eons full of silver came from Acapulco. Doug M. Shaftoe has been
playing with blocks, so he zeroes in on the basic concept right away. Dad
carries son up and down the stairway a few times. They stand at the bottom
and look up at it. The block analogy has struck deep. Without any prompting,
Doug M. raises both arms over his head and hollers "Soooo big" and the sound
echoes up and down the stairs. Bobby wants to explain to the boy that this
is how it's done, you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up
and keep it up sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your
slab of granite that year but you stick with it and eventually you end up
with something sooo big.
He wishes that he could also make some further point about Glory and
how she's been hard at work building her own staircase. Maybe if he was a
word man like Enoch Root he would be able to explain. But he knows that this
is going way over the toddler's head, just as it went over Bobby's head when
Glory first showed him the steps. The only thing that'll stick with Douglas
MacArthur Shaftoe is the memory that his father brought him here and carried
him up and down the staircase, and if he lives long enough and thinks hard
enough maybe he'll come to understand it too, the way Bobby does. That is a
good enough start.
Word has gotten around, among the women in the courtyard, that Bobby
Shaftoe has arrived better late than never! and so he does not have time for
meaningful speeches anyway. The Altamiras send him out on an errand: to find
Carlos, an eleven year old boy who was rounded up a few days ago when the
Nips swept through Malate. Shaftoe finds MacArthur and Goto Dengo first, and
excuses himself. Those two are deeply involved in a discussion of Goto
Dengo's tunnel building acumen, and how it might be put to use during the
rebuilding of Nippon, a project that The General is eager to launch as soon
as he finishes reducing the entire Pacific Rim to rubble.
"You have sins to atone for, Shaftoe," The General says, "and you can't
atone for them by getting down on your knees and saying Hail Marys."
"I understand that, sir," Shaftoe says.
"I have a little job that needs doing precisely the kind of thing for
which a Marine Raider with parachute training would be ideally suited."
"What's the Department of the Navy going to think of that, sir?"
"I have no intention of letting the swabbies know I've found you until
you have carried out this mission. But when you are finished all is
forgiven."
"I'll be right back," Shaftoe says.
"Where are you going, Shaftoe?"
"Got some other people who need to forgive me first."
He heads in the direction of Fort Santiago with a reconstituted, re
armed and beefed up squad of Huks. The old Spanish fort has been liberated,
within the last couple of hours, by the Americans. They have thrown open the
doors to the dungeons and the subterranean caverns along the Pasig River.
Finding eleven year old Carlos Altamira is, then, a problem of sorting
through several thousand corpses. Almost all of the Filipinos who were
herded into this place by the Nips died, either through out and out
execution, or by suffocating in the dungeons, or by drowning when the tide
came up the river and flooded the cells. Bobby Shaftoe doesn't really know
what Carlos looked like, and so the best he can do is cull out the young
looking corpses and present them to members of the Altamira family for
inspection. The benzedrine he took a couple of days ago has worn off, and he
feels half dead himself. He trudges through the Spanish dungeon with a
kerosene lantern, shining the dim yellow light on the faces of the dead,
muttering the words to himself like a prayer.
"Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?"
Chapter 86 WISDOM
A few years ago, when Randy became tired of the ceaseless pressure in
his lower jaw, he went out onto the north central Californian oral surgery
market looking for someone to extract his wisdom teeth. His health plan
covered this, so price was not an obstacle. His dentist took one of those
big cinemascopic wraparound X rays of his entire lower head, the kind where
they pack your mouth with half a roll of high speed film and then clamp your
head in a jig and the X ray machine revolves around you spraying radiation
through a slit, as the entire staff of the dentist's office hits the deck
behind a lead wall, resulting in a printed image that is a none too
appetizing distortion of his jaw into a single flat plane. Looking at it,
Randy eschewed cruder analogies like "head of a man run over several times
by steamroller while lying flat on his back" and tried to think of it as a
mapping transformation just one more in mankind's long history of ill
advisedly trying to represent three D stuff on a flat plane. The corners of
this coordinate plane were anchored by the wisdom teeth themselves, which
even to the dentally unsophisticated Randy looked just a little disturbing
in that each one was about the size of his thumb (though maybe this was just
a distortion in the coordinate transform like the famously swollen Greenland
of Mercator) and they were pretty far away from any other teeth, which
(logically) would seem to put them in parts of his body not normally
considered to be within a dentist's purview, and they were at the wrong
angle not just a little crooked, but verging on upside down and backwards.
At first he just chalked all of this up to the Greenland phenomenon. With
his Jaw map in hand, he hit the streets of Three Siblings land looking for
an oral surgeon. It was already beginning to work on him psychologically.
Those were some big ass teeth! Brought into being by the workings of relict
DNA strands from the hunter gatherer epoch. Designed for reducing tree bark
and mammoth gristle to easily digestible paste. Now these boulders of living
enamel were horrifyingly adrift in a gracile cro magnon head that simply did
not have room for them. Think of the sheer extra weight he had been carrying
around. Think of the use that priceless head real estate could have been put
to. When they were gone, what would fill up the four giant molar shaped
voids in his melon? It was moot until he could find someone to get rid of
them. But one oral surgeon after another turned him down. They would put the
X ray up on their light boxes, stare into it and blanch. Maybe it was just
the pale light coming out of the light boxes but Randy could have sworn they
were blanching. Disingenuously as if wisdom teeth normally grew someplace
completely different they all pointed out that the wisdom teeth were buried
deep, deep