lawan. A tourist
can buy a kris at the duty free shop at NAIA, but this one appears to be
less flashy but better made than the tourist shop jobs, and worn from use.
She has a gold chain around her neck with a gnarled black pearl dangling
from it. She has just emerged from the water holding a tiny jeweler's
screwdriver between her teeth. Her mouth is open to breathe, displaying
crooked, bright white teeth with no fillings. For this brief moment she is
in her element, completely absorbed in what she is doing, totally unself
conscious. At this moment Randy thinks he understands her: why she spends
most of her time living here, why she didn't bother with going to college,
why she left behind her mother's family, who raised her, lovingly, in
Chicago, to be in business with her father, the wayward veteran who walked
out of the household when America was nine years old.
Then she turns to scan the approaching launch, and sees Randy on it
staring at her. She rolls her eyes, and the mask falls down over her face
again. She says something to the Filipino men who are squatting in the boat
around her and two of them go into action, scampering down the outrigger
poles, like balance beam artists, to stand on the outrigger pontoon. They
hold their arms out as shock absorbers to ease the contact between the
launch which Doug Shaftoe has cheerfully christened Mekong Memory –
and the much longer, much narrower pamboat.
One of the other Filipinos plants his bare foot against the top of a
small Honda portable generator and pulls on the ripcord, the tendons and
wiry muscles popping out of his arm and back for a moment like so many
ripcords themselves. The generator starts instantly, with a nearly inaudible
purr. It is good stuff, part of the capital improvements that Semper Marine
made as part of its contract with Epiphyte and Filitel. Now they are using
it, effectively, to defraud the Dentist.
"She lies one hundred and fifty four meters below that buoy," says Doug
Shaftoe, pointing to a gallon plastic milk jug bobbing on the swells. "She
was lucky, in a way."
"Lucky?"
Randy clambers off the launch and rests his weight on the outrigger,
shoving it down so that the warm water comes up to his knees. Holding out
his arms like a tightrope walker, he makes his way down an arm toward the
canoe hull in the center.
"Lucky for us," Shaftoe corrects himself. "We're on the flank of a
seamount. The Palawan Trough is nearby." He's following Randy, but without
all of the teetering and arm waving. "If she had sunk in that, she'd have
gone down so deep that she'd be hard to reach, and the pressure down there
would've crushed her. But at two hundred meters, there wouldn't've been such
an implosion." Reaching the boat's hull, he makes dramatic crushing motions
with his hands.
"Do we care?" Randy asks. "Gold and silver don't implode."
"If her hull is intact, getting the goods out is a hell of a lot
easier," says Doug Shaftoe.
Amy has vanished beneath the pamboat's canopy. Randy and Doug follow
her into its shade, and find her sitting crosslegged on a fiberglass
equipment case that is encrusted with airport baggage stickers. Her face is
socketed into the top of a black rubber pyramid whose base is the screen of
a ruggedized cathode ray tube. "How's the cable business?" she mutters.
Months ago, she gave up even trying to hide her scorn for the dull work of
cable laying. Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier mâché houses,
must be energetically maintained or they will dissolve. Another case in
point: some time ago, Randy gave up pretending that he was not completely
fascinated with Amy Shaftoe. This is not exactly the same thing as being in
love with her, but it has quite a few things in common with that. He has
always had a weird, sick fascination with women who smoked and drank a lot.
Amy does neither, but her complete disregard of modern skin cancer
precautions puts her in the same category: people too busy leading their
lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.
In any case, he has a desperate craving to know what Amy's dream is.
For a while he thought it was treasure hunting in the South China Sea. This
she definitely enjoys, but he is not sure if it gives her satisfaction
entire.
"Been adjusting the trim on those dive planes again," she explains. "I
don't think those pushrod things were engineered very well." She pulls her
head out of the black rubber cowl and gives Randy a quick sidelong look,
holding him responsible for the shortcomings of all engineers. "I hope it'll
run now without corkscrewing all over the place."
"Are you ready?" her father asks.
"Whenever you are," she answers, slamming the ball back into his court.
Doug rises to a crouch and duck walks out from under the low canopy.
