English Channel, which would be suicidal; head north between Britain and
Ireland, which would be suicidal; or veer to the west around Ireland, which
would be suicidal.
Of course there's always France, which is friendly territory, but it is
a siren whose allure must be sternly resisted. It's not enough for Bischoff
just to run the U boat aground on a godforsaken beach somewhere; he wants to
get the thing back to a proper base. But the skies above the proper bases
are infested with Catalinas, illuminating the sea with the satanic light of
their radars. It is much cleverer to make them think that he's headed for
France, and then head for a German port instead.
Or at least it seemed that way two days ago. Now the complexities of
the plan are weighing on him.
The shadow of the ship above them suddenly seems much longer and
deeper. This means either that the earth's rotation has just sped up
tremendously, moving the sun around to a different angle, or that the ship
has veered towards them. "Hard to starboard," Bischoff says quietly. His
voice travels down a pipe to the man who controls the rudder. "Anything on
the radio?"
"Nothing," says the Funkmaat. That's weird; usually when the ships are
zigzagging, they coordinate it on the radio. Bischoff spins the periscope
around and gets a load of the transport, still trying to shoulder its way
into them. He checks his course; the bitch has veered a full ninety degrees!
"They've seen us," Bischoff says. "We'll dive in just a moment." But
before he loses his ability to use the periscope, he does one more three
sixty, just to verify that his mental map of the convoy is accurate. It is,
more or less; why, there's a destroyer, right there where he thought it was.
He steadies the 'scope, calls out target bearings. The Torpedomaat echoes
the digits while dialing them into the targeting computer: the very latest
fully analog technology. The computer grinds through some calculations and
sets the gyroscopes on a couple of torpedoes. Bischoff says: fire, fire,
dive. It happens, almost that fast. The diesels' anvil chorus, which has
been subtly driving them all insane for a couple of days, is replaced by a
startling silence. They are running on batteries now.
As has always been the case, and as will continue to be the case for at
least another half century, batteries suck. The convoy seems to bolt forward
as U 691's speed drops to a pathetic wallow. The destroyers can go about
five times as fast as they can now. Bischoff hates this part.
"The destroyer is taking evasive action," says the sound man.
"Did we have time to get the weather forecast?" he asks.
"Storm front moving in this evening. Foul weather tomorrow."
"Let's see if we can stay alive until the storm hits," Bischoff says.
"Then we'll run this bucket of shit straight up the middle of the English
Channel, right up Winston Churchill's fat ass, and if we die, we'll die like
men."
A terrible clamor radiates through the water and pierces the hull. The
men cheer sullenly; they have just sunk another ship. Whoopdy doo!
"I think it was the destroyer," says the sound man, as if he can hardly
believe their luck.
"Those homing torpedoes are bastards," Bischoff says, "when they don't
turn round and home in on you."
One destroyer down, three to go. If they can sink another one, they
have a chance of escaping the remaining two. But it's nearly impossible to
escape from three destroyers.
"There's no time like the present," he says. "Periscope depth! Let's
see what the fuck is going on, while we've got them rattled."
It is like this: one of the destroyers is sinking and another is
heading towards it to render assistance. The other two are converging on
where U 691 was about thirty seconds ago, but they are hindered by having to
make their way through the middle of the convoy. Almost immediately, they
begin to fire their guns. Bischoff looses a spread of torpedoes towards the
assisting destroyer. Water is spouting up all around them now as they are
straddled by shells from the other two. He does another three sixty, fixing
the image of the convoy in his mind's eye.
"Dive!" he says.
Then he has a better idea. "Belay that! Surface and go to flank speed."
Any other U boat crew would cut his throat at this moment, then surrender.
But these guys don't even hesitate; either they really do love him, or
they've all decided they're going to die anyway.
Twenty seconds of raw terror ensue. U 691 is screaming across the
surface, banking like a Messerschmidt as shells pound into the water all
around her. Crewmen are spilling out of her hatches, looking like prison
camp inmates in the bright sun, trying not to slide off the deck as it tilts
this way and that, diving to snap the carabiners of their safety lines onto
cables before they are blown out of their shoes by the waterspouts from the
exploding shells. They are manning the guns.
