"The business plan has to say the Intra-Philippines network could be spun off as an independent business, and still survive," Randy says, "to justify our doing it."
Neither one of them needs to say any more. They've been concentrating on each other pretty intensely for a while, shutting out the rest of the bar with their postures, and now, spontaneously, both of them lean back, stretch, and begin looking around. The timing's fortuitous, because Goto Furudenendu has just come in with a posse of what Randy guesses are civil engineers: healthy-looking, clean-cut Nipponese men in their thirties. Randy invites him over with a smile, then flags down their waiter and orders a few of those great big bottles of bitterly cold Nipponese beer.
"This reminds me-the Secret Admirers are really on my case," Randy says.
Cantrell grins, showing some affection for those crazy Secret Admirers. "Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology," he says, "but they don't always understand business."
"Maybe they understand it too well," Randy says. He is left with some residual annoyance that he came down to the Bomb and Grapnel party in order to answer the question posed by root@eruditorum.org ("Why are you doing it?") and he still doesn't know. As a matter of fact, he knows less now than he did before.
Then the men from Goto join them, and it just happens that Eberhard F
At some point Tom Howard puts his beefy arm up on the back of Cantrell's chair, the better to shout into his ear. Their matched Eutropian bracelets, engraved with "Hello Doctor, please freeze me as follows" messages, are glittery and conspicuous, and Randy's nervous that the Nipponese guys are going to notice this and ask questions that will be exceedingly difficult to answer. Tom is reminding Cantrell of something (for some reason they always refer to Cantrell in this way; some people are just made to be called by last names). Cantrell nods and shoots Randy a quick and somewhat furtive look. When Randy looks back at him, Cantrell glances down apologetically and takes to chivvying his beer bottle nervously between his hands. Tom just keeps looking at Randy kind of interestedly. All of this motivated glancing finally brings Randy and Tom and Cantrell together at the farthest end of the bar from the karaoke speakers.
"So, you know Andrew Loeb," Cantrell says. It's clear he's basically dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he'd just learned that Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never bothered to mention it.
"It's true," Randy says. "As well as anyone can know a guy like that."
Cantrell is paying undue diligence to the project of picking the label off of his beer bottle and so Tom picks up the thread now. "You were in business together?"
"Not really. Can I ask how you guys are aware of this? I mean, how do you even know that Andrew Loeb exists in the first place? Because of the Digibomber thing?"
"Oh, no-it was after that. Andy became a figure of note in some of the circles where Tom and I both hang out," Cantrell says.
"The only circles I can imagine that Andy'd be a part of would be primitive survivalists, and people who believe they've been Satanically ritually abused."
Randy says this mindlessly, as if his mouth is a mechanical teletype hammering out a weather forecast. It kind of hangs there.
"That helps fill in a few gaps," Tom finally says.
"What did you think when the FBI searched his cabin?" Cantrell asks, his grin returned.
"I didn't know what to think," Randy says. "I remember watching the videotape on the news-the agents coming out of that shack with boxes of evidence, and thinking my name must be on papers in them. That somehow I'd get mixed up in the case as a result."
"Did the FBI ever contact you?" Tom asks.
"No. I think that once they searched through all of his stuff, they figured out pretty quickly that he wasn't the Digibomber, and crossed him off the list."
"Well, not long after that happened, Andy Loeb showed up on the Net," Cantrell says.
"I find that impossible to believe."
"So did we. I mean, we'd all received copies of his manifestoes-printed on this grey recycled paper that was like the sheets of fuzz that you peel off a clothes dryer's lint trap."
"He used some kind of organic, water-based ink that flaked off like black dandruff," Tom says.
"We used to joke about having Andy-grit all over our desks," Cantrell says. "So when this guy called Andy Loeb showed up on the Secret Admirers mailing list, and the Eutropia newsgroup, posting all of these long rants, we refused to believe it was him."
"We thought that someone had just written really brilliant parodies of his prose style," Cantrell says.
"But when they kept coming, day after day, and he started getting into these long dialogs with people, it became obvious that it really was him," Tom grumbles.
"How did he square that with being a Luddite?"
Cantrell: "He said that he'd always thought of computers as a force that alienated and atomized society."
Tom: "But as the result of being the number one Digibomber suspect for a while, he'd been forcibly made aware of the Internet, which changed computers by connecting them."
"Oh, my god!" Randy says.
"And he'd been mulling over the Internet while he was doing whatever Andrew Loeb does," Tom continues.
Randy: "Squatting naked in icy mountain streams strangling muskrats with his bare hands."
Tom: "And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society."