Randy follows him, wanting to see the ROV for himself.
It rests in the water alongside the pamboat's center hull: a stubby
yellow torpedo with a glass dome for a nose, held in place by a Filipino
crewman who leans over the gunwale to grip it with both hands. Pairs of
stunted wings are mounted at the nose and at the tail, each wing supporting
a miniature propeller mounted in a cowl. Randy is reminded of a dirigible
with its outlying engine gondolas.
Noting Randy's interest, Doug Shaftoe squats alongside it to point out
the features. "It's neutrally buoyant, so when we have it alongside like
this, we have it in this foam cradle, which we will now take off." He begins
jerking loose some quick release bungee cords, and molded segments of foam
peel away from the ROV's hull. It drops lower in the water, nearly pulling
the crewman over the side with it, and he lets go, keeping his arms extended
so he can prevent it from bumping into them with each swell. "You'll notice
there's no umbilical," Doug says. "Normally that is mandatory for an ROV.
You need the umbilical for three reasons."
Randy grins, because he knows that Doug Shaftoe is about to enumerate
the three reasons. Randy has spent almost no time around military people,
but he is finding that he gets along with them surprisingly well.
His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate every
one around them, all the time. Randy does not need to know anything about
the ROV, but Doug Shaftoe is going to give him a short course anyway. Randy
supposes that when you are in a war, practical knowledge is a good thing to
spread around.
"One," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, "to provide power to the ROV.
But this ROV carries its own power source an oxygen/natural gas swash plate
motor, adapted from torpedo technology, and part of our peace dividend"
(that is the other thing Randy likes about military people their mastery of
deadpan humor) "that generates enough electricity to run all of the
thrusters. Two, for communications and control. But this unit uses blue
green lasers to communicate with the control console which Amy is manning.
Three, for emergency recovery in the event of total systems failure. But if
this unit fails, it is smart enough, supposedly, to inflate a bladder and
float up to the surface where it will activate a strobe light so that we can
go recover it."
"Jeez," Randy says, "isn't this thing incredibly expensive?"
"It is incredibly expensive," Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe says, "but the
guy who runs the company that makes it is an old buddy of mine we were at
the Naval Academy together he loans it to me sometimes, when I have a
pressing need."
"Does your friend know what the pressing need is in this case?"
"He does not know specifically," says Doug Shaftoe, mildly offended,
"but I suppose he is not a stupid man either."
"Clear!" shouts Amy Shaftoe, sounding rather impatient.
Her father takes a good look at each of the thrusters in turn. "Clear,"
he responds. A moment later, something begins to thrum inside the ROV, and a
stream of bubbles spurts from an orifice on its tail, and then the thrusters
begin to spin around. They swivel on the ends of their stubby wings until
they are facing downwards, throwing fountains into the air, and the ROV
sinks rapidly. The fountains diminish and become slight upwellings in the
sea. Seen through the water's rough surface, the ROV is a yellow splatter.
It shortens as the vehicle's nose pitches down, then rapidly disappears as
the thrusters drive it straight down. "Always kinda takes my breath away to
see something that costs so much going off to who knows where," Doug Shaftoe
says meditatively.
The water around the boat has begun to emit a kind of dreadful, sickly
light, like radiation in a low budget horror film. "Jeez! The laser?" Randy
says.
"Mounted to the bottom of the hull, in a little dome," Doug says.
"Punches through even turbid water with ease."
"What kind of bandwidth can you transmit on it?"
"Amy is seeing decent monochrome video on her little screen right now,
if that is what you mean. It is all digital. All packetized. So if some of
the data doesn't make it through, the image gets a little choppy, but we do
not lose visuals altogether."
"Cool."
"Yes, it is cool," Doug Shaftoe allows. "Let us go and watch TV."
They crouch beneath the canopy. Doug turns on a small Sony portable
television, a ruggedized waterproof model encased in yellow plastic, and
patches its input cable into a spare output jack on the back of Amy's rig.
He turns it on and they begin to see a bit of what Amy is seeing. They do
not have the benefit of the dark cowl that Amy is using, and so the glare of
the sun washes out everything but a straight white line emerging from the
dark center of the picture and expanding towards the edge. It is moving.
