Cryptonomicon (111 page)

The new jail cell is indeed in a big scary old building somewhere in the torus of major governmental institutions that surrounds the dead hole of Intramuros. It is not in, but it is right next to, a major court building. They drive through alleys among these big old stone buildings for a while and then present credentials at a guardhouse and wait for a big iron gate to be rolled aside, and then they drive across a paved courtyard that hasn’t been swept out in a while and present more credentials and wait for an actual portcullis to be winched up, clearing an orifice that ramps them down beneath the building itself. Then the car stops and they are abruptly surrounded by men in uniforms.

The process is uncannily like pulling up to the main entrance of an Asian business hotel, except that the men in the uniforms carry guns and don’t offer to tote Randy’s laptop. He has a chain around his waist and manacles attached to that chain in front, and leg chains that shorten his stride. The chain between his ankles is supported in the middle by another chain that goes up to his waist so that it will not scrape the ground as he walks. He has just enough manual dexterity to grip the laptop and keep it pressed up against his lower abdomen. He’s not just any chained wretch, he is a digital chained wretch, Marley’s Ghost on the Information Superhighway. That a man in his situation is being allowed to have the laptop is so grotesquely implausible that it causes him to doubt even his own supremely cynical assessment of it,
namely that Someone—presumably the same Someone who is Sending Him a Message—has already discovered that everything on the hard drive is encrypted, and is now trying to gull him into firing the machine up and using it so that—so that what? Maybe they’ve rigged up a camera in his cell and will be peering over his shoulder. But that would be easy for him to defeat; he just has to not be completely stupid.

The guards lead Randy down a corridor and through some prisoner check-in stuff that doesn’t really apply to him since he has already filled out the forms and turned over his personal effects at another jail. Then the great big scary metal doors commence, and corridors that don’t smell so good, and he hears the generalized hubbub of a jail. But they take him past the hubbub and into other corridors that seem to be older and less used, and finally through an old-fashioned jailhouse door of iron bars and into a long vaulted stone room containing a single row of maybe half a dozen cells, with a guard’s passageway running along past the doors of the iron cages. Like a theme-park simulacrum of a jail. They take him all the way down to the last cell and put him there. A single iron bedstead awaits him, a thin cotton mattress with stained but clean sheets and an army blanket folded and stacked on top of it. An old wooden filing cabinet and folding chair have been moved into the cell and placed in one corner, right against the stone wall that is the terminus of this long room. The filing cabinet is evidently meant to serve as Randy’s work table. The drawers are locked shut. This cabinet has actually been locked into place with a few turns of heavy chain and a padlock, so it’s very clear that he is expected to use the computer there, in that corner of the cell, and nowhere else. As Attorney Alejandro promised, an extension cord has been plugged into a wall outlet near the cellblock entrance and run down the passageway and securely knotted around a pipe out of Randy’s reach and the tail end of it allowed to trail across in the direction of the filing cabinet. But it does not quite reach into Randy’s cell, so the only way to plug the computer in is to set it up on that cabinet and stick the power cord into the back and then toss the other end out through the iron bars to a guard, who can mate it with the extension cord.

At first this appears to be just one of these maddening control-freak things, an exercise of power for the pure sadistic pleasure of it. But after Randy’s been unchained, and locked in his cell, and left alone for a few minutes to run through it in his head, he thinks otherwise. Of course normally Randy could leave the computer on the card table while the batteries charged and then carry it over to his bed and use it there until the batteries ran down. But the batteries were removed from the machine before Attorney Alejandro gave it to him, and there don’t seem to be any ThinkPad battery packs lying around his cell. So he will have to keep it plugged in all the time, and because of the way they have set up the filing cabinet and the extension cord, he is forced by certain immutable properties of three-dimensional Euclidean spacetime to use the machine in one and only one place: right there on top of that damn filing cabinet. He does not think this is an accident.

He sits down on that filing cabinet and scans the wall and ceiling for over-the-shoulder video cameras, but he doesn’t look very hard and he doesn’t really expect to see one. To make out text on a screen they would have to be very high-resolution cameras, which would imply big and obvious; subtle pinhole cameras wouldn’t do it. There aren’t any big cameras around here.

Randy becomes almost certain that if he could unlock that filing cabinet, he would find some electronic gear inside it. Directly underneath his laptop there is probably an antenna to pick up Van Eck signals emanating from the screen. Below that, there is some gear to translate those signals into a digital form and transmit the results to a listening station nearby, probably right on the other side of one of these walls. Down in the bottom are probably some batteries to make it all run. He rocks the cabinet back and forth as much as the chains will allow, and finds that it is indeed rather bottom-heavy, as if there’s a car battery sitting in the bottom drawer. Or maybe it’s just his imagination. Maybe they are letting him have his laptop just because they are nice guys.

