Hut 8 is where they decrypt naval Enigma transmissions. Hut 4 accepts the decrypts from Hut 8 and analyzes them. If Waterhouse pretends to be a Hut 4 man the disguise will not last for long, because those fellows have to actually know something about the Navy. He perfectly fits the profile of a Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math.
One of the RAF men peruses his papers, then steps into a small guardhouse and stirs the crank on a telephone. Waterhouse stands there awkwardly, marveling at the weapons slung from the shoulders of the RAP men. They are, as far as he can tell, nothing more than steel pipes with a trigger mounted toward one end. A small window cut through the pipe provides a view of a coil spring nested inside. A few handles and fittings bolted on from place to place do not make the Sten gun look any less like an ill-conceived high school metal shop project.
"Captain Waterhouse? You are to proceed to the Mansion," says the guard who had spoken on the telephone. "You can't miss it."
Waterhouse walks for about fifty feet and finds that the Mansion is, indeed, tragically unmissable. He stands and stares at it for a minute, trying to fathom what the architect had been thinking. It is a busy piece of work, with an excessive number of gables. He can only suppose that the designer wanted to build what was really a large, single dwelling, but sought to camouflage it as a line of at least half a dozen wildly mismatched urban row-houses inexplicably crammed together in the middle of six hundred acres of Buckinghamshire farmland.
The place has been well looked after, but as Waterhouse draws closer, he can see black lianas climbing up the brickwork. The root system that he glimpsed in the Underground has spread beneath forest and pasture even to this place and has begun to throw its neoprene creepers upwards. But this organism is not phototropic-it does not grow towards the light, always questing towards the sun. It is infotropic. And it has spread to this place for the same reason that infotropic humans like Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and Dr. Alan Mathison Turing have come here, because Bletchley Park has roughly the same situation in the info world as the sun does in the solar system. Armies, nations, prime ministers, presidents and geniuses fall around it, not in steady planetlike orbits but in the crazy careening ellipses and hyperbolae of comets and stray asteroids.
Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber can't see Bletchley Park, because it is the second best kept secret in the world, after Ultra Mega. But from his office in Berlin, sifting through dispatches from the Beobachtung Dienst, he can glimpse fragments of those trajectories, and dream up hypotheses to explain why they are just so. If the only logical hypothesis is that the Allies have broken Enigma, then Detachment 2702 will have failed.
Lawrence displays further credentials and enters between a pair of weathered gryphons. The mansion is nicer once you can no longer see its exterior. Its faux-rowhouse design provides many opportunities for bay windows, providing sorely needed light. The hall is held up by gothic arches and pillars made of a conspicuously low grade of brown marble that looks like vitrified sewage.
The place is startlingly noisy; there is a rushing, clattering noise, like rabid applause, permeating walls and doors, carried on a draft of hot air with a stinging, oily scent. It is the peculiar scent of electric teletypes-or teleprinters, as the Brits call them. The noise and the heat suggest there must be dozens of them in one of the mansion's lower rooms.
Waterhouse climbs a paneled stairway to what the Brits call the first floor, and find it quieter and cooler. The high panjandrums of Bletchley have their offices here. If the organization is run true to bureaucratic form, Waterhouse will never see this place again once his initial interview is finished. He finds his way to the office of Colonel Chattan, who (Waterhouse's memory jogged by the sight of the name on the door) is the fellow at the top of the chart of Detachment 2702.
Chattan rises to shake his hand. He's strawberry blond, blue-eyed, and probably would be rosy-cheeked if he didn't have such a deep desert tan at the moment. He is wearing a dress uniform; British officers have their uniforms tailor-made, it is the only way to obtain them. Waterhouse is hardly a clothes horse, but he can see at a glance that Chattan's uniform was not thrown together by Mummy in a few evenings in front of a flickering coal grate. No, Chattan has himself an honest-to-god tailor somewhere. Yet, when he speaks Waterhouse's name, he does not say "woe to hice" like the Broadway Buildings crowd. The R comes through hard and crackling and the "house" part is elongated into some thing like "hoos." He has some kind of a wild-ass accent on him, this Chattan.
With Chattan is a smaller man in British fatigues-tight at the wrists and ankles, otherwise blousy, of thick khaki flannel that would be intolerably hot if these people couldn't rely on a steady ambient temperature, indoors and out, of about fifty-five degrees. The overall effect always reminds Waterhouse of Dr. Dentons. This fellow is introduced as Leftenant Robson, and he is the leader of one of 2702's two squads-the RAE one. He has a bristly mustache, trimmed very short, of silver and auburn whiskers. He is a cheerful sort, at least in the presence of higher ranks, and smiles frequently. His teeth splay out radially from the gumline so that each mandible has the appearance of a coffee can in which a small grenade has been detonated.