"I am following the buoy line down," she explains. "Kind of boring."
Randy's calculator watch beeps twice. He checks the time; it is three
in the afternoon.
"Randy?" Amy says, in a velvet voice.
"Yes?"
"Could you give me the square root of three thousand eight hundred
twenty three on that thing?"
"Why do you want that?"
"Just do it."
Randy holds his wrist up so that he can see the watch's digital
display, takes a pencil out of his pocket, and begins using its eraser to
press the tiny little buttons. He hears a metallic snicking noise, but pays
it no mind.
Something cool and smooth glides along the underside of his wrist.
"Hold still," Amy says. She bites her lip and pulls. The watch falls off,
and comes away in her left hand, its vinyl band neatly severed. She's
holding the kris in her right, the edge of its blade still decorated with a
few of Randy's arm hairs. "Huh. Sixty one point eight three oh four. I
would've guessed higher." She tosses the watch over her shoulder and it
disappears into the South China Sea. "Square roots are tricky that way."
"Amy, you're losing the rope!" says her father impatiently, focused
entirely on the screen of the TV.
Amy jams the kris back into its sheath, smiles sweetly at Randy, and
plugs her face back into the rig. Randy is speechless for a while.
The question of whether or not she is a lesbian is rapidly becoming
more than purely academic. He performs a quick mental review of all of the
lesbians he has known. Usually they are mid level, nine to five city
dwellers with sensible haircuts. In other words, they are just like most of
the other people Randy knows. Amy is too flagrantly exotic, too much like a
horny film director's idea of what a lesbian would be. So maybe there is
some hope here.
"If you're gonna stare at my daughter that way," Doug Shaftoe says,
"you'd better start boning up on your ballroom dancing."
"Is he starin' at me? I can never tell when I have my face stuck in
this thing," Amy says.
"He was in love with his watch. Now he has no object for his
affections," Doug says. "So, hold on to your hats!"
Randy can tell when someone is trying to rattle him. "What is it that
offended you so much about my watch? The alarm?"
"The whole package was pretty annoying," Amy says, "but the alarm is
what made me psychotic."
"You should have said something. Being a true geek, I actually know how
to turn that alarm off."
"Then why didn't you?"
"I don't want to lose track of time."
"Why? Got a cake in the oven?"
"The Dentist's due diligence people will be all over me."
Doug shifts position and screws up his face curiously. "You mentioned
that before. What is due diligence?"
"It's like this. Alfred has some money that he wants to invest."
"Who's Alfred?"
"A hypothetical person whose name begins with A."
"I don't understand."
"In the crypto world, when you are explaining a cryptographic protocol,
you use hypothetical people. Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Evan, Fred, Greg, and
so on."
"Okay."
"Alfred invests his money in a company that is run by Barney. When I
say 'run by' what I mean is that Barney has ultimate responsibility for what
that company does. So, perhaps Barney is the chairman of the board of
directors in this case. He's been chosen, by Alfred, Alice, Agnes, Andrew,
and the other investors, to look after the company. He and the other
directors hire corporate officers such as Chuck, who is the president. Chuck
and the other officers hire Drew to run one of the company's divisions. Drew
hires Edgar, the engineer, and so on and so forth. So, in military terms,
there is a whole chain of command that extends down to the guys in the
trenches, like Edgar."
"And Barney's the man at the top of the chain of the command," Doug
says.
"Right. So, just like a general, he is ultimately responsible for
everything that is done below him. Alfred has personally entrusted Barney
with that money. Barney is legally required to exercise due diligence in
seeing that the money is spent responsibly. If Barney fails to show due
diligence, he is in major legal trouble."
"Ah."
"Yeah. That gets Barney's attention. Alfred's lawyers might show up at
any moment and demand proof that due diligence is being exercised. Barney
needs to stay on his toes, make sure that his ass is covered at all times."
"Barney in this case is the Dentist?"
"Yeah. Alfred, Agnes, and the others are all of the people in his
investment club half of the orthodontists in Orange County."
"And you are Edgar the Engineer."
"No, you are Edgar the Engineer. I am a corporate officer of Epiphyte.
