not recognize the river. Until now, it has always
been a few trickles of water braided down a rocky bed. Even before they ran
a road up it, you could get up almost as far as the waterfall by hopping
from one dry rock to the next.
Now, all of a sudden, the river is wide, deep, and murky. The tips of a
few big rocks protrude from the surface here and there.
He remembers something he saw a hundred years ago, in a previous
incarnation, on another planet: a bedsheet from the Manila Hotel with a
crude map sketched on it. The Tojo River drawn in with a fat trail of blue
fountain pen ink.
"We dynamited the rockfall," Noda says, "according to the plan."
Long ago, they had poised rocks above a bottleneck in the river, ready
to create a little dam. But setting off that dynamite was supposed to be
almost the last thing they did before sealing themselves up inside.
"But we are not ready," Goto Dengo says.
Noda laughs. He seems quite high spirited. "You have been telling me
for a month that you are ready."
"Yes," Lieutenant Goto says, slowly and thickly, "you are right. We are
ready."
Noda slaps him on the back. "You must get to the main entrance before
it floods."
"My crew?"
"Your crew is waiting for you there."
Goto Dengo begins walking towards the trail that will take him down to
the main entrance. Along the way, he passes the top of another ventilation
shaft, Several dozen workers are queued up there, thumbs lashed together
behind their backs with piano wire, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets.
One by one, prisoners kneel at the lip of the shaft. Lieutenant Mori whips
his officer's sword into the nape of each neck with a terrific grunt. Head
and body tumble forward into the ventilation shaft and thud meatily into
other bodies, far below, a couple of seconds later. Every leaf and pebble
within a three meter radius of the shaft opening is saturated with bright
red blood, and so is Lieutenant Mori.
"Don't worry about that," Captain Noda says. "I will see to it that the
tops of the shafts are backfilled with rubble, as we discussed. The jungle
will grow over them long before the Americans ever find this place."
Goto Dengo averts his eyes and turns to leave.
"Lieutenant Goto!" says a voice. He turns around. It is Lieutenant
Mori, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. A Filipino kneels before
him, mumbling a prayer in Latin, fumbling with a rosary that dangles from
his bound hands.
"Yes, Lieutenant Mori."
"According to my roster, six prisoners are signed out to you. I will
need them."
"Those six prisoners are down below, helping to load in the last
shipment."
"But all of the shipment is inside the tunnels now."
"Yes, but not well placed. The entire purpose of the fool's vault is
ruined if we strew gold and diamonds around the place in such a way as to
lead thieves deeper into the caverns. I need these men to continue that
work."
"You take full responsibility for them?"
"I do," Goto Dengo says.
"If there are only six," Captain Noda says, "then your crew should be
able to keep them under control."
"I will see you at Yasukuni, Goto Dengo," says Lieutenant Mori.
"I will look forward to it," Goto Dengo says. He does not add that
Yasukuni must be a very crowded place by now, and they will probably have a
terrible time finding each other.
"I envy you. The end will be longer and harder for those of us on the
outside." Lieutenant Mori snaps his blade into the back of the Filipino's
head, cutting him off between an Ave and a Maria.
"Your heroism will not go unrewarded," Goto Dengo says.
Lieutenant Mori's crew awaits him down below, in front of the mouse
hole that leads into Golgotha: four hand picked soldiers. Each wears a
thousand stitch headband, and so each has an orange ball centered on his
forehead, reminding Goto Dengo not of the Rising Sun but of an exit wound.
The water is up to mid thigh now, and the entrance tunnel is half full. When
Goto Dengo arrives, followed closely by Captain Noda, the men all cheer him
politely.
Goto Dengo squats in the opening. Only his head and shoulders are above
the water. Before him the tunnel is black. It takes a powerful effort of
will for him to enter. But it is no worse than what he used to do in the
abandoned mines, back in Hokkaido.
Of course, the abandoned mines weren't going to be dynamited shut
behind him.
Going forward is his chance to survive. If he hesitates, Noda will kill
him on the spot, and all his crew, and others will be sent in to finish the
job. Noda made sure that others were trained to do it.
"See you at Yasukuni," he says to Captain Noda, and without waiting for
a response he sloshes forward into blackness.