"This the fellow we've been waiting for," Chattan says to Robson. "The one we could've used in Algiers."
"Yes!" Robson says. "Welcome to Detachment 2701, Captain Waterhouse."
"2702," Waterhouse says.
Chattan and Robson look ever so mildly startled.
"We can't use 2701 because it is the product of two primes."
"I beg your pardon?" Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault. Robson has the look of a man who has come up through the ranks. A Yank of that type would already be scornful and blustery.
"Which ones?" Chattan says. That is encouraging; he at least knows what a prime number is.
"73 and 37," Waterhouse says.
This makes a profound impression on Chattan. "Ah, yes, I see." He shakes his head. "I shall have to give the Prof a good chaffing about this."
Robson has cocked his head far to one side so that it is almost resting upon the thick woolly beret chucked into his epaulet. He is squinting, and has an aghast look about him. His hypothetical Yank counterpart would probably demand, at this point, a complete explanation of prime number theory, and when it was finished, denounce it as horseshit. But Robson just lets it go by. "Am I to understand that we are changing the number of our Detachment?"
Waterhouse swallows. It seems clear from Robson's reaction that this is going to involve a great deal of busy-work for Robson and his men: weeks of painting and stenciling and of trying to propagate the new number throughout the military bureaucracy. It will be a miserable pain in the ass.
"2702 it is," Chattan says breezily. Unlike Waterhouse, he has no difficulty issuing difficult, unpopular commands.
"Right then, I must see to some things. Pleasure making your acquaintance, Captain Waterhouse."
"Pleasure's mine."
Robson shakes Waterhouse's hand again and excuses himself.
"We have a billet for you in one of the huts to the south of the canteen," Chattan says. "Bletchley Park is our nominal headquarters, but we anticipate that we will spend most of our time in those theaters where heaviest use is being made of Ultra."
"I take it you've been in North Africa," Waterhouse says.
"Yes." Chattan raises his eyebrows, or rather the ridges of skin where his eyebrows are presumably located; the hairs are colorless and transparent, like nylon monofilament line. "Just got out by the skin of our teeth there, I'm afraid."
"Had a close shave, did you?"
"Oh, I don't mean it that way," Chattan says. "I'm talking about the integrity of the Ultra secret. We are still not sure whether we have survived it. But the Prof has done some calculations suggesting that we may be out of the woods."
"The Prof is what you call Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. He recommended you personally, you know."
"When the orders came through, I speculated as much."
"Turing is presently engaged on at least two other fronts of the information war, and could not be part of our happy few."
"What happened in North Africa, Colonel Chattan?"
"It's still happening," Chattan says bemusedly. "Our Marine squad is still in-theater, widening the bell curve.
"Widening the bell curve?"
"Well, you know better than I do that random things typically have a bell-shaped distribution. Heights, for example. Come over to this window, Captain Waterhouse."
Waterhouse joins Chattan at a bay window, where there is a view across acres of what used to be gently undulating farmland. Looking beyond the wooded belt to the uplands miles away, he can see what Bletchley Park probably used to look like: green fields dotted with clusters of small buildings.
But that is not what it looks like now. There is hardly a piece of land within half a mile that has not been recently paved or built upon. Once you get beyond the Mansion and its quaint little outbuildings, the park consists of one-story brick structures, nothing more than long corridors with multiple transepts: +++++++, and new +'s being added as fast as the masons can slap bricks on mud (Waterhouse wonders, idly, whether Rudy has seen aerial reconnaissance photos of this place, and deduced from all of those +'s the mathematical nature of the enterprise). The tortuous channels between buildings are narrow, and each is made twice as narrow by an eight-foot-high blast wall running down the middle of it, so that the Jerries will have to spend at least one bomb for each building.
"In that building there," Chattan says, pointing to a small building not far away-a truly wretched-looking brick hovel-"are the Turing Bombes. That's 'bombe' with an 'e' on the end. They are calculating machines invented by your friend the Prof."
"Are they true universal Turing machines?" Waterhouse blurts. He is in the grip of a stunning vision of what Bletchley Park might, in fact, be: a secret kingdom in which Alan has somehow found the resources needed to realize his great vision. A kingdom ruled not by men but by information, where humble buildings made of + signs house Universal Machines that can be configured to perform any computable operation.
"No," Chattan says, with a gentle, sad smile.
Waterhouse exhales for a long time. "Ah."
"Perhaps that will come next year, or the next."
"Perhaps."
"The bombes were adapted, by Turing and Welchman and others, from a design dreamed up by Polish cryptanalysts. They consist of rotating drums that test many possible Enigma keys with great speed. I'm sure the Prof will explain it to you. But the point is that they have these vast pegboards in the back, like telephone switchboards, and some of our girls have the job of putting the right pegs into the right holes and wiring the things up every day. Requires good eyesight, careful attention, and height."
"Height?"
