They show him the organizational chart for RAE Special Detachment No. 2701, which contains the names of all of the twenty-four people in the world who are on to Ultra Mega. The top is cluttered with names such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then come some other names that seem oddly familiar to Waterhouse-perhaps the names of these very gents here in this room. Below them, one Chattan, a youngish RAF colonel who (Waterhouse is assured) accomplished some very fine things during the Battle of Britain.
In the next rank of the chart is the name Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. There are two other names: one is an RAF captain and the other is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. There is also a dotted line veering off to one side, leading to the name Dr. Alan Mathison Turing. Taken as a whole, this chart may be the most irregular and bizarre ad-hocracy ever grafted onto a military organization.
In the bottom row of the chart are two groups of half a dozen names, clustered beneath the names of the RAF captain and the Marine captain respectively. These are the squads that represent the executive wing of the organization: as one of the guys at the Broadway Building puts it, "the men at the coal-face," and as the one American Guy translates it for him, "this is where the rubber meets the road."
"Do you have any questions?" the Main Guy asks.
"Did Alan choose the number?"
"You mean Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. Did he choose the number 2701?"
This level of detail is clearly several ranks beneath the station of the men in the Broadway Buildings. They look startled and almost offended, as if Waterhouse has suddenly asked them to take dictation.
"Possibly," says the Main Guy. "Why do you ask?"
"Because," Waterhouse says, "the number 2701 is the product of two primes, and those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation, are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other."
All heads swivel toward the don, who looks put out. "We'd best change that," he says, "it is the sort of thing that Dr. von Hacklheber would notice." He stands up, withdraws a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket, and amends the organizational chart so that it reads 2702 instead of 2701. As he is doing this, Waterhouse looks at the other men in the room and thinks that they look satisfied. Clearly, this is just the sort of parlor trick they have hired Waterhouse to perform.
Chapter 13 CORREGIDOR
There is no fixed boundary between the water of Manila Bay and the humid air above it, only a featureless blue-grey shroud hanging a couple of miles away. Glory IVmaneuvers cautiously through an immense strewing of anchored cargo ships for about half an hour, then picks up speed and heads out into the center of the bay. The air thins a bit, allowing Randy a good view of Bata'an off to starboard: black mountains mostly veiled in haze and speckled by the mushroom-cap-shaped clouds of ascending thermals. For the most part, it has no beaches, just red cliffs plummeting the last few yards into the sea. But as they work their way out to the end of the peninsula, the land tails off more gently and supports a few pale green fields. At the very tip of Bata'an are a couple of stabbing limestone crags that Randy recognizes from Avi's video. But by this point he has eyes mostly for Corregidor itself, which lies a few miles off the end of the peninsula.
America Shaftoe, or Amy as she likes to be called, spends most of the voyage bustling around on the deck, engaging the Filipino and American divers in bursts of serious conversation, sometimes sitting cross-legged on the deck plates to go over papers or charts. She has donned a frayed straw cowboy hat to protect her head from solar radiation. Randy's in no hurry to expose himself. He ambles around the air-conditioned cabin, sipping his coffee and looking at the photographs on the walls.
He is naively expecting to see pictures of divers landing submarine cables on beaches. Semper Marine Services does a fair amount of cable work-and does it well, he checked their references before hiring them-but they apparently do not consider that kind of work interesting enough to photograph. Most of these pictures are of undersea salvage operations: divers, with enormous grins on their leathery faces, triumphantly holding up barnacle-encrusted vases, like hockey players brandishing the Stanley Cup.
From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows that it is really a sperm-shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.
Amy storms past and throws the cabin door open. "Come to the bridge," she says, "you should see this."
Randy follow's her. "Who's the guy in most of those pictures?" he asks.
"Scary, crew cut?"
"Yeah."
"That's my father," she says. "Doug."
"Would that be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe?" Randy asks. He's seen the name on some of the documents that he's exchanged with Semper Marine.
"The same."
"The ex-SEAL?"
"Yeah. But he doesn't like to be referred to that way. It is sucha cliche."
"Why does he seem familiar to me?"
Amy sighs. "He had his fifteen minutes of fame back in 1975."
''I'm having trouble remembering."
"You know Comstock?"
"Attorney General Paul Comstock? Hates crypto?"
"I'm talking about his father. Earl Comstock."
"Cold War policy guy-the brains behind the Vietnam War-right?"
