom Howard grins triumphantly: he works in the Crypt, he probably knew before anyone. Randy and John Cantrell exchange a look.
Eb sits up stiffly. "How long have you known about this?" he asks, Randy sees a look of annoyance flash across Beryl's face. She does not like being probed.
"Would the rest of you excuse Eb and me for a minute?" Randy says, getting to his feet.
Dr. Eberhard F
"Leave your laptop," Randy says, escorting him out into the hallway. "We're just going here."
"Why?"
"It's like this," Randy says, pulling the door closed but not letting it lock. "People like Avi and Beryl, who have been in business a lot, have this noticeable preference for two-person conversations-like the one you and I are having right now. Not only that, they rarely write things down."
"Explain."
"It's kind of an information theory thing. See, if worse comes to worst, and there is some kind of legal action-"
"Legal action? What are you talking about?"
Eb came from a small city near the border with Denmark. His father was a high school mathematics teacher, his mother an English teacher. His appearance would probably make him an outcast in his home town, but like many of the people who still live there, he believes that things should be done in a plain, open, and logical fashion.
"I don't mean to alarm you," Randy says, "I'm not implying that any such thing is happening, or about to. But America being the way it is right now, you'd be amazed how often business ventures lead to lawsuits. When that happens, any and all documents are disclosable. So people like Avi and Beryl never write anything down that they wouldn't want to see in open court. Furthermore, anyone can be asked, under oath, to testify about what happened. That's why two-person conversations, like this one, are best."
"One person's word against another. I understand this."
"I know you do."
"We should anyway have been discreetly told."
"The reason that Avi and Beryl didn't tell us about this until now was that they wanted to work out the problem face-to-face, in two-person conversations. In other words, they did it to protect us-not to hide anything from us. Now they are formally presenting us with the news."
Eberhard is no longer suspicious. Now he is irked, which is worse. Like a lot of techies, he can become obstreperous when he decides that others are not being logical. Randy holds up his hands, palms out, in surrender.
"I stipulate that this does not make sense," Randy says.
Eb glares into the distance, not mollified.
"Will you agree with me that the world is full of irrational people, and crazy situations?"
"Jaaaa-" Eb says guardedly.
"If you and I are going to hack and get paid for it, people have to hire us, right?"
Eb considers it carefully. "Yes."
"That means dealing with those people, at some level, unpleasant as it may be. And accepting a whole lot of other nonsense, like lawyers and PR people and marketroids. And if you or I tried to deal with them, we would go out of our minds. True?"
"Most likely, yes."
"It is good, then, that people like Avi and Beryl have come into existence, because they are our interface." An image from the Cold War comes into Randy's head. He reaches out with both hands and gropes in the air. "Like those glove boxes that they use to handle plutonium. See?"
Eberhard nods. An encouraging sign.
"But that doesn't mean that it's going to be like programming computers. They can only filter and soften the irrational nature of the world beyond, so Avi and Beryl may still do things that seem a little crazy."
Eb has been getting a more and more faraway look in his eyes. "It would be interesting to approach this as a problem in information theory," he announces. "How can data flow back and forth between nodes in an internal network"-Randy knows that by this Eb means people in a small corporation—"but not exist to a person outside?"
"What do you mean, not exist?"
"How could a court subpoena a document if, from their reference frame, it had never existed?"
"Are you talking about encrypting it?"
Eb looks slightly pained by Randy's simple-mindedness. "We are already doing that. But someone could still prove that a document, of a certain size, had been sent out at a certain time, to a certain mailbox."
"Traffic analysis."
"Yes. But what if one jams it? Why couldn't I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other."
"That would be expensive."
Eberhard waves his hand dismissively. "Bandwidth is cheap."
"That is more an article of faith than a statement of fact," Randy says, "but it might be true in the future."
"But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.
"Well," Randy says, "could we continue this discussion later?"
"Of course."
They go back into the room. Tom, who has spent the most time here, is saying: "The five-footers with yellowish-brown spots on an aqua background are harmless and make great pets. The six-footers with brownish-yellow spots on a turquoise background kill you with a single bite, in ten minutes, unless you commit suicide in the meantime to escape the intolerable pain."
This is all a way of letting Randy and Eb know that the others have not been discussing business while they were out of the room.
"Okay," Avi says, "the upshot is that the Crypt is going to be potentially much bigger than we thought at first, so this is good news. But there is one thing that we have to deal with." Avi has known Randy forever, and knows that Randy won't really be bothered by what is to come.
All eyes turn towards Randy, and Beryl picks up the thread. She has arrogated to herself the role of worrying about people's feelings, since the other people in the company are so manifestly unqualified, and she speaks regretfully. "The work Randy's been doing in the Philippines, which is very fine work, is no longer a critical part of this corporation's activities."
"I accept that," Randy says. "Hey, at least I got my first tan in ten years."
Everyone seems immediately relieved that Randy is not pissed off.