So this is it then. This is the setup. This is the deal. It is all very clean and simple. Randy fires up the laptop just to prove
that it still works. Then he makes his bed and goes and lies down on it, just because it feels really good to lie down. It is the first time he’s had anything like privacy in at least a week. Notwithstanding Avi’s bizarre admonition against self-abuse on the beach in Pacifica, it is high time that Randy took care of something. He needs to concentrate really hard now, and a certain distraction must be done away with. Replaying his last conversation with Amy is enough to give him a good erection. He reaches down into his pants and then abruptly falls asleep.

He wakes up to the sound of the cellblock door clanging open. A new prisoner is being led in. Randy tries to sit up and finds that his hand is still in his pants, having failed to accomplish its mission. He pulls it out of there reluctantly and sits up. He swings his feet down off the bed and onto the stone floor. Now he’s got his back to the adjacent cell, which is a mirror image of his; i.e., the beds and the toilets of the two cells are right next to each other along their shared partition. He stands up and turns around and watches this other prisoner being led into the cell next to his. The new guy is a white man, probably in his sixties, maybe even seventies, though you could make a case for fifties or eighties. Quite vigorous, anyway. He’s wearing a prison coverall just like Randy’s, but accessorized differently: instead of a laptop, he’s got a crucifix dangling from a rosary with great big fat amber beads, and some sort of medallion on a silver chain, and he’s clutching several books to his belly: a Bible, and something big and in German, and a current bestselling novel.

The guards are treating him with extreme reverence; Randy assumes the guy is a priest. They are talking to him in Tagalog, asking him questions—being, Randy thinks, solicitous to his needs and desires—and the white man answers them in reassuring tones and even tells a joke. He makes a polite request; a guard scurries out and returns moments later with a deck of cards. Finally the guards back out of the cell, practically bowing and scraping, and lock him in with apologies that start to get a little monotonous. The white man says something, forgiving them wittily. They laugh nervously and leave. The white man stands there in the middle of his cell for a minute, staring at the floor contemplatively, maybe praying or something. Then he snaps out of it and starts looking
around. Randy leans into the partition and sticks his hand through the bars. “Randy Waterhouse,” he says.

The white man frisbees his books onto the bed, glides towards him, and shakes his hand. “Enoch Root,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you in person, Randy.” His voice is unmistakably that of Pontifex—[email protected].

Randy freezes up for a long time, like a man who has just realized that a colossal practical joke is being played on him, but doesn’t know just
how
colossal it is, or what to do about it. Enoch Root sees that Randy is paralyzed, and steps smoothly into the gap. He flexes the deck of cards in one hand and shoots them across to the other; the queue of airborne cards just hangs there between his hands for a moment, like an accordion. “Not as versatile as ETC cards, but surprisingly useful,” he muses. “With any luck, Randy, you and I can
make
a
bridge
—as long as you are just standing there
pontificating
anyway.”

“Make a bridge?” Randy echoes, feeling and probably sounding rather stupid.

“I’m sorry, my English is a bit rusty—I meant
bridge
as in a card game. Are you familiar with it?”

“Bridge? No. But I thought it took four people.”

“I have come up with a version that is played by
two
. I only hope this deck is complete—the game requires fifty-four cards.”

“Fifty-four,” Randy muses. “Is your game anything like Pontifex?”

“One and the same.”

“I think I have the rules for Pontifex squirreled away on my hard drive somewhere,” Randy says.

“Then let’s play,” says Enoch Root.

S
HAFTOE JUMPS OUT OF THE AIRPLANE.
T
HE AIR IS
bracingly cold up here, and the wind chill factor is something else. It is the first time in a year that he has not been loathsomely hot and sweaty.

Something jerks mightily on his back: the static line, still attached to the airplane—God forbid that American fighting men should be entrusted to pull their own ripcords. He can just imagine the staff meeting where they dreamed up the concept of the static line: “For God’s sake, General, they’re just enlisted men! As soon as they jump out of the airplane they’ll probably start daydreaming about their girlfriends, take a few hits from their pocket flasks, catch forty winks, and before you know it they’ll all pile into the ground at a couple of hundred miles an hour!”

The drogue chute flutters out, catches air, and then eviscerates his main pack in one jerk. There’s a bit of flopping and buffeting as Bobby Shaftoe’s body pulls the disorganized cloud of silk downwards, then it thunks open and he is left hanging in space, his dark body forming a small perfect bullseye in the center of the off-white canopy for any Nipponese riflemen down below.