Then there's a big transport ship between them and the two destroyers.
They're safe now, for a minute. Bischoff's up on the conning tower. He turns
aft and gets a load of the other destroyer, spiraling crazily in an effort
to shake off those homing torpedoes.
When they come out from behind the shelter of the big transport,
Bischoff sees that his mental map of the convoy was more or less accurate.
He speaks more orders to the rudder and the engines. Before the two
attacking destroyers have a chance to open up with their guns again,
Bischoff has got himself positioned between them and a troop transport: a
decrepit ocean liner covered with a hasty coat of wartime camo. They can't
shoot at him now without blowing hundreds of their own troops to shreds. But
he can shoot at them. When Bischoff's men see the liner above them, and gaze
across the water at the impotent destroyers, they actually break out into
song: a congratulatory beer hall ditty.
U 691 is topheavy with weaponry, armed to the teeth because of the
aircraft threat. Bischoffs crew opens fire on the destroyers with all of the
small and medium sized stuff, to give the deck gun crew a chance to line up
its shot. At this range, the danger is that the shell will pass all the way
through the destroyer's hull, and out the other side, without detonating.
You have to be patient, take your time, aim for the engines. Bischoff's crew
knows this.
A skull cracking explosion sounds from the barrel of the deck gun; the
shell skims the water, hits the closest destroyer right in the boilers. The
destroyer doesn't blow up, but it does go dead in the water. They take a few
more shots at the other destroyer and manage to knock out one of its guns
and one of its depth charge launchers. Then the lookouts see airplanes
headed their way, and it's time to dive. Bischoff does one final periscope
scan before they go under, and is surprised to see that the destroyer that
was trying to evade the torpedoes managed to do so; apparently two of them
curved back and hit transport ships instead.
They go straight down to a hundred and sixty meters. Destroyers drop
depth charges on them for eight hours. Bischoff takes a nap. When he wakes
up, depth charges are booming all over the place and everything is fine. It
should be dark and stormy up there now: bad weather for Catalinas. He evades
the destroyers by (in a nutshell) doing clever things he has learned the
hard way. The U boat is as thin as a knitting needle, and when you turn it
directly toward or away from the source of a ping, it makes almost no
reflection. All that's required is a clear mental map of where you are with
respect to the destroyers.
After another hour, the destroyers give up and leave. Bischoff takes U
691 up to schnorkel depth and points her straight up the middle of the
English Channel, as advertised. He also uses the periscope to verify that
the weather is, also as advertised, awful.
Those bastards have a big fat red pin on the map marking his position
as last reported by those destroyers. Around that pin, as the hours go by,
they will draw circles of steadily increasing radius, widening gyres
enclosing the set of all points in the ocean where U 691 could possibly be
at the moment, based on their assumptions about her speed. The square
mileage that must be searched will increase as the square of that radius.
Going up the Channel, while submerged, just isn't going to work they'll
run into one of the block ships that the Brits sank there to prevent U boats
from doing just that. The surface is the only way, and it's a hell of a lot
faster too. This raises the airplane issue. Airplanes search not for the
boat itself, which is tiny and dark, but for its wake, which is white and
spreads for miles on calm water. There will be no wake behind U 691 tonight
or rather, there will be, but it will be lost in random noise of much higher
amplitude. Bischoff decides that covering distance is more important than
being subtle at the moment, and so he brings her up to the surface and then
pins the throttle. This will burn fuel insanely, but U 691 has a range of
eleven thousand miles.
Sometime around noon the next day, U 691, battering its way through a
murderous storm, lances the Straits of Dover and breaks through into the
North Sea. She must be lighting up every radar screen in Europe, but
airplanes can't do much in this weather.
"The prisoner Shaftoe wishes to speak to you," says Beck, who has gone
back to being his second in command, as if nothing had ever been different.
War gives men good ignoring skills. Bischoff nods.
Shaftoe enters the control room, accompanied by Root, who will
apparently serve as translator, spiritual guide, and/or wry observer. "I
know a place where we can go," Shaftoe says.
Bischoff is floored. He hasn't thought about where they were actually
going in days. The concept of having a coherent goal is almost beyond his
comprehension.