I am more like Chuck or Drew."
Amy breaks in. "But what does the Dentist have over you? You don't work
for him."
"I'm sorry to tell you that is no longer the case, as of yesterday."
This gets the Shaftoes' attention.
"The Dentist now owns ten percent of Epiphyte."
"How did that come about? Last I was informed of anything," Doug says
accusingly, "the son of a bitch was suing you."
"He was suing us," Randy says, "because he wanted in. None of our stock
was for sale, and we were not planning to go public anytime soon, so the
only way he could get in was by essentially blackmailing us with a lawsuit."
"You said it was a bogus lawsuit!" Amy exclaims, the only person here
who is bothering to show, or feel, any moral outrage.
"It was. But it would have cost so much to litigate it that it would
have bankrupted us. On the other hand, when we offered to sell the Dentist
some stock, he dropped the suit. We got our hands on some of his money,
which is always useful."
"But now you are beholden to his due diligence people."
"Yeah. They are on the cable ship even as we speak they came out on a
tender this morning."
"What do they think you are doing?"
"I told them that the sidescan sonar revealed some fresh anchor scars
near the cable route, which needed to be assessed."
"Very routine."
"Yeah. Due diligence people are easy to manipulate. You just have to
act really diligent. They eat it up."
"We're there," Amy says, and hauls back on a joystick, twisting her
body to put a little English on the maneuver.
Doug and Randy look at the TV screen. It is completely dark. Digits
along the bottom state that the pitch is five degrees and the roll is eight,
which means that the ROV is nearly level. The yaw number is spinning around
rapidly, meaning that the ROV is rotating around its vertical axis like a
fishtailing car. "Should come into view at around fifty degrees," Amy
mutters.
The yaw numbers slow down, dropping through a hundred degrees, ninety,
eighty. At around seventy degrees, something rotates into view at the edge
of the screen. It looks like a rugged, particolored sugarloaf rising from
the seafloor. Amy gooses the controls a couple of times and the rotation
drops to a crawl. The sugarloaf glides into the center of the screen and
then stops. "Locking in the gyros," Amy says, whacking a button. "All
forward." The sugarloaf slowly begins to get bigger. The ROV is moving
towards it, its direction automatically stabilized by its built in
gyroscopes.
"Swing wide around it to starboard," Doug says. "I want a different
angle on this." He pays some attention to a VCR that's supposed to be
recording this feed.
Amy lets the joystick come back to neutral, then executes a series of
moves that causes them to lose the image of the wreck for a minute. All they
can see are coral formations passing beneath the ROV's cameras. Then she
yaws it around to the left and there it is again: the same streamlined
projectile shape. But from this angle, they can see it's actually projecting
from the seafloor at a forty five degree angle.
"It looks like the nose of an airplane. A bomber," Randy says. "Like a
B 29."
Doug shakes his head. "Bombers had to have a circular cross section
because they were pressurized. This thing does not have a circular cross
section. It is more eliptical."
"But I don't see all of the railings and guns and, and "
"Crap that a classic German U boat would have hanging off of it. This
is a more modern streamlined shape," Doug says. He shouts something in
Tagalog at one of his crew, over on Glory IV.
"Looks pretty crusty," Randy says.
"There will be plenty of crap growing on her," Doug says, "but she's
still recognizable. There was not a catastrophic implosion."
A crew member runs onto the pamboat carrying an old picture book from
Glory IV's small but idiosyncratic library: a pictorial history of German U
boats. Doug flips past the first three quarters of the book and stops at a
photograph of a sub whose lines are strikingly familiar.
"God, that looks just like the Beatles' Yellow Submarine," Randy says.
Amy pulls her head out of the viewer and crowds him out of the way to look.
"Except it's not yellow," Doug says. "This was the new generation.
Hitler could've won the war if he'd made a few dozen of these." He flips
forward a few pages. There are pictures of more U boats with similar lines,
but much larger.
A cross sectional diagram shows a thin walled, elliptical outer hull
enclosing a thick walled, perfectly circular inner hull. "The circle is the
pressure hull. Always kept at one atmosphere and full of air, for the crew.