Chapter 78 PONTIFEX
By the time Randy reaches the Air Kinakuta boarding lounge, he has
already forgotten how he reached the airport. He honestly can't remember.
Did he hail a taxi? Not likely in down town Los Altos. Did he get a ride
from some hacker? He couldn't have driven the Acura, because the Acura's
electronics had been burned to a crisp by the electromagnetic pulse gun. He
had pulled the title out of the glove compartment and signed it over to a
Ford dealer three blocks away, in exchange for five thousand dollars in
cash.
Oh, yeah. The Ford dealer gave him a ride to the airport.
He has always wanted to pull the stunt of walking up to the counter of
an exotic foreign airline and saying, "Get me on the next plane to X." But
now he's just done it and it wasn't cool and romantic as he had hoped. It
was sort of bleak and stressful and expensive. He had to buy a first class
ticket, which consumed most of the five thousand dollars. But he doesn't
feel like beating himself to death over how he is managing his assets just
now, i.e., at a time when his net worth is a negative number that can only
be expressed using scientific notation. The probability is high that he
failed to wipe Tombstone's hard drive before the cops seized it, and that
the Dentist's lawsuit will consequently succeed.
On his way down the concourse he stands and stares at a bank of
telephones for a while. He very much wants to notify the Shaftoes of recent
events. It would be a good thing if they could somehow strip the sunken sub
clean of treasure as fast as possible, reducing its value and hence the
damage that the Dentist can inflict on Epiphyte.
The math is pretty simple here. The Dentist has a way to claim damages
from Epiphyte. The amount of those damages is x, where x is what the
Dentist, as a minority shareholder, would have made in capital gains if
Randy had been responsible enough to write a better contract with Semper
Marine. If such a contract had specified a fifty fifty split, then x would
be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth
of Epiphyte that the Dentist owns minus a few percent for taxes and other
frictional effects of the real world. So if there's ten million dollars in
the wreck, then x works out to around half a million bucks.
In order for the Dentist to gain control of Epiphyte, he has to acquire
an additional forty percent of its stock. The price of that stock (if it
were for sale) is simply 0.4 times the total value of Epiphyte. Call it y.
If x > y, the Dentist wins. Because then the judge is going to say,
"You, Epiphyte, owe this poor aggrieved minority shareholder $x. But as I
look at the parlous state of the corporation's finances I see that there's
no way for you to raise that kind of money. And so the only way to settle
the debt is to give the plaintiff the one asset you have in abundance, which
is your crappy stock. And since the value of the whole corporation is
really, really close to being zero, you're going to have to give him almost
all of it."
So how to make x < y? Either reduce the value of the wreck, by
stripping it of its gold, or else increase the value of Epiphyte, by what,
exactly?
In better times they could maybe take the company public. But setting
up an IPO takes months. And no investor's going to touch it when it's
encumbered by a lawsuit from the Dentist.
Randy has this vision of driving through the jungle with an end loader
and scooping up that big pile of gold bars he found with Doug and taking it
straight to a bank and depositing it in Epiphyte's account. That'd do it.
The whole concept makes his body tingle as he stands there in the middle of
the international concourse.
Off to the left, some kind of huddled or teeming mass, heavy on the
women and children, passes, and Randy hears some familiar voices. His mind
has wrapped itself like a starving squid around this gold in the jungle
concept, and in order to address reality for just a second, he has to peel
the tentacles away, popping those suckers off of it one by one. He
eventually focuses in on the scuttling group and identifies it as Avi's
family: Devorah and a bunch of kids and the two nannies, clutching passports
and tickets in El Al jackets. The kids are small and prone to sudden darting
tactics, the adults are tense and not inclined to let them stray, so the
group's movement down the concourse has the general aspect of a sack of
beagles heading in the approximate direction of some fresh meat. Randy is
probably personally responsible for this exodus and would much rather slink
into the men's room and crawl down a toilet, but he has to say something. So
he catches up with Devorah and startles her by offering to carry the child
support bag that she has slung over her shoulder. This turns out to be
shockingly heavy: several gallons of apple juice, he would estimate, plus
complete asthma attack management infrastructure, and maybe a few bricks of
solid gold in case of some totalizing civil breakdown en route.
"So. Uh, going to Israel?"
"El Al doesn't fly to Acapulco." Pow! Devorah is in peak form.