Randy: "And I'll bet he was just the guy to unite it."
Cantrell: "Well, that's actually not far away from what he said."
Randy: "So, are you about to tell me that he became a Eutropian?"
Cantrell: "Well, no. It's more like he discovered a schism in the Eutropian movement we didn't know was there, and created his own splinter group.
Randy: "I think of the Eutropians as being totally hard-core individuals, pure libertarians."
"Well, yeah!" Cantrell says. "But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were libertarians."
Tom says, "But the idea has attracted all kinds of people-including Andy Loeb. He showed up one day and started yammering about hive minds."
"And of course he was flamed to a crisp by most of the Eutropians, because that concept was anathema to them," Cantrell says.
Tom: "But he kept at it, and after a while, some people started agreeing with him. Turned out there was really a pretty substantial faction within the Eutropians who didn'tespecially care for libertarianism and who found the idea of a hive mind attractive."
"So, now Andy's the leader of that faction?" Randy asks.
"I would suppose so," Cantrell says. "They split away and formed their own newsgroup. We haven't heard much from them in the last six months or so."
"So how did you become aware of a connection between Andy and me?"
"He stills pops into the Secret Admirers newsgroup from time to time," Tom says. "And there's been a lot of discussion there about the Crypt lately."
Cantrell says, "When he found out that you and Avi were involved, he posted this vast rant-twenty or thirty K of run-on sentences. Not very complimentary."
"Well, Jesus. What's his beef? He won the case. Completely bankrupted me. You'd think he'd have something better to do than beat this dead horse," Randy says, thumping himself on the chest. "Doesn't he have a day job?"
"He's some kind of a lawyer now," Cantrell says.
"Ha! Figures."
"He's been denouncing us," Tom says. "Capitalist roader. Atomizing society. Making the world safe for drug traffickers and Third-World kleptocrats."
"Well, at least he got something right," Randy says. He's delighted to have an answer, finally, to the question of why they're building the Crypt.
Chapter 27 RETROGRADE MANEUVER
Sio is a mud cemetery. Those who have already given their lives for the emperor compete for mire space with those who intend to. Bizarre forktailed American planes dive out of the sun every day to murder them with terrible glowing rains of cannon fire and the mind-crushing detonations of bombs, so they sleep in open-topped graves and only come out at night. But their pits are full of reeking water that chums with hostile life, and when the sun goes down, rain beats them, carrying into their bones the deadly chill of high altitudes. Every man in the 20th Division knows that he will not leave New Guinea alive, so it remains only to choose the method of death: surrender to be tortured, then massacred by the Australians? Put grenades to their heads? Remain where they are to be killed by the airplanes all day, and all night by malaria, dysentery, scrub typhus, starvation, and hypothermia? Or walk two hundred miles over mountains and flooding rivers to Madang, which is tantamount to suicide even when it is peacetime and you have food and medicine...?
But that is what they are ordered to do. General Adachi flies to Sio-it is the first friendly plane they have seen in weeks-and lands on the rutted septic field that they call an airstrip, and orders the evacuation. They are to move inland in four detachments. Regiment by regiment, they bury their dead, pack up what is left of their equipment, hoard what little food is left, wait for dark, and trudge towards the mountains. The later echelons can find their path by smell, following the reek of dysentery and of the corpses dropped behind the pathfinder groups like breadcrumbs.
The top commanders stay to the end, and the radio platoon stays with them; without a powerful radio transmitter, and the cryptographic paraphernalia that goes with it, a general is not a general, a division is not a division. Finally they go off the air, and begin breaking the transmitter down into the smallest pieces they can, which unfortunately are not all that small; a divisional radio transmitter is a powerful beast, made for lighting up the ionosphere. It has an electrical generator, transformers, and other components that cannot be made light. The men of the radio platoon, who would find it difficult to move even the weight of their own skeletons over the mountains and across the surging rivers, will carry the additional burdens of engine blocks, fuel tanks, and transformers.
And the big steel trunk with all of the Army codebooks. These books were heavy as death when they were bone dry; now they are sodden. To carry them out is beyond imagining. The rules dictate that they must therefore be burned.
The men of the 20th Division's radio platoon are not much inclined to humor of any kind at the moment, not even the grim sardonic humor universal among soldiers. If anything in the world is capable of making them laugh at this moment, it is the concept of trying to construct a bonfire out of saturated codebooks in a swamp during a rainstorm. They might be able to burn them if they used a lot of aviation fuel-more than they actually have. Then the fire would produce a towering column of smoke that would draw P-38s as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.