Outside of it, an outer hull, smooth and streamlined, with room for fuel and
hydrogen peroxide tanks "
"It carried its own oxidizer? Like a rocket?"
"Sure for running submerged. Any interstices in this outer hull would
have been filled with seawater, pressurized to match the external pressure
of the ocean, to keep it from collapsing."
Doug holds the book up beneath the television monitor and rotates it,
comparing the lines of a U boat to the shape on the screen. The latter is
rugged and furry with coral and other growths, but the similarity is
obvious.
"Why isn't it lying flat on the bottom, I wonder?" Randy says.
Doug grabs a plastic water bottle, which is still mostly full, and
tosses it overboard. It floats upside down.
"Why isn't it lying flat, Randy?"
"Because there's an air bubble trapped in one end," Randy says
sheepishly.
"She suffered damage at the stern. The bow pitched up. There was a
partial collapse. Seawater, rushing into the breach at the stern, forced all
of the air into the bow. The depth is a hundred and fifty four meters,
Randy. That's fifteen atmospheres of pressure. What does Boyle's Law tell
you?"
"That the volume of the air must have been reduced by a factor of
fifteen."
"Bingo. Suddenly, fourteen fifteenths of the boat is full of water, and
the other fifteenth is a pocket of compressed air, capable of supporting
life briefly. Most of her crew dead, she fell fast and settled hard onto the
bottom, breaking her back and leaving the bow section pointing upwards, as
you see her. If anyone was still alive in the bubble, they died a long, slow
death. May God have mercy on their souls."
In other circumstances, the religious reference would make Randy
uncomfortable, but here it seems like the only appropriate thing to say.
Think what you will about religious people, they always have something to
say at times like this. What would an atheist come up with? Yes, the
organisms inhabiting that submarine must have lost their higher neural
functions over a prolonged period of time and eventually turned into pieces
of rotten meat. So what?
"Closing in on what passes for the conning tower," Amy says. According
to the book, this U boat isn't going to have the traditional high vertical
tower rising out of its back: just a low streamlined bulge. Amy has piloted
the ROV very close to the U boat now, and once again she brings it to a stop
and yaws it around. The hull pans into the screen, a variegated mountain of
coral growths, completely unrecognizable as a man made object until
something dark enters the screen. It turns into a perfectly circular hole.
An eel comes snaking out of it and snaps angrily at the camera for a moment,
its teeth and gullet filling the screen. When it swims away, they can see a
dome shaped hatch cover hanging from its hinges next to the hole.
"Someone opened the hatch," Amy says.
"My god," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe. "My god." He leans away from
the TV as if he can't handle the image any more. He crawls out from under
the canopy and stands up, staring out across the South China Sea. "Someone
got out of that U boat."
Amy is still fascinated, and one with her joysticks, like a thirteen
year old boy in a video arcade. Randy rubs the strange empty place on his
wrist and stares at the screen, but he is not seeing anything now except
that perfect round hole.
After a minute or so, he goes out to join Doug, who is ritualistically
lighting up a cigar. "This is a good time to smoke," he mumbles. "Want one?"
"Sure. Thanks." Randy pulls out a folding multipurpose tool and cuts
the end from the cigar, a pretty impressive looking Cuban number. "Why do
you say it's a good time to smoke?"
"To fix it in your memory. To mark it." Doug tears his gaze from the
horizon and looks at Randy searchingly, almost beseeching him to understand.
"This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever
be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an
adventure, or learn something. But we have been changed. We are standing
close to the Heracitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces." He produces a
flaring safety match from his cupped palms like a magician, and holds it up
before Randy's eyes, and Randy puffs the cigar alive, staring into the
flame.
"Well, here's to it," Randy says.
"And here's to whoever got out," replies Doug.
Chapter 50 SANTA MONICA
The United States Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and
foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a
stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another,
and last and least a fighting organization. For the last couple of weeks he
has been owned by the second group. They put him on a luxury liner too swift
to be caught by U boats though this is a moot point since, as Waterhouse and
a few other people know, Dönitz has declared defeat in the Battle of the
Atlantic, and pulled his U boats off the map until he can build the new
generation, which will run on rocket fuel and need never come to the
surface. In this way Waterhouse got to New York. From Penn Station he took
trains to the Midwest, where he spent a week with his family and reassured
them for the ten thousandth time that, because of what he knew, he could
never be sent into actual combat.
