is what big dumb pieces of metal are
supposed to do. Eventually it does fall again but then it rises up again.
It is skipping across the water like the flat rocks that the boys of
Kulu used to throw across the fish pond near the village. Goto Dengo watches
it skip several more times, utterly fascinated. Once again, the fortunes of
war have provided a bizarre spectacle, seemingly for no other reason than to
entertain him. He savors it as if it were a cigarette discovered in the
bottom of a pocket. Skip, skip, skip.
Right into the flank of one of the escorting destroyers. A gun turret
flies straight up into the air, tumbling over and over. Just as it slows to
its apogee, it is completely enveloped in a geyser of flame spurting out of
the ship's engine room.
The Kulu boys are still chanting, refusing to accept the evidence of
their own eyes. Something flashes in Goto Dengo's peripheral vision; he
turns to watch another destroyer being snapped in half like a dry twig as
its magazines detonate. Tiny black things are skip, skip, skipping all over
the ocean now, like fleas across the rumpled bedsheets of a Shanghai
whorehouse. The chant falters. Everyone watches silently.
The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle
of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in
the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted
their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and
embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill
their enemies.
No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So
flexible. What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had
trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men?
They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.
The American Marines in Shanghai weren't proper warriors either.
Constantly changing their ways. Like Shaftoe. Shaftoe tried to fight
Nipponese soldiers in the street and failed. Having failed, he decided to
learn new tactics from Goto Dengo. "The Americans are not warriors,"
everyone kept saying. "Businessmen perhaps. Not warriors."
Belowdecks, the soldiers are cheering and chanting. They have not the
faintest idea what is really going on. For just a moment, Goto Dengo tears
his eyes away from the sea full of exploding and sinking destroyers. He gets
a bearing on a locker full of life preservers.
The airplanes all seem to be gone now. He scans the convoy and finds no
destroyers in working order.
"Put on the life jackets!" he shouts. None of the men seem to hear him
and so he makes for the locker. "Hey! Put on the life jackets!" He pulls one
out and holds it up, in case they can't hear him.
They can hear him just fine. They look at him as if what he's doing is
more shocking than anything they've witnessed in the last five minutes. What
possible use are life jackets?
"Just in case!" he shouts. "So we can fight for the emperor another
day." He says this last part weakly.
One of the men, a boy who lived a few doors away from him when they
were children, walks up to him, tears the life jacket out of his hands, and
throws it into the ocean. He looks Goto up and down, contemptuously, then
turns around and walks away.
Another man shouts and points: the second wave of planes is coming in.
Goto Dengo goes to the rail to stand among his comrades, but they sidle
away. The American planes charge in unopposed and veer away, leaving behind
nothing but more skipping bombs.
Goto Dengo watches a bomb come directly toward him for a few bounces,
until he can make out the message painted on its nose: BEND OVER, TOJO!
"This way!" he shouts. He turns his back to the bomb and walks back
across the deck to the locker full of life preservers. This time a few of
the men follow him. The ones who don't perhaps five percent of the
population of the village of Kulu are catapulted into the ocean when the
bomb explodes beneath their feet. The wooden deck buckles up wards. One of
the Kulu boys falls with a four foot long splinter driven straight up
through his viscera. Goto Dengo and perhaps a dozen others make it to the
locker on hands and knees and grab life preservers.
He would not be doing this if he had not already lost the war in his
soul. A warrior would stand his ground and die. His men are only following
him because he has told them to do it.
Two more bombs burst while they are getting the life preservers on and
struggling to the rail. Most of the men below must be dead now. Goto Dengo
nearly doesn't make it to the railing because it is rising sharply into the
air; he ends up doing a chin up on it and throwing one leg over the side,
which is now nearly horizontal. The ship is rolling over! Four others get a
grip on the rail, the rest slide helplessly down the deck and vanish into a
pit of smoke. Goto Dengo ignores what his eyes are telling him and tries to
listen to his inner ear. He is standing up on the side of the ship now, and
looking toward the stern he can see one of the propellers spinning uselessly
in the air. He begins running uphill. The four others follow him. An
American fighter plane comes over. He doesn't even realize they are being
strafed until he turns around and sees that the bullets have essentially cut
one man in half and crippled another by exploding his knee, so that the
lower leg and foot dangle by a few shreds of gristle. Goto Dengo throws the
man over his shoulders like a sack of rice and turns to resume the uphill
race, but finds that there is no more uphill to race towards.