"It is " Bischoff gropes " touching that you have taken an interest."
Shaftoe shrugs. "I heard you were in deep shit with Dönitz."
"Not as bad as I was," Bischoff says, immediately perceiving the folksy
wisdom of this American barnyard metaphor. "The depth is the same, but now I
am head up instead of head down."
Shaftoe chuckles delightedly. They are all buddies now. "You have any
charts of Sweden?"
This strikes Bischoff as a good but half witted idea. Seeking temporary
refuge in a neutral country: fine. But much more likely is that they run the
boat aground on a rock.
"There's a bay there, by this little town," Shaftoe says. "We know the
depths."
"How could that be?"
"Because we charted the fucking thing ourselves, a couple of months
ago, with a rock on a string."
"Was this before or after you boarded the mysterious U boat full of
gold?" Bischoff asks.
"Just before."
"Would it be out of line for me to inquire what an American Marine
Raider and an ANZAC chaplain were doing in Sweden, a neutral country,
performing bathymetric surveys?"
Shaftoe doesn't seem to think it's out of line at all. He's in such a
good mood from the morphine. He tells another yam. This one begins on the
coast of Norway (he is deliberately vague about how he got there) and is all
about how Shaftoe led Enoch Root and a dozen or so men, including one who
had a serious ax wound to the leg (Bischoff raises his eyebrows) all the way
across Norway on skis, slaying pursuing Germans right and left, and into
Sweden. The story then bogs down for a while because there are no more
Germans to kill, and Shaftoe, sensing that Bischoffs attention is beginning
to wander, tries to inject some lurid thrills into the narrative by
describing the progress of the gangrene up the leg of the officer who ran
afoul of the ax (who, as far as Bischoff can make out, was under suspicion
as a possible German spy). Shaftoe keeps encouraging Root to jump in and
tell the story of how Root performed several consecutive amputations of the
officer's leg, all the way up to the pelvis. Just as Bischoff is finally
starting to actually care about this poor bastard with the gangrenous leg,
the story takes another zigzag: they reach a little fishing town on the Gulf
of Bothnia. The gangrenous officer is delivered into the hands of the town
doctor. Shaftoe and his comrades hole up in the woods and strike up what
sounds like an edgy relationship with a Finnish smuggler and his lissome
daughter. And now it's clear that Shaftoe has reached his favorite part of
the story, which is this Finnish girl. And indeed, up to this point his
story telling style has been as rude and blunt and functional as the inside
of a U boat. But now he relaxes, begins to smile, and becomes damn near
poetic to the point where a few members of Bischoff's crew, who speak a
little bit of English, start to loiter within earshot. Essentially the story
goes totally off the rails at this point, and while it's entertaining
material, it appears to be headed exactly nowhere. Bischoff finally
interrupts with "What about the guy with the bad leg?" Shaftoe frowns and
bites his lip. "Oh, yeah," he finally says, "he died."
"The rock on the string," prompts Enoch Root. "Remember? That's why you
were telling the story."
"Oh, yeah," Shaftoe says, "they came and picked us up with a little
submarine. That's how we got to Qwghlm and saw the U boat with the gold. But
before they could enter the harbor, they had to have a chart. So Lieutenant
Root and I went out on a fucking rowboat with a rock on a string and charted
it."
"And you still have a copy of this chart with you?" Bischoff asks
skeptically.
"Nah," Shaftoe says, with a flip coolness that in a less charismatic
man would be infuriating. "But the lieutenant remembers it. He's really good
at remembering numbers. Aren't you, sir?"
Enoch shrugs modestly. "Where I grew up, memorizing the digits of pi
was the closest thing we had to entertainment."
Chapter 48 CANNIBALS
Goto Dengo flees through the swamp. He is fairly certain that he is
being chased by the cannibals who just cooked up the friend with whom he had
washed ashore. He climbs up a tangle of vines and hides himself several
meters above the ground; men with spears search the general area, but they
do not find him.
He passes out. When he wakes up, it's dark, and some small animal is
moving in the branches nearby. He is so desperate for food that he grabs at
it blindly. The creature has a body the size of a house cat, but long
leathery arms: some kind of huge bat. It bites him several times on the
hands before he crushes it to death. Then he eats it raw.