"Did Avi give you any kind of rationale for this?"
"You're asking me? I kind of assumed you would know," Devorah says.
"Well, things have been, certainly, volatile," Randy says. "I don't
know if fleeing the country is warranted."
"Then why are you in the airport with an Air Kinakuta ticket sticking
out of your pocket?"
"Oh, you know ... some business issues need resolving."
"You seem really depressed. Do you have a problem?" Devorah asks.
Randy sighs. "That depends. Do you?"
"Do I what? Have a problem? Why should I have a problem?"
"Because you've been uprooted and sent packing on ten minutes' notice."
"We're going to Israel, Randy. That's not being uprooted. That's being
rerooted." Or perhaps she is saying "rerouted." Without a transcript, there
is no way for Randy to tell.
"Yeah, but it's still kind of a hassle "
"Compared to what?"
"Compared to staying at home and living your life."
"This is my life, Randy." Devorah is definitely kicking out a prickly
vibe here. Randy figures that she is incredibly pissed off, but under some
kind of emotional nondisclosure agreement. This is probably better than the
only other two alternatives Randy can think of, namely (1) dissolving into
hysterical recriminations and (2) beatific serenity. It is an I'll do my
job, you do yours, why are you in my face attitude. Randy feels like an
idiot, all of a sudden, for having taken Devorah's bag. She is clearly just
this side of aghast, wondering why the fuck Randy is toiling as a skycap at
this critical moment. Like she and the nannies are not capable of humping a
sack down a hallway. Has she, Devorah, offered to step in and help Randy
write any code lately? And if Randy really has nothing better to do, why
doesn't he be a man, and strap grenades all over his body and give the
Dentist a big hug?
Randy says, "I assume you'll be in touch with Avi before you take off.
Would you give him a message?"
"What's the message?"
"Zero."
"That's it?"
"That's it," Randy says.
Devorah is perhaps not familiar with Randy and Avi's practice of
conserving precious bandwidth by communicating in binary code, one bit at a
time, la Paul Revere and the Old North Church. In this case, "zero" means
that Randy did not succeed in wiping out all the data on Tombstone's hard
drive.
***
Air Kinakuta's first class lounge, with its free drinks and highly un
American concept of service, beckons. Randy avoids it because he knows he
will sink straight into a coma if he goes there, and they would have to load
him onto the 747 with a forklift. Instead he walks around the airport,
clutching his hip spastically every time he re realizes that his laptop
isn't dangling there. He is not adjusting very quickly to the fact that most
of the laptop is stuffed into a wastebasket at the Ford dealership where he
unloaded the Acura. While he was waiting for his man to scurry back from the
bank with the five grand, he used the screwdriver attachments on his
multipurpose pocket tool to extract the laptop's hard drive, and then threw
away the rest.
Very large television sets hang from the ceilings in the departure
lounge, showing the Airport Channel, which is a parade of news bits even
more punishingly flimsy than normal television news, mixed in with a great
deal of weather and stock quotes. Randy is struck, but not precisely
surprised, to see footage of black hatted Secret Admirers exercising their
Second Amendment rights in the streets of Los Altos, and of Ordo's barricade
avalanching towards the camera, and the police storming over it weapons
drawn. Paul Comstock is shown pausing, as he climbs into a limousine to say
something, looking hale and smug. The conventional wisdom about TV news is
that the image is everything and if that is the case then this is a big win
for Ordo, which looks like the victim of jackbooted thugs. Which gets
Epiphyte nowhere, since Ordo is, or ought to be, nothing more than a
bystander. This is supposed to be a private conflict between the Dentist and
Epiphyte and now it's become a public one between Comstock and Ordo, and
this makes Randy irritated and confused.
He goes and gets on his plane and starts eating caviar. Normally he
doesn't partake, but caviar has a decadent fiddling while Rome burns thing
going for it that works for him just now.
As is his nerdly custom, Randy actually reads the informational cards
that are stuffed in among the in flight magazines and vomit sacs. One of
these extols the fact that Sultan Class passengers (as first class
passengers are called) can not only make outgoing phone calls from their
seats but can also receive incoming ones. So Randy dials the number for
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe's GSM telephone. It's an Australian phone number,
but it'll ring anywhere on the planet. Right now it's something like six
A.M. in the Philippines, but Doug is bound to be awake, and indeed he
answers his phone on the second ring. Randy can tell from the sound of horns
and diesels that he is stuck in Manila traffic, probably in the back of a
taxi.