"I've never heard him described that way, but yeah, we're talking about the same guy. You might remember that back in 1975, Earl Comstock fell, or was pushed, off a ski lift in Colorado, and broke his arms."
"Oh, yeah. It's sort of coming back to me.
"My pop-" Amy does a little head-fake towards one of the photographs "-happened to be seated right next to him at the time."
"By accident, or-"
"Total chance. Not planned."
"That's one way to look at it," Randy says, "but on the other hand, if Earl Comstock went skiing frequently, the probability was actually rather high that sooner or laterhe'd find himself sitting, fifty feet off the ground, next to a Vietnam combat veteran."
"Whatever. All I'm saying is-I don't want to talk about it, actually."
"Am I going to get to meet this character?" Randy asks, looking at the photograph.
Amy bites her lip and squints at the horizon. "Ninety percent of the time his presence is a sign that something really weird is going on." She opens the hatch to the bridge and holds it for him, pointing out the high step.
"The other ten percent?"
"He's bored, or on the outs with his girlfriend."
Glory'spilot is concentrating intensely and ignores them, which Randy takes to be a sign of professionalism. The bridge has many counters fashioned from doors or thick plywood, and all of the available space is covered with electronic gear: a fax, a smaller machine that spews out weather bulletins, three computers, a satellite phone, a few GSM phones socketed into their chargers, depth-sounding gear. Amy leads him over to a machine with a big screen that is showing what looks like a black-and-white photo of rugged terrain. "Sidescan sonar," she explains, "one of our best tools for this kind of work. Shows us what's on the bottom." She checks one of the computer screens for their current coordinates and then runs a quick calculation in her head. "Ernesto, change course five degrees to starboard please."
"Yes ma'am," Ernesto says, and makes it happen.
"What are you looking for?"
"This is a freebie-like the cigarettes at the hotel," Amy explains. "Just an extra added bonus for doing business with us. Sometimes we like to play tour guide. See? Check that out." She uses her pinkie to point out something that is just becoming visible on the screen. Randy hunches over and peers at it. It is clearly a manmade shape: a jumble of straight lines and right angles.
"Looks like a heap of debris," he says.
"It is now," Amy says, "but it used to be a good chunk of the Filipino treasury."
"What?"
"During the war," Amy says, "after Pearl Harbor, but before the Japanese took Manila, the government emptied out the treasury. They put all the gold and silver into crates and shipped it to Corregidor for safekeeping-supposedly."
"What do you mean, supposedly?"
She shrugs. "This is the Philippines," she says. "I have the feeling a lot of it ended up elsewhere. But a lot of the silver ended up there." She straightens up and nods out the window at Corregidor. "At the time they thought Corregidor was impregnable."
"When was this, roughly?"
"December '41 or January '42. Anyway, it became obvious that Corregidor was going to fall. A submarine came and took away the gold at the beginning of February. Then another sub came and took off guys they couldn't allow to be captured, like codebreakers. But they didn't have enough subs to carry away all the silver. MacArthur left in March. They started taking the silver out, in crates, in the middle of the night, and dropping it into the water."
"You're shitting me!"
"They could always come back later and try to recover it," Amy says. "Better to lose it all than let the Japanese take it, right?"
"I guess so."
"The Japanese recovered a lot of that silver-they captured a bunch of American divers on Bata'an and Corregidor, and made them go down, right down below where we are at this moment, and recover it. But those same divers managed to hide a lot of silver from their guards and get it to Filipinos, who smuggled it into Manila, where it became so common that it totally debased the Japanese occupation currency.
"So what are we seeing right now?"
"The remains of old crates that burst open when they hit the seafloor," Amy says.
"Was there any of that silver left when the war ended?"
"Oh, sure," Amy says breezily. "Most of it was dumped here, and those divers got it, but some was dumped in other areas. My dad recovered some of it as late as the 1970s."
"Wow. That doesn't make any sense!"
"Why not?"
"I can't believe that piles of silver just sat on the bottom of the ocean for thirty years, free for the taking."
"You don't know the Philippines very well," Amy says.
"I know that it's a poor country. Why didn't someone come out and get that silver?"
"Most of the treasure hunters in this part of the world are looking for much bigger game," Amy says, "or easier."
Randy's nonplussed. "A pile of silver on the bottom of the bay seems big and easy to me.
"It's not. Silver's not worth that much. A Sung Dynasty vase, cleaned up, can go for more than its weight in gold. Gold. And it's easier to find the vase-you just scan the seafloor, looking for something shaped like a junk. A sunken junk makes a distinctive image on sonar. Whereas an old crate, all busted up and covered with coral and barnacles, tends to look like a rock."