"You'll notice that the girls who are assigned to that particular duty are unusually tall. If the Germans were to somehow get their hands on the personnel records for all of the people who work at Bletchley Park, and graph their heights on a histogram, they would see a normal bell shaped curve, representing most of the workers, with an abnormal bump on it-representing the unusual population of tall girls whom we have brought in to work the plug boards."
"Yes, I see," Waterhouse says, "and someone like Rudy-Dr. von Hacklheber-would notice the anomaly, and wonder about it."
"Precisely," Chattan says. "And it would then be the job of Detachment 2702-the Ultra Mega Group-to plant false information that would throw your friend Rudy off the scent." Chattan turns away from the window, strolls over to his desk, and opens a large cigarette box, neatly stacked with fresh ammunition. He offers one to Waterhouse with a deft hand gesture, and Waterhouse accepts it, just to be social. As Chattan is giving him a light, he gazes through the flame into Waterhouse's eye and says, 'I put it to you now. How would you go about concealing from your friend Rudy that we had a lot of tall girls here?'
"Assuming that he already had the personnel records?"
"Yes."
"Then it would be too late to conceal anything."
"Granted. Let us instead assume that he has some channel of information that is bringing him these records, a few at a time. This channel is still open and functioning. We cannot shut it down. Or perhaps we choose not to shut it down, because even the absence of this channel will tell Rudy something important."
"Well, there you go then," Waterhouse says. "We gin up some false personnel records and plant them in the channel."
There is a small chalkboard on the wall of Chattan's office. It is a palimpsest, not very well erased; the housekeeping detail here must have a standing order never to clean it, lest something important be lost. As Waterhouse approaches it, he can see older calculations layered atop each other, fading off into the blackness like transmissions of white light propagating into deep space.
He recognizes Alan's handwriting all over the place. It takes a physical effort not to stand there and try to reconstruct Alan's calculations from the ghosts lingering on the slate. He draws over them only with reluctance.
Waterhouse slashes an abscissa and an ordinate onto the board, then sweeps out a bell-shaped curve. On top of the curve, to the right of the peak, he adds a little hump.
"The tall girls," he explains. "The problem is this notch." He points to the valley between the main peak and the bump. Then he draws a new peak high and wide enough to cover both:
"We can do that by planting fake personnel records in Rudy's channel, giving heights that are taller than the overall average, but shorter than the bombe girls."
"But now you've dug yourself another hole," Chattan says. He is leaning back in his officer's swivel chair, holding the cigarette in front of his face, regarding Waterhouse through a motionless cloud of smoke.
Waterhouse says, "The new curve looks a little better because I filled in that gap, but it's not really bell-shaped. It doesn't tail off right, out here at the edges. Dr. von Hacklheber will notice that. He'll realize that someone's been tampering with his channel. To prevent that from happening I would have to plant more fake records, giving some unusually large and small values."
"Invent some fake girls who were exceptionally short or tall," Chattan says.
"Yes. That would make the curve tail off in the way that it should.'
Chattan continues to look at him expectantly.
Waterhouse says, "So, the addition of a small number of what would otherwise be bizarre anomalies makes it all look perfectly normal."
"As I said," Chattan says, "our squad is in North Africa-even as we speak-widening the bell curve. Making it all look perfectly normal."
Chapter 15 MEAT
Okay, so Private First Class Gerald Hott, late of Chicago, Illinois, did not exactly shoot up through the ranks during his fifteen-year tenure in the United States Army. He did, how ever, carve a bitchin' loin roast. He was as deft with a boning knife as Bobby Shaftoe is with a bayonet. And who is to say that a military butcher, by conserving the limited resources of a steer's carcass and by scrupulously observing the mandated sanitary practices, might not save as many lives as a steely-eyed warrior? The military is not just about killing Nips, Krauts, and Dagoes. It is also about killing livestock-and eating them. Gerald Hott was a front-line warrior who kept his freezer locker as clean as an operating room and so it is only fitting that he has ended up there.
Bobby Shaftoe makes this little elegy up in his head as he is shivering in the sub-Arctic chill of a formerly French, and now U.S. Army, meat locker the size and temperature of Greenland, surrounded by the earthly remains of several herds of cattle and one butcher. He has attended more than a few military funerals during his brief time in the service, and has always been bowled over by the skill of the chaplains in coming up with moving elegies for the departed. He has heard rumors that when the military inducts 4-Fs who are discovered to have brains, it teaches them to type and assigns them to sit at desks and type these things out, day after day. Nice duty if you can get it.
The frozen carcasses dangle from meathooks in long rows. Bobby Shaftoe gets tenser and tenser as he works his way up and down the aisles, steeling himself for the bad thing he is about to see. It is almost preferable when your buddy's head suddenly explodes just as he is puffing his cigarette into life-buildup like this can drive you nuts.