"It's Randy. On a plane," says Randy. "An Air Kinakuta plane."
"Randy! Well I've just been watching you on television," Doug says. It
takes a minute for that to sink in; Randy has used a couple of vodkas to
cleanse his palate of the caviar.
"Yeah," Doug continues, "I turned on CNN when I woke up and glimpsed
you sitting on top of a car typing. What's going on?"
"Nothing! Nothing at all," Randy says. He figures that this is a big
stroke of luck. Now that Doug has seen him on CNN, he'll be more likely to
effect superbly dramatic measures out of sheer paranoia. Randy slurps vodka
and says, "Wow, this Sultan Class service is great. Anyway, if you do a Web
search on Ordo, you'll see this nonsense had absolutely nothing to do with
us. Nothing."
"That's funny, because Comstock is denying that it's a crackdown on
Ordo," Doug says. When speaking of official U.S. government denials, Vietnam
combat veterans like Doug are capable of summoning up a drawling irony that
is about as subtle as having automotive jumper cables connected directly to
your fillings, but much funnier. Vodka climbs about halfway up Randy's nose
before he controls it. "They say that it's just a little old civil suit,"
Doug says, now using a petal soft, wounded innocent tone.
"Ordo's status as purveyor of stuff that the government hates and fears
is just coincidental," Randy guesses.
"That's right."
"Well then, I'm sure there's nothing to it other than our troubles with
the Dentist," Randy says.
"What troubles are those, Randy?"
"Happened during the middle of the night, your time. I'm sure you will
have some interesting faxes awaiting you this morning."
"Well, maybe I should look at those faxes, then," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Maybe I'll give you a buzz when I reach Kinakuta," Randy says.
"You have a good flight, Randall."
"Have a nice day, Douglas."
Randy puts the phone back in its armrest cradle and prepares to sink
into a well deserved plane coma. But five minutes later the phone rings. It
is so disorienting to have one's phone ring on an airplane that he doesn't
know what to make of it for a while. When he finally realizes what's going
on, he has to consult the instruction card to figure out how to answer it.
When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says,
"You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two
people in the world who know that Sultan Class passengers can receive
incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he's never heard this voice before.
It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age,
but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral.
"Um, who's this?"
"Am I right in thinking that you want Mr. Shaftoe to go to a pay
telephone somewhere and then call you back?"
"Who is this, please?"
"You think that's more secure than his GSM phone? It's not really." The
speaker pauses frequently before, during, and after sentences, as if he's
been spending a lot of time alone, and is having trouble hitting his
conversational stride.
"Okay," Randy says, "you know who I am and whom I was calling. So
obviously you are surveilling me. You're not working for the Dentist, I take
it. That leaves what? The United States Government? The NSA, right?"
The man laughs. "As a rule the Fort Meade boys don't bother to check in
with the people whose lines they are tapping." The caller has an un American
crispness in his voice, vaguely Northern European. "In your case the NSA
might make an exception, it's true when I was there, they were all great
admirers of your grandfather's work. In fact, they liked it so much they
stole it."
"No higher flattery, I guess."
"You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not."
"Why do you say that?"
"Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to
make difficult choices who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much
worse than being a moron."
"Did Grandpa work for you at the NSA?"
"He wasn't interested. Said he had a higher calling. So while he made
better and better computers to solve the Harvard Waterhouse Prime Factor
Challenge, my friends at the NSA watched him, and learned."
"And you did too."
"I? Oh, no, I have only modest skills with a soldering iron. I was
there to watch the NSA watching your grandfather."
"On behalf of whom? Don't tell me eruditorum.org?"
"Well done, Randy."
"What should I call you Root? Pontifex?"
"Pontifex is a nice word."
"It's true," Randy says. "I checked it out, looking for clues in the
etymology it's an old Latin word meaning 'priest.' "
"Catholics call the Pope 'Pontifex Maximus,' or pontiff for short,"
says Pontifex agreeably, "but the word was also used by pagans to denote
their priests, and Jews their rabbis it is ever so ecumenical."
