"Doug, how are you?"
"I am just fine, thank you!" Doug is one of these guys who always interprets "how are you" as a literal request for information, not just an empty formality, and always seems slightly touched that someone would care enough to ask. "Mr. Howard here says that when you were sitting on top of that car typing you were actually doing something clever. And dangerous. At least from a legal point of view."
"Were you monitoring that?" Randy asks Tom.
"I saw packets moving through the Crypt, and later saw you on television. I put two and two together," Tom says. "Nice job, Randy." He lumbers forward and shakes Randy's hand. This is an almost embarrassing outpouring of emotion by Tom Howard standards.
"What I did there probably failed," Randy says. "If Tombstone's disk was blanked, it was blanked by the doorframe coil, and not by what I did."
"Well, you deserve recognition anyway, which is what your friend is trying to give you," Doug says, mildly irked at Randy's obtuseness.
"I should offer you a drink, and a chance to relax, and all of that," Tom says, looking towards his house, "but on the other hand Doug says you were flying Sultan Class."
"Let's talk out here," Randy says. "But actually there is one thing you could get me."
"What's that?" Tom asks.
Randy pulls the little disembodied hard drive out of his pocket and holds it up in the light, the wire-ribbon adangle. "A laptop computer and a screwdriver."
"Done," Tom says, and disappears down the tunnel. Doug meanwhile begins dismantling the weapon, as if just to keep his hands busy. He takes the parts out one by one and regards them curiously.
"What do you think of the HEAP gun?" Cantrell asks.
"I don't think it's as crazy as when I first heard of it," Doug says, "but if your friend Avi thinks that people are going to be able to manufacture rifled gun barrels in their basements to protect themselves against ethnic cleansing, he's got another thing coming."
"Rifled barrels are hard," Cantrell says. "There's no way around it. They'd have to be stockpiled and smuggled. But the idea is that anyone who downloaded the HEAP, and who had access to some basic machine tools, could build the rest of the weapon."
"I need to sit down with you sometime and explain everything else that's wrong with the idea," Doug says.
Randy changes the subject. "How's Amy?"
Doug looks up and eyes Randy carefully. "You want my opinion? I think she is lonely, and in need of reliable support and companionship."
Now that Doug has totally alienated both Randy and John, the gun range is completely silent for a while, which is probably how Doug likes it. Tom comes out with a laptop in one hand and, in the other, half a dozen blue plastic water bottles all shrink-wrapped together, already dribbling a trail of condensation.
"I have an agenda," Cantrell says, holding up the notepad.
"Wow! You guys are organized," Tom says.
"Item the first: Lawsuit and whether Epiphyte can continue to exist." Randy lays the laptop out on the same table where Doug is working with the HEAP gun and begins to remove screws. "I assume you guys know of the lawsuit and have worked out the implications of it yourself," he says. "If the Dentist can prove that Doug discovered the wreck as a byproduct of work he did for us, and if the value of that wreck is high enough compared to the value of the company, then the Dentist owns us, and for all practical purposes owns the Crypt."
"Whoa! Wait a minute. The Sultanowns the Crypt," Tom says. "If the Dentist controls Epiphyte, all he gets out of it is a contract to provide certain technical services in the Crypt."
Randy senses everyone's looking at him. He twirls screws out of the computer, refusing to agree with this.
"Unless there's something here I'm not getting," Tom says.
"I guess I'm just being paranoid and sort of assuming that the Dentist is somehow collaborating with forces in the U.S. government that are anti-privacy and anti-crypto," Randy says.
"Attorney General Comstock's cabal, in other words," Tom says.
"Yeah. For which I have never actually seen any evidence at all. But in the wake of the Ordo raid everyone seems to be assuming it. If that is the case, and the Dentist ends up providing technical services to the Crypt, then the Crypt is compromised. We have to assume, in that case, that Comstock has a man on the inside."
"Not just Comstock," Cantrell says.
"Okay, the U.S. government."
"Not just the U.S. government," Cantrell says. "The Black Chamber."
"What the hell do you mean by that?" Doug asks.
"There was a high-level conference a couple of weeks ago in Brussels. Hastily organized we think. Chaired by Attorney General Comstock. Representatives of all the G7 countries and a few others. We know people from the NSA were there. People from Internal Revenue. Treasury people-Secret Service. Their counterparts in the other countries. And a lot of mathematicians known to have been co-opted by the government. The U.S. vice president was there. Basically we think that they are planning to form some kind of international body to clamp down on crypto and particularly on digital money."