Finally he rounds the end of a row and discovers a man slumbering on the floor, locked in embrace with a pork carcass, which he was apparently about to butcher at the time of his death. He has been there for about twelve hours now and his body temp is hovering around minus ten degrees Fahrenheit.
Bobby Shaftoe squares himself to face the body and draws a deep breath of frosty, meat-scented air. He clasps his cyanotic hands in front of his chest in a manner that is both prayerful and good for warming them up. "Dear Lord," he says out loud. His voice does not echo; the carcasses soak it up. "Forgive this marine for these, his duties, which he is about to perform, and while you are at it, by all means forgive this marine's superiors whom You in Your infinite wisdom have seen fit to bless him with, and forgive their superiors for getting the whole deal together."
He considers going on at some length but finally decides that this is no worse than bayonetting Nips and so let's get on with it. He goes to the locked bodies of PFC Gerald Hott and Frosty the Pig and tries to separate them without success. He squats by them and gives the former a good look. Hott is blond. His eyes are half-closed, and when Shaftoe shines a flashlight into the slit, he can see a glint of blue. Hott is a big man, easily two-twenty-five in fighting trim, easily two-fifty now. Life in a military kitchen does not make it easy for a fellow to keep his weight down, or (unfortunately for Hott) his cardiovascular system in any kind of dependable working order.
Hott and his uniform were both dry when the heart attack happened, so thank god the fabric is not frozen onto the skin. Shaftoe is able to cut most of it off with several long strokes of his exquisitely sharpened V-44 "Gung Ho" knife. But the V-44's machetelike nine-and-a-half-inch blade is completely inappropriate for close infighting-viz., the denuding of the armpits and groin-and he was told to be careful about inflicting scratches, so there he has to break out the USMC Marine Raider stiletto, whose slender double-edged seven-and-a-quarter-inch blade might have been designed for exactly this sort of procedure, though the fish-shaped handle, which is made of solid metal, begins freezing to the sweaty palm of Shaftoe's hand after a while.
Lieutenant Ethridge is hovering outside the locker's tomblike door. Shaftoe barges past him and heads straight for the building's exit, ignoring Ethridge's queries: "Shaftoe? How 'bout it?"
He does not stop until he is out of the shade of the building. The North African sunshine breaks over his body like a washtub of morphine. He closes his eyes and turns his face into it, holds his frozen hands up to cup the warmth and let it trickle down his forearms, drip from his elbows.
"How 'bout it?" Ethridge says again.
Shaftoe opens his eyes and looks around.
The harbor's a blue crescent with miles of sere jetties snaking around each other like diagrams of dance steps. One of them's covered with worn stumps of ancient bastions and next to it a French battleship lies half-sunk, still piping smoke and steam into the air. All around it, the ships of Operation Torch are unloading shit faster than you can believe. Cargo nets rise from the holds of the transports and splat onto the quays like giant loogies. Longshoremen haul, trucks carry, troops march, French girls smoke Yankee cigarettes, Algerians propose joint ventures.
Between those ships, and the Army's meat operation, up here on this rock, is what Bobby Shaftoe takes to be the City of Algiers. To his discriminating Wisconsinan eye it does not appear to have been builtso much as swept up on the hillside by a tidal wave. A lot of acreage has been devoted to keeping the fucking sun off, so from above, it has a shuttered-up look about it-lots of red tile, decorated with flowers and Arabs. Looks like a few modern concrete structures (e.g. this meat locker) have been thrown up by the French in the wake of some kind of vigorous slum-clearing offensive. Still, there's a lot of slums left to be cleared-target number one being this human beehive or anthill just off to Shaftoe's left, the Casbah, they call it. Maybe it's a neighborhood. Maybe it's a single poorly organized building. Has to be seen to be believed. Arabs packed into the place like fraternity pledges into a telephone booth.
Shaftoe turns around and looks again at the meat locker, which is dangerously exposed to enemy air attack here, but no one gives a fuck because who cares if the Krauts blow up a bunch of meat?
Lieutenant Ethridge, almost as desperately sunburned as Bobby Shaftoe, squints.
"Blond," Shaftoe says.
"Okay."
"Blue-eyed."
"Good."
"Anteater-not mushroom."
"Huh?"
"He's not circumcised, sir!"
"Excellent! How 'bout the other thing?"
"One tattoo, sir!"
Shaftoe is enjoying the slow buildup of tension in Ethridge's voice:
"Describe the tattoo, Sergeant!"
"Sir! It is a commonly seen military design, sir! Consisting of a heart with a female's name in it."
"What is that name, Sergeant?" Ethridge is on the verge of pissing his pants.
"Sir! The name inscribed on the tattoo is the following name: Griselda. Sir!"