Then it was trains again to Los Angeles, and now he waits for what
sounds like it will be a killing series of airplane flights halfway round
the world to Brisbane. He is one of about a million young men and women in
uniform and on leave, wandering around Los Angeles looking for some
entertainment.
Now, they say that this city is the entertainment capital and so
entertainment shouldn't be hard to find. Indeed you can hardly walk down a
city block without bumping into half a dozen prostitutes and passing an
equal number of night spots, movie theaters, and pool halls. Waterhouse
samples all of these during his four day layover, and is distressed to find
that he is no longer entertained by any of them. Not even the whores!
Maybe this is why he is walking along the bluff north of the Santa
Monica Pier, looking for a way down to the beach, which is completely empty
the only thing in Los Angeles that isn't generating commissions and
residuals for someone. The beach lures but does not pander. The plants up
here, standing watch over the Pacific, are like something from another
planet. No, they do not even look like real plants from any conceivable
planet. They are too geometric and perfect. They are schematic diagrams for
plants sketched out by some impossibly modern designer with a strong eye for
geometry but who has never been out in a woods and seen a real plant. They
don't even grow out of any recognizable organic matrix, they are embedded in
the sterile ochre dust that passes for soil in this part of the country.
Waterhouse knows that this is just the beginning, that it will only get
weirder from here on out. He heard enough from Bobby Shaftoe to know that
the other side of the Pacific is going to be indescribably strange.
The sun is preparing to go down and the pier, down the beach to his
left, is alight, a gaudy galaxy; the zoot suits of the carnival barkers
stand out from a mile away, like emergency flares. But Waterhouse is in no
hurry to reach it. He can see ignorant armies of soldiers, sailors, marines
milling around, distinguishable by the hues of their uniforms.
The last time he was in California, before Pearl Harbor, he was no
different from all of those guys on the pier just a little smarter, with a
knack for numbers and music. But now he understands the war in a way that
they never will. He is still wearing the same uniform, but only as a
disguise. He believes now that the war, as those guys understand it, is
every bit as fictional as the war movies being turned out across town in
Hollywood.
They say that Patton and MacArthur are daring generals; the world
watches in anticipation of their next intrepid sortie behind enemy lines.
Waterhouse knows that Patton and MacArthur, more than anything else, are
intelligent consumers of Ultra/Magic. They use it to figure out where the
enemy has concentrated his forces, then loop around them and strike where he
is weakest. That's all.
They say that Montgomery is a steady hand, cagey and insightful.
Waterhouse has no use for Monty; Monty's an idiot; Monty doesn't read his
Ultra; he ignores it, in fact, to the detriment of his men and of the war
effort.
They say that Yamamoto was killed by a lucky accident when some roving
P 38s just happened across an anonymous flight of Nipponese planes and shot
them down. Waterhouse knows that Yamamoto's death warrant was hammered out
by an Electrical Till Corporation line printer in a Hawaiian cryptanalysis
factory, and that the admiral was the victim of a straightforward political
assassination.
Even his concept of geography has changed. When he was home, he sat
down with his grandparents and they looked at the globe, spinning it around
until all they saw was blue, tracing his route across the Pacific, from one
lonely volcano to the next godforsaken atoll. Waterhouse knows that those
little islands, before the war, had only one economic function: information
processing. The dots and dashes traveling along the undersea cable are
swallowed up by the earth currents after a few thousand miles, like ripples
in heavy surf. The European powers colonized those islands at about the same
time as the long cables were being laid, and constructed power stations
where the dots and dashes coming down the line were picked up, amplified,
and sent on to the next chain of islands.
Some of those cables must plunge into the deep not far from this beach.
Waterhouse is about to follow the dots and dashes over the western horizon,
where the world ends.
He finds a ramp that leads down to the beach and lets gravity draw him
towards sea level, gazing to the south and west. The water is pacific and
colorless beneath a hazy sky, the horizon line is barely discernable.