"But the literal meaning of the word is 'bridge builder,' and so it's a
good name for a cryptosystem," Randy says.
"Or, I hope, for me," Pontifex says drily. "I am glad you feel that
way, Randy. Many people would think of a cryptosystem as a wall, rather than
a bridge."
"Well, gosh. It's nice to telephonically meet you, Pontifex."
"The pleasure is mutual."
"You've been so quiet on the e mail front recently."
"Didn't want to give you the creeps. I was afraid if I bothered you any
more, you'd think I was proselytizing."
"Not at all. By the way people in the know think your cryptosystem is
weird, but good."
"It's not weird at all, once you understand it," Pontifex says
politely.
"Well, uh, what occasions this phone call? Obviously your friends are
still surveilling me on behalf of whom, exactly?"
"I don't even know," Pontifex says. "But I do know that you're trying
to crack Arethusa."
Randy cannot even remember ever uttering the word "Arethusa." It was
printed on the wrappers on the bricks of ETC cards that he ran through
Chester's card reader. Now Randy pictures a box inside Grandpa's old trunk
labeled Harvard Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge and dated in the early
1950s. So that at least gives him a date to peg on Pontifex. "You were at
NSA during the late forties and early fifties," Randy says. "You must have
worked on Harvest." Harvest was a legendary code breaking supercomputer,
three decades ahead of its time, built by ETC engineers working under an NSA
contract.
"I told you," Pontifex says, "your grandfather's work came in handy."
"Chester's got this retired ETC engineer working on his card
machinery," Randy says. "He helped me read the Arethusa cards. Saw the
wrappers. He's a friend of yours. He called you."
Pontifex chuckles. "Among our little band there is hardly a word with
more memories attached to it than Arethusa. He nearly hit the floor when he
saw it. Called me from the cellphone on his boat, Randy."
"Why? Why was Arethusa such a big deal?"
"Because we spent ten years of our lives trying to break the damned
code! And we failed!"
"It must have been really frustrating," Randy says, "you still sound
angry."
"I'm angry at Comstock."
"Not the "
"Not Attorney General Paul Comstock. His father. Earl Comstock."
"What!? The guy that Doug Shaftoe threw off the ski lift? The Vietnam
guy?"
"No, no! I mean, yes. Earl Comstock was largely responsible for our
Vietnam policy. And Doug Shaftoe did get his fifteen minutes of fame by
throwing him off a ski lift in, I believe, 1979. But all of that Vietnam
nonsense was just a coda to his real career."
"Which was?"
"Earl Comstock, to whom your grandfather reported in Brisbane during
World War II, was one of the founders of the NSA. And he was my boss from
1949 through about 1960. He was obsessed with Arethusa."
"Why?"
"He was convinced it was a Communist cipher. That if we could break it,
we could then exploit that break to get into some later Soviet codes that
were giving us difficulty. Which was ridiculous. But he believed it or
claimed to and so we battered our heads against Arethusa for years. Strong
men had nervous breakdowns. Brilliant men concluded that they were stupid.
In the end it turned out to be a joke."
"A joke? What do you mean by that?"
"We ran those intercepts through Harvest backwards and forwards. The
lights dimmed in Washington and Baltimore, we used to say, when we were
doing Arethusa work. I still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA
and so on. Those double As! People wrote dissertations about their
significance. We concluded in the end that they were just flukes. We
invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it wrote new volumes
of the Cryptonomicon. The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in
them was like trying to read a book that had been burned, and its ashes
mixed with all the cement that went into the Hoover Dam. We never got
anything that was worth a damn.
"After ten years or so, we began using it to haze incoming recruits. By
that time the NSA was getting fantastically huge, we were hiring all of the
most brilliant math prodigies in the United States, and when we got one who
was especially cocky we'd put him on the Arethusa project just to give him
the message that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. We broke a lot of
kids on that wheel. But then, around 1959, this one kid came in the smartest
kid we had seen yet and he broke it."
"Well, I assume you didn't place this phone call just to keep me in
suspense," Randy says. "What did he find?"
"He found that the Arethusa intercepts did not represent coded messages
at all. They were simply the output of a particular mathematical function, a
Riemann zeta function, which has many uses one being that it is used in some
cryptosystems as a random number generator. He proved that if you set up
this function in a particular way, and then gave it, as input, a particular
string of numbers, it would crank out the exact sequence that was on those
intercepts. So that was all she wrote. And it almost ended Comstock's
career."