The next day he goes forth into the swamp, trying to put more distance
between himself and the cannibals. Around midday he finds a stream the first
one he's seen. For the most part the water just seeps out of New Guinea
though marshes, but here is an actual river of cold, fresh water, just
narrow enough to jump across.
A few hours later he finds another village that is similar to the first
one, but only about half as big. The number of dangling heads is much
smaller; maybe these headhunters are not quite as fearsome as the first
group. Again there is a central fire where white stuff is being cooked in a
pot: in this case, it appears to be a wok, which they must have gotten
though trade. The people of this village don't know a starving Nipponese
soldier is lurking in the vicinity, so they are not very vigilant. Around
twilight, when the mosquitoes come out of the swamps in a humming fog, they
all retire into their longhouses. Goto Dengo runs out into the middle of the
compound, grabs the wok, and makes off with it. He forces himself not to
take any of the food until he is far away, hidden in a tree again, and then
he gorges himself. The food is a rubbery gel of what would appear to be pure
starch. Even to a ravenous man, it has no flavor at all. Nevertheless he
licks the wok clean. While he is doing so, an idea comes to him.
The next morning, when the sun's bubble bursts out of the sea, Goto
Dengo is kneeling in the bed of the river, scooping sand up into the wok and
swirling it around, hypnotized by the maelstrom of dirt and foam, which
slowly develops a glittering center.
The next morning Dengo is standing on the edge of the village bright
and early, shouting: "Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!" which is what the people in the
first village called gold.
The villagers wriggle out of their tiny front doors, bewildered at
first, but when they see his face and the wok dangling from one hand, rage
flashes over them like the sun burning out from behind a cloud. A man
charges with a spear, sprinting straight across the clearing. Goto Dengo
dances back and takes half shelter behind a coconut tree, holding the wok up
over his chest like a shield. "Ulab! Ulab!" he cries again. The warrior
falters. Goto Dengo holds out his fist, swings it to and fro until it finds
a warm shaft of sunlight, and then loosens it slightly. A tiny cascade of
glittering flakes trickles out, catching the sun, then plunges into shadow,
hissing as it strikes the leaves below.
It gets their attention. The man with the spear stops. Someone behind
him says something about patah.
Goto Dengo levels the wok, resting it on his forearm, and sprinkles the
entire handful of gold dust into it. The village watches, transfixed. There
is a great deal more whispering about patah. He steps forward into the
clearing, holding the wok out before him as an offering to the warrior,
letting them see his nakedness and his pitiful condition. Finally he
collapses to his knees, bows his head very low, and sets the wok on the
ground at the warrior's feet. He remains there, head bowed, letting them
know that they can kill him now if they want to.
If they want to choke off their newly discovered gold supply, that is.
The matter will require some discussion. They tie his elbows together behind
his back with vines, put a noose around his neck, and tie that to a tree.
All of the kids in the village stand around him and stare. They have purple
skin and frizzy hair. Flies swarm around their heads.
The wok is taken into a hut that is decorated with more human heads
than any of the other huts. All of the men go in there. Furious discussion
ensues.
A mud daubed woman with long skinny breasts brings Goto Dengo half a
shell of coconut milk and a handful of white, knuckle sized grubs wrapped up
in leaves. Her skin is a tangle of overlapping ringworm scars and she is
wearing a necklace that consists of a single human finger strung on a piece
of twine. The grubs squirt when Goto Dengo bites down on them.
The children abandon him to watch a pair of American P 38s fly by, out
over the ocean. Bored with airplanes, Goto Dengo squats on his haunches and
observes the menagerie of arthropods that have converged on him in hopes of
sucking his blood, taking a bite of his flesh, eating his eyeballs out of
his skull, or impregnating him with their eggs. The haunch position is a
good one because every five seconds or so he has to bash his face against
one knee, then the other, in order to keep the bugs out of his eyes and
nostrils. A bird drops out of a tree, lands clumsily on his head, pecks
something out of his hair, and flies away. Blood jets out of his anus and
pools hotly under the arches of his feet. Creatures with many legs gather at
the edge of the pool and begin to feast. Goto Dengo moves away, and leaving
them to it, gets a few minutes' respite.