The fine dry sand plumps under his feet in fat circular waves that
crest around his ankles, so he has to stop and unlace his hard leather
shoes. Sand has become trapped in the matrix of his black socks and he pulls
them off too and stuffs them in his pockets. He walks towards the water
carrying one shoe in each hand. He sees others who have tied their shoes
together through belt loops, leaving their hands free. But the asymmetry of
this offends him, so he carries his shoes as if preparing to invert himself
and wade on his hands with his head dangling into the water.
The low sun shines flatly across the sand, grazing the chaos and
creating a knife sharp terminator at the crest of each dunelet. The curves
flirt and osculate with one another in some pattern that is, Waterhouse
guesses, deeply fascinating and significant but too challenging for his
tired mind to attack. Some areas have been stomped level by seagulls.
The sand at the surf line has been washed flat. A small child's
footprints wander across it, splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts.
The sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it. Then
small imperfections are betrayed by swirls in the water. Those swirls in
turn carve the sand. The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape;
the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and some
times carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to
the marks. Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the
wet sand that are read by the ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but
in the process its state has been changed, the pattern of its swirls has
been altered. Waterhouse imagines that the disturbance might somehow
propagate across the Pacific and into some super secret Nipponese
surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves; Nip
listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water
swirling around Waterhouse's feet carries information about Nip propeller
design and the deployment of their fleets if only he had the wit to read it.
The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.
The land war is over for Waterhouse. Now he is gone, gone to the sea.
This is the first time he's taken a good look at it the sea, that is since
he reached Los Angeles. It looks big to him. Before, when he was at Pearl,
it was just a blank, a nothing. Now it looks like an active participant and
a vector of information. Fighting a war out on that thing could turn you
into some kind of a maniac, make you deranged. What must it be like to be
the General? To live for years among volcanoes and alien trees, to forget
about oaks and cornfields and snowstorms and football games? To fight the
terrible Nipponese in the jungle, burning them out of caves, driving them
off cliffs into the sea? To be an oriental potentate the supreme authority
over millions of square miles, hundreds of millions of people. Your only
tether to the real world a slender copper fiber rambling across the ocean
floor, a faint bleating of dots and dashes in the night? What kind of man
would this make you?
Chapter 51 OUTPOST
When their sergeant was aerosolized by the Australian with the tommy
gun, Goto Dengo and his surviving comrades were left mapless, and mapless in
the jungles of New Guinea during a war is bad, bad, bad.
In another country, they might have been able to keep walking downhill
until they reached the ocean, and then follow the coastline to their
destination. But travel along the coast is even more nearly impossible than
travel in the interior, because the coast is a chain of pestilential
headhunter infested marshes.
In the end, they find a Nipponese outpost by simply following the sound
of the explosions. They may not have maps, but the American Fifth Air Force
does.
The relentless bombing is reassuring, in a way, to Goto Dengo. After
their encounter with the Australians, he entertains an idea that he dare not
voice: that by the time they reach their destination, it might already have
been overrun by the enemy. That he can even conceive of such a possibility
proves beyond all doubt that he is no longer fit to be a soldier of the
emperor.
In any case, the drone of the bombers' engines, the tympanic thuds of
the explosions, the flashes on the night horizon give them plenty of helpful
hints as to where the Nipponese people are located. One of Goto Dengo's
comrades is a farmboy from Kyushu who seems to be capable of substituting
enthusiasm for food, water, sleep, medicine, and any other bodily needs. As
they trudge onwards through the jungle, this boy keeps his spirits up by
looking forward to the day when they draw close enough to hear the sound of
the antiaircraft batteries and see the American planes, torn open by
shellfire, spiraling into the sea.
That day never arrives. As they get closer, though, they can find the
outpost with their eyes closed, simply by following the reek of dysentery
and decaying flesh. Just as the stench draws close enough to be
overpowering, the enthusiastic boy makes an odd grunting sound. Goto Dengo
turns to see a peculiar, small, oval shaped entrance wound in the center of
the boy's forehead. The boy falls down and lies on the ground quivering.
"We are Nipponese!" Goto Dengo says.