As they draw closer to Corregidor, Randy can see that the tail of the island is lumpy, with big stacks of rock protruding from it here and there. The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green and then a sere reddish-brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer. Randy's gaze is fixed on one of those rocky crags, which is surmounted by a new steel tower. Atop the tower is a microwave horn aimed east, toward Epiphyte's building in Intramuros.
"See those caves along the waterline?" Amy says. She seems to regret having mentioned sunken treasure in the first place, and now wants to get off the subject.
Randy tears himself away from the microwave antenna, of which he is part owner, and looks in the direction Amy's pointing. The limestock flank of the island, which drops vertically the last few meters into the water, is riddled with holes.
"Yeah."
"Built by Americans to house beach defense guns. Enlarged by the Japanese as launch sites for suicide boats."
"Wow."
Randy notices a deep gargling noise, and looks over to see that a boat has fallen in alongside them. It is a canoe-shaped affair maybe forty feet long, with long outriggers on either side. A couple of ragged flags fly from a short mast, and bright laundry flaps gaily from various lines strung here and there. A big, naked diesel engine sits in the middle of the hull flailing the atmosphere with black smoke. Forward of that, several Filipinos, including women and children, are gathered in the shade of a bright blue tarpaulin, eating. Aft, a couple of men are fiddling with diving equipment. One of them is holding something up to his mouth: a microphone. A voice blares from Glory'sradio, speaking Tagalog. Ernesto stifles a laugh, picks up the mike, and answers briefly. Randy doesn't know what they are saying, but he suspects it is something like "Let's horse around later, our client is on the bridge right now."
"Business associates," Amy explains dryly. Her body language says that she wants to get away from Randy and back to work.
"Thanks for the tour," Randy says. "One question."
Amy raises her eyebrows, trying to look patient.
"How much of Semper Marine's revenue derives from treasure hunting?"
"This month? This year? The last ten years? Over the lifetime of the company?" Amy says.
"Whatever."
"That kind of income is sporadic," Amy says. "Glorywas paid for, and then some, by pottery that we recovered from a junk. But some years we get all of our revenue from jobs like this one."
"In other words, boring jobs that suck?" Randy says. He just blurts it out. Normally he controls his tongue a little better. But shaving off his beard has blurred his ego boundaries, or something.
He's expecting her to laugh or at least wink a him, but she takes it very seriously. She has a pretty good poker face. "Think of it as making license plates," she says.
"So you guys are basically a bunch of treasure hunters," Randy says. "You just make license plates to stabilize your cash flow."
"Call us treasure hunters if you like," Amy says. "Why are you in business, Randy?" She turns around and stalks out of the place.
Randy's still watching her go when he hears Ernesto cursing under his breath, not so much angry as astonished. Gloryis swinging around the tip of Corregidor's tail now and the entire southern side of the island is becoming visible for the first time. The last mile or so of the tail curves around to form a semicircular bay. Anchored in the center of this bay is a white ship that Randy identifies, at first, as a small ocean liner with rakish and wicked lines. Then he sees the name painted on its stern: RUI FALEIRO-SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA
Randy goes and stands next to Ernesto and they stare at the white ship for a while. Randy has heard about it, and Ernesto, like everyone else in the Philippines, knows about it. But seeing it is another thing entirely. A helicopter sits on its afterdeck like a toy. A dagger-shaped muscle boat hangs from a davit, ready for use as a dinghy. A brown-skinned man in a gleaming white uniform can be seen polishing a brass rail.
"Rui Faleiro was Magellan's cosmographer," Randy says.
"Cosmographer?"
"The brains of the operation," Randy says, tapping his head.
"He came here with Magellan?" Ernesto asks.
In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.
"When Magellan set out on his ship, Faleiro stayed behind in Seville," Randy says. "He went crazy."
"You know a lot about Magallanes, eh?" Ernesto says. "No," Randy says, "I know a lot about the Dentist."
"Don't talk to the Dentist. Ever. Not about anything. Not even tech stuff. Any technical question he asks you is just a stalking horse for some business tactic that is as far beyond your comprehension as G
Avi told Randy this spontaneously one evening, as they were tucking into dinner at a restaurant in downtown Makati. Avi refuses to discuss anything important within a mile of the Manila Hotel because he thinks every room, and every table, is under surveillance.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Randy said.
"Hey," Avi said, "I'm just trying to stake out my turf here-justify my existence in this project. I'll handle the business stuff."
