Cryptonomicon (97 page)

The carts that brought in the equipment were simply grabbed off the roads by the Nipponese Army, along with their drivers—mostly farmboys—and pressed into service on the spot. The farmboys can never leave Bundok, of course. The weaker carabaos are slaughtered for meat, the stronger ones put to work on Golgotha, and the drivers are assimilated into the workforce. One of these is a boy named Juan with a big round head and a distinctly Chinese cast to his features. He turns out to be trilingual in English, Tagalog, and Cantonese. He can communicate in a sort of pidgin with Wing and the other Chinese, frequently by using a finger to draw Chinese characters on the palm of his hand. Juan is small, healthy, and has a kind of wary agility that Goto Dengo thinks may be useful in what is to come, and so he becomes one of the special crew.

The submerged plumbing in Lake Yamamoto needs to be inspected. Goto Dengo has Rodolfo ask around and see if there are any men among them who have worked as pearl divers. He quickly finds one, a lithe, frail-looking fellow from Palawan, named Agustin. Agustin is weak from dysentery, but he seems to perk up around water, and after a couple
of days’ rest is diving down to the bottom of Lake Yamamoto with no trouble. He becomes another one of Rodolfo’s picked men.

There are really too many Filipinos for the number of tools and holes that they have available, and so the work goes quickly at first as fresh men are quickly rotated through by the squad leaders. Then, one night at about two in the morning, an unfamiliar sound reverberates through the jungle, filtering up from the lowlands where the Tojo River meanders through cane fields and rice paddies.

It is the sound of vehicles. Masses of them. Since the Nipponese have been out of fuel for months, Goto Dengo’s first thought is that it must be MacArthur.

He throws on a uniform and runs down to Bundok’s main gate along with the other officers. Dozens of trucks, and a few automobiles, are queued up there, engines running, headlights off. When he hears a Nipponese voice coming from the lead car, his heart sinks. He long ago stopped feeling bad about wanting to be rescued by General Douglas MacArthur.

Many soldiers ride atop the trucks. When the sun rises, Goto Dengo savors the novel and curious sight of fresh, healthy, well-fed Nipponese men. They are armed with light and heavy machine guns. They look like Nipponese soldiers did way back in 1937, when they were rolling across northern China. It gives Goto Dengo a strange feeling of nostalgia to remember a day when a terrible defeat was not imminent, when they were not going to lose everything horribly. A lump actually gathers in his throat, and his nose begins to run.

Then he snaps out of it, realizing that the big day has finally arrived. The part of him that is still a loyal soldier of the emperor has a duty to see that the vital war materiel, which has just arrived, is stored away in the big vault of Golgotha. The part of him that isn’t a loyal soldier anymore still has a lot to accomplish.

In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can’t find your ass with both hands. This day is no exception. But after a few hours of chaos, things get straightened out, people
learn their roles. The heavier trucks cannot make it up the rough road that Goto Dengo has had built up the streambed of the Tojo River, but a couple of the small ones can, and these become the shuttles. So the big trucks pull, one by one, into a heavily fenced and guarded area—well sheltered from MacArthur’s observation planes—that was built months ago. Filipinos swarm into these trucks and unload crates, which are small, but evidently quite heavy. Meanwhile the smaller trucks shuttle the crates up the Tojo River Road to the entrance of Golgotha, where they are unloaded onto hand cars and rolled into the tunnel to the main vault. As per the instructions handed down from on high, Goto Dengo sees to it that every twentieth crate is diverted to the fool’s chamber.

The unloading proceeds automatically from there, and Goto Dengo devotes most of these days to supervising the final stages of the digging. The new ventilation shafts are proceeding on schedule, and he only needs to check them once a day. The diagonal is now only a few meters away from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. Groundwater has begun to seep through small cracks in the bedrock and trickle down the diagonal into Golgotha, where it collects in a sump that drains into the Tojo. Another few meters of cutting and they will break through into the short stub tunnel that Wing and his men created many months ago, digging downwards from what later became the bottom of the lake.

Wing himself is otherwise engaged these days. He and Rodolfo and their special crew are completing final preparations. Rodolfo and company are digging down from the top of the ridge, cutting what looks like just another vertical ventilation shaft. Wing and company are directly below, engaged in a complicated subterranean plumbing project.

Goto Dengo has entirely lost track of what day it is. About four days after the trucks come, though, he gets a clue. The Filipinos spontaneously break into song over their evening rice bowls. Goto Dengo recognizes the tune vaguely; he occasionally heard the American Marines singing it in Shanghai.

What child is this,

Who laid to rest,

On Mary’s lap is sleeping?