He and the other two are standing on the summit of the ship now, a
steel bulge that rises for no more than a man's height out of the water. He
turns around once, then twice, looking for a place to run and sees nothing
but water all around. The water bloops and fizzes angrily as air and smoke
jet from the interior of the wrecked hull. Sea rushes in towards them. Goto
Dengo looks down at the steel bubble supporting his feet and realizes that
he is still, just for a moment, perfectly dry. Then the Bismarck Sea
converges on his feet from all directions at once and begins to climb up his
legs. A moment later the steel plate, which has been pressing so solidly
against the soles of his boots, drops away. The weight of the wounded man on
his shoulders shoves him straight down into the ocean. He gulps fuel oil
into his sinuses, struggles out from beneath the wounded man, and comes to
the surface screaming. His nose, and the cavities of his skull, are filled
with oil. He swallows some of it and goes into convulsions as his body tries
to eject it from every orifice at once: sneezing, vomiting, hawking it up
out of his lungs. Reaching up to his face with one hand he feels the oil
coating his skin thickly and knows that he dare not open his eyes. He tries
to wipe the oil from his face with his sleeve, but the fabric is saturated
with it.
He has to get down in the water and wipe himself clean so that he can
see again, but the oil in his clothing makes him float. His lungs are
finally clear now and he begins to gasp in air. It smells of oil but at
least it's breathable. But the volatile chemicals in the oil have gotten
into his blood now and he feels them spread through his body like fire. It
feels as though a hot spatula is being shoved between his scalp and his
skull. The other men are howling and he realizes that he is too. Some of the
Chinese workers in Shanghai used to breathe gasoline to get high, and this
was the noise that they made.
One of the men near him screams. He hears a noise approaching, like a
sheet being torn in half to make bandages. Radiant heat strikes him in the
face like a hot frying pan, just before Goto Dengo dives and kicks
downwards. The motion exposes a band of flesh around his calf, between his
boot and his trouser leg, and in the moment that it's poking straight up out
of the water, it gets seared to a crisp.
He swims blind through an ocean of fuel oil. Then there is a change in
the temperature and the viscosity of the fluid streaming over his face.
Suddenly the life preserver begins to tug him upwards; he must be in water
now. He swims for a few more kicks and begins to wipe at his eyes. The
pressure on his ears tells him he's not that deep, maybe a couple of meters
beneath the surface. Finally he risks opening his eyes. Ghostly, flickering
light is illuminating his hands, making them glow a bright green; the sun
must have come out. He rolls over on his back and looks straight up. Above
him is a lake of rolling fire.
He rips the life preserver off over his head and lets it go. It shoots
straight up and bursts out of the surface, burning like a comet. His oil
soaked clothing is tugging him relentlessly upwards, so he rips his shirt
off and lets it tumble up towards the surface. His boots pull down, his oily
pants push up, and he reaches some sort of equilibrium.
***
He grew up in the mines.
Kulu is near the north coast of Hokkaido, on the shore of a freshwater
lake where rivers converge from the inland hills and commingle their waters
before draining to the Sea of Okhotsk. The hills rise sharply from one end
of that lake, looming over a cold silver creek that rushes down out of
forest inhabited only by apes and demons. There are small islands in that
part of the lake. If you dig down into the islands, or the hills, you will
find veins of copper ore, and sometimes you will find zinc and lead and even
silver. That is what the men of Kulu have done for many generations. Their
monument is a maze of tunnels that snake through the hills, not following
straight lines but tracking the richest veins.