No wonder those paratroopers think they are gods among men: they get such a nice view of things, so much better than a poor Marine grunt stuck down on the beach, who is always looking uphill into courses of pillboxes. All of Luzon stretches out before him. He can see one or two hundred miles north, across a mat of vegetation as dense as felt, to the mountains in the far north where General Yamashita, the Lion of Malaya, is holed up with a hundred thousand troops, each of whom would like nothing better than to strap lots of explosives to his body, sneak through the lines at night, run into the middle of a large concentration of American soldiers, and blow himself up for his emperor. To Shaftoe’s starboard is Manila Bay, and even from this distance, some thirty miles, he can see the jungle suddenly turn thin and brown as it nears the shore, like a severed leaf that is dying from the edge inwards—that would be what’s left of the city of Manila. The fat twenty-mile-long tongue of land protruding towards him is Bata’an. Just off the tip of it is a rocky island shaped like a tadpole with a green head and a bony brown tail: Corregidor. Smoke jets from many vents on the island, which has been mostly reconquered by the Americans. Quite a few Nipponese blew themselves up in their underground bunkers rather than
surrender. This heroic act has given someone in The General’s chain of command a nifty idea.

A couple of miles from Corregidor, motionless on the water, is something that looks like an absurdly squat, asymmetrical battleship, except much bigger. It is encircled by American gunboats and amphibious landing forces. From a source on its lid, a long wisp of red smoke trickles downwind: a smoke bomb dropped out of Shaftoe’s plane a few minutes ago, on a parachute. As Shaftoe descends, and the wind blows him directly towards it, he can see the grain of the reinforced concrete of which this prodigy is made. It used to be a dry rock in Manila Bay. The Spanish built a fort there, the Americans built a chain of gun emplacements on top of that, and when the Nips showed up they turned the entire thing into a solid reinforced-concrete fortress with walls thirty feet thick, and a couple of double-barreled fourteen-inch gun turrets on the top. Those guns have long since been silenced; Shaftoe can see long cracks in their barrels, and craters, like frozen splashes in the steel. Even though he is parachuting onto the roof of an impregnable Nipponese fortress chock-full of heavily armed men who are desperately looking for a picturesque way to die, Shaftoe is perfectly safe; every time a Nip pokes a rifle barrel or a pair of binoculars out of a gun slit, half a dozen American antiaircraft gunners open up on him at point-blank range from the nearby ships.

A tremendous racket ensues as a small power boat pops out of a little cave along the waterline of the island and heads directly towards an American landing craft. A hundred guns open fire on it simultaneously. Supersonic bits of metal crash into the water all around the little boat, ton after ton of them. Each bit makes a splash. All of the splashes combine into a jagged, volcanic eruption of white water centered on the little boat. Bobby Shaftoe puts his fingers in his ears. Two thousand pounds of high explosive packed into the little boat’s nose detonate. The shock wave flashes across the surface of the water, a powdery white ring expanding with supernatural velocity. It hits Bobby Shaftoe like a baseball to the bridge of the nose. He neglects to steer his chute for a while, and trusts the winds to carry him to the right place.

The smoke bomb was dropped as proof of the concept that a man on a parachute might actually be able to land on the roof of this fortress. Bobby Shaftoe is, of course, the final and irrefutable test of this proposition. As he gets closer, and his head clears from the explosion, Shaftoe sees that the smoke bomb never actually reached the roof: its little chute got tangled up in the briar patch of antennas growing out of the top of the thing.

All kinds of fucking antennas! Even during his days in Shanghai, Shaftoe had a weird feeling around antennas. Those Station Alpha pencil-necks, in their little wooden roof-shack with all the antennas sprouting from it—those were not soldiers, sailors, or Marines in the normal sense. Corregidor was covered with antennas before the Nips came and took it. And everywhere that Shaftoe went during his Detachment 2702 stint, there were antennas.

He is going to spend the next few moments concentrating very hard on those antennas, and so he turns his head for a moment to get a bearing on the American LCM—the landing craft that the Nip suicide boat was hoping to destroy. It is exactly where it is supposed to be—halfway between the encircling force of naval ships and the sheer, forty-foot-high wall of the fortress. Even if Shaftoe didn’t already know the plan, he would, at a glance, identify this vessel as a Landing Craft, Mechanized (Mark 3), a fifty-foot-long steel shoebox designed to cough a medium-sized tank up onto a beach. It has a couple of fifty-caliber machine guns on it which are pounding away dutifully at various targets on the wall of the fortress which Shaftoe cannot see. But from his vantage point On High he can see something that the Nipponese can’t: the LCM is not carrying a tank, in the sense of a vehicle on caterpillar treads with a gun turret. It is carrying, rather, a tank in the sense of a large steel container with pipes and hoses and stuff attached to it.