"Aaaah!" Lieutenant Ethridge lets loose deep from the diaphragm. Veiled women turn and look. Over in that Casbah, starved-looking, shave-needing ragheads lean out of spindly towers yodeling out of key.
Ethridge shuts up and contents himself with clenching his fists until they go white. When he speaks again, his voice is hushed with emotion. "Battles have hinged on lesser strokes of luck than this one, Sergeant!"
"You're telling me!?" Shaftoe says. "When I was on Guadalcanal, sir, we got trapped in this little cove and pinned down-"
"I don't want to hear the lizard story, Sergeant!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
Once when Bobby Shaftoe was still in Oconomowoc, he had to help his brother move a mattress up a stairway and learned new respect for the difficulty of manipulating heavy but floppy objects. Hott, may God have mercy on his soul, is a heavy S.O.B., and so it is excellent luck that he is frozen solid. After the Mediterranean sun has its way with him, he is sure enough going to be floppy. And then some.
All of Shaftoe's men are down in the detachment's staging area. This is a cave built into a sheer artificial cliff that rises from the Mediterranean, just above the docks. These caves go on for miles and there is a boulevard running over the top of them. But even the approaches to their particular cave have been covered with tents and tarps so that no one, not even Allied troops, can see what they are up to: namely, looking for any equipment with 2701 painted on it, painting over the last digit, and changing it to 2. The first operation is handled by men with green paint and the second by men with white or black paint.
Shaftoe picks one man from each color group so that the operation as a whole will not be disrupted. The sun is stunningly powerful here, but in that cavern, with a cool maritime breeze easing through, it's not really that bad. The sharp smell of petroleum distillates comes off all of those warm painted surfaces. To Bobby Shaftoe, it is a comforting smell, because you never paint stuff when you're in combat. But the smell also makes him a little tingly, because you frequently paint stuff just beforeyou go into combat.
Shaftoe is about to brief his three handpicked Marines on what is to come when the private with black paint on his hands, Daniels, looks past him and smirks. "What's the lieutenant looking for now do you suppose, Sarge?" he says.
Shaftoe and Privates Nathan (green paint) and Branph (white) look over to see that Ethridge has gotten sidetracked. He is going through the wastebaskets again.
"We have all noticed that Lieutenant Ethridge seems to think it is his mission in life to go through wastebaskets," Sergeant Shaftoe says in a low, authoritative voice. "He is an Annapolis graduate."
Ethridge straightens up and, in the most accusatory way possible, holds up a fistful of pierced and perforated oaktag. "Sergeant! Would you identify this material?"
"Sir! It is general issue military stencils, Sir!"
"Sergeant! How many letters are there in the alphabet?"
"Twenty-six, sir!" responds Shaftoe crisply.
Privates Daniels, Nathan and Branph whistle coolly at each other-this Sergeant Shaftoe is sharp as a tack.
"Now, how many numerals?"
"Ten, sir!"
"And of the thirty-six letters and numerals, how many of them are represented by unused stencils in this wastebasket?"
"Thirty-five, sir! All except for the numeral 2, which is the only one we need to carry out your orders, sir!"
"Have you forgotten the second part of my order, Sergeant?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" No point in lying about it. Officers actually like it when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter they are than you. It makes them feel needed.
"The second part of my order was to take strict measures to leave behind no trace of the changeover!"
"Sir, yes, I do remember that now, sir!"
Lieutenant Ethridge, who was just a bit huffy first, has now calmed down quite a bit, which speaks well of him and is duly, silently noted by all of the men, who have known him for less than six hours. He is now speaking calmly and conversationally, like a friendly high school teacher. He is wearing the heavy-rimmed black military eyeglasses known in the trade as RPGs, or Rape Prevention Glasses. They are strapped to his head by a hunk of black elastic. They make him look like a mental retard. "If some enemy agent were to go through the contents of this wastebasket, as enemy agents have been known to do, what would he find?"
"Stencils sir!"
"And if he were to count the numerals and letters, would he notice anything unusual?"
"Sir! All of them would be clean except for the numeral twos which would be missing or covered with paint, sir!"
Lieutenant Ethridge says nothing for a few minutes, allowing his message to sink in. In reality no one knows what the fuck he is talking about. The atmosphere becomes tinderlike until finally, Sergeant Shaftoe makes a desperate stab. He turns away from Ethridge and towards the men. "I want you Marines to get paint on all of those goddamn stencils!" he barks.
The Marines charge the wastebaskets as if they were Nip pillboxes, and Lieutenant Ethridge seems mollified. Bobby Shaftoe, having scored massive points, leads Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Branph out into the street before Lieutenant Ethridge figures out that he was just guessing. They head for the meat locker up on the ridge, double-time.
These Marines are all lethal combat veterans or else they never would have gotten into a mess this bad-trapped on a gratuitously dangerous continent (Africa) surrounded by the enemy (United States Army troops). Still, when they get into that locker and take their first gander at PFC Hott, a hush comes over them.