The men in the hut arrive at some sort of agreement. The tension is
broken. There is laughter, even. He wonder what counts as funny to these
guys.
The guy who wanted to impale him earlier comes across the clearing,
takes his leash, and tugs Goto Dengo to a standing position. "Patah," he
says.
He looks at the sky. It is getting late, but he does not relish trying
to explain to them that they should simply wait until tomorrow. He stumbles
across the clearing to the cooking fire and nods at a pan full of brain
stew. "Wok," he says.
It doesn't work. They think he wants to trade gold for the wok.
There follows about eighteen hours of misunderstandings and failed
attempts to communicate. Goto Dengo almost dies; at least he feels like he
might. Now that he is not on the move, the last few days are really catching
up with him. But finally, in the middle of the next morning, he gets to show
his magic. Squatting in the nearby stream, his elbows unbound, the wok in
his hands, surrounded by skeptical village fathers still keeping a tight
grip on his rustic noose, he begins to pan for gold. Within a few minutes he
has managed to summon a few flakes of the stuff out of the riverbed,
demonstrating the basic concept.
They want to learn it themselves. He was expecting this. He tries to
show one of them how it's done, but (as Goto Dengo himself learned long ago)
it is one of those harder than it looks deals.
Back to the village. He actually gets a place to sleep this night: they
stuff him into a long skinny sack of woven grass and tie it shut above his
head this is how they keep themselves from being eaten alive by insects
while they are asleep. Malaria hits him now: alternating waves of chill and
heat swamping his body with the force of riptides.
Time goes out of whack for a while. Later, he realizes he has been here
for a while now, because his broken forefinger is now solid and gnarled, and
the abrasions that he got from the coral head are now a field of fine,
parallel scars, like the grain in a piece of wood. His skin is covered with
mud and he smells of coconut oil and of the smoke that they fill their huts
with to chase away the bugs. His life is simple: when malaria has him
teetering on the brink of death, he sits in front of a felled palm tree and
chips away at it mindlessly for hours, slowly creating a heap of fibrous
white stuff that the women use to make starch. When he is feeling stronger,
he drags himself over to the river and pans for gold. In return they do what
they can to keep New Guinea from killing him. He's so weak they do not even
bother to send a chaperone with him when he goes out.
It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the
insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that
the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads
for decoration. The one thing that Goto Dengo thinks about, when he's
capable of thinking, is that there is a boy in this village who looks to be
about twelve years old. He remembers the twelve year old who was initiated
by driving a spear through his companion's heart, and wonders who's going to
be used for this boy's initiation rite.
From time to time the village elders pound on a hollow log for a while,
then stand around listening to other hollow logs being pounded in other
villages. One day there is an especially long episode of pounding, and it
would seem that the villagers are pleased by what they have heard. The next
day, they have visitors: four men and a child who speak a completely
different language; their word for gold is gabitisa. The child whom they
have brought with them is about six years old, and obviously retarded. There
is a negotiation. Some of the gold that Goto Dengo has panned out of the
stream is exchanged for the retarded child. The four visitors disappear into
the jungle with their gabitisa. Within a few hours, the retarded child has
been tied to a tree and the twelve year old boy has stabbed it to death and
become a man. After some parading around and dancing, the older men sit on
top of the younger man and cut long complicated gashes into his skin and
pack dirt into them so that they will heal as decorative welts.
Goto Dengo cannot do very much except gape in numb astonishment. Every
time he begins to think beyond the next fifteen minutes, tries to formulate
a plan of action, the malaria comes back, flattens him for a week or two,
scrambles his brain and forces him to start again from scratch. Despite all
of this he manages to extract a few hundred grams of gold dust from that
stream. From time to time the village is visited by relatively light skinned
traders who move up and down the coast in outrigger canoes and who speak yet
another different language. These traders begin to come more frequently, as
the village elders start trading the gold dust for betel nuts, which they
chew because it makes them feel good, and for the occasional bottle of rum.
One day, Goto Dengo is on his way back from the river, carrying a
teaspoon of gold dust in the wok, when he hears voices from the village
voices speaking in a cadence that used to be familiar.