The Filipinos sing that and other songs, in English and Spanish and Latin, all evening long. After they get their lungs unlimbered they sing astonishingly well, occasionally breaking into two- and three-part harmony. At first, Lieutenant Mori’s guards get itchy trigger fingers, thinking it’s some kind of a signal for a mass breakout. Goto Dengo doesn’t want to see his work cut short by a massacre, and so he explains to them that it is a religious thing, a peaceful celebration.

That night, another midnight truck convoy arrives and the workers are rousted to unload it. They work cheerfully, singing Christmas carols and making jokes about Santa Claus.

The whole camp stays up well past sunrise unloading trucks. Bundok has gradually become a nocturnal place anyway, to avoid the gaze of observation planes. Goto Dengo is just thinking of hitting the sack when a fusillade of sharp crackling noises breaks out up above the camp on the Tojo River. Ammunition being in short supply, hardly anyone actually fires guns anymore, and he almost doesn’t recognize the sound of the Nambu.

Then he jumps onto the running board of a truck and tells the driver to head upstream. The shooting has died down as suddenly as it started. Beneath the bald tires of the truck, the river has turned opaque and bright red.

About two dozen corpses lie in the water before the entrance to Golgotha. Nipponese soldiers stand around them, up to their calves in the red water, their weapons slung from their shoulders. A sergeant is going around with a bayonet, stirring the guts of the Filipinos who are still moving.

“What is going on?” Goto Dengo says. No one answers. But no one shoots him, either; he will be allowed to figure it out himself.

The workers had clearly been unloading another small truck, which is still parked there at the head of the road. Resting beneath its tailgate is a wooden crate that was
apparently dropped. Its heavy contents have exploded the crate and spilled across the uneven conglomerate of river rocks, poured concrete, and mine tailings that make up the riverbed here.

Goto Dengo sloshes up to it and looks. He sees it clearly enough, but he can’t somehow absorb the knowledge until he feels it in his hands. He bends down, wraps his fingers around a cold brick on the bottom of the river, and heaves it up out of the water. It is a glossy ingot of yellow metal, incredibly heavy, stamped with words in English:
BANK OF SINGAPORE
.

There is a scuffle behind him. The sergeant stands at the ready as two of his men jerk the Filipino driver out of the cab of his truck that Goto Dengo rode in on. Calmly—looking almost bored—the sergeant bayonets the driver. The men drop him in the red water and he disappears. “Merry Christmas” one of the soldiers cracks. Everyone laughs, except for Goto Dengo.

A
S
A
VI WALKS BACK THROUGH HIS HOUSE, HE UTTERS
something biblical-sounding in Hebrew that causes his kids to burst into tears, and his nannies to rise from the kid-mat and begin shoving stuff into bags. Devorah emerges from a back room where she’s been sleeping off some morning sickness. She and Avi embrace tenderly in the hallway and Randy begins to feel like a fleck of debris lodged in someone’s eye. So he heads straight for an exit, goes out to his car and starts driving. He winds through the hills over the San Andreas Fault to Skyline and then heads south. Ten minutes later, Avi’s car howls past him in the left lane, doing ninety or a hundred. Randy barely has time to read the bumper sticker:
MEAN PEOPLE SUCK
.

Randy’s looking for a totally anonymous location where he can patch into the Internet. A hotel doesn’t work because a hotel keeps good records of outgoing telephone calls. What he should really do is use this packet radio
interface he has for his laptop, but even that requires a place to sit down and work undisturbed for a while. Which gets him thinking in terms of a fast food joint, not to be found in the mid-peninsular wasteland. By the time he has reached the northern skirts of the Valley—Menlo Park and Palo Alto—he has decided fuck it, he’ll just go to the scene of the action. Maybe he could be of some use there. So he gets off at the El Monte exit and heads into the business district of Los Altos, a pretty typical mid-twentieth-century American downtown gradually being metabolized by franchises.

A major street intersects, at something other than a ninety-degree angle, a smaller commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute-angle lots and two (larger) obtuse-angle lots. On one side of the major street, the obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a two-storey office building, home of Ordo’s offices and Tombstone. The acute-angle lot is occupied by the McDonald’s. On the opposite side of the major street, the acute-angle lot is occupied by, weirdly enough, a 24 Jam, the only one Randy has ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. The obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a Park ‘n’ Lock, where you can park for the old-fashioned purpose of wandering around the business district from store to store.