Private Branph clasps his hands, rubbing them together surreptitiously. "Dear Lord-"
"Shut up, Private!" Shaftoe says, "I already did that."
"Okay, Sarge."
"Go find a meat saw!" Shaftoe says to Private Nathan.
The privates all gasp.
"For the fucking pig!" Shaftoe clarifies. Then he turns to Private Daniels, who is carrying a featureless bundle, and says, "Open it up!"
The bundle (which was issued by Ethridge to Shaftoe) turns out to contain a black wetsuit. Nothing GI; some kind of European model. Shaftoe unfolds it and examines its various parts while Privates Nathan and Branph dismember Frosty the Pig with vigorous strokes of an enormous bucksaw.
They are all working away silently when a new voice interrupts. "Dear Lord," the voice begins, as they all look up to see a man standing nearby, hands clasped prayerfully. His words, sacramentally condensed into an outward and visible cloud of steam, veil his face. His uniform and rank are obscured by an Army blanket thrown over his shoulders. He'd look like a camel-riding Holy Land prophet if he were not clean-shaven and wearing Rape Prevention Glasses.
"Goddamn it!" Shaftoe says. "I already said a fucking prayer."
"But are we praying for Private Hott, or for ourselves?" the man says. This is a poser. Everything becomes quiet as the meat saw stops moving. Shaftoe drops the wetsuit and stands up. Blanket Man's got very short grizzly hair, or maybe that's frost coalescing on his scalp. His ice colored eyes meet Shaftoe's through the mile-thick lenses of his RPGs, as if he's really expecting an answer. Shaftoe takes a step closer and realizes that the man is wearing a clerical collar.
"You tell me, Rev," Shaftoe says.
Then he recognizes Blanket Man. He's about to let fly with a lusty What in the fuck are you doing here,but something makes him hold back. The chaplain's eyes make a sideways dart so small and so fast that only Shaftoe, who's practically rubbing noses with him, could possibly see it.
The message being: Shut up, Bobby, we'll talk later.
"Private Hott is with God now-or wherever people go after they die," says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root.
"What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ! 'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?"
"I guess I'm a Detachment 2702 kind of chaplain," the chaplain says. Lieutenant Enoch Root finally breaks eye contact with Shaftoe and turns his gaze to where the action is. "As you were, fellows," he says. "Looks like bacon tonight, huh?"
The men chuckle nervously and resume sawing.
Once they get the pig's carcass disentangled from Hott's, each of the Marines grabs a limb. They carry Hott out into the butcher shop, which has been temporarily evacuated for purposes of this operation, so that Hott's former comrades-in-shanks will not spread rumors.
Hasty evacuation of a butcher shop after one of its workers has been found dead on the floor could spawn a few rumors in and of itself. So the cover story du jour, freshly spun by Lieutenant Ethridge, is that Detachment 2702 is (contrary to all outward appearances) an elite, crack medical team concerned that Hott had been struck down by a rare new form of North African food poisoning. Maybe even something deliberately left behind by the French, who are, by accounts, a little irritable about having their battleship sunk. Anyway, the whole shop (the story goes) has to be shut down for the day and gone over with a nit comb. Hott's corpse will be cremated before being sent back to the family, just to make sure that the dreaded affliction does not spread into Chicago-the planetary abbatoir capital-where its incalculable consequences could alter the outcome of the war.
There is a GI coffin laid out on the floor, just to preserve the fiction. Shaftoe and his men ignore it completely and begin dressing the body, first in an appalling pair of swim trunks, then various components of the wetsuit.
"Hey!" Ethridge says. "I thought you were going to do the gloves last."
"Sir, we're doing them first, by your leave, sir!" Bobby Shaftoe says.
"On account of his fingers will thaw out first and once that happens we are screwed, sir!"
"Well, slap this on him first," Ethridge says, and hands over a wrist watch. Shaftoe hefts it and whistles. It's a beaut: a Swiss chronometer in solid uranium, its jewel-laden movement throbbing away like the heart beat of a small mammal. He swings it on the end of its wristband, made in cunningly joined armor plates. It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.
"Nice," Shaftoe says, "but it doesn't tell time too good."
"In the time zone where we are going," Ethridge says, "it does."
The chastened Shaftoe sets about his work. Meanwhile, Lieutenants Ethridge and Root are making themselves useful. They carry the crudely sawed remains of Frosty the Pig into the butcher shop and throw them on a gigantic scale. They add up to some thirty kilograms, whatever the fuck thatmeans. Enoch Root, showing an appetite for physical labor that is duly and silently noted by the men, hauls in another pig carcass, stiff as a Radio Flyer, and dumps it onto the scale, bringing the total up to seventy. Ethridge does the breaststroke through clouds of flies to gather up all the cuts of meat that were on the chopping blocks when the place was evacuated. He throws them on the scale and the needle swings up to near the one-hundred mark. From that point they are able to bring it up to one-thirty by ferrying hams and roasts in from the freezer one at a time. Enoch Root-who seems to be conversant with exotic systems of measurement-has made a calculation, and checked it twice, establishing that the weight of Gerald Hott, converted into kilograms, is one hundred and thirty.