"You're not being a little paranoid?"
"Listen. The Dentist has at least a billion dollars of his own, and another ten billion under management-half the fucking orthodontists in Southern California retired at age forty because he dectupled their IRAs in the space of two or three years. You don't achieve those kinds of results by being a nice guy."
"Maybe he just got lucky."
"He did get lucky. But that doesn't mean he's a nice guy. My point is that he put that money into investments that were extremely risky. He played Russian roulette with his investors' life savings, keeping them in the dark. I mean, this guy would invest in a Mindanao kidnapping ring if it gave a good rate of return."
"Does he understand that he was lucky, I wonder?"
"That's my question. I'm guessing no. I think he considers himself to be an instrument of Divine Providence, like Douglas MacArthur."
Rui Faleirois the pride of Seattle's superyacht industry, which has been burgeoning, ever so discreetly, of late. Randy gleaned a few facts about it from a marketing brochure that was published before the Dentist actually bought the ship. So he knows that the helicopter and the speedboat came included in the purchase price, which has never been divulged. The vessel contains, among other things, ten tons of marble. The master bedroom suite contains full his and hers bathrooms lined with black marble and pink marble respectively, so that the Dentist and the Diva don't have to fight over sink space when they are primping for a big event in the yacht's grand ballroom.
"The Dentist?" Ernesto says.
"Kepler. Doctor Kepler," Randy says. "In the States, some people call him the Dentist." People in the high-tech industry.
Ernesto nods knowingly. "A man like that could have had any woman in the world," he says. "But he picked a Filipina."
"Yes," Randy says cautiously.
"In the States, do people know the story of Victoria Vigo?"
"I must tell you that she is not as famous in the States as she is here."
"Of course."
"But some of her songs were very popular. Many people know that she came from great poverty."
"Do people in the States know about Smoky Mountain? The garbage dump in Tondo, where children hunt for food?"
"Some of them do. It will be very famous when the movie about Victoria Vigo's life shows on television."
Ernesto nods, seemingly satisfied. Everyone here knows that a movie about the Diva's life is being made, starring herself. They generally don't know that it's a vanity project, financed by the Dentist, and that it will be aired only on cable television in the middle of the night.
But they probably know that it will leave out all the good parts.
"As far as the Dentist is concerned," Avi said, "our advantage is that, when it comes to the Philippines, he will be predictable. Tame. Even docile." He smiles cryptically.
"How so?"
"Victoria Vigo whored her way up out of Smoky Mountain, right?"
"Well, there seems to be a lot of nudging and winking to that effect, but I've never heard anyone come out and sayit before," Randy said, glancing around nervously.
"Believe me, it's the only way she could have gotten out of there. Pimping arrangements were handled by the Bolobolos. This is a group from Northern Luzon that was brought into power along with Marcos. They run that part of town-police, organized crime, local politics, you name it. Consequently, they own her-they have photographs, videos from the days when she was an underage prostitute and porn film starlet."
Randy shook his head in disgust and amazement. "How the hell do you get this information?"
"Never mind. Believe me, in some circles it's as well known as the value of pi."
"Not my circles."
"Anyway, the point is that her interests are aligned with the Bolobolos and always will be. And the Dentist is always going to obediently do whatever his wife tells him to."
"Can you really assume that?" Randy said. "He's a tough guy. He probably has a lot more money and power than the Bolobolos. He can do whatever he wants."
"But he won't," Avi says, smiling that little smile again. "He'll do what his wife tells him to.
"How do you know that?"
"Look," Avi said, "Kepler is a major control freak-just like most powerful, rich men. Right?"
"Right."
"If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does that translate into?"
"I hope I'll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman.
"Wrong!" Avi said. "Sex is more complicated than that, Randy. Sex is a place where people's repressed desires come out. People get most turned on when their innermost secrets are revealed-"
"Shit! Kepler's a masochist?"
"He is such a fucking masochist that he was famous for it. At least in the Southeast Asian sex industry. Pimps and Madams in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shenzhen, Manila, they all had files on him-they knew exactly what he wanted. And that's how he met Victoria Vigo. He was in Manila, see, working on the FiliTel deal. Spent a lot of time here, staying in a hotel that's owned, and bugged, by the Bolobolos. They studied his mating habits like entomologists watching the reproductive habits of ants. They groomed Victoria Vigo-their ace, their bombshell, their sexual Terminator-to give Kepler exactly what Kepler wanted. Then they sent her into his life like a guided fucking missile and pow! true love."