All of the men of the village, some twenty in all, are standing up with
their backs to coconut trees, their arms secured behind the trees with
ropes. Several of these men are dead, with their intestines spilling down
onto the ground, already black with flies. The ones who are not dead yet are
being used for bayonet practice by a few dozen gaunt, raving Nipponese
soldiers. The women ought to be standing around screaming, but he doesn't
see them. They must be inside the huts.
A man in a lieutenant's uniform swaggers out of a hut, smiling broadly,
wiping blood off of his penis with a rag, and almost trips over a dead
child.
Goto Dengo drops the wok and puts his hands up in the air. "I am
Nipponese!" he shouts, even though all he wants to say at this moment is I
am not Nipponese.
The soldiers are startled, and several of them try to swing their
rifles around in his direction. But the Nipponese rifle is an awful thing,
nearly as long as the average soldier is tall, too heavy to maneuver even
when its owner is in perfect health. Luckily all of these men are clearly
starving to death and half crippled by malaria and bloody flux, and their
minds work quicker than their bodies. The lieutenant bellows, "Hold your
fire!" before anyone can get off a shot in the direction of Goto Dengo.
There follows a long interrogation in one of the huts. The lieutenant
has many questions, and asks most of them more than once. When he repeats a
question for the fifth or thirteenth time, he adopts a grand magnanimity, as
if giving Goto Dengo the opportunity to retract his earlier lies. Goto Dengo
tries to ignore the screams of the bayoneted men and the raped women, and
concentrate on giving the same answer each time without variation.
"You surrendered to these savages?"
"I was incapacitated and helpless. They found me in this condition."
"What efforts did you make to escape?"
"I have been building my strength and learning from them how to survive
in the jungle what foods I can eat.
"For six months?"
"Pardon me, sir?" He hasn't heard this question before.
"Your convoy was sunk six months ago."
"Impossible."
The lieutenant steps forward and slaps him across the face. Goto Dengo
feels nothing but tries to cringe anyway, so as not to humiliate the man.
"Your convoy was coming to reinforce our division!" bellows the
lieutenant. "You dare to question me?"
"I humbly apologize, sir!"
"Your failure to arrive forced us to make a retrograde maneuver!
(1) We are marching overland to rendezvous with our forces at
Wewak!"
"So, you are the advance guard for the division?" Goto Dengo has seen
perhaps two dozen men, a couple of squads at most.
"We are the division," the lieutenant says matter of factly. "So,
again, you surrendered to these savages?"
***
When they march out the following morning, no one remains alive in the
village; all of them have been used for bayonet practice or shot while
trying to run away.
He is a prisoner. The lieutenant had decided to execute him for the
crime of having surrendered to the enemy, and was in the act of drawing his
sword when one of the sergeants prevailed upon him to wait for a while.
Impossible as it might seem, Goto Dengo is in far better physical condition
than any of the others and therefore useful as a pack animal. He can always
be properly executed in front of a large audience when they reach a larger
outpost. So he marches in the middle of the group now, unfettered, the
jungle serving the purpose of chains and bars. They have loaded him down
with the one remaining Nambu light machine gun, which is too heavy for
anyone else to carry, and too powerful for them to fire; any man who pulled
the trigger on this thing would be shaken to pieces by it, the jungle rotted
flesh scattering from jittering bones.
After a few days have gone by, Goto Dengo requests permission to learn
how to operate the Nambu. The lieutenant's reply is to beat him up though he
does not have the strength to beat anyone up properly so Goto Dengo has to
help him, crying out and doubling over when the lieutenant thinks he has
landed a telling blow.
Every couple of days, when the sun comes up in the morning, this or
that soldier is found to have more bugs on him than any of the others. This
means that he is dead. Lacking shovels or the strength to dig, they leave
him where he lies and march onward. Sometimes they get lost, march back over
the same territory, and find these corpses all swollen and black; when they
begin to smell rotting human flesh, they know that they have just wasted a
day's effort. But in general they are gaining altitude now, and it is
cooler. Ahead of them, their route is blocked by a ridge of snow capped
peaks that runs directly to the sea. According to the lieutenant's maps,
they will have to climb up one side of it and down the other in order to
reach Nipponese controlled territory.