Tom, typically, gets right to brass tacks: "Can we pull out of our relationship with the Dentist? Just make a clean break?"
The rhythm of the conversation is abruptly lost. It's like a power failure in a discotheque.
"Unknown," Avi finally says. "We looked at the contracts. But they were written by the Dentist's lawyers."
"Aren't some of his partners lawyers?" Cantrell asks.
Avi shrugs impatiently, as if that's not the half of it. "His partners. His investors. His neighbors, friends, golfing buddies. His plumberis probably a lawyer."
"The point being that he is famously litigious," Randy says.
"The other potential problem," Beryl says, "is that, if we did find a way to extract ourselves from the deal with AVCLA, we would then lose the short-term cash flow that we were counting on from the Philippines network. The ramifications of that turn out to be uglier than we had expected."
"Damn!" Randy says, "I was afraid of that."
"What are the ramifications?" Tom says, hewing as ever to the bottom line.
"We would have to raise some more money to cover the shortfall," Avi says. "Diluting our stock."
"Diluting it how much?" John asks.
"Below fifty percent."
This magic figure touches off an epidemic of sighing, groaning and shifting around among the officers of Epiphyte Corp., who collectively hold over fifty percent of the company's stock. As they work through the ramifications in their heads, they begin to look significantly at Randy.
Finally Randy stands, and holds out his hands as if warding them off. "Okay, okay, okay," he says. "Where does this take us? The business plan states, over and over, that the Philippines network makes sense in and of itself-that it could be spun off into an independent business at any time and still make money. As far as we know, that's still true, right?"
Avi thinks this over before issuing the carefully engineered statement:
"It is as true as it ever was."
This elicits a titter, and a bit of sarcastic applause, from the others. Clever Avi! Where would we be without him?
"Okay," Randy says. "So if we stick with the Dentist-even though his project is now irrelevant to us-we hopefully make enough money that we don't need to sell any more stock. We can retain control over the company. On the other hand, if we break our relationship with AVCLA, the Dentist's partners start to hammer us with lawsuits-which they can do at virtually no cost, or risk. We get mired in court in L.A. We have to fly back there and testify and give depositions. We spend a ton of money on lawyers."
"And we might even lose," Avi says.
Everyone laughs.
"So we have to stay in," Randy concludes. "We have to work with the Dentist whether we want to or not."
No one says anything.
It's not that they disagree with Randy; on the contrary. It's just that Randy is the guy who's been doing the Philippines stuff, and who is going to end up handling this unfortunate situation. Randy's going to take all the force of this blow personally. It is better that he volunteer than that it be forced on him. He is volunteering now, loudly and publicly, putting on a performance. The other actors in the ensemble are Avi, Beryl, Tom, John, and Eb. The audience consists of Epiphyte Corp.'s minority shareholders, the Dentist, and various yet-to-be-empaneled juries. It is a performance that will never come to light unless someone files a lawsuit against them and brings them all to the witness box to recount it under oath.
John decides to trowel it on a little thicker. "AVCLA's financing the Philippines on spec, right?"
"Correct," Avi says authoritatively, playing directly to the hypothetical juries-of-the-future. "In the old days, cable-layers would sell capacity first to raise capital. AVCLA's building it with their own capital. When it's finished, they'll own it outright, and they'll sell the capacity to the highest bidder."
"It's not all AVCLA's money-they're not that rich," Beryl says. "They got a big wad from NOHGI."
"Which is?" Eb asks.
"Niigata Overseas Holding Group Inc.," three people say in unison.
Eb looks baffled.
"NOHGI laid the deep-sea cable from Taiwan to Luzon," Randy says.
"Anyway," John says, "my point is that since the Dentist is wiring the Philippines on spec, he is highly exposed. Anything that delays the completion of that system is going to cause him enormous problems. It behooves us to honor our obligations."
John is saying to the hypothetical jury in Dentist v. Epiphyte Corp.: we carefully observed the terms of our contract with AVCLA.
But this is not necessarily going to look so good to the hypothetical jury in the otherhypothetical minority shareholder lawsuit, Springboard Group v. Epiphyte Corp. So Avi hastens to add, "As I think we've established, through a careful discussion of the issues, honoring our obligations to the Dentist is part and parcel of our obligation to our own shareholders. These two goals dovetail."
Beryl rolls her eyes and heaves a deep sigh of relief.
"Let us therefore go forth and wire the Philippines," Randy says.
Avi addresses him in formal tones, as if his hand were resting, even now, on a Gideon Bible. "Randy, do you feel that the resources allotted to you are sufficient for you to meet our contractual obligations to the Dentist?"
"We need to have a meeting about that," Randy says.
"Can it wait until after tomorrow?" Avi says.
"Of course. Why shouldn't it?"
"I have to use the bathroom," Avi says.
This is a signal that Avi and Randy have used many times in the past. Avi gets up and goes into the bathroom. A moment later, Randy says, "Come to think of it . . ." and follows him in there.