"Why?"
"Partly because of the insane amount of money and manpower he had
thrown into the Arethusa project. But mostly because the input string the
seed for the random number generator was the boss's name.
C O M S T O C K."
"You're kidding."
"We had the proof right there. It was impeccable from a pure math
standpoint. So, either Comstock had generated the Arethusa intercepts
himself, and been stupid enough to use his own name as the seed and believe
me, he really was that kind of guy or else someone had played an enormous
practical joke on him."
"Which do you think it was?"
"Well, he never divulged where he had gotten these intercepts in the
first place and so it was difficult to form a hypothesis. I am inclined
toward the joke theory, because he was the sort of man who gives his
subordinates a powerful urge to play practical jokes on him. But in the end
it didn't matter. He was drummed out of the NSA at the age of forty six. A
classic grey man, a war veteran, a technocrat with a high security clearance
and any number of high powered connections. He went more or less straight to
Kennedy's National Security Counsel from there, and the rest is history."
"Wow!" Randy says, kind of awed. "What a jerk!"
"No kidding," says Pontifex. "And now, his son well, don't get me
started on his son."
As Pontifex's voice trails off, Randy asks, "So, you are calling me now
for what purpose?"
Pontifex doesn't answer for a few moments, as if he's wrestling with
the question himself. But Randy doubts that's the case. Someone is trying to
send you a message. "I suppose that I am just appalled by the very idea of
more young bright men throwing themselves against Arethusa. Until I received
that call from a boat on Lake Washington, I had thought it was dead and
buried."
"But why should you care?"
"You've already been cheated out of a fortune in computer patents,"
Pontifex says. "It wouldn't be fair."
"So, it's pity, then."
"Furthermore as I said it is my friend's job to keep you under
surveillance. He's going to hear almost every word you say for the next few
months, or at least read transcripts. For you and Cantrell and those others
to spend that entire time yammering about Arethusa would be more than he
could bear. Hideous deja vu. Just intolerably Kafkaesque. So please, just
let it go."
"Well, thanks for the tip."
"You're welcome, Randy. And may I give you a word of advice?"
"That's what Pontifex is supposed to do."
"First a disclaimer: I've been out of circulation for a while. Have not
picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments."
"Okay, I am bracing myself."
"My advice: do try to build the best Crypt you possibly can. Your
clients some of them, anyway are, for all practical purposes, aborigines.
They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a
Joseph Campbell footnote."
"So you're talking about your basic Colombian drug lord types, here?"
"Yes, I am, but I'm also referring to certain white men in suits. It
only takes a single generation to revert to savagery."
"Well, we provide state of the art cryptographic services to all of our
clients even the ones with bones in their noses."
"Excellent! And now as much as I hate to sign off on a dark note I must
say good bye."
Randy hangs up, and the phone rings again almost immediately.
"Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane,
and I get a busy signal."
"I have a funny story to tell you," Randy says, "about a guy you ran
into once while skiing. But unfortunately it will have to wait."
Chapter 79 GLORY
Bare chested, camouflage painted, trench knife in hand, Colt .45 stuck
in the waistband of his khaki trousers, Bobby Shaftoe moves like a cloud of
mist through the jungle. He stops when he can get a clear view of the Nip
Army truck, framed between the hairy, cluttered trunks of a couple of date
palms. A skirmish line of ants crawls over the skin of his sandaled foot. He
ignores them.
It has all the earmarks of a piss stop. Two Nipponese privates climb
out of the truck and confer for a few moments. One of them wades into the
jungle. The other leans against the truck's fender and lights up a
cigarette. Its glowing tip echoes the light of the sunset behind him. The
one in the jungle drops his trousers, squats, leans back against a tree to
take a shit.
At this moment they are supremely vulnerable. The contrast between the
brightness of the sunset and the dimness of the jungle renders them nearly
blind. The shitter is helpless, and the smoker looks exhausted. Bobby
Shaftoe sheds his sandals. He emerges from the jungle onto the road behind
the truck, strides forward on ant bitten feet, crouches behind the truck's
bumper. The weapon comes out of his hip pocket silently. Without taking his
eyes off the smoker's feet visible beneath the truck's chassis he peels away
the backing and slaps the payload onto the truck's tailgate. Then, just to
rub it in, he slaps up another one. Mission accomplished! Take that, Tojo!