The parking lot of the McDonald’s is full, and so Randy pulls through its drive-through window, chooses
n,
where
n
is a random number between one and six, and asks for Value Meal
n
with super-size fries. This having been secured, he guns the Acura directly across the big street into the Park ’n’ Lock just in time to see its last available space being seized by a minivan bearing the logo of a San Jose television station. Randy is not planning to stray far from his car, so he just blocks in another car. But as he is setting the parking brake, he notices movement inside it, and with a bit of further attention realizes he is watching a man with long hair and a beard methodically ramming shells into a pump shotgun. The man catches sight of Randy in his rearview mirror and turns around with a scrupulously polite pardon-me-sir-but-you-seem-to-have-blocked-me-in look. Randy recognizes him as Mike or Mark, a graphics card hacker who farms ostriches in Gilroy (quirky hobbies
being de rigueur in the high-tech world). He moves the Acura, blocking in what looks like an abandoned van from the
Starsky and Hutch
epoch.

Randy climbs up on the roof of his car with his laptop and his Value Meal
n.
Until recently he would never have sat on top of his Acura because his considerable mass would dimple the sheet metal. But after Amy rammed it with the truck, Randy became much less anal, and now sees it as a tool to be used until it is just a moraine of rusted shards. He happens to have a twelve-volt adapter for the laptop, so he runs that down into his cigarette lighter socket. Finally, he’s settled, and gets a chance to take a good look around.

The parking lot of Novus Ordo Seclorum’s office building is filled with cop cars, and BMWs and Mercedes Benzes that Randy assumes belong to lawyers. Avi’s Range Rover is parked jauntily on top of some landscaping, and a few TV camera crews have set up, as well. In front of the building’s main entrance a lot of people are jammed into the smallest possible space screaming at each other. They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring of cops, media, and law-firm minions—collectively, what Tolkien would call Men—and a few non- or post-human creatures imbued with peculiar physiognomies and vaguely magical powers: Dwarves (steady, productive, surly) and Elves (brilliant in a more ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has begun to realize that his grandfather may have been an Elf. Avi is a Man with a strong Elvish glow about him. Somewhere in the center of this whole thing, presumably, is Gollum.

There is a little window on the screen of Randy’s laptop showing a cheesy 1940s-newsreel-style animation of a radio tower, with zigzaggy conceptual radio waves radiating outwards from it over the whole earth, which is shown ludicrously not to scale in this rendering—the diameter of the earth is about equal to the height of the radio tower. That these Jovian info-bolts are visible and moving is a visual cue that his radio adapter has managed to patch itself into the packet radio network. Randy opens a terminal window and types

telnet laundry.org

and in a few seconds bang! he gets a login prompt. Randy now has another look at the animated window, and notes with approval that the info-bolts have been replaced with gouts of question marks. This means that his computer has recognized laundry.org as a S/WAN machine—running the Secure Wide Area Network protocol—which means that every packet going back and forth between Randy’s laptop and laundry.org is encrypted. Definitely a good idea when you are about to do something illegal over the radio.

Mike or Mark gets out of his car, cutting a dramatic figure in a long black Western-style coat, a look rather spoiled by the t-shirt he’s got on underneath it: black with a fat red question mark in the middle. He hitches the strap of his shotgun up onto his shoulder and leans into his back door to retrieve a large black cowboy hat, which he places on the roof of his car. He thrusts his elbows into the air and gathers his long hair back behind his ears, staring up at the sky, and then clamps the cowboy hat down on his head. Tied loosely around his neck is a black bandanna with a question-mark pattern, which he now pulls up over the bridge of his nose so that just an eye-slit shows between it and the cowboy hat. Randy would be really alarmed if it weren’t for the fact that several of his friends, such as John Cantrell, often go around looking this way. Mike or Mark strides across the Park ‘n’ Lock, tracked carefully by a panning cameraman, and jogs across the street to the 24 Jam.

Randy logs onto laundry.org using ssh—“secure shell”—a way of further encrypting communications between two computers. Laundry.org is an anonymizing service; all packets routed through it to another computer are stripped of identifying information first, so that anyone down the line who intercepts one of those packets has no way of knowing where it originated. Once he’s patched into the anonymizer, Randy types

telnet crypt.kk

and hits the return key and then actually, literally, prays. The Crypt is still going through its shakedown period (which, indeed, is the only reason that all of Tombstone’s contents have not been moved onto it yet).

In the lot of the 24 Jam, Mike or Mark has joined three other elvish-looking sorts in black cowboy hats and bandannas, whom Randy can identify based on the length and color of their ponytails and beards. There’s Stu, a Berkeley grad student who is somehow mixed up in Avi’s HEAP project, and Phil, who invented a major programming language a couple of years ago and goes helicopter-skiing in his spare time, and Craig, who knows everything there is to know about encrypted credit-card transactions on the Net and is a devotee of traditional Nipponese archery. Some of these guys are wearing long coats and some aren’t. There is a lot of Secret Admirers iconography: t-shirts bearing the number 56, which is a code for Yamamoto, or just pictures of Yamamoto himself, or big fat question marks. They are having an energetic and very happy conversation—though it looks a bit forced—because, to a man, they are carrying long weapons out in plain sight. One of them has a hunting rifle, and each of the others is slinging a rudimentary-looking gun with a banana clip sticking out of the side. Randy thinks, but is not sure, that these are HEAP guns.