"You'd think he would have been suspicious, or something. I'm surprised he'd get that involved with a whore."
"He didn't know she was a whore! That's the beauty of the plan! The Bolobolos set her up with a fake identity as a concierge at Kepler's hotel! A demure Catholic school girl! It starts with her getting him tickets to a play, and inside of a year. he's chained to his bed on that fucking mega-yacht of his with strap marks on his ass, and she's standing over him with a wedding ring on her finger the size of a headlamp, the hundred and thirty-eighth richest woman in the world."
"Hundred and twenty-fifth," Randy corrected him, "FiliTel stock has been on a bull run lately."
Randy spends the next days trying not to run into the Dentist. He stays at a small private inn up on the top of the island, eating continental breakfast every morning with an assortment of American and Nipponese war veterans who have come here with their wives to (Randy supposes) deal with emotional issues a million times more profound than anything Randy's ever had to contend with. The Rui Faleirois nothing if not conspicuous, and Randy can get a pretty good idea of whether the Dentist is aboard it by watching the movements of the helicopter and the speedboat.
When he thinks it's safe, he goes down to the beach below the microwave antenna and watches Amy's divers work on the cable installation. Some of them are working out in the surf zone, bolting sections of cast-iron pipe around the cable. Some are working a couple of miles offshore coordinating with a barge that is injecting the cable directly into the muddy seafloor with a giant, cleaver-like appendage.
The shore end of the cable runs into a new reinforced-concrete building set back about a hundred meters from the high-tide level. It is basically just a big room filled with batteries, generators, air-conditioning units, and racks of electronic equipment. The software running on that equipment is Randy's responsibility, and so he spends most of his time in that building, staring into a computer screen and typing. From there, transmission lines run up the hill to the microwave tower.
The other end is being extended out towards a buoy that is bobbing in the South China Sea a few kilometers away. Attached to that buoy is the end of the North Luzon Coastal Festoon, a cable, owned by FiliTel, that runs up the coast of the island. If you follow it far enough you reach a building at the northern tip of the island, where a big cable from Taiwan comes in. Taiwan, in turn, is heavily webbed into the world submarine cable network; it is easy and cheap to get data into or out of Taiwan.
There is only one gap left in the private chain of transmission that Epiphyte and FiliTel are trying to establish from Taiwan to downtown Manila, and that gap gets narrower by the day, as the cable barge grinds its way towards the buoy.
When it finally gets there, Rui Faleiroweighs anchor and glides out to meet it. The helicopter and the speedboat, and a flotilla of hired boats, go into action ferrying dignitaries and media crews out from Manila. Avi shows up carrying two fresh tuxedos from a tailor shop in Shanghai ("All those famous Hong Kong tailors were refugees from Shanghai"). He and Randy tear off the tissue paper, put them on, and then ride in an un-air conditioned jeepney down the hill to the dock, where Gloryawaits them.
Two hours later, Randy gets to lay eyes on the Dentist and the Diva for the first time ever-in the grand ballroom of the Rui Faleiro.To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude.
The one thing that is special about this party is that two tar-covered cables, each about the thickness of a baseball bat, are running up onto the quarterdeck. If you go to the rail and look down you can see them disappear into the brine. The cable ends meet on a tabletop in the middle of the deck, where a technician, flown in from Hong Kong and duded up in a tuxedo, sits with a box of tools, working on the splice. He is also working on a big hangover, but that is fine with Randy since he knows that it's all fake-the cables are just scraps, their loose ends trailing in the water alongside the yacht. The real splice was performed yesterday and is already lying on the bottom of the sea with bits running through it.
There is another man on the quarterdeck, mostly staring at Bata'an and Corregidor but also keeping an eye on Randy. The moment Randy notices him, this man nods as if checking something off a list in his head, stands up, walks over, and joins him. He is wearing a very ornate uniform, the U.S. Navy equivalent of black tie. He is mostly bald, and what hair he does have is battleship grey, and shorn to a length of perhaps five millimeters. As he walks toward Randy, several Filipinos watch him with obvious curiosity.
"Randy," he says. Medals clink together as he grips Randy's right hand and shakes it. He looks to be around fifty, but he has the skin of an eighty-year-old Bedouin. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest, and many of them are red and yellow, which are colors that Randy vaguely associates with Vietnam. Above his pocket is a little plastic nameplate reading, SHAFTOE. "Don't be deceived, Randy," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, "I'm not on active duty. Retired eons ago. But I'm still entitled to wear this uniform. And it's a hell of a lot easier than going out and trying to find a tuxedo that fits me."