Moments later, he's back in the jungle, watching as the Nip truck
drives away, now sporting two red, white, and blue stickers reading: I SHALL
RETURN! Bobby congratulates himself on another successful mission.
Long after dark, he reaches the Hukbalahap camp up on the volcano. He
works his way in through the booby trapped perimeter and makes plenty of
noise as he approaches, so that the Huk sentries won't shoot at him in the
darkness. But he needn't have bothered. Discipline has broken down, they are
all drunk and getting drunker, because of something they heard on the radio:
MacArthur has returned. The General has landed on Leyte.
Bobby Shaftoe's response is to boil up some powerful coffee and begin
pouring it into their signal man, Pedro. While the caffeine works its magic,
Shaftoe grabs a message pad and the stub of a pencil, and writes out his
idea for the seventh time: OPPORTUNITY EXISTS TO CONTACT AND SUPPLY
FILAMERICAN ELEMENTS IN CONCEPCION STOP I VOLUNTEER FOR SAME STOP AWAIT
INSTRUCTIONS STOP SIGNED SHAFTOE.
He gets Pedro to encrypt it and send it off. After that, all he can do
is wait and pray. This shit with the stickers has to stop.
He has been tempted, a thousand times, to desert, and to go into
Concepcion himself. But just because he's out in the boondocks with a band
of Huk irregulars doesn't mean he's beyond the reach of military discipline.
Deserters can still get shot or hanged, and despite the fact that he was one
in Sweden, Bobby Shaftoe believes that they deserve to be.
Concepcion is down in the lowlands north of Manila. From the high
places of the Zambales Mountains you can actually see the town lying amid
the green rice paddies. Those lowlands are still totally Nip controlled. But
when the General lands, he's probably going to land north of here at
Lingayen Gulf, just like the Nips did when they invaded in '41, and then
Concepcion is going to lie right in the middle of his route to Manila. He's
going to need eyes there.
Sure enough, the order comes through a couple of days later: RENDEZVOUS
TARPON POINT GREEN 5 NOVEMBER STOP CONVEY TRANSMITTER CONCEPCION STOP AWAIT
FURTHER ORDERS STOP.
Tarpon is the submarine that has been bringing them ammunition, medical
supplies, I SHALL RETURN stickers, cartons of American cigarettes with I
SHALL RETURN inserts in each pack, I SHALL RETURN matchbooks, I SHALL RETURN
coasters, and I SHALL RETURN condoms. Shaftoe has been stockpiling the
condoms because he knows they won't go over well in a Catholic country. He
figures that when he finds Glory he'll go through a long ton of condoms in
about a week.
Three days later, he and a squad of Huks are on hand to meet Tarpon at
"Point Green," which is their code name for a tiny cove on the west coast of
Luzon, down beneath Mount Pinatubo, not all that far north of Subic Bay. The
submarine glides in at around midnight, running on its electric motors so it
won't make any sound, and the Huks pull up alongside in rubber boats and
outrigger canoes and unload the cargo. Sure enough, the transmitter's there.
And this time there's none of those goddamn stickers or matchbooks. The
cargo is ammunition and a few fighting men: some Filamerican commandoes
fresh from a debriefing with MacArthur's intelligence chief, and a couple of
Americans MacArthur's advance scouts.
Over the next several days, Shaftoe and a few hand picked Huks carry
the transmitter up one slope of the Zambales Mountains and down the other.
They stop when the foothills finally give way to low lying paddy land. The
main north south road, from Manila up towards Lingayen Gulf, lies directly
across their path.
After a few days of scrambling and scrounging, they are able to load
the transmitter on board a farm cart and bury it in manure. They harness the
cart to a pathetic carabao, loaned by a loyal but poor farmer, and set out
across Nip country, headed for Concepcion.
At this point they have to split up, though, because there's no way
that blue eyed Shaftoe can travel in the open. Two Huks, pretending to be
farmboys, take the manure cart while Shaftoe begins making his way cross
country, traveling at night, sleeping in ditches or in the homes of trusted
American sympathizers.