Sometimes the tunnels dip below the level of the lake. When the mines
were working these tunnels were pumped out, but now that they are exhausted,
the water has been allowed to seek its level and has formed sumps. There are
cavities and tunnels back in the hills that can only be reached by boys who
are brave enough to dive into the cold black water and swim through the
darkness for ten, twenty, thirty meters.
Goto Dengo went to all of those places when he was a boy. He even
discovered some of them. Big, fat and buoyant, he was a pretty good swimmer.
He was not the best swimmer, or the best at holding his breath. He was not
even the bravest (the bravest did not put on life preservers, and went to
their deaths like warriors).
He went where the others wouldn't because he, alone among all the boys
of Kulu, was not afraid of the demons. When he was a boy, his father, a
mining engineer, would take him hiking up into the places in the mountains
where demons were said to live. They would sleep out under the stars and
wake up to find their blankets covered with frost, and sometimes their food
stolen by bears. But no demons.
The other boys believed that demons lived in some of those underwater
tunnels, and that this explained why some of the boys who swam back there
never returned. But Goto Dengo did not fear the demons and so he went back
there fearing only the cold and the dark and the water. Which was plenty to
fear.
Now he need only pretend that the fire is a stone ceiling. He swims
some more. But he did not breathe properly before diving, and he is close to
panic now. He looks up again and sees that the water is burning only in
patches.
He is quite deep, he realizes, and he can't swim well in trousers and
boots. He fumbles at his bootlaces, but they are tied in double knots. He
pulls a knife from his belt and slashes through the laces, kicks the boots
off, sheds his pants and drawers too. Naked, he forces himself to be calm
for ten more seconds, brings his knees to his chest and hugs them. His
body's natural buoyancy takes over. He knows that he must be rising slowly
toward the surface now, like a bubble. The light is growing brighter. He
need only wait. He lets go of the knife, which is only slowing him down.
His back feels cold. He explodes out of the fetal position and thrusts
his head up into the air, gasping for breath. A patch of burning oil is
almost close enough for him to touch, and the oil is trickling across the
top of the ocean as if it were a solid surface. Nearly invisible blue flames
seep from it, then turn yellow and boil off curling black smoke. He
backstrokes away from a reaching tendril.
A glowing silver apparition passes over him, so close he can feel the
warmth of its exhaust and read the English warning labels on its belly. The
tips of its wing guns are sparkling, flinging out red streaks.
They are strafing the survivors. Some try to dive, but the oil in their
uniforms pops them right back to the surface, legs flailing uselessly in the
air. Goto Dengo first makes sure he is nowhere near any burning oil, then
treads water, spinning slowly in the water like a radar dish, looking for
planes. A P 38 comes in low, gunning for him. He sucks in a breath and
dives. It is nice and quiet under the water, and the bullets striking its
surface sound like the ticking of a big sewing machine. He sees a few rounds
plunging into the water around him, leaving trails of bubbles as the water
cavitates in their wake, slowing virtually to a stop in just a meter or two,
then turning downwards and sinking like bombs. He swims after one of them
and plucks it out of the water. It is still hot from its passage. He would
keep it as a souvenir, but his pockets are gone with his clothes and he
needs his hands. He stares at the bullet for a moment, greenish silver in
the underwater light, fresh from some factory in America.
How did this bullet come from America to my hand?
We have lost. The war is over.
I must go home and tell everyone.
I must be like my father, a rational man, explaining the facts of the
world to the people at home, who are crippled by superstitions.
He lets the bullet go again, watches it drop towards the bottom of the
sea, where the ships, and all of the young men of Kulu, are bound.
Chapter 38 MUGS
Hey, it's an immature market.
The rationalizations have not actually begun yet Randy's still sitting
in the sultan's big conference room, and the meeting's just getting up to
speed.
Naturally the early adopters are not going to be your regular joes.
Tom Howard has taken the floor to explain his work. Randy doesn't have
much to do, so he's imagining tonight's conversation in the Bomb and
Grapnel.
It's like the Wild West a little unruly at first, then in a few years
it settles down and you've got Fresno.