"Pleased to meet you."
"Pleasure's mine. Where'd you get yours, by the way?"
"My tuxedo?"
"Yeah."
"My partner had it made."
"Your business partner, or your sexual partner?"
"My business partner. At the moment, I am without a sexual partner." Doug Shaftoe nods impassively. "It is telling that you have not obtained one in Manila. As our host did, for example."
Randy looks into the ballroom at Victoria Vigo, who, if she were any more radiant, would cause paint to peel from the walls and windowpanes to sag like caramel.
"I guess I'm just shy, or something," Randy says.
"Are you too shy to listen to a business proposition?"
"Not at all."
"My daughter asserts that you and our host might lay some more cables around here in coming years."
"In business, people rarely plan to do a thing only once," Randy says. "It messes up the spreadsheets."
"You are aware, by now, that the water in this area is shallow."
"Yeah."
"You know that cables cannot be laid in shallow water without extremely detailed, high-resolution sidescan sonar surveys."
"Yes."
"I would like to perform those surveys for you, Randy."
"I see."
"No, I don't think you do see. But I want you to see, and so I'm going to explain it."
"Okay," Randy says. "Should I bring my partner out?"
"The concept I am about to convey to you is very simple and does not require two first-rate minds in order to process it," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Okay. What is the concept?"
"The detailed survey will be just chock-full of new information about what is on the floor of the ocean in this part of the world. Some of that information might be valuable. More valuable than you imagine."
"Ah," Randy says. "You mean that it might be the kind of thing that your company knows how to capitalize on."
"That's right," says Doug Shaftoe. "Now, if you hire one of my competitors to perform your survey, and they stumble on this kind of information, they will not tell you about it. They will exploit it themselves. You will not know that they have found anything and you will not profit from it. But if you hire Semper Marine Services, I will tell you about whatever I find, and I will cut you and your company in on a share of any proceeds."
"Hmmmm," Randy says. He is trying to figure out how to do a poker face, but he knows that Shaftoe sees right through him.
"On one condition," Doug Shaftoe says.
"I suspected there might be a condition."
"Every hook that's worth a damn has a barb. This is the barb."
"What is it?" Randy asks.
"We keep it a secret from that son of a bitch," Doug Shaftoe says, jerking his thumb at Hubert Kepler. "Because if the Dentist finds out, then he and the Bolobolos will just split the entire thing up between them and we'll see nothing. There's even a chance we would end up dead."
"Well, the being dead part is something that we will certainly have to think about," Randy says, "but I will convey your proposal to my partner."
Chapter 14 TUBE
Waterhouse and a few dozen strangers are standing and sitting in an extraordinarily long, narrow room that rocks from side to side. The room is lined with windows but no light comes into them, only sound: a great deal of rumbling, rattling, and screeching. Everyone is pensive and silent, as if they were sitting in church waiting for the service to kick off.
Waterhouse is standing up gripping a ceiling-mounted protuberance that keeps him from being rocked right onto his can. For the last couple of minutes he has been staring at a nearby poster providing instructions on how to put on a gas mask. Waterhouse, like everyone else, is carrying one such device with him in a small dun canvas shoulder bag. Waterhouse's looks different from everyone else's because it is American and military. It has drawn a stare or two from the others.
On the poster is a lovely and stylish woman with white skin, and auburn hair which appears to have been chemically melted and reset into its current shape at a quality salon. She stands upright, her spine like a flagpole, chin in the air, elbows bent, hands ritualistically posed: fingers splayed, thumbs sticking straight up in the air just in front of her face. A sinister lump dangles between her hands, held in a cat's-cradle of khaki strapping. Her upthrust thumbs are the linchpins of this tidy web.
Waterhouse has been in London for a couple of days now and so he knows the next part of the story. He would know this pose anywhere. This woman is poised for the chin thrust. If gas ever falls on the capital, the gas rattles will sound and the tops of the massive mailboxes, which have all been treated with special paint, will turn black. Twenty million thumbs will point into the greenish, poison sky, ten million gas masks will dangle from them, ten million chins will thrust. He can just imagine the crisp luscious sound of this woman's soft white skin forcing itself into the confining black rubber.