Burning them can't be necessary. New Guinea is a howling maelstrom of decay and destruction; the only things that endure are rocks and wasps. They rip off the covers to bring home as proof that they have been destroyed, then pack the books into their trunk and bury it in the bank of an especially vindictive river.
It's not a very good idea. But they have been getting bombed a lot. Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb's shock wave is like a stone wall moving at seven hundred miles an hour. Unlike a stone wall, it passes through your body, like a burst of light through a glass figurine. On its way through your flesh, it rearranges every part of you down to the mitochondrial level, disrupting every process in every cell, including whatever enables your brain to keep track of time and experience the world. A few of these detonations are enough to break the thread of consciousness into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as they were when they left home; they cannot be expected to think clearly or to do things for good reasons. They throw mud on the trunk not as a sane procedure for getting rid of it but as a kind of ritual, just to demonstrate the proper respect for its lode of strange information.
Then they shoulder their burdens of iron and rice and begin to strain up into the mountains. Their comrades have left a trampled path that is already growing back into jungle. The mileposts are bodies-by now just stinking battlegrounds-disputed by frenzied mobs of microbes, bugs, beasts, and birds never catalogued by scientists.
Chapter 28 HUFFDUFF
The huffduff mast is planted before they even have a roof on the new headquarters of Detachment 2702, and the huffduff antenna is raised before there is any electricity to run it.
Waterhouse does his best to pretend as if he cares. He lets the workers know: vast tank armadas clashing in the African desert might be dashing and romantic, but the real battle of this war (ignoring, as always, the Eastern Front) is the Battle of the Atlantic. We can't win the Battle of the Atlantic without sinking some U-boats, and we can't sink them until we find them, and we need a way of finding them other than the tried-and-true approach of letting our convoys steam through them and get blown to bits. That way, men, is to get this antenna in action as soon as humanly possible.
Waterhouse is no actor, but when the second ice storm of the week blows through and inflicts grievous damage on the antenna, and he has to stay up all night repairing it by the light of the Galvanick Lucifer, he is pretty sure that he has them hooked. The castle staff work late shifts to keep him supplied with hot tea and brandy, and the builders give him some zesty hip-hip-hoorays the next morning when the patched antenna is winched back up to the top of the mast. They are all so sure that they are saving lives in the North Atlantic that they would probably lynch him if they knew the truth.
This huffduff story is ridiculously plausible. It is so plausible that if Waterhouse were working for the Germans, he'd be suspicious. The antenna is a highly directional model. It receives a strong signal when pointed towards the source and a weak signal otherwise. The operator waits for a U-boat to begin transmitting and then swings the antenna back and forth until it gives the maximum reading; the direction of the antenna then gives the azimuth to the source. Two or more such readings, supplied by different huffduff stations, can be used to triangulate the origin of the signal.
In order to keep up appearances, the station needs to be manned 24 hours a day, which almost kills Waterhouse during the first weeks of 1943. The rest of Detachment 2702 has not shown up on schedule, so it is up to Waterhouse to preserve the illusion in the meantime.
Everyone within ten miles-basically, the entire civilian population of Qwghlm, or, to put it another way, the entire Qwghlmian race-can see the new huffduff antenna rising from the mast on the castle. They are not stupid people and some of them, at least, must understand that the damn thing doesn't do any good if it is always pointed in the same direction. If it's not moving, it's not working. And if it's not working, then just what the hell is going on up there in the castle anyway?
So Waterhouse has to move it. He lives in the chapel, sleeping-when he sleeps-in a hammock strung at a perilous altitude above the floor ("skerries" are excellent jumpers, he has found).
If he sleeps during the daytime, even casual observers in the town will notice that the antenna does not move. That's no good. But he can't sleep at night, when the Germans bounce their transmissions off the ionosphere between the U-boats in the North Atlantic and their bases in Bordeaux and Lorient because a really close observer-say an insomniacal castle worker, or a German spy up in the rocks with a pair of binoculars-will suspect that the immobile huffduff antenna is just a cover story. So Waterhouse tries to split the difference by sleeping for a few hours around dusk and another few hours around dawn-a plan that does not go over well with his body. And when he gets up, he has absolutely nothing to look forward to besides sitting at the huffduff console for eight or twelve hours at a stretch, watching the breath come out of his mouth, twiddling the antenna, listening to-nothing!
He freely stipulates that he is a selfish bastard for feeling sorry for himself when other men are being blown to bits.