Most of the delegations have brought hired guns: engineers and security
experts who'll get a bounty if they can find a flaw in Tom's system. One by
one, these guys stand up to take their shots.
Ten years from now, widows and paperboys will be banking in cyberspace.
Magnificent isn't the word you would normally use to describe Tom
Howard; he's burly and surly, completely lacking in social graces, and
doesn't apologize for it. Most of the time he sits silently, wearing an
expression of sphinxlike boredom, and so it's easy to forget how good he is.
But during this particular half hour of Tom Howard's life, it is of the
essence that he be magnificent. He is going blade to blade with the Seven
Samurai here: the nerdiest high octane Ph.D.s and the scariest private
security clicks that Asia can produce. One by one they come after him and he
cuts their heads off and stacks them on the table like cannon balls. Several
times he has to stop and think for sixty seconds before delivering the
deathblow. Once he has to ask Eberhard Föhr to make some calculations on his
laptop. Occasionally he has to call on the cryptographic expertise of John
Cantrell, or to look over at Randy for a nod or shake of the head. But
eventually, he shuts the hecklers up. Beryl wears a not very convincing
smile throughout the entire thing. Avi just grips the arms of his chair, his
knuckles going from blue to white to pink to a normal healthy glow over the
course of the final five minutes, when it's clear that the Samurai are
withdrawing in disarray. It makes Randy want to empty a six shooter into the
ceiling and holler, "Yeee haaw!" at the top of his lungs.
Instead he listens, just in case Tom gets tripped up in the briar patch
of plesiosynchronous protocol arcana, whence only Randy can drag him out.
This gives him some more time to survey the faces of the other people in the
room. But the meeting is a couple of hours old now, and they are all as
familiar to him as siblings.
Tom wipes his sword on his pantleg and thwacks his big ass resoundingly
into his leather chair. Minions scurry into the room bringing tea and coffee
and sugar/fat pods. Dr. Pragasu stands up and introduces John Cantrell.
Sheesh! So far, the agenda is revolving entirely around Epiphyte Corp.
What gives?
Dr. Pragasu, having developed a friendly relationship with these
California hackers, is pimping them to his big money contacts. That's what
gives.
This is very interesting from a business standpoint. But Randy finds it
a bit irksome and threatening, this one way flow of information. By the time
they go home, this assemblage of shady gmokes is going to know everything
about Epiphyte Corp., but Epiphyte will still be in the dark. No doubt
that's exactly how they want it.
It occurs to Randy to look over at the Dentist. Dr. Hubert Kepler is
sitting on the same side of the table as he is, and so it's hard to read his
face. But it's clear he's not listening to John Cantrell. He's covering his
mouth with one hand and staring into space. His Valkyries are furiously
passing notes back and forth, like naughty cheerleaders.
Kepler's just as surprised as Randy. He doesn't seem like the kind of
guy who delights in surprises.
What can Randy do right now to enhance shareholder value? Intrigue is
not his specialty; he'll leave that to Avi. Instead, he tunes out the
meeting, opens up his laptop, and begins to hack.
Hacking is an overly glorious word for this. Everyone in Epiphyte Corp.
has a laptop with a tiny built in video camera, so that they can do long
distance videoconferencing. Avi insisted on it. The camera is almost
invisible: just an orifice a couple of millimeters across, mounted in the
top center of the frame that surrounds the screen. It doesn't have a lens as
such it's a camera in the oldest sense, a camera obscura. One wall contains
the pinhole and the opposite wall is a silicon retina.
Randy has the source code the original program for the
videoconferencing software. It is reasonably clever in its use of bandwidth.
It looks at the stream of frames (individual still images) coming from the
pinhole camera and notices that, although the total amount of data in those
frames is rather large, the difference from one frame to the next is tiny.
It would be altogether different if Frame 1 were a talking head and Frame 2,
a fraction of a second later, were a postcard shot of a Hawaiian beach and
Frame 3 a diagram of a printed circuit and Frame 4 a closeup of a
dragonfly's head. But in fact, each frame is a talking head the same
person's head, with minor changes in position and expression. The software
can save on precious bandwidth by mathematically subtracting each new frame
from the previous one (since, to the computer, each image is just a long
number) and then transmitting only the difference.