Once the chin-thrust is complete, all is well. You have to get the straps neatly arranged atop your auburn permanent and get indoors, but the worst danger is past. The British gas masks have a squat round fitting on the front to allow exhalation, which looks exactly like the snout of a pig, and no woman would be caught dead in such a thing if the models in the gas mask posters were not such paragons of high-caste beauty.
Something catches his eye out in the darkness beyond the window. The train has reached one of those parts of the Underground where dim gun-barrel-colored light sifts down, betraying the stygian secrets of the Tube. Everyone in the car blinks, glances, and draws breath. The World has rematerialized around them for a moment. Fragments of wall, encrusted trusses, bundles of cable hang in space out there, revolving slowly, like astronomical bodies, as the train works its way past.
The cables catch Waterhouse's eye: neatly bracketed to the stone walls in parallel courses. They are like the creepers of some plutonic ivy that spreads through the darkness of the Tube when the maintenance men aren't paying attention, seeking a place to break out and up into the light.
When you walk along the street, up there in the Overground, you see the first tendrils making their way up the ancient walls of the buildings. Neoprene-jacketed vines that grow in straight lines up sheer stone and masonry and inject themselves through holes in windowframes, homing in particularly on offices. Sometimes they are sheathed in metal tubes. Sometimes the owners have painted them over. But all of them share a common root system that flourishes in the unused channels and crevices of the Underground, converging on giant switching stations in deep bomb-proof vaults.
The train invades a cathedral of dingy yellow light, and groans to a stop, hogging the aisle. Lurid icons of national paranoia glow in the niches and grottoes. An angelic chin-thrusting woman anchors one end of the moral continuum. At the opposite we have a succubus in a tight skirt, sprawled on a davenport in the midst of a party. smirking through her false eyelashes as she eavesdrops on the naive young servicemen gabbing away behind her.
Signs on the wall identify this as Euston in a tasteful sans-serif that screams official credibility. Waterhouse and most of the other people get off the train. After fifteen minutes or so of ricocheting around the station's precincts, asking directions and puzzling out timetables, Waterhouse finds himself sitting aboard an intercity train bound for Birmingham. Along the way, it is promised, it will stop at a place called Bletchley.
Part of the reason for the confusion is that there is another train about to leave from an adjacent siding, which goes straight to Bletchley, its final destination, with no stops in between. Everyone on that train, it seems, is a female in a quasimilitary uniform.
The RAF men with the Sten guns, standing watch by each door of that train, checking papers and passes, will not let him aboard. Waterhouse looks through the yellowing influence of the windows at the Bletchley girls in the train, facing each other in klatsches of four and five, getting their knitting out of their bags, turning balls of Scottish wool into balaclavas and mittens for convoy crews in the North Atlantic, writing letters to their brothers in the service and their mums and dads at home. The RAF gunmen remain by the doors until all of them are closed and the train has begun to move out of the station. As it builds speed, the rows and rows of girls, knitting and writing and chatting, blur together into something that probably looks a good deal like what sailors and soldiers the world over are commonly seeing in their dreams. Waterhouse will never be one of those soldiers, out on the front line, out in contact with the enemy. He has tasted the apple of forbidden knowledge. He is forbidden to go anywhere in the world where he might be captured by the enemy.
The train climbs up out of the night and into a red-brick arroyo, headed northwards out of the city. It is about three in the afternoon; that special BP train must have been carrying swing shift gals.
Waterhouse has the feeling he will not be working anything like a regular shift. His duffel bag-which was packed for him-is pregnant with sartorial possibilities: thick oiled-wool sweaters, tropical-weight Navy and Army uniforms, black ski mask, condoms.
The train slowly pulls free of the city and passes into a territory patched with small residential towns. Waterhouse feels heavy in his seat, and suspects a slight uphill tendency. They pass through a cleft that has been made across a low range of hills, like a kerf in the top of a log, and enter into a lovely territory of subtly swelling emerald green fields strewn randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep.
Of course, their distribution is probably not random at all-it probably reflects local variations in soil chemistry producing grass that the sheep find more or less desirable. From aerial reconnaissance, the Germans could draw up a map of British soil chemistry based upon analysis of sheep distribution.
The fields are enclosed by old hedges, stone fences, or, especially in the uplands, long swaths of forest. After an hour or so, the forest comes right up along the left side of the train, covering a bank that rises up gently from the railway siding. The train's brakes come on gassily, and the train grumbles to a stop in a whistle-stop station. But the line has forked and ramified quite a bit, more than is warranted by the size of the station. Waterhouse stands, plants his feet squarely, squats down in a sumo wrestler's stance, and engages his duffel bag. Duffel appears to be winning as it seemingly pushes Waterhouse out the door of the train and onto the platform.