Having gotten that out of the way, what is he going to do to stay sane? He has got his routine down pat: leave the antenna pointed generally westwards for a while, then swing it back and forth in diminishing arcs, pretending to zero in on a U-boat, then leave it sitting for a while and do jumping jacks to warm back up. He has ditched his uniform for raiments of warm Qwghlmian wool. Every once in a while, at totally unpredictable intervals, members of the castle staff will burst in on him with an urn of soup or tea service or simply to see how he is doing and tell him what a fine chap he is. Once a day, he writes down a bunch of gibberish-his purported results-and dispatches it over to the naval base.
He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about mathematics. The former keeps intruding upon the latter. It gets worse when the stout fiftyish cook named Blanche, who has been bringing him his meals, comes down with dropsy or ague or gout or colic or some other Shakespearian ailment and is replaced by Margaret, who is about twenty and quite fetching.
Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the real thing. The effect wears off too soon.
While he's waiting for it to wear off, he gets a lot of solid math done. Alan provided him with some notes on redundancy and entropy, relating to the voice encryption work he is currently doing in New York City. Waterhouse works through that stuff and comes up with some nice lemmas which he lamentably cannot send to Alan without violating both common sense and any number of security procedures. This done, he turns his attention to cryptology, pure and raw. He spent enough time at Bletchley Park to realize just how little of this art he really understood.
The U-boats talk on the radio way too much and everyone in the German Navy knows it. Their security experts have been nagging their brass to tighten up their security, and they finally did it by introducing the four-rotor version of the Enigma machine, which has knocked Bletchley Park on its ass for about a year...
Margaret has to walk round the castle out of doors to bring Waterhouse his meals, and by the time she gets here, her cheeks have turned rosy red. The steam coming from her mouth floats around her face like a silken veil-
Stop that, Lawrence! The subject of today's lecture is the German Naval four-wheel Enigma, known to them as Triton and to the Allies as Shark. Introduced on 2 February of last year (1942), it wasn't until the recovery of the beached German U-boat U-559 on 30 October that Bletchley Park got the material they needed to break the code. A couple of weeks ago, on 13 December, Bletchley Park finally busted Shark, and the internal communications of the German Navy became an open book to the Allies once more.
The first thing they have learned, as a result, is that the Germans have broken our merchant shipping codes wide open, and that all year long they have known exactly where to find the convoys.
All of this information has been provided to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse within the last few days, via the totally secure one-time pad channel. Bletchley is telling him this stuff because it raises a question of information theory, which is hisdepartment and hisproblem. The question is: how quickly can we replace our busted merchant shipping codes without tipping the Germans off to the fact that we have broken Shark?
Waterhouse does not have to think about this one for very long before he concludes that it is far too tricky to play games with. The only way to handle the situation is to concoct an incident of some sort that will explain to the Germans why we have totally lost faith in our own merchant shipping codes and are changing them. He writes up a message to this effect, and begins to encrypt it using the one-time pad that he shares with Chattan.
"Is everything quite all right?"
Waterhouse stands and whirls around, heart thrashing.
It is Margaret, standing there veiled in the steam of her own breath, a grey wool overcoat thrown over her maid's uniform, supporting a tray of tea and scones with grey wool mittens. The only parts of her not encased in wool are her ankles and her face. The former are well turned; Margaret is not above wearing heels. The latter has never been exposed to the direct rays of the sun and brings to mind rose petals strewn over Devonshire clotted cream.
"Oh! Let me take it!" Waterhouse blurts, and lunges forward with a jerkiness born of passion blended with hypothermia. While taking the tray from her hands, he inadvertently pulls off one of her mittens, which falls to the floor. "Sorry!" he says, realizing he has never seen her hands before. She has red polish on the nails of the offended hand, which she cups over her mouth and blows on. Her large green eyes are looking at him, full of placid expectation.
"Beg pardon?" Waterhouse says.
"Is everything quite all right?" she repeats.
"Yes! Why shouldn't it be?"
"The antenna," Margaret says. "It hasn't moved in over an hour."
Waterhouse is so flummoxed he can barely remain standing.
Margaret is still breathing through her lacquered fingertips, so that Waterhouse can only see her green eyes, which now angle and twinkle mischievously. She glances towards his hammock. "Been napping on the job, have we?"
Waterhouse's first impulse is to deny it and to explain the truth, which is that he was thinking about sex and crypto and forgot to move the antenna. But then he realizes that Margaret has supplied him with a better excuse. "Guilty as charged," he says. "Was up late last night."
"That tea will keep you alert," Margaret says. Then her eyes return to the hammock. She pulls her mitten back on. "What is it like?"
"What is what like?"
"Sleeping in one of those. Is it comfortable?"
"Very comfortable."
"Can I just see what it's like?"
"Ah. Well, it's very difficult to get in-at that height."
"You manage it, though, don't you?" she says chidingly. Waterhouse feels himself blushing. Margaret walks over to the hammock and kicks off her heels. Waterhouse winces to see her bare feet on the stone floor, which has not been warm since the Barbary Corsairs burned the place down. Her toenails are also painted red. "I don't mind it," Margaret says, "I'm a farmer's daughter. Come on, give me a leg up!"
Waterhouse has completely lost whatever control he might ever have had over the situation and himself. His tongue seems to be made of erectile tissue. So he lumbers over, bends down, and makes a stirrup of his hands. She puts her foot into it and launches herself into the hammock, disappearing with a whoop and a giggle into his bulky nest of grey wool blankets. The hammock swings back and forth across the center of the chapel, like a censer dispersing a faint lavender scent. It swings once, twice. It swings five times, ten times, twenty. Margaret is silent and motionless. Waterhouse stands as if his feet were planted in mortar. For the first time in weeks he does not know exactly what is going to happen next, and the loss of control leaves him stunned and helpless.
"It's dreamy," she says. Dreamily. Then, finally, she shifts. Waterhouse sees her little face peeking out over the edge, shrouded in the grey cowl of a blanket. "Ooh!" she screams, and flips flat on her back again. The sudden movement puts an eccentric jiggle into the rhythmic motion of the hammock.
"What's wrong?" Waterhouse says hopelessly.
"I'm afraid of heights!" she exclaims. "I'm so sorry, Lawrence, I should have warned you. Is it all right if I call you Lawrence?" She sounds as if she would be terribly hurt if he said no. And how can Lawrence wound the feelings of a pretty, barefoot, acrophobic girl, helpless in a hammock?
"Please. By all means," he says. But he knows perfectly well that the ball is still in his court. "Can I be of any assistance?"
"I should be so obliged," Margaret says.
"Well, would you like to climb down onto my shoulders, or some thing?" Waterhouse essays.
"I'm really far too terrified," she says.
There is only one way out. "Well. Would you take it the wrong way if I came up there to help?"
"It would be so heroic of you!" she says. "I should be unspeakably grateful."
"Well, then . . ."
"But I insist that you continue with your duties first!"
"Beg pardon?"
"Lawrence," Margaret says, "when I get down from this hammock I shall go to the kitchen and mop the floor-which is already quite clean enough, thank you. You, on the other hand, have important work to do-work that might save the lives of hundreds of men on some Atlantic convoy! And I know that you have been very naughty in sleeping on the job. I refuse to allow you up here until you have made amends."
"Very well," Waterhouse says, "you leave me no alternative. Duty calls." He squares his shoulders, spins on his heel, and marches back to his desk. Skerries have already made off with all of Margaret's scones, but he pours himself some tea. Then he resumes encrypting his instructions to Chattan: ONLY BRUTE FORCE APPROACH WILL BE SAFE PUT CODE BOOK ON SHIP INSERT SHIP IN MURMANSK CONVOY WAIT FOR FOG RAM NORWAY.
The one-time pad encryption takes a while. Lawrence can do mod 25 arithmetic in his sleep, but doing it with an erection is a different matter. "Lawrence? What are you doing?" Margaret asks from her nest in the hammock, which, Lawrence imagines, is getting warmer and cozier by the minute. He glances surreptitiously at her discarded high heels.
"Preparing my report," Lawrence says. "Doesn't do me any good to make observations if I don't send them out."
"Quite right," Margaret says thoughtfully.
This is an excellent time to stoke the chapel's pathetic iron stove. He puts in a few scoops of precious coal, his worksheet, and the page from the one-time pad that he has just used to do the encryption. "Should warm up now," he says.
"Oh, lovely," Margaret says, "I'm all shivery."
Lawrence recognizes this as his cue to initiate a rescue operation. About fifteen seconds later, he is up there in the hammock with Margaret. To the great surprise of neither one of them, the quarters are awkward and tight. There is some flopping around which ends with Lawrence on his back and Margaret on top of him, her thigh between his.
She is shocked to discover that he has an erection. Ashamed, apparently, that she did not anticipate his need. "You poor dear!" she exclaims. "Of course! How could I have been so dense! You must have been so lonely here." She kisses his cheek, which is nice since he is too stunned to move. "A brave warrior deserves all the support we civilians can possibly give him," she says, reaching down with one hand to open his fly.
Then she pulls the grey wool over her head and burrows to a new position. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is stunned by what happens next. He gazes up at the ceiling of the chapel through half-closed eyes and thanks God for having sent him what is obviously a German spy and an angel of mercy rolled into one adorable package.
When it's finished, he opens his eyes again and takes a deep breath of cold Atlantic air. He is seeing everything around him with newfound clarity. Clearly, Margaret is going to do wonders for his productivity on the cryptological front-if he can only keep her coming back.
Chapter 29 PAGES
It has been a long time since horses ran at the Ascot Racetrack in Brisbane. The infield's a commotion of stretched khaki. The grass has died from lack of sun and from the trampling feet of enlisted men. The field has been punctured with latrines, mess tents have been pitched. Three shifts a day, the residents trudge across the track, round back of the silent and empty stables. In the field where the horses used to stretch their legs, two dozen Quonset huts that have popped up like mushrooms. The men work in those huts, sitting before radios or typewriters or card files all day long, shirtless in the January heat.
It has been just as long since whores sunned themselves on the long veranda of the house on Henry Street, and passing gentlemen, on their way to or from the Ascot Racetrack, peered at their charms through the white railing, faltered, checked their wallets, forgot their scruples, turned on their heels, and climbed up the house's front stairs. Now the place is full of male officers and math freaks: mostly Australians on the ground floor, mostly Americans upstairs, and a sprinkling of lucky Brits who were spirited out of Singapore before General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya and the conqueror of that city, was able to capture them and mine their heads for crucial data.
Today the old bordello has been turned upside down; everyone with Ultra clearance is out in the garage, which thrums and roars with the sound of fans, and virtually glows with contained heat. In that garage is a rusted steel trunk, still spattered with riverbank mud that partially obscures the Nipponese characters stenciled on its sides. Had a Nipponese spy glimpsed the trunk during its feverish passage from the port to the whorehouse's garage, he would have recognized it as belonging to the radio platoon of the 20th Division, which is currently lost in the jungles of New Guinea.
The rumor, shouted over the sound of the fans, is that a digger-an Australian grunt-found it. His unit was sweeping the abandoned headquarters of the 20th Division for booby traps when his metal detector went nuts along the banks of a river.
The codebooks are stacked inside as neatly as gold bars. They are wet and mildewed and their front covers are all missing, but this is mint condition by the standards of wartime. Stripped to the waist and streaming with sweat, the men raise the books out one by one, like nurses lifting newborn infants from the bassinette, and carry them to tables where they slice away the rotten bindings and peel the sodden pages off the stacks one by one, hanging them from improvised clotheslines strung overhead. The stench and damp of New Guinea saturate the air as the river water trapped in those pages is lifted out by the rushing air; it all vents to the outside eventually, and half a mile downwind, pedestrians wrinkle their noses. The whorehouse's closets-still redolent of French perfume, powder, hairspray and jism, but now packed to the ceiling with office supplies-are raided for more string. The web of clotheslines grows, new layers crisscrossing above and below the old ones, every inch of string claimed by a wet page as soon as it is stretched. Each page is a grid, a table with hiragana or katakana or kanji in one box, a group of digits or Romanji in another box, and the pages all cross-referenced to other pages in a scheme only a cryptographer could love.
The photographer comes in, trailed by assistants who are burdened with miles of film. All he knows is that each page must be photographed perfectly. The malarial reek practically flattens him the moment he walks in the door, but when he recovers, his eyes scan the garage. All he can see, stretching as if to infinity, are pages dripping and curling, turning white as they dry, casting their grids of information into sharp relief, like the reticules of so many bomb sights, the graven crosshairs of so many periscopes, plunging through cloud and fog to focus, distinctly on the abdomens of Nipponese troopships, pregnant with North Borneo fuel, alive with burning steam.
Chapter 30 RAM
"Sir! Would you mind telling me where we are going, sir!"
Lieutenant Monkberg heaves a deep, quivering sigh, his rib-cage shuddering like a tin shack in a cyclone. He executes a none too snappy pushup. His hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his head from the bowl, of a toilet-or "head," as it is referred to in this context: an alarmingly rundown freighter. He jerks down a strip of abrasive Euro-bumwad and wipes his mouth before looking up at Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.
And Shaftoe does need some serious bracing, because he is carrying close to his own weight in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully prepacked.
He could have left it that way. But this is not how an Eagle Scout operates. Bobby Shaftoe has gone through and unpacked all of it, spread it out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.
This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he infers that the men of Detachment 2702 are expected to spend most of the next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well-armed sons of bitches. German, most likely.
"N-N-N-Norway," Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that Shaftoe considers offering him some m-m-m-morphine, which induces a mild nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck himself sideways.
"Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?"
Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. "Ram and run," he says.
"Sir! Ram what, sir?"
''Norway."
"Sir! Run where, sir?"
"Sweden."
Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U boat-infested waters, the collision with Norway, the desperate run across frozen Nazi-occupied territory, all seem trivial compared with the shining goal of dipping into the world's largest and purest reservoir of authentic Swedish poontang.
"Shaftoe! Wake up!"
''Sir! Yes, sir!"
"You have noticed the way we are dressed." Monkberg refers to the fact that they have discarded their dog tags and are all wearing civilian or merchant-marine clothing.
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"We don't want the Nuns, or anyone else, to know what we really are."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"Now, you might ask yourself, if we're supposed to look like civilians, then why the hell are we carrying tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera."
"Sir! That was going to be my next question, sir!"
"Well, we have a cover story all worked out for that. Come with me."
Monkberg looks enthusiastic all of a sudden. He clambers to his feet and leads Shaftoe down various passageways and stairs to the freighter's cargo hold. "You know those other ships?"
Shaftoe looks blank.
"Those other ships around us? We are in the middle of a convoy, you know."
"Sir, yes sir!" Shaftoe says, a little less certainly. None of the men has been abovedecks very much in the hours since they were delivered, via submarine, to this wallowing wreck. Even if they had gone up for a look around they would have seen nothing but darkness and fog.
"A Murmansk convoy," Monkberg continues. "All of these ships are delivering weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. See?"
They have reached a cargo hold. Monkberg turns on an overhead light, revealing-crates. Lots and lots and lots of crates.
"Full of weapons," Monkberg says, "including tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera. Get my drift?"
"Sir, no sir! I do not get the lieutenant's drift!"
Monkberg comes one step closer to him. Unsettlingly close. He speaks, now, in a conspiratorial tone. "See, we're all just crew members on this merchant ship, making the run to Murmansk. It gets foggy. We get separated from our convoy. Then, boom! We slam into fucking Norway. We are stuck on Nazi-held territory. We have to make a break for Sweden! But wait a second, we say to ourselves. What about all those Germans between us and the Swedish border? Well, we had better be armed to the teeth, is what. And who is in a better position to arm themselves to the teeth than the crew of this merchant ship that is jam-packed with armaments? So we run down into the cargo hold and hastily pry open a few crates and arm ourselves."
Shaftoe looks at the crates. None of them have been pried open.
"Then," Monkberg continues, "we abandon ship and head for Sweden."
There is a long silence. Shaftoe finally rouses himself to say, "Sir! Yes, sir!"
"So get prying."
''Sir! Yes, sir!"
"And make it look hasty! Hasty! C'mon! Shake a leg!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
Shaftoe tries to get into the spirit of the thing. What's he going to use to pry a crate open? No crowbars in sight. He exits the cargo hold and strides down a passageway. Monkberg following him closely, hovering, urging him to be hastier: "You're in a hurry! The Nazis are coming! You have to arm yourself! Think of your wife and kids back in Glasgow or Lubbock or wherever the fuck you're from!"
"Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sir!" Shaftoe says indignantly.
"No, no! Not in real life! In your pretend role as this stranded merchant son of a bitch! Look, Shaftoe! Look! Salvation is at hand!"
Shaftoe turns around to see Monkberg pointing at a cabinet marked
FIRE.
Shaftoe pulls the door open to find, among other implements, one of those giant axes that firemen are always carrying in and out of burning structures.
Thirty seconds later, he's down in the cargo hold, Paul Bunyaning a crate of .45-caliber ammunition. "Faster! More haphazard!" Monkberg shouts. "This isn't a precise operation, Shaftoe! You are in a blind panic!" Then he says, "Goddamn it!" and runs forward and seizes the ax from Shaftoe's hands.
Monkberg swings wildly, missing the crate entirely as he adjusts to the tremendous weight and length of the implement. Shaftoe hits the deck and rolls to safety. Monkberg finally gets his range and azimuth worked out, and actually makes contact with the crate. Splinters and chips skitter across the deck.
"See!" Monkberg says, looking over his shoulder at Shaftoe, "I want splinteriness! I want chaos!" He is swinging the ax at the same time as he's talking and looking at Shaftoe, and he's moving his feet too because the ship is rocking, and consequently the blade of the weapon misses the crate entirely, overshoots, and comes down right on Monkberg's ankle.
"Gadzooks!" Lieutenant Monkberg says, in a quiet, conversational tone. He is looking down at his ankle in fascination. Shaftoe comes over to see what's so interesting.
A good chunk of Monkberg's lower left leg has been neatly cross sectioned. In the beam of Shaftoe's flashlight, it is possible to see severed blood vessels and ligaments sticking out of opposite sides of the meaty wound, like sabotaged bridges and pipelines dangling from the sides of a gorge.
"Sir! You are wounded, sir!" Shaftoe says. "Let me summon Lieutenant Root!"
"No! You stay here and work!" Monkberg says. "I can find Root myself." He reaches down with both hands and squeezes his leg above the wound, causing blood to gush out onto the deck. "This is perfect!" he says meditatively. "This adds so much realism."
After several repetitions of this order, Shaftoe reluctantly goes back to crate-hacking. Monkberg hobbles and staggers around the hold for a few minutes, bleeding on everything, then drags himself off in search of Enoch Root. The last thing he says is, "Remember! We are aiming for a ransacked effect!"
But the bit with the leg wound gets the idea across to Shaftoe more than Monkberg's words ever could. The sight of the blood brings up memories of Guadalcanal and more recent adventures. His last dose of morphine is wearing off, which makes him sharper. And he's staffing to get really seasick, which makes him want to fight it by doing some hard work.
So he more or less goes berserk with that ax. He loses track of what is going on.
He wishes that Detachment 2702 could have stayed on dry land-preferably dry warm land such as that place they stayed, for two sunny weeks, in Italy.
The first part of that mission had been hard work, what with humping those barrels of shit around. But the remainder of it (except for the last few hours) had been just like shore leave, except that there weren't any women. Every day they'd taken turns at the observation site, looking out over the Bay of Naples with their telescopes and binoculars. Every night, Corporal Benjamin sat down and radioed more gibberish in Morse code.
One night, Benjamin received a message and spent some time deciphering it. He announced the news to Shaftoe: "The Germans know we're here."
"What do you mean, they know we're here?"
"They know that for at least six months we have had an observation post overlooking the Bay of Naples," Benjamin said.
"We've been here less than two weeks."
''They're going to begin searching this area tomorrow."
"Well, then let's get the fuck out of here," Shaftoe said.
"Colonel Chattan orders you to wait," Benjamin said, "until you know that the Germans know that we are here."
"But I do know that the Germans know that we are here," Shaftoe said, "you just told me."
"No, no no no no," Benjamin said, "wait until you wouldknow that the Germans knew even if you didn'tknow from being told by Colonel Chattan over the radio."
"Are you fucking with me?"
"Orders," Benjamin said, and handed Shaftoe the deciphered message as proof.
As soon as the sun came up they could hear the observation planes crisscrossing the sky. Shaftoe was ready to execute their escape plan, and he made sure that the men were too. He sent some of those SAS blokes down to reconnoiter the choke points along their exit route. Shaftoe himself just laid down on his back and stared up at the sky, watching those planes.
Did he know that the Germans knew now?
Ever since he'd woken up, a couple of SAS blokes had been following him around, staring at him. Shaftoe finally looked in their direction and nodded. They ran away. A moment later he heard wrenches crashing against the insides of toolboxes.
The Germans had observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans knew. And those planes were clearly visible to Shaftoe, so he could, arguably, know that they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put "until positively sighted by Germans," whatever that meant.
One of those planes, in particular, was coming closer and closer. It was searching very close to the ground, cutting only a narrow swath on each pass. Waiting for it to pass over their position, Shaftoe wanted to scream. This was too stupid to be real. He wanted to send up a flare and get this over with.
Finally, in midafternoon, Shaftoe, lying on his back in the shade of a tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of that German airplane: a Henschel Hs 126[12] with a single swept-back wing mounted above the fuselage, so as not to block the view downwards, and with ladders and struts and giant awkward splay-footed landing gear sticking out all over. One German encased in a glass shroud and flying the plane, another out in the open, peering down through goggles and fiddling with a swivel-mounted machine gun. This one did all but look Shaftoe in the eye, then tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.
The Henschel altered its normal search pattern, cutting the pass short to swing round and fly over their position again.
"That's it," Shaftoe said to himself. He stood up and began walking towards the dilapidated barn. "That's it!" he shouted. "Execute!"
The SAS guys were in the back of the truck, under a tarp, working with their wrenches. Shaftoe glanced in their direction and saw gleaming parts from the Vickers laid out on clean white fabric. Where the hell had these guys gotten clean white fabric? They'd probably been saving it for today. Why couldn't they have got the Vickers in good working order before? Because they'd had orders to assemble it hastily, at the last possible minute.