What it all means is that this software has a lot of built in
capabilities for comparing one image with another, and gauging the magnitude
of the difference from one frame to the next. Randy doesn't have to write
that stuff. He just has to familiarize himself with these already existing
routines, learn their names and how to use them, which takes about fifteen
minutes of clicking around.
Then he writes a little program called Mugshot that will take a snap
shot from the pinhole camera every five seconds or so, and compare it to the
previous snapshot, and, if the difference is large enough, save it to a
file. An encrypted file with a meaningless, random name. Mugshot opens no
windows and produces no output of its own, so the only way you can tell it's
running is by typing the UNIX command
ps
and hitting the return key. Then the system will spew out a long list
of running processes, and Mugshot will show up somewhere in that list.
Just in case someone thinks of this, Randy gives the program a fake
name: VirusScanner. He starts it running, then checks its directory and
verifies that it has just saved an image file: one mug shot of Randy. As
long as he sits fairly still, it won't save any more mug shots; the pattern
of light that represents Randy's face striking the far wall of the camera
obscura won't change very much.
In the technology world, no meeting is complete without a demo.
Cantrell and Föhr have developed a prototype of the electronic cash system,
just to demonstrate the user interface and the built in security features.
"A year from now, instead of going to the bank and talking to a human being,
you will simply launch this piece of software from any where in the world,"
Cantrell says, "and communicate with the Crypt." He blushes as this word
seeps through the translators and into the ears of the others. "Which is
what we're calling the system that Tom Howard has been putting together."
Avi's on his feet, coolly managing the crisis. 'Mì fú," he says,
speaking directly to the Chinese guys, "is a better translation."
The Chinese guys look relieved, and a couple of them actually crack
smiles when they hear Avi speaking Mandarin. Avi holds up a sheet of paper
bearing the Chinese characters (1):
Painfully aware that he has just dodged a bullet, John Cantrell
continues with a thick tongue. "We thought you might want to see the
software in action. I'm going to demo it on the screen now, and during the
lunch break you should feel free to come around and try it out yourselves."
Randy fires up the software. He's got his laptop plugged into a video
jack on the underside of the table so that the sultan's lurking media geeks
can project a duplicate of what Randy's seeing onto a large projection
screen at the end of the room. It is running the front end to the cash demo,
but his mug shot program is still running in the background. Randy slides
the computer over to John, who runs through the demo (there should be a mug
shot of John Cantrell stored on the hard disk now).
"I can write the best cryptographic code possible, but it's all
worthless unless there is a good system for verifying the user's identity,"
John begins, regaining some poise now. "How does the computer know that you
are you? Passwords are too easy to guess, steal, or forget. The computer
needs to know something about you that is as unique to you as your
fingerprint. Basically it has to look at some part of your body, such as the
blood vessels in your retina or the distinctive sound of your voice, and
compare it against known values stored in its memory. This kind of
technology is called biometrics. Epiphyte Corp. boasts one of the top
biometrics experts in the world: Dr. Eberhard Föhr, who wrote what's
considered to be the best handwriting recognition system in the world." John
rushes through this encomium. Eb and everyone else in the room look bored by
it they've all seen Eb's resume. "Right now we're going with voice
recognition, but the code is entirely modular, so we could swap in some
other system, such as a hand geometry reader. That's up to the customer."
John runs the demo, and unlike most demos, it actually works and does
not crash. He even tries to fake it out by recording his own voice on a
pretty good portable digital tape recorder and then playing it back. But the
software is not fooled. This actually makes an impression on the Chinese
guys, who, up to the point, have looked like the contents of Madame
Tussaud's Dumpster after an exhibit on the Cultural Revolution.
Not everyone is such a tough sell. Harvard Li is a committed Cantrell
supporter, and the Filipino heavyweight looks like he can hardly wait to
deposit his cash reserves in the Crypt.