There is a stronger than usual smell of coal, and a good deal of noise coming from not far away. Waterhouse looks up the line and discovers a heavy industrial works unfurled across the many sidings. He stands and stares for a couple of minutes, as his train pulls away, headed for points north, and sees that they are in the business of repairing steam locomotives here at Bletchley Depot. Waterhouse likes trains.
But that is not why he got a free suit of clothes and a ticket to Bletchley, and so once again Waterhouse engages Duffel and gets it up the stairs to the enclosed bridge that flies over all of the parallel lines. Looking toward the station, he sees more Bletchley girls, WAAFs and WRENs, coming towards him; the day shift, finished with their work, which consists of the processing of ostensibly random letters and digits on a heavy-industrial scale. Not wanting to appear ridiculous in their sight, he finally gets Duffel maneuvered onto his back, gets his arms through the shoulder straps, and allows its weight to throw him forward across the bridge.
The WAAFs and WRENs are only moderately interested in the sight of a newly arriving American officer. Or perhaps they are only being demure. In any case, Waterhouse knows he is one of the few, but not the first. Duffel shoves him through the one-room station like a fat cop chivvying a hammerlocked drunk across the lobby of a two-star hotel. Waterhouse is ejected into a strip of open territory running along the north-south road. Directly across from him the woods rise up. Any notion that they might be woods of the inviting sort is quickly dissolved by a dense spray of gelid light glinting from the border of the wood as the low sun betrays that the place is saturated with sharpened metal. There is an orifice in the woods, spewing WAAFs and WRENs like the narrow outlet of a giant yellowjacket nest.
Waterhouse must either move forward or be pulled onto his back by Duffel and left squirming helplessly in the parking lot like a flipped beetle, so he staggers forward, across the street and onto the wide footpath into the woods. The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War.
Waterhouse has not even been given the full tour of BP yet, but he knows the gist of it. He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.
He makes slow and apologetic progress against the tide of the departing day shift. At one point he simply gives up, steps aside, body-slams Duffel into the ivy, lights up a cigarette, and waits for a burst of a hundred or so girls to go by him. Something pokes at his ankle: a wild raspberry cane, furious with thorns. It supports an uncannily small and tidy spider-web whose geodesic strands gleam in a beam of low afternoon light. The spider in the center is an imperturbable British sort, perfectly unruffled by Waterhouse's clumsy Yank antics.
Waterhouse reaches out and catches a yellow-brown elm leaf that happens to fall through the air before him. He hunkers down, plants his cigarette in his mouth, and, using both hands for steadiness, draws the sawtooth rim of the elm leaf across one of the web's radial strands, which, he knows, will not have any sticky stuff on it. Like a fiddle bow on a string, the leaf sets up a fairly regular vibration in the web. The spider spins to face it, rotating instantly, like a character in a badly spliced movie. Waterhouse is so startled by the speed of the move that he starts back just a bit, then he draws the leaf across the web again. The spider tenses, feeling the vibrations.
Eventually it returns to its original position and carries on as before, ignoring Waterhouse completely.
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine. Waterhouse has tried many different tricks, but he has never been able to spoof a spider. Not a good omen!
The rush hour seems to have ended during Waterhouse's science experiment. He engages Duffel once more. The struggle takes them another hundred yards down the path, which finally empties out into a road just at the point where it is barred by an iron gate slung between stupid obelisks of red brick. The guards are, again, RAF men with Sten guns, and right now they are examining the papers of a man in a canvas greatcoat and goggles, who has just ridden up on an Army green motorcycle with panniers slung over the rear wheel. The panniers are not especially full, but they have been carefully secured; they contain the ammunition that the girls feed into the chattering teeth of their ravenous weapons.
The motorcyclist is waved through, and makes an immediate left turn down a narrow lane. Attention falls upon Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who after a suitable exchange of salutes, presents his credentials.
He has to choose among his several sets, which he doesn't manage to hide from the guards. But the guards do not seem alarmed or even curious about this, which sets them distinctly apart from most whom Waterhouse has dealt with. Naturally, these men are not on the Ultra Mega list, and so it would be a grave breach of security to tell them that he was here on Ultra Mega business. They appear to have greeted many other men who can't state their real business, however, and don't bat an eyelash when Lawrence pretends to be one of the naval intelligence liaisons in Hut 4 or Hut 8.