The birds and plants are different up here. One day, while the
lieutenant is urinating against a tree, the foliage shakes and an enormous
bird runs out. It looks vaguely like an ostrich, but more compact and more
colorful. It has a red neck, and a cobalt blue head with a giant helmetlike
bone sticking out of the top of its skull, like the nose of an artillery
shell. It prances straight up to the lieutenant and kicks him a couple of
times, knocking him flat on his ass, then bends his long neck down, shrieks
in his face, and runs back into the jungle, using its head bone as a kind of
battering ram to clear a path through the brush.
Even if the men were not dying on their feet, they would be too
startled to raise their weapons and take a shot at it. They laugh giddily.
Goto Dengo laughs until he cries. The bird must have delivered a powerful
kick, though, because the lieutenant lies there for a long time, clutching
his stomach.
Finally one of the sergeants regains his composure and walks over to
help the poor man. As he draws closer, he suddenly turns around to face the
rest of the group. His face has gone slack.
Blood is fountaining out of a couple of deep stab wounds in the
lieutenant's belly, and his body is already going limp when the rest of the
group gathers around him. They sit and watch until they are pretty sure he
is dead, and then they march onwards. That evening, the sergeant shows Goto
Dengo how to disassemble and clean the Nambu light machine gun.
They are down to nineteen. But it seems as though all of the men who
were susceptible to dying in this place have now died, because they go for
two, three, five, seven days without losing any more. This is in spite of,
or maybe because of, the fact that they are climbing up into the mountains.
It is brutal work, especially for the heavily laden Goto Dengo. But the cold
air seems to clear up their jungle rot and quench the ravenous internal
fires of malaria.
One day they break their march early at the edge of a snowfield, and
the sergeant orders double rations for everyone. Black stone peaks rise
above them, with an icy saddle in between. They sleep huddled together,
which does not prevent some of them waking up with frostbitten toes. They
eat most of what remains of their food supply and then set out towards the
pass.
The pass turns out to be almost disappointingly easy; the slope is so
gentle that they're not really aware that they've reached the summit until
they notice that the snow is sloping downwards beneath their feet. They are
above the clouds, and the clouds cover the world.
The gentle slope stops abruptly at the edge of a cliff that drops
almost vertically at least a thousand feet down then it passes through the
cloud layer, so there's no way of knowing its true height. They find the
memory of a trail traversing the slope. It seems to head down more
frequently than it heads up and so they follow it. It is new and exciting at
first, but then it grows just as brutally monotonous as every other
landscape where soldiers have ever marched. As the hours go by, the snow
gets patchier, the clouds get closer. One of the men falls asleep on his
feet, stumbles, and tumbles end over end down the slope, occasionally
bounding into free fall for several seconds. By the time he vanishes through
the cloud layer, he's too far away to see.
Finally the eighteen descend into a clammy mist. Each sees the one in
front of him only when very close, and then only as a grey, blurred form,
like an ice demon in a childhood nightmare. The landscape has become jagged
and dangerous and the lead man has to grope along practically on hands and
knees.
They are working their way around a protruding rib of fog slicked stone
when the lead man suddenly cries out: "Enemy!"
Some of the eighteen actually laugh, thinking it is a joke.
Goto Dengo distinctly hears a man speaking English, with an Australian
accent. The man says, "Fuck 'em."
Then a noise starts up that seems powerful enough to split the mountain
in half. He actually thinks it is a rock avalanche for awhile until his ears
adjust, and he realizes that it is a weapon: something big, and fully
automatic. The Australians are firing at them.
They try to retreat, but they can only move a few steps every minute.
Meanwhile, thick lead slugs are hurtling through the fog all around them,
splintering against the rock, sending stone shards into their necks and
faces. "The Nambu!" someone shouts. "Get the Nambu!" But Goto Dengo can't
fire the Nambu until he finds a decent place to stand.
Finally he gets to a ledge about the size of a large book, and unslings
the weapons. But all he can see is fog.