***
The tendency of bombs to fall out of the sky and blow up among them
whenever then sun is up dictates that bunkers and foxholes be dug.
Unfortunately ground coincides with water table. Footprints fill up with
water before the foot has even been worried loose from the clutching mud.
Bomb craters are neat, circular ponds. Slit trenches are zigzagging canals.
There are no wheeled vehicles and no beasts of burden, no livestock, no
buildings. Those pieces of charred aluminum must have been parts of
airplanes once. There are a few heavy weapons, but their barrels are cracked
and warped from explosions, and pocked with small craters. Palm trees are
squat stumps crowned with a few jagged splinters radiating away from the
site of the most recent explosion. The expanse of red mud is flecked with
random clutches of gulls tearing at bits of food; Goto Dengo suspects
already what they're eating, and confirms this when he cuts his bare foot on
an excerpt of a human jawbone. The sheer volume of high explosive that has
detonated here has suffused every molecule of the air, water, and earth with
the chemical smell of TNT residue. This smell reminds Goto Dengo of home;
the same stuff is good for pulverizing any rock that is standing between you
and a vein of ore.
A corporal escorts Goto Dengo and his one surviving comrade from the
perimeter to a tent that has been pitched out on the mud, its ropes tied not
to stakes but to jagged segments of tree trunks, or heavy fragments of
ruined weapons. Inside, the mud is paved with the lids of wooden crates. A
shirtless man of perhaps fifty sits crosslegged on top of an empty
ammunition box. His eyelids are so heavy and swollen that it is difficult to
tell whether he is awake. He breathes erratically. When he inhales, his skin
retracts into the interstices between ribs, producing the illusion that his
skeleton is trying to burst free from his doomed body. He has not shaved in
a long time, but doesn't have enough whiskers to muster a real beard. He is
mumbling to a clerk, who squats on his haunches atop a crate lid stenciled
MANILA and copies down his words.
Goto Dengo and his comrade stand there for perhaps half an hour,
desperately trying to master their disappointment. He expected to be lying
in a hospital bed drinking miso soup by now. But these people are in worse
shape than he is; he is afraid that they might ask him for help.
Still, it is good just to be under canvas, and standing in the presence
of someone who has authority, who is taking charge. Clerks enter the tent
carrying message decrypts, which means that somewhere around here is a
functioning radio station, and a staff with codebooks. They are not totally
cut off.
"What do you know how to do?" says the officer, when Goto Dengo is
finally granted the opportunity to introduce himself.
"I am an engineer," says Goto Dengo.
"Ah. You know how to build bridges? Airstrips?"
The officer is engaging in a bit of whimsy here; bridges and airstrips
are as far beyond their grasp as intergalactic starships. All of his teeth
have fallen out and so he gums his words, and sometimes must pause to draw
breath two or three times in the course of a sentence.
"I will build such things if it is my commander's wish, though for such
things, others have skill far better than mine. My specialty is underground
works."
"Bunkers?"
A wasp stings him on the back of the neck and he inhales sharply. "I
will build bunkers if it is my commander's wish. My specialty is tunnels, in
earth or in rock, but especially in rock."
The officer stares at Goto Dengo fixedly for a few moments, then
directs a glance at his clerk, who nods a little bow and takes it down.
"Your skills are useless here," he says offhandedly, as if this is true of
just about everyone.
"Sir! Also, I am proficient with the Nambu light machine gun."
"The Nambu is a poor weapon. Not as good as what the Americans and
Australians have. Still, useful in jungle defense."
"Sir! I will defend our perimeter to my last breath "
"Unfortunately they will not attack us from the jungle. They bomb us.
But the Nambu cannot hit a plane. When they come, they will come from the
ocean. The Nambu is useless against an amphibious assault."
"Sir! I have lived in the jungle for six months."
"Oh?" For the first time, the officer seems interested. "What have you
been eating?"
"Grubs and bats, sir!"
"Go and find me some."
"At once, sir!"
***
He untwists some old rope to make twine, and knots the twine into nets,
and hangs the nets in trees. Once that is done, his life is simple: every
morning he climbs up into the trees to collect bats from the nets