All the meat goes into the coffin. Ethridge slams the lid shut, trapping some flies who have no idea what they are in for. Root goes around with a clawhammer, driving in sixteen-penny nails with sure, powerful, Carpenter-of-Nazareth-like strokes. Meanwhile, Ethridge has taken a GI manual out of his briefcase. Shaftoe is close enough to read the title, printed in block letters on its olive drab cover:
COFFIN SEALING PROCEDURES
PART III: TROPICAL ENVIRONMENTS
VOL. II: HIGH DISEASE RISK SITUATIONS (BUBONIC PLAGUE, ETC.)
The two lieutenants devote a good hour to following the instructions in that manual. The instructions are not that complicated, but Enoch Root keeps noticing syntactical ambiguities and wants to explore their ramifications. First this rattles Ethridge, then his emotions tend towards impatience and, finally, extreme pragmatism. To make the chaplain shut up, Ethridge confiscates the manual and starts Root on stenciling Hott's name on the coffin and pasting it up with red stickers printed with medical warnings so appalling that the topic headings alone induce faint nausea. By the time Root is finished, the only person who can legally open this coffin is General George C. Marshall himself, and even he would have to first get special permission from the Surgeon General and evacuate all living things within a hundred-mile radius.
"Chaplain talks kind of funny," says Private Nathan at one point, listening, slackjawed, to one of these Root/Ethridge debates.
"Yeah!" exclaims Private Branph, as if the accent took a really keen listener to notice. "What kind of an accent is that anyway?"
All eyes turn to Bobby Shaftoe, who pretends to listen for a bit and then says, "Well, fellas, I would guess that this Enoch Root is the offspring of a long line of Dutch and possibly German missionaries in the South Sea Islands, interbred with Aussies. And furthermore, I would guess that-being as how he grew up in territories controlled by the British-that he carries a British passport and was drafted into their military when the war started and is now part of ANZAC."
"Haw!" roars Private Daniels, "if you got all of that right, I'll give you five bucks."
"Deal," Shaftoe says.
Ethridge and Root finish sealing the coffin at about the same time Shaftoe and his Marines are wrestling the last bits of the wetsuit into place. It takes a shitload of talcum powder, but they get it done. Ethridge supplies them with the talcum powder, which is not GI talc; it is from somewhere in Europe. Some of the letters on the label have pairs of dots over them, which Shaftoe knows to be a characteristic of the German language.
A truck backs up to the loading dock, smelling the fresh paint (it is a Detachment 2702 truck). In go the sealed coffin and the now-vulcanized dead butcher.
"I'm going to stay behind and check the wastebaskets," Lieutenant Ethridge tells Shaftoe. "I'll meet you at the airfield in one hour."
Shaftoe imagines one hour in the back of a hot truck with this cargo. "You want me to keep him on ice, sir?" he asks.
Ethridge has to think about this one for a while. He sucks his teeth, checks his watch, hems and haws. But when he finally answers, he sounds definite. "Negative. It is imperative, for purposes of this mission, that we now get him into a thawed mode."
PFC General Hott and his meat-laden coffin occupy the center of the truck's bed. The Marines sit to the sides, arranged like pallbearers. Shaftoe finds himself staring across the carnage into the face of Enoch Root, which is wearing an expression of forced nonchalance.
Shaftoe knows he ought to wait, but he just can't stand it. "What are you doinghere?" he finally says.
"The detachment is relocating," the Rev says. "Closer to the front."
"We just got off the fucking boat," Shaftoe says. "Of course we're going closer to the goddamn front-we can't go any fartherunless we swim."
"As long as we're pulling up stakes," Root says coolly, "I'll be coming along for the ride."
"I don't mean that," Bobby Shaftoe says. "I mean, why should the detachment have a chaplain?"
"You know the military," Root says. "Every unit has to have one."
"It's bad luck."
"It's bad luckto have a chaplain? Why?"
"It means the waffle-butts are expecting a lot of funerals, is why."
"So you are taking the position that the only thing a cleric can do is to preside over funerals? Interesting."
"And weddings and baptisms," Shaftoe says. All of the other Marines chortle.
"Could it be you're feeling a little anxious about the unusual nature of Detachment 2702's first mission?" Root inquires, casting a significant glance at the late Hott, then staring directly into Shaftoe's eyes.
"Anxious? Listen, Rev, I done some things on Guadalcanal that make this look like Emily Fucking Post."