There is a lull of a few minutes. Goto Dengo calls out the names of his
comrades. The three behind him are accounted for. The others do not seem to
answer his calls. Finally, one man struggles back along the path. "The
others are all dead," he says, "you may fire at will."
So he begins to fire the Nambu into the fog. The recoil almost knocks
him off the mountain, so he learns to brace it against an outcropping. Then
he sweeps it back and forth. He can tell when he's hitting the rock because
it makes a different sound from hitting fog. He aims for the rock.
He spends several clips without getting any results. Then he begins
walking forward along the path again.
The wind gusts, the fog swirls and parts for a moment. He sees a blood
covered path leading directly to a tall Australian man with a red mustache,
carrying a tommy gun. Their eyes meet. Goto Dengo is in a better position
and fires first. The man with the tommy gun falls off the cliff.
Two other Australians, concealed on the other side of the rock rib, see
this happen, and begin cursing.
One of Goto Dengo's comrades scampers down the path, shouts, "Banzai!"
and disappears around the corner, carrying a fixed bayonet. There is a
shotgun blast and two men scream in unison. Then there is the now familiar
sound of bodies tumbling down the rock face. "God damn it!" hollers the one
remaining Aussie. "Fucking Nips."
Goto Dengo has only one honorable way out of this. He follows his
comrade around the corner and opens up with the Nambu, pouring it into the
fog, sweeping the rock face with lead. He stops when the magazine is empty.
Nothing happens after that. Either the Aussie retreated down the path or
else Goto Dengo shot him off the cliff.
By nightfall, Goto Dengo and his three surviving comrades are back down
in the jungle again.
Chapter 49 WRECK
To: root@eruditorum.org
From: randy@epiphyte.com
Subject: answer
That you are a retail level philosopher who just happens to have
buddies who are in the surveillance business is simply too big a coincidence
for me to accept.
So I'm not going to tell you why.
But in case you are worried, let me assure you that we have our reasons
for building the Crypt. And it's not just to make money though it will be
very good for our share holders. Did you think we were just a bunch of nerds
who stumbled into this and got in over our heads? We aren't.
P.S. What do you mean when you say that you "noodle around with novel
cryptosystems?" Give me an example.
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
Current meatspace coordinates, hot from the GPS receiver card in my
laptop:
8 degrees, 52.33 minutes N latitude 117 degrees, 42.75 minutes E
longitude
Nearest geographical feature: Palawan, the Philippines
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re: answer
Randy.
Thank you for your oddly defensive note. Very pleased you have a good
reason. Never thought otherwise. Of course you should not feel obligated to
share it with me.
My having friends in the world of electronic intelligence gathering is
not the big coincidence you make it out to be.
How did you come to be a founder of the Crypt? By being good at science
and math.
How did you come to be good at science and math? By standing on the
shoulders of the ones who came before you.
Who were those people?
We used to call them natural philosophers.
Likewise, my friends in the surveillance business owe their skills to
the practical application of philosophy. They have the wit to understand
this, and to give credit where credit is due.
P.S. You forgot to use the "dwarf@siblings.net" front address. I assume
this was deliberate?
P.P.S. You say you want an example of a novel cryptosystem that I am
working on. This sounds like a test. You and I both know, Randy, that the
history of crypto is strewn with the wreckage of cryptosystems invented by
arrogant dilettantes and soon demolished by clever codebreakers. You
probably suspect that I don't know this that I'm just another arrogant
dilettante. Quite cleverly, you ask me to stick my neck out, so that you and
Cantrell and his like minded friends can cut it off. You are testing me
trying to find my level
Very well. I'll send you another message in a few days. I'd love to
have the Secret Admirers take a crack at my scheme anyway.
In a narrow hulled double outrigger boat in the South China Sea,
America Shaftoe stands astride a thwart, her body pointing straight up at
the sun, despite the rollers, as if she is gyroscopically stabilized. She is
wearing a sleeveless diving vest that reveals strong, deeply tanned
shoulders, the walnut brown skin etched with a couple of black tattoos and
brilliantly jeweled with beads of water. The handle of a big knife projects
from a shoulder holster. The blade is that of a regular diving knife but the
handle is that of a kris, an ornate traditional weapon of Pa