The Nips in the fortress are taking potshots at the approaching LCM, but the only target at which they have to aim is its front door, a piece of metal that can flop down to become a ramp, and which was designed, incredibly enough, on the assumption that doomed Nips would spend a lot of time trying to blow holes in it with various
projectile weapons. So the defenders are not getting anywhere. Antiaircraft gunners on other ships have begun raking the walls of the fortress insanely, making it hard for the Nipponese to poke their heads and their gun barrels out. Shaftoe notes fragments of antennas skittering and bouncing across the roof of the fortress, and occasional streaks of tracers, and hopes that the men on those ships have the presence of mind to hold their fire before he lands on the fucking thing, which will be in a few seconds.

Shaftoe realizes that his mental concept of what this mission was going to be like, as he reviewed it with the officers in the LCM, bears no relationship to the reality. This is only about the five thousandth time Shaftoe has experienced this phenomenon in the course of the Second World War; you’d think he would no longer be surprised by it. The antennas, which looked wispy and inconsequential on the reconnaissance photos, are in fact sizable engineering works. Or they were until they got de-engineered by the naval gunfire that silenced those big guns. Now they are just wreckage of a sort that is going to be peculiarly nasty to parachute down on top of. The antennas were, and the wreckage is, made of all kinds of different shit: spars of Philippine mahogany, sturdy columns of bamboo, welded steel trusses. The most common bits are the ones that catch a parachutist’s eye: long metal poky things, and miles and miles of guy wire, snarled into a briarpatch, some of it taut enough to cut a plummeting Marine’s head off and some of it all loose and tangly with sharp hovering ends.

It dawns on Shaftoe that this pile isn’t just a gun emplacement; it’s a Nip intelligence headquarters. “Waterhouse, you fucking son of a bitch!” Shaftoe hollers. As far as he knows, Waterhouse is still in Europe. But he realizes, as he’s clapping his hands protectively over his eyes and falling into the nightmare, that Waterhouse must have something to do with this.

Bobby Shaftoe has landed. He tries to move and the wreckage moves with him; he is one with it.

He opens his eyes carefully. His head is wrapped up in a snarl of heavy wire—a guy wire that broke under tension and whipped around him. Peering between loops of wire,
he sees three lengths of quarter-inch metal tubing projecting out of his torso. Another one has gone through his thigh, and yet another through his upper arm. He’s pretty sure he has a broken leg too.

He lies there for a while, listening to the sound of the guns all around him.

There is work that needs to be done. All he can think of is the boy.

He gropes for the wire cutter with his free hand and begins to cut himself loose from the snarl.

The jaws of the wire cutter just barely fit over the metal tubing of the antenna. He reaches behind himself, finds the places where the tubes poke into his back, and cuts them off, snip, snip, snip. He cuts the tube that has impaled his arm. He leans forward and cuts the one that goes through his leg. Then he pulls the tubes out of his flesh and drops them on the concrete, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink. Lots of blood follows.

He doesn’t even try to walk. He just begins to drag himself across the concrete roof of the fortress. The sun has warmed the concrete and it feels good. He cannot see the LCM, but he can see the few antennas that stick out of its top, and he knows it is in position now.

The rope should be there. Shaftoe props himself up on his elbows and looks. Sure enough, there it is, a manila rope (natch!) tied to a grapnel, one point of the grapnel lodged in a shell crater near the edge of the roof.

He gets to it eventually, and begins to pull on the rope. He closes his eyes, but tries not to fall asleep. He keeps pulling, and eventually feels something big and thick between his hands: the hose.

Almost finished. Lying on his back, hugging the end of the hose to his chest, he rolls his head from side to side until he can see the air vent that they picked out on the reconnaissance photos. It used to have a sheet-metal hood on the top of it, but that’s long gone now, it’s just a hole in the roof with a few jagged bits of metal at its edges. He crawls over to it and feeds in the end of the hose.

Someone must be watching him on one of the ships, because the hose stiffens, like a serpent coming alive, and
between his hands Bobby Shaftoe can feel the fuel oil streaming through it. Ten thousand gallons of the stuff. Straight down into the fortress. He can hear the Nips down there, singing hoarse songs. By now they will have figured out what is about to happen. General MacArthur is giving them exactly what they’ve been praying for.

At this point, Bobby Shaftoe is supposed to abseil down a rope into the LCM, but he knows it isn’t going to happen. No one can reach him now, no one can help him. When the fuel oil stops streaming through the hose, he summons all the concentration he has left. Pretends, one last time, that he actually gives a damn. Jerks the safety pin from a white phosphorus grenade, lets the handle fly off and tinkle merrily across the roof. He can feel it come alive in his hand, the thrumming animal fizz of its inner fuse. He drops it into the air shaft: a circular pipe straight down, a black disk centered on a field of dingy grey, like the ashes of a Nipponese flag.

Then, on an impulse, he dives in there after it.

Semper Fidelis

Dawn star flares on disk of night

I fall, sun rises