All of the other Marines think this is a great line, but Root is undeterred.
"Did you know why you were doing those things on Guadalcanal?"
"Sure! To stay alive."
"Do you know why you're doing this?"
"Fuck no."
"Doesn't that irritate you a little bit? Or are you too much of a stupid jarhead to care?"
"Well, you kind of backed me into a corner there, Rev," Shaftoe says. After a pause he goes on, "I'll admit to being a little curious.
"If there were someone in Detachment 2702 who could help answer your questions about why,would that be useful?"
"I guess so," Shaftoe grumbles. "It just seems weird to have a chaplain."
"Why does it seem weird?"
"Because of what kind of unit this is."
"What kind of unit isit?" Root asks. He asks it with a certain sadistic pleasure.
"We're not supposed to talk about it," Shaftoe says. "And anyway, we don't know."
Down the hill, immense zigzagging ramps descend pompously over rows of tiger-striped arches to the strand of ramifying railway lines that feed the port from the south. "It's like standing in the drain of a fucking pinball machine," says B. Shaftoe, looking up at the way they have just come, thinking about what might come rolling down out of the Casbah. They head south along those railway lines and come into a zone of ore dumps and coal heaps and smokestacks, clearly recognizable to Great Lakes Eagle Scout Shaftoe, but here operated through some kind of cross-cultured gear train about a million meshings deep. They pull up in front of the Socihim.There is also a Paperwork Negation Effect going on here; whenever Shaftoe expects to be stalled by the usual half an hour's worth of red tape, an anxious officer runs up and waves his hands furiously and he is allowed to proceed.
An Arab, wearing what appears to be a red coffee can on his head, hauls an iron door open; flames lunge at him and he beats them back with a blackened iron stick. The pallbearers center the head of the coffin in the opening and then shove it through, like ramming a big shell home into a sixteen-inch gun, and the man with the can on his head clangs the door shut, a tassel on the top of his can whipping around crazily. Before he's even got it latched he's yodeling just like those guys up in the Casbah. The officers all stand around agreeing with each other and signing their names on clipboards.
So with a dearth of complications that can only strike combat veteran Bobby Shaftoe as eerie, the truck leaves the Soci
"What is that? Chocolate?" Bobby Shaftoe asks.
"If it was chocolate," Root says, "that guy wouldn't have taken a Hershey bar for it."
Shaftoe shrugs. "Unless it's shitty chocolate."
"Or shit!" blurts Private Nathan, provoking incredible hilarity.
"You heard of Mary Jane?" Root asks.
Shaftoe-role model, leader of men-stifles the impulse to say, Heard of her?I've fuckedher!
"This is the concentrated essence," says Enoch Root.
"How would you know, Rev?" says Private Daniels.
The Rev is not rattled. "I'm the God guy here, right? I know the religious angle?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Well, at one time, there was a group of Muslims called the hashishinwho would eat this stuff and then go out and kill people. They were so good at it, they became famous or infamous. Over time the pronunciation of the name has changed-we know them as assassins."
There is an appropriately respectful silence. Finally, Sergeant Shaftoe says, "What the hell are we waiting for?"
They eat some. Shaftoe, being the highest-ranking enlisted man present, eats more than the others. Nothing happens. "Only person I feel like assassinating is that guy who sold it to us," he says.
The airfield, eleven miles out of town, is busier than it was ever intended to be. This is nice grape— and olive-growing land, but stony mountains are visible farther inland, and beyond 'em is a patch of sand the size of the United States-most of which seems to be airborne and headed their way. Countless airplanes-predominantly Dakota transports, a.k.a. Gooney Birds-stir up vast, tongue-coating, booger-nucleating dust clouds. It doesn't occur to Shaftoe for quite some time that his dry eyes and mouth may not be entirely the result of dust in the air. His saliva has the consistency of tile adhesive.
The detachment is so damn secret that no one at the airfield even knows that they exist. There are a lot of Brits here, and in the desert, Brits wear shorts, which makes Shaftoe want to punch them in the nose. He controls the urge. But his obvious hostility towards men in short pants, combined with the fact that he is demanding to be pointed in the direction of a unit that is so secret that he cannot specify it by name or even vaguely describe it, leads to a lot of bafflement, a lot of incredulity, and generally gets the Anglo-American alliance off on the wrong foot.
Sergeant Shaftoe, however, now understands that anything to do with this detachment is liable to be way off to one side, shrouded in black tarps and awnings. Like any other military unit, Detachment 2702 is rich in some supplies and poor in others, but they do appear to control about fifty percent of last year's total U.S. tarpage production. When Shaftoe mentions this fact, and goes on about it to his comrades at great length, some of the men look at him a little funny. It's left to Enoch Root to say, "Between the giant lizards and the black tarps some people might think you were acting a little paranoid."