Lunchtime! Doors are hauled open to reveal a dining room with a buffet
along the far wall, redolent of curry, garlic, cayenne, and bergamot. The
Dentist makes a point of sitting at the same table with Epiphyte Corp., but
doesn't say very much just sits there with a dreadfully choleric expression
on his face, staring and chewing and thinking. When Avi finally asks him
what he thinks, Kepler says, levelly: "It's been informative."
The Three Graces cringe epileptically. Informative is evidently an
extremely bad word in the Dentist's lexicon. It means that Kepler has
learned something at this meeting, which means that he did not know
absolutely everything going into it, which would certainly rate as an
unforgivable intelligence failure on his scale of values.
There is an agonizing silence. Then Kepler says, "But not devoid of
interest."
Deep sighs of relief ventilate the blindingly white, plaque free
dentition of the Hygienists. Randy tries to imagine which is worse: that
Kepler suspects that the wool was pulled over his eyes, or that he sees a
new opportunity here. Which is more terrible, the paranoia or the avarice of
the Dentist? They are about to find out. Randy, with his sappy, romantic
instinct for ingratiation, almost says something like, "It's been
informative for us, too!" but he holds back, noticing that Avi has not said
it. Saying it would not enhance shareholder value. Best to play one's cards
close to the vest, let Kepler wonder whether Epiphyte Corp. knew the real
agenda.
Randy has chosen his seat tactically, so that he can look straight
through the door into the conference room and keep an eye on his laptop. One
by one, members of the other delegations excuse themselves, go into the
room, and run the demo, imprinting their own voices into the computer's
memory and then letting it recognize them. Some of the nerds even type
commands on Randy's keyboard; probably that ps command, snooping. Despite
the fact that Randy's got it set up so it can't be meddled with too much, it
bothers him at a deep level to see the fingertips of these strangers
prodding away at his keyboard.
It gnaws at him all through the afternoon session, which is all about
the communications links joining Kinakuta to the wide world. Randy ought to
be paying attention to this, since it impinges massively on the Philippines
project. But he doesn't. He broods over his keyboard, contaminated by a
foreign touch, and then he broods about the fact that he's brooding about
it, which demonstrates his unfitness for Biz. It's technically Epiphyte's
keyboard not even his and if it enhances shareholder value for sinister
Eastern nerds to poke around his files, he should be happy to let them do
it.
They adjourn. Epiphyte and the Nipponese dine together, but Randy's
bored and distracted. Finally, about nine P.M., he excuses himself and goes
to his room. He's mentally composing a response to root@eruditorum.org,
along the lines of because there seems to be a hell of a market for this
kind of thing, and it's better that I fill the niche, than someone frankly
and overly evil. But before his laptop has even had time to boot up, the
Dentist, clad in a white terrycloth robe and smelling like vodka and hotel
soap, knocks on Randy's door and invites himself in. He invades Randy (no;
the shareholders') bathroom and helps himself to a glass of water. He stands
at the shareholders' window and glowers down at the Nipponese cemetery for
several minutes before speaking.
"Do you realize who those people were?" he says. His voice, if
subjected to biometric analysis, would reflect disbelief, bewilderment,
maybe a trace of amusement.
Or maybe he's just faking it, trying to get Randy to let down his
guard. Maybe he is root@eruditorum.org.
"Yeah," Randy lies.
When Randy revealed the existence of Mugshot, after the meeting, Avi
gave him a commendation for deviousness, printed up the mugshots in his
hotel room, and Federal Expressed them to a private dick in Hong Kong.
Kepler turns around and gives Randy a searching look. "Either I had bad
information about you guys," he says, "or else you are in way over your
heads."
If this were the First Business Foray, Randy would piss his pants at
this point. If it were the Second, he would resign and fly back to
California tomorrow. But it's the third, and so he manages to maintain
composure. The light is behind him, so perhaps Kepler's momentarily dazzled
and can't read his face very well. Randy takes a swallow of water and
breathes deeply, asking, "In light of today's events," he says, "what's in
store for our relationship?"