It takes him a week and a half to cover the fifty kilometers, but in
time, with patience and perseverance, he reaches the town of Concepcion, and
knocks on the door of their local contact around midnight. The contact is a
prominent local citizen the manager of the town's only bank. Mr. Calagua is
astonished to see an American standing at his back door. This tells Shaftoe
that something must have gone wrong the boys with the transmitter should
have arrived a week ago. But the manager tells him that no one has shown up
though rumor has it that the Nips recently caught some boys trying to
smuggle contraband in a farm cart and executed them on the spot.
So Shaftoe is marooned in Concepcion with no way to get orders or to
send messages. He feels bad for the boys who died, but in a way, this isn't
such a bad situation for him. The only reason he wanted to be in Concepcion
is that the Altamira family comes from here. Half of the local farmers are
related to Glory in some way.
Shaftoe breaks into the Calaguas' stables and improvises a bed. They
would put him up in a spare bedroom if he asked, but he tells them that the
stables are safer if he gets caught, the Calaguas can at least claim
ignorance. He recuperates on a pile of straw for a day or two, then starts
trying to learn something about the Altamiras. He can't go out nosing around
by himself, but the Calaguas know everyone in town, and they have a good
sense of who can be trusted. So inquiries go out, and within a couple of
days, information has come back in.
Mr. Calagua explains it to him over glasses of bourbon in his study.
Wracked by guilt over the fact that his honored guest is sleeping on a pile
of hay in an outbuilding, he pushes bourbon at him all the time, which is
fine with Bobby Shaftoe.
"Some of the information is reliable, some is er farfetched," Mr.
Calagua says. "Here is the reliable part. First of all, your guess was
correct. When the Japanese took over Manila, many members of the Altamira
family came back to this area to stay with relatives. They believed it would
be safer."
"Are you telling me Glory is up here?"
"No," Mr. Calagua says sadly, "she is not up here. But she was
definitely here on September 13th, 1942."
"How do you know?"
"Because she gave birth to a baby boy on that day the birth certificate
is on file at the town hall. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe."
"Well, I'll be fucked sideways," Shaftoe says. He starts calculating
dates in his head.
"Many of the Altamiras who fled here have since gone back to the city
supposedly to obtain work. But some of them are also serving as eyes and
ears for the resistance."
"I knew they would do the right thing," Shaftoe says.
Mr. Calagua smiles cautiously. "Manila is full of people who claim to
be the eyes and ears of the resistance. It is easy to be eyes and ears. It
is harder to be fists and feet. But some of the Altamiras are fighting, too
they have gone into the mountains to join the Huks."
"Which mountains? I didn't run across any of them up in the Zambales."
"South of Manila and Laguna de Bay are many volcanoes and heavy jungle.
This is where some of Glory's family are fighting."
"Is that where Glory is? And the baby? Or are they in the city?"
Mr. Calagua is nervous. "This is the part that may be far fetched. It
is said that Glory is a famous heroine of the fight against the Nips."
"Are you telling me she's dead? If she's dead, just tell me."
"No, I have no information that she is dead. But she is a heroine. This
is for certain."
The next day, Bobby Shaftoe's malaria comes back and keeps him laid up
for about a week. The Calaguas move him right into their house and bring in
the town doctor to look after him. It's the same doctor who delivered
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe two years ago.
When he's feeling a little stronger, he lights out for the south. It
takes him three weeks to reach the northern outskirts of Manila, hitching
rides on trains and trucks, or sloshing through paddies in the middle of the
night. He kills two Nipponese soldiers stealthily, and three of them in a
firefight at an intersection. Each time, he has to go to ground for a few
days to avoid capture. But get to Manila he does.
He can't go into the heart of the city in addition to being really
stupid, it would just slow him down. Instead he skirts it, taking advantage
of the thriving resistance network. He is passed from one barangay to the
next, all the way around the outskirts of Manila, until he has reached the
coastal plain between Laguna de Bay and Manila Bay. At this point nothing is
left to the south except for a few miles of rice paddies and then the
volcanic mountains where Altamiras are making names for themselves as
guerilla fighters. During his trip he has heard a thousand rumors about
them. Most of them are patently false people telling him what he obviously
wants to hear. But several times he has heard what sounds like a genuine
scrap of informa