This scene, not surprisingly, has caught the attention of the police, who have surrounded these four with squad cars, and who are standing at the ready with rifles and shotguns. It is an oddity of the law in many jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one-shot .22 derringer requires a license, openly carrying (e.g.) a big game rifle is perfectly legal. Concealed weapons are outlawed or at least heavily regulated, and unconcealed ones are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers—who tend to be gun nuts—have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out the absurdity of those rules. Their point is this: who gives a shit about concealed weapons anyway, since they are only useful for defending oneself against assaults by petty criminals, which almost never happens? The real reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by packing something really big.

A bunch of junk scrolls up Randy’s screen.
WELCOME TO THE CRYPT
, it begins, and then there’s a paragraph of information about what a great idea the Crypt is and how anyone who gives a damn about privacy should get an account here. Randy truncates the commercial message with the whack of a key, and logs in as Randy. Then he enters the command

telnet tombstone.epiphyte.com

and gets two gratifying messages in return: one saying that a connection has been established with Tombstone, and the next saying that a S/WAN link has been automatically negotiated. Finally he gets

tombstone login:

which means that he is now free to log on to the machine right across the street from him. And now Mr. Randy has a little decision to make.

So far, he’s clean. The bits coming out of his laptop are encrypted; so even if someone is monitoring the local packet radio net, all they know is that some encrypted bits are flying around. They cannot trace any of those bits to Randy’s machine without bringing in an elaborate radio direction-finding rig and zeroing in on him most conspicuously. Those encrypted bits are eventually finding their way to laundry.org up in Oakland, which is a big Internet host that probably has thousands of packets rushing in and out of it every second. If someone were tapping laundry.org’s T3 line, which would require an enormous investment in computers and communications gear, they would detect a very small number of encrypted packets going out to crypt.kk in Kinakuta. But these packets would have been stripped of any identifying information before leaving laundry.org and so there would be no way to tell where they originated. Now, crypt.kk is also an anonymizer, and so an entity tapping its staggeringly enormous T5 line (a job on the order of eavesdropping on a small country’s telecommunications system) might theoretically be able to detect a few packets going back and forth between crypt.kk and Tombstone. But
again, these would be stripped of identifying information, and so it would be impossible to trace them even as far back as laundry.org, to say nothing of tracing them all the way back to Randy’s laptop.

But in order for Randy to get into Tombstone and begin actually tampering with the evidence, he must now log on. If it were a poorly secured host of the type that used to be legion on the Internet, he could just exploit one of its numerous security holes and crack his way into it, so that if his activities on the machine were discovered, he could claim that it wasn’t him—just some cracker who happened to break into the machine at the very moment it was being seized by the cops. But Randy has spent the last several years of his life making machines such as this one impregnable to crackers, and he knows it’s impossible.

Furthermore, there’s no point in logging on as just any old user—like using a guest account. Guests are not allowed to tamper with system files. In order to do any meaningful evidence-tampering here, Randy has to log on as the superuser. The name of the superuser account is, inconveniently, “randy” and you can’t actually log in as “randy” without entering a password that only Randy would know. So after using the very latest in cryptographic technology and trans-oceanic packet-switching communications to conceal his identity, Randy now finds himself faced with the necessity of typing his name into the fucking machine.

A little scenario flashes up in his head in which he sends an anonymous broadcast message to all laundry.org users telling them that the password for the “randy” account on “tombstone.epiphyte.com” is such and such and urging them to spread this information all over the Internet as fast as possible. This might have been a decent idea if he had thought of it an hour ago. Now it is too late; any sentient prosecutor tracing the time-stamps on the messages would be able to prove that it was just a blind. Besides, time is running low. The discussion across the street, which is just a shrill hubbub at this distance, is rising to some sort of climax.

Randy has meanwhile booted up his browser and gone to the ordo.net home page. Usually it’s a pretty dull corporate
home page, but today all of the blurbs and quotidian press releases have been obliterated by a window showing live color video of what is going on in front of the building (or rather, what was going on a couple of seconds ago; coming over his miserable low-bandwidth radio link, the video changes frames about once every three seconds). The video is originating from Ordo itself, where they’ve evidently aimed a camera out the window and are slamming the images straight out over their very own T3 line.