"It is no longer about providing cheap long distance service to the
Philippines if, indeed, it ever was in the first place!" Kepler says darkly.
"The data flowing through the Philippines network now takes on entirely new
significance. It's a superb opportunity. At the same time, we're competing
against heavy hitters: those Aussies and the Singapore group. Can we compete
against them, Randy?"
It is a simple and direct question, the most dangerous kind. "We
wouldn't be risking our shareholders' money if we didn't think so."
"That's a predictable answer," Kepler snorts. "Are we going to have a
real conversation here, Randy, or should we invite our PR people into the
room and exchange press releases?"
During an earlier business foray, Randy would have buckled at this
point. Instead he says, "I'm not prepared to have a real conversation with
you, here and now."
"Sooner and later we have to have one," says the Dentist. Those wisdom
teeth will have to come out someday.
"Naturally."
"In the meantime, here is what you should be thinking about," Kepler
says, getting ready to leave. "What the hell can we offer, in the way of
telecommunications services, that stacks up competitively against the
Aussies and those Singapore boys? Because we can't beat 'em on price."
This being Randy's Third Business Foray, he doesn't blurt out the
answer: redundancy. "That question will certainly be on all of our minds,"
Randy says instead.
"Spoken like a flack," says Kepler, his shoulders sagging. He goes out
into the hallway and turns around, saying, "See you tomorrow at the Crypt."
Then he winks. "Or the Vault, or Cornucopia of Infinite Prosperity, or
whatever the Chinese word for it is." Having knocked Randy off balance with
this startling display of humanity, he walks away.
Chapter 39 YAMAMOTO
Tojo and his claque of imperial army boneheads said to him, in effect:
Why don't you go out and secure the Pacific Ocean for us, because we'll need
a convenient shipping lane, say, oh, about ten thousand miles wide, in order
to carry out our little plan to conquer South America, Alaska, and all of
North America west of the Rockies. In the meantime we'll finish mopping up
China. Please attend to this ASAP.
By then they were running the country. They had assassinated anyone in
their way, they had the emperor's ear, and it was hard to tell them that
their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get
really pissed off and annihilate them. So, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a
dutiful servant of the emperor, put a bit of thought into the problem,
sketched out a little plan, sent out one or two boats on a small jaunt
halfway across the fucking planet, and blew Pearl Harbor off the map. He
timed it perfectly, right after the formal declaration of war. It was not
half bad. He did his job.
One of his aides later crawled into his office in the nauseatingly
craven posture that minions adopt when they are about to make you really,
really unhappy and told him that there had been a mix up in the embassy in
Washington and that the diplomats there had not gotten around to delivering
the declaration of war until well after the American Pacific Fleet had gone
to the bottom.
To those Army fuckheads, this is nothing just a typo, happens all the
time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that
the Americans are grudge holders on a level that is inconceivable to the
Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow
solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs
to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they'd laugh it off. What're
they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges?
Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!
Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during
his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their
appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of
course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast,
attained some genuine insight as a side effect of being robbed blind by
Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be
dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay perfectly understandable,
in fact.
But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red
headed ape men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to
drill the notion into the heads of his partners in the big Nipponese scheme
to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver. He wishes that they would
get the message. A lot of the Navy men have been around the world a few
times and seen it for themselves, but those Army guys have spent their
careers mowing down Chinamen and raping their women and they honestly
believe that the Americans are just the same except taller and smellier.
Come on guys, Yamamoto keeps telling them, the world is not just a big
Nanjing. But they don't get it. If Yamamoto were running things, he'd make a
rule: each Army officer would have to take some time out from bayoneting
Neolithic savages in the jungle, go out on the wide Pacific in a ship, and
swap 16 inch shells with an American task force for a while. Then maybe,
they'd understand they're in a real scrap here.
This is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he
clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword
whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of
plane "Betty," an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again,
the Yanks name even their own planes after women, and paint naked ladies on
their sacred instruments of war! If they had samurai swords, Americans would
probably decorate the blades with nail polish.