"The International Data Transfer Regulatory Organization," Tom Howard says.
"The Black Chamber is a nickname for that?" Doug asks.
"That's what people on the Secret Admirers mailing list have started calling it," Cantrell says.
"Why form this organization now?" Randy wonders.
"Because the Crypt is about to go hot, and they know it," Cantrell says.
"They are scared shitless about their ability to collect taxes when everyone is using systems like the Crypt," Tom explains to Doug.
"This has been the talk of the Secret Admirers mailing list for the last week. And so when Ordo was raided, it really hit a raw nerve.
"Okay," Randy says, "I've been wondering why people showed up there almost immediately with guns and stranger things." He has got the laptop opened up now and disconnected its hard drive.
"You have wandered off the agenda," Doug says, pulling an oily rag down the barrel of the HEAP gun. "The question is, does the Dentist have you guys by the balls, or only by the short hairs? And that question basically revolves around yours truly. Right?"
"Right!" Randy says, a little too forcefully-he's feeling desperate for a change in subject. The whole Kepler/Epiphyte/Semper Marine thing is stressful enough all by itself, and the last thing he needs is to be hanging around with people who believe it is nothing more than a skirmish in a war to decide the fate of the Free World-a preliminary round of the Apocalypse. Avi's obsession with the Holocaust seemed fine to Randy as long as Holocausts were things that happened long ago or far away-being personally involved in one is something Randy can do without. He should have stayed in Seattle. But he didn't, and so the next best thing for him is to limit the conversation to straightforward things like bars of gold.
"In order for him to have a claim, the Dentist needs to prove that Semper Marine found that wreck when it was doing the cable survey. Right?" Doug asks.
"Right," Cantrell says, before Randy can step in and say that it's a bit more complicated than that.
"Well, I havebeen kicking around this part of the world for half of my life, and I can always testify that I found the wreck on an earlier survey. That son of a bitch can never prove that I'm lying," Doug says.
"Andrew Loeb-his lawyer-is smart enough to know that. He will not put you on the stand," Randy says, screwing his own hard drive into place.
"Fine. Then all he's got is circumstantial evidence. Namely, the proximity of the wreck to the cable survey corridor."
"Right. Which implies a correlation," Cantrell says.
"Well, it is not that damn close," Doug says. "I was cutting a very wide swath at the time."
"I have bad news," Randy says. "First of all, it is a civil case and so circumstantial evidence is all he needs to win. Secondly, I just heard from Avi, on the plane, that Andrew Loeb is filing a second suit, for breach of contract."
"What goddamn contract?" Doug demands.
"He has anticipated everything you just said," Randy says. "He still doesn't know where the wreck is. But if it turns out to be miles and miles away from the survey corridor, he will claim that by surveying such a wide swath you were basically risking the Dentist's money in order to go prospecting, and that thus the Dentist still deserves a share of the proceeds."
"Why does the Dentist want a beef with me?" Doug says.
"Because then he can pressure you into testifying against Epiphyte. You get to keep all the gold. That gold becomes damages which the Dentist leverages into control of Epiphyte."
"Jesus fuckin' Christ!" Doug exclaims. "He can kiss my ass."
"I know that," Randy says, "but if he gets wind of that attitude, he'll just come up with another tactic and file another suit."
Doug begins, "Well that's kind of defeatist-"
"Where I'm headed with this," Randy says, "is that we cannot fight the Dentist on his turf-which is the courtroom-any more than the Viet Cong could have fought a pitched battle in the open against the U.S. Army. So there are some really good reasons to get that gold out of the wreck surreptitiously, before the Dentist can prove it's there."
Doug looks outraged. "Randy, have you ever tried to swim while holding a gold bar in one hand?"
"There's got to be a way to do it. Little submarines or something."
Doug laughs out loud and mercifully decides not to debunk the concept of little submarines. "Supposing it was possible. What do I do with the gold then? If I deposit it in a bank account, or spend it on something, what's to keep this Andrew Loeb guy from taking that as circumstantial evidence that the wreck had a ton of money in it? You're saying I have to sit on this money for the rest of my life in order to protect you from this lawsuit."
"Doug. You can do this," Randy says. "You get the gold. You put it on a boat. My friends here can explain the rest." Randy fits the laptop's plastic case back together and begins maneuvering the little screws back into their recesses.
Cantrell says, "You bring the boat here."
Tom continues, "To that beach, right down the hill. I'll be waiting for you with the Humvee."
"And you and Tom can drive it downtown and deposit that bullion in the vaults of the Central Bank of Kinakuta." Cantrell concludes.
Someone has finally said something that actually knocked Doug Shaftoe off balance. "And get what in return?" he asks suspiciously.
"Electronic cash from the Crypt. Anonymous. Untraceable. And untaxable."
Doug's regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs. "What'll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?"
"Soon enough, it'll buy you anything that money can buy," Tom says. "I would have to know a little more about it," Doug says. "But once again we are straying from the agenda. Let's leave it at this: you guys need me to strip that wreck bare, quickly and secretly."
"It's not just what weneed. It might be in your best interests, too," Randy says, groping on the back of the laptop for the power switch.
"Item the second: A former NSA hondo is surveilling us-and something about a Wizard?" John says.
"Yeah."
Doug's giving Randy a queer look and so Randy launches into a brief summary of his classification system of Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men-not to mention Gollums, which makes practically no sense to Doug, who hasn't read Lord of the Rings.Randy goes on to tell them about his conversation with Pontifex on the airplane phone. John Cantrell and Tom Howard are interested in this, as Randy would expect them to be, but what surprises him is how intently Doug Shaftoe listens.
"Randy!" Doug almost shouts. "Didn't you at any point ask this guy why Old Man Comstock was so interested in the Arethusa messages?"
"Coincidentally, this is the third item on the agenda," Cantrell says.
"Why didn't you ask him on the ski lift?" Randy jokes.
"I was giving him a very closely reasoned explanation of why I was about to sever the linkage between his ugly and perfumed corporeal self and his eternally condemned soul," Doug says. "Seriously! You got the messages from your grandpa's old war souvenirs. Right?"
"Right."
"And your grandpa Waterhouse picked them up where?"
"Judging from the dates, he must have been in Manila."
"Well, what do you imagine could have happened in Manila around that time that would be so damned important to Earl Comstock?"
"I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code."
"But that's bullshit!" Doug says. "Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'? Now. What do you think is the real reason Comstock wanted to crack Arethusa?"
"I have no idea," Randy says.
"The reason is gold," Doug says.
Randy snorts. "You have got gold on the brain."
"Did I or did I not take you out into the jungle and show you something?" Doug demands.
"You did. Sorry."
"Gold is the only thing that could account for it. Because otherwise, the Philippines just were not that important during the fifties, to justify such an effort at the NSA."
"There was an ongoing Huk insurrection," Tom says. "But you're right. The real focus-around here anyway-was Vietnam."
"You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war-which was Old Man Comstock's brainchild-the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary."
"As in primary gold repository?"
"You got it."
"Is that what Marcos eventually found?"
"Opinions differ," Doug says. "A lot of people think that the Primary is still waiting to be discovered."
"Well, there isn't any information about the Primary, or anything else, in these messages," Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode, with a torrent of error messages triggered by its inability to find various pieces of hardware that were present on Randy's laptop (which is in a Ford dealership's dumpster in Los Altos) but are not on Tom's. And yet the basic kernel works to the point that Randy can look at the file system and makes sure it's intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its long list of short files, each file the result of running a different stack of cards through Chester's card-reader. Randy opens up the first one and finds several lines of random capital letters.
"How do you know there's no information about the primary in those messages, Randy?" Doug asks.
"The NSA couldn't decrypt these messages in ten years," Randy says. "It all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator."
Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types
grep AADAA *
and hits the return key. It is a command to find the opening letter group in the ETC card messages, the famous one to which Pontifex had alluded. The machine answers back almost immediately with an empty prompt, meaning that the search failed.
"Ho-ly shit," Randy says.
"What?" everyone says at once.
Randy takes a long, deep breath. "These are not the same messages that Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break."
Chapter 81 DELUGE
It takes Goto Dengo about half a minute to waddle up the narrow entrance of the tunnel. He is trailing the fingers of one hand along the stone ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of the drills. Behind him he can hear the four members of his crew making their way along, muttering to each other calmly.
His fingers slide over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he's into the main drift now. He stands up and wades forward. Perfect blackness is cozy and reassuring to him-in it, he can always pretend that he is still a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that the last few years of his life have never happened.
But in fact he is a grownup and he is trapped in a hole in the Philippines and surrounded by armies of demons. He opens the valves on an acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but his crew is not, and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.
"Is everything okay, Lieutenant?" says one of his crew, fifty meters behind him.
"Fine," Goto Dengo says, loudly and clearly. "You four be careful you do not break your toes on this bar."
So now, Wing and Rodolfo and their men, waiting up ahead, know the number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.
"Where are the last few workers?" one of the crew shouts.
"In the fool's vault."
It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault, because it is packed with treasure. The starry core of a galaxy must look like this. They clamber up the shaft in its ceiling and make their way to the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.
"Shut off your headlamps," Goto Dengo says, "to conserve fuel. I will leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power."
He pulls a fistful of white cotton from a sterile box. It is the cleanest whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into smaller wads, like Father Ferdinand breaking the bread of the mass, and passes them out to the men, who stuff it ritualistically into their ears. "There is no more time to waste," he hollers, "Captain Noda must be growing impatient out there."
"Sir!" one of the men says, standing at attention and handing him a pair of wires marked MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION.
"Very well," Goto Dengo says, and screws the wires down to a pair of terminals on a wooden switch box.
It seems as though he should say something ceremonious, but nothing comes to mind. Nipponese men are dying all over the Pacific without first getting to make speeches.
He clenches his teeth together, shuts his eyes, and twists the switch handle.
The shock wave comes through the floor first, whacking the soles of their feet like a flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and strikes them like a moving wall of stone. The cotton in the ears seems to accomplish nothing. Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce off the backs of their sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have been crisply sheared off at the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his lungs. They are empty for the first time since the moment of his birth. Like newborn infants, he and the other men can only writhe and look around themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.
One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass around the jagged bottom of the bottle, each man taking a gulp of what remains. Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely shouts: "Check your watches." They all do. "In two hours, Captain Noda will demolish the plug on the bottom of the lake and flood the water traps. In the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs-get to work!"
They all hai,turn on their heels, and go their separate ways. It is the first time that Goto Dengo has actually sent men off to their deaths. But they are all dead men anyway, and so he doesn't know how to feel about it.
If he still believed in the emperor-still believed in the war-he would think nothing of it. But if he still believed, he wouldn't be doing what he is about to do.
It is important to keep up the appearance that this is a normal operation, and so he descends to the vault to perform his next scheduled duty: inspect what used to be the main drift. The vault is filled with a fog of rock dust around which his windpipe clenches like a fist grabbing a rope. His acetylene lamp only makes the dust glow, giving him a visibility of perhaps six inches. All he can see is the bullion right in front of his face, which still glimmers beneath a film of dust and smoke. The shock wave has deranged his formerly neat stacks of crates and bricks and turned the entire hoard into a rude mound that is still shedding avalanches, seeking its angle of repose. A 75-kilogram gold brick slides down the pile like a runaway boxcar, emerging suddenly from the cloud of dust, and he jumps out of its way. Bits of rock are still sifting down from the crazed ceiling and plinking against his helmet.
He scrambles carefully over the heap, breathing through a wad of cotton, until he can see what used to be the main drift. The dynamite has done the right thing: shattered the roof of the drift into billions of shards. Collapsed on the floor, they occupy a larger volume than the same mass of stone did when it was all in one piece. The drift is filled with tons of loose stone, all the way down to the entrance along the Tojo River, where Captain Noda's men are at work even now, concealing the tiny puncture wound behind river rocks.
He feels, rather than hears, a small explosion, and knows that some thing is going wrong. No one should be setting off explosions now.
Movement in this place is agonizingly slow, like a nightmare when you are trying to run away from a demon. It takes him so long to get back to the Hall of Glory that there is almost no point in doing it; whatever was happening is over when he arrives.
What he sees, when he arrives, is a group of three men waiting for him: Wing, Rodolfo, and the Filipino named Bong.
"The soldiers?"
"All dead," Rodolfo says flatly, irritated by the stupidity of the question.
"The others?"
"One soldier set off a grenade. Killed himself and my two men, Wing says.
"Another soldier heard the grenade and had a knife ready when Agustin came for him," Bong says. He shakes his head sorrowfully. "I think that Agustin was not ready to kill a man. He hesitated."
Goto Dengo stares at Bong, fascinated. "And you?"
Bong doesn't understand the question for a moment. Then light dawns. "Oh, no, I did not hesitate, Lieutenant Goto. A Nipponese soldier hurt my sister one time, in a very inappropriate way."
Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the other men are all looking at him expectantly. Then he checks his watch. He is shocked to see that only half an hour has gone by since he set off the dynamite.
"We have an hour and a half before the water traps are flooded. If we are not in the Bubble by then, we will be sealed off, with no escape possible," says Goto Dengo.
"We go there and wait," Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.
"No. Captain Noda listens, outside, for more explosions," Goto Dengo says, also in Chinese; then, in English, tells the Filipinos, "We have to set off the demolition charges at certain times or Noda-san will grow suspicious."
"Whoever sets them off will be trapped forever in this chamber," Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.
"We will not set them off from here," says Goto Dengo, pulling the lid from a crate. Inside are several long coils of two-stranded telephone wire. He hands the coils out to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. They understand, and begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.
They retreat through Golgotha in stages, lugging battery packs with them and unrolling the wires as they go, dynamiting the tunnel sections behind them one by one. As they do this, certain oddities of the tunnel system finally become clear to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. It becomes fully evident to them, for the first time, that the entire complex was carefully designed by Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes. To a loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like precisely what he was ordered to build: a vault laced with booby traps. But to the four men sealed inside, Golgotha has a second function. It is an escape machine. As the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and other features suddenly become clear, they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at Goto Dengo, with the same expressions as the soldiers wore, weeks ago, when they discovered the Buddha in the Mercedes.
Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who asked, that it was a water reservoir, put there to increase the deadliness of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four meters in diameter, that begins in the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a few meters, then dead-ends. Ladders still cling to its walls, and by ascending, they can reach a rock ledge big enough to sit on. Canteens of water and boxes of biscuits have already been stocked here by Wing and his men.
By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses this. It fills him with unutterable misery.
They have fifteen minutes to wait. The others spend it sipping water and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills it with self-recrimination. "I am a loathsome worm," he says, "a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy to clean out the latrines of true soldiers of Nippon. I am bereft-totally cut off from the nation I've betrayed. I am now part of a world of people who hate Nippon-and who therefore hate me-but at the same time I am hateful to my own kind. I will stay here and die."
"You are alive," Rodolfo says. "You have saved our lives. And you are rich."
"Rich?"
Wing and Rodolfo and Bong look at each other, confused. "Yes, of course!" Bong says.
Goto Dengo is still looking nonplussed. Reckoning that he has merely gone deaf or daft from the explosions, Bong reaches into his trousers and pulls out a hand-sewn pouch, teases it open, and displays a healthy double handful of diamonds. Wing and Rodolfo scarcely take note.
Goto Dengo looks away despondently. He himself has saved no treasure except these men's lives. But that's not why he feels so bad. He had hoped that being thus saved they would all be noble, and not think of the treasure. But maybe that was too much to hope for.
A distant thump lifts them slightly off the ledge, just for a moment. Goto Dengo feels a strange sensation in his head: the air pressure is beginning to rise. The column of air trapped in the diagonal is being compressed by a piston of water rushing down it from the lake. Captain Noda has dynamited the plug.
Goto Dengo is so excited that he forgets to die.
He is an engineer, trapped inside one of his own machines. The machine was designed to keep him alive, and he will never know whether it worked unless it works. After he has achieved that satisfaction, he supposes, he can always kill himself at leisure.
He pinches his nose shut, presses his lips together, and begins to blow air into his Eustachian tubes, equalizing the pressure. The others follow his lead.
All of Golgotha's traps are basically the same. All of them derive their killing power from the pressure of the water communicated down to this level from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. In any number of places in the complex, false walls have been constructed, designed to be pierced by greedy thieves, or to collapse of their own accord when thieves dig out the sand that holds them up. Then the water will rush in with explosive force and probably crush them before they have a chance to drown.
At its Golgotha end, the diagonal tunnel forks again and again, like a river breaking up into distributaries. Goto Dengo explained it to inspecting officers by likening it to the plumbing inside a modern hotel, which is supplied by a single main that is pressurized by a distant water tower, but which divides into many different pipes that supply pressurized water to taps all over the structure.
Golgotha seethes, hisses, and moans as every pipe in its ramified system is pressurized by the deluge unleashed by Captain Noda's dynamite charge. The bubbles of air trapped at the ends of those pipes are seeking escape: some are leaking out through cracks in the walls and others are bubbling away into the diagonal. The surface of Lake Yamamoto must be boiling like a cauldron, and Captain Noda must be standing above it, watching the air flee Golgotha, grinning with satisfaction. In moments, the floors of the tunnels are obscured by whirling lagoons of dirty water, and the barrels and railcars that were left there have begun to rise, bobbing like corks and clanging together.
Most of the air trapped in the Golgotha does not, however, come bubbling up out of Lake Yamamoto. Most of it rises towards the Bubble, because that is how Goto Dengo planned it. He knows it's working because his ears begin to pop.
Eventually the water rises up into the Bubble itself, but it rises slowly, because the pressure of the air in here has become quite high already. As the water climbs, it further pressurizes the bubble of air in which Goto Dengo and the others are trapped. The pressure of the air rises steadily until it becomes equal to the pressure of the water. Then balance is achieved, and the water cannot rise any more. Another kind of balance is being reached within their bodies, as the compressed air floods into their chests, and the nitrogen in that air seeps through the membranes of their lungs and dissolves into their bloodstreams.
"Now we wait," says Goto Dengo, and shuts off his acetylene lamp, leaving them in darkness. "As long as we do not burn lamps, there is enough air in this chamber to keep us alive for several days. Captain Noda and his men will spend at least that long tidying up the Bundok site, erasing all traces of our work, and killing themselves. So we must wait, or else his men will only kill us when we appear on the shores of Lake Yamamoto. I would like to spend the time educating you on the subject of caisson disease, also known as the bends."
Two days later they set off one last, relatively small dynamite charge, blowing a hole through the wall of the Bubble that is large enough to admit a human being. On the other side, the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto begins.
Rodolfo is more terrified than anyone else, and so they send him first. Then goes Bong, and then Wing. Finally Goto Dengo leaves the foul, used-up air of the Bubble behind. Within a few moments they have found their way into the ascending diagonal tunnel. They begin to swim uphill through total darkness. All of them are trailing their hands against the tunnel ceiling, feeling for the opening of the first vertical shaft. Rodolfo is supposed to stop when he feels it, but the others must also be alert in case Rodolfo misses.
They thud into one another in the darkness like a loosely connected train bumping to a halt. Rodolfo has stopped-with any luck, he has found the first vertical shaft. Wing finally moves forward, and Goto Dengo follows straight up the vertical shaft and finally into a bulb at its top where a bubble of air has been trapped. The bulb is just barely wide enough to accommodate four men. They pause there, all jammed together in a cluster of bodies, heaving as they exhale the nitrogen— and carbon-dioxide-tainted air that they've been living on for the last sixty seconds, and breathe in fresh lungfuls. Goto Dengo feels his ears popping as pressure is relieved.
They have covered only a small fraction of the four hundred and fifty meters that separate Golgotha from the lake horizontally.But half of the hundred-meter verticaldistance has already been covered. That is, the pressure of the air they are breathing in this chamber is only half of what it was in the Bubble.
Goto Dengo is not a diver, and knows very little of diving medicine. But his father used to speak of how caissons were used to send workers deep underwater, to build things or to mine. That is how he learned about caisson disease, and how he learned the rule of thumb that most men will not suffer its symptoms if you have them decompress for a while at half the original air pressure. If they stop and breathe for a while, the nitrogen will come out of the tissues. Once this is done, the air pressure may be halved again.
In the Bubble, the air pressure was nine or ten atmospheres. Here in the first chamber, it's more like five. But there's not much air in this one-just enough to let them breathe for fifteen or twenty minutes, and bleed nitrogen out of their tissues, and get lungfuls of air for the next leg of the swim.
"Okay," Goto Dengo says, "we go." He finds Rodolfo in the darkness and slaps him encouragingly on the shoulder. Rodolfo takes a series of deep breaths, getting ready, and Goto Dengo recites the numbers that they all know by heart: "Twenty-five strokes straight. Then the tunnel bends up. Forty strokes up a steep hill. Where the tunnel bends again, you go straight up to the next air chamber."
Rodolfo nods, crosses himself, and then does a somersault in the water and kicks himself downwards. Then goes Bong, then Wing, and finally Goto Dengo.
This leg is very long. The last fifteen meters is a vertical ascent into the air chamber. Goto Dengo had hoped that the natural buoyancy of their bodies would make this easy, even if they were on the verge of drowning. But as he is kicking up the narrow shaft, pushing frantically on the feet of Wing, who is above him and not going as fast as he would like, he feels a growing panic in his lungs. Finally he understands that he must fight the urge to hold his breath-that his lungs are filled with air at a much higher pressure than the water around him, and that if he doesn't let some of that air out, his chest will explode. So against his instinct to save that precious air, he lets it boil out of his mouth. He hopes that the bubbles will pass by the faces of the men above him and give them the idea too. But shortly after he does it, they all stop moving entirely.
For perhaps ten seconds Goto Dengo is trapped in total darkness in a water-filled vertical hole in the rock that is not much wider than his own body. Of all the things he has experienced in the war, this is the worst. But just as he gives up and prepares to die, they begin moving again. They are half dead when they get to the breathing chamber.
If Goto Dengo's calculations were right, then the pressure in here should be no more than two or three atmospheres. But he is beginning to doubt those calculations. When he has breathed in enough air to restore full consciousness, he's aware of sharp pains in his knees, and it's clear from the sounds that the others are making that they are suffering the same way.
"This time we wait as long as we can," he says.
The next leg is shorter, but it's made more difficult by the pain in their knees. Again Rodolfo goes first. But when Goto Dengo rises up into the next air chamber, about one and a half atmospheres above normal, only Bong and Wing are there.
"Rodolfo missed the opening," Bong says. "I think he went too far-up the ventilation shaft!"
Goto Dengo nods. Only a few meters beyond where they turned into this passage is a ventilation shaft that goes all the way to the surface. It has a sharp sideways jog in the middle that Goto put there so that when Captain Noda filled it up with rubble (which he has presumably done by now), the diagonal tunnel-their escape route-would not be blocked. If Rodolfo went up that shaft, he found a cul-de-sac, with no air bubble in the top.
Goto Dengo doesn't have to tell the others that Rodolfo is dead. Bong crosses himself and says a prayer. Then they stay for a while and take advantage of the air that Rodolfo should be sharing. The pain in Goto Dengo's knees becomes sharper, but after a while it plateaus.
"From here, only small changes in altitude, not much need to decompress. Mostly we swim for distance now," he says. They still have more than three hundred horizontal meters to cover, pierced with four more shafts for air. The last of these doubles as a legitimate ventilation shaft.
So from there on it is just swimming and resting, swimming and resting, until finally the walls of the tunnel peel away from them and they find themselves in Lake Yamamoto.
Goto Dengo breaks the surface and does nothing for a long time but tread water and breathe clean air. It is nighttime, and for the first time in a year, Bundok is quiet, except for the sound of Bong, kneeling on the shore of the lake, making the sign of the cross and mumbling prayers as fast as his lips can move.
Wing has already departed, without so much as a good-bye. This is shocking to Goto Dengo until he realizes what it means: he, too, is free to go. As far as the world knows, he is dead, all of his obligations discharged. For the first time in his life, he can do whatever he wants.
He swims to the shore, gets up on his feet, and starts walking. His knees hurt. He cannot believe that he has come through all of this, and his only problem is sore knees.
Chapter 82 BUST
"Kopi," Randy says to the flight attendant, then reconsiders, remembering that he is in steerage this time, and getting to a toilet might not be so easy. It's just a little Malaysian Air 757. The flight attendant sees the indecision on his face and wavers. Her face is framed in a gaudy, vaguely Islamic scarf that is the most tokenistic nod to sexual modesty he has ever seen. "Kopi nyahkafeina,"Randy says, and she beams and pours from the orange carafe. It is not that she doesn't speak English, just that Randy is starting to feel comfortable with the local pidgin. He realizes that this is the first step in a long process that will eventually turn him into one of these cheerful, burly, sunburned expats who infest the airport bars and Shangri-La hotels of the Rim.
Outside his window, the long slender isle of Palawan lies parallel to their flight path. A fogbound pilot could almost get from Kinakuta to Manila by following Palawan's beaches, but that is a moot point on a day like this. Those beaches slope gradually into the transparent waters of the South China Sea. When you're down there planted in the sand, looking at a glancing angle across the waves, it probably doesn't look like much, but from up here you can see straight down through the water for many fathoms, and so all of the islands, and even the coral heads, have skirts that start out dark brown or dun near the water and blend into yellow and finally into swimming-pool blue before eventually fading into the deep blue of the ocean. Every little coral head and sandbar looks like the iridescent eye on a peacock's plume.
After the conversation at Tom Howard's last night, Randy slept in his guest room and then spent most of the day in Kinakuta buying a new laptop, complete with a new hard drive, and transferring all of the data from the drive he salvaged in Los Altos onto the new one, encrypting everything in the process. Considering all of the completely boring and useless corporate documents he has subjected to state-of-the-art encryption, he can't believe he carried the Arethusa stuff around on his hard drive, unencrypted, for several days, and across a couple of national borders. Not to mention the original ETC punch-cards, which now reside in Tom Howard's basement safe. Of course that stuff is encrypted to begin with, but that was done in 1945, and so by modern standards it might as well have been enciphered with a cereal-box decoder ring. Or at least that is what Randy is kind of hoping. Another thing he did this morning was to download the current version of the Cryptonomiconfrom the ftp server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy's never looked at it in detail, but he has heard it contains samples of code, or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the very latest public code-breaking techniques in the Cryptonomiconmight match up to the classified technology that Pontifex and his colleagues were employing at the NSA thirty years ago. Those techniques didn't work against the Arethusa messages that they were trying to decrypt, but this was probably only because those messages were random numbers-not the real messages. Now that Randy has what he suspects are the real messages, he may be able to accomplish what Earl Comstock tried and failed to do during the fifties.
They are angling across the terminator-not the robotic assassin of moviedom, but the line between night and day through which our planet incessantly rotates. Looking east, Randy can see over the rim of the world to places where it is dusk, and the clouds catch only the reddest fraction of the sun's light, squatting in darkness but glowing with sullen contained fire like coals in their feathery ruffs of ash. The airplane is still in the daylight, and is assiduously tracked by mysterious bars of rainbow, little spectral doppelgangers-probably some new NSA surveillance technology. Some of the Palawan's rivers run blue and straight into the ocean and some carry enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept up the shore by currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of these countries are burning resources at a fantastic rate to get their economies stoked up, gambling that they'll be able to make the jump into hyperspace-some kind of knowledge economy, presumably-before they run out of stuff to sell and turn into Haiti.
Randy is paging his way through the opening sections of the Cryptonomicon,but he can never concentrate when he's on an airplane. The opening sections are stolen pages from World War II-era military manuals. These used to be classified until ten years ago, when one of Cantrell's friends found copies just sitting in a library in Kentucky and drove there with a shitload of dimes and photocopied them. That got public, civilian cryptanalysis up to where the government was in the l940s. The Xeroxes have been scanned and OCRed and converted to the HTML format used for Web pages so that people can put in links and marginal notes and annotations and corrections without messing with the original text, and this they have done enthusiastically, which is all very well but makes it hard to read. The original text is set in a deliberately crabbed, old-fashioned typeface to make it instantly distinguishable from the cyber-era annotations. The introduction to the Cryptonomiconwas written, probably before Pearl Harbor, by a guy named William Friedman, and is filled with aphorisms probably intended to keep neophyte code-breakers from slapping grenades to their heads after a long week of wrestling with the latest Nipponese machine ciphers.
The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.
Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.
And, Randy's favorite,
As to luck, there is the old miners' proverb: "Gold is where you find it."
So far so good, but then with a few whacks of the Page Down key Randy's looking at endless staggered grids of random letters (some kind of predigital method for solving ciphers) which the author would not have put into the document if they did not convey some kind of useful lesson to the reader. Randy is miserably aware that until he has learned to read through these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that the book was written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant, who lived in some radically different pre-hokiness era where planes really did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in conversation were likely to end up pitied or shunned or maybe even psychoanalyzed.