Because the plane's a bomber, the pilot and copilot are crammed into a
cockpit above the main tube of the fuselage. The nose of the plane, then, is
a blunt dome of curving struts, like the meridians and parallels of a globe,
the trapezoids between them filled with sturdy panes of glass. The plane has
been parked pointing east, so the glass nose is radiant with streaky dawn,
the unreal hues of chemicals igniting in a lab. In Nippon nothing happens by
accident, so he has to assume that this is a deliberate morale building tip
o' the helmet to the Rising Sun. Making his way up to the greenhouse, he
straps himself in where he can stare out the windows as this Betty, and
Admiral Ugaki's, take off.
In one direction is Simpson's Harbor, one of the best anchorages in the
Pacific, an asymmetrical U wrapped in a neat grid of streets, conspicuously
blighted by a fucking British cricket oval! In the other direction, over the
ridge, lies the Bismarck Sea. Somewhere down there, the corpses of a few
thousand Nipponese troops lie pickled in the wrinkled hulls of their
transport ships. A few thousand more escaped to life rafts, but all of their
weapons and supplies went to the bottom, so the men are just useless mouths
now.
It's been like this for almost a year, ever since Midway, when the
Americans refused to bite on Yamamoto's carefully designed feints and ruses
up Alaska way, and just happened to send all of their surviving carriers
directly into the path of his Midway invasion force. Shit. Shit Shit. Shit.
Slit. Shit. Shit. Yamamoto's chewing on a thumbnail, right through his
glove.
Now those clumsy, reeking farmhands are sinking every transport ship
that the Army sends to New Guinea. Double shit! Their observation planes are
everywhere always showing up in the right place at the right time tally
hoing the emperor's furtive convoys in the sawing twang of bloody gummed
Confederates. Their coast watchers infest the mountains of all these
godforsaken islands, despite the Army's efforts to hunt them down and flush
them out. All of their movements are known.
The two planes fly southeastwards across the tip of New Ireland and
enter the Solomon Sea. The Solomon Islands spread out before them, fuzzy
jade humps rising from a steaming ocean, 6,500 feet below. A couple of small
humps and then a much bigger one, today's destination: Bougainville.
Have to show the flag, go out on these inspection tours, give the
frontline troops a glimpse of glory, build morale. Yamamoto frankly has
better things to do with his time, so he tries to pack as many of these
obligatory junkets into a single day as possible. He left his naval citadel
at Truk and flew to Rabaul last week so that he could supervise his latest
big operation: a wave of massed air attacks on American bases from New
Guinea to Guadalcanal.
The air raids were purportedly successful; kind of. The surviving
pilots reported vast numbers of sinkings, whole fleets of American aircraft
destroyed on their mucky airstrips. Yamamoto knows perfectly well that these
reports will turn out to be wildly exaggerated. More than half of his planes
never came back the Americans, and their almost equally offensive cousins,
the Australians, were ready for them. But the Army and the Navy alike are
full of ambitious men who will do everything they can to channel good news
the emperor's way, even if it's not exactly the truth. Accordingly, Yamamoto
has received a personal telegram of congratulations from none other than the
sovereign himself. It is his duty, now, to fly round to his various
outposts, hop out of his Betty, wave the sacred telegram in the air, and
pass on the blessings of the emperor.
Yamamoto's feet hurt like hell. Like everyone else within a thousand
miles, he has a tropical disease; in his case, beriberi. It is the scourge
of the Nipponese and especially of the Navy, because they eat too much
polished rice, not enough fish and vegetables. His long nerves have been
corroded by lactic acid, so his hands quiver. His failing heart can't shove
fluid through his extremities, so his feet swell. He needs to change his
shoes several times a day, but he doesn't have room here; he is encumbered
not only by the curvature of the plane's greenhouse, but also by his sword.
They are approaching the Imperial Navy airbase at Bougainville, right
on schedule, at 9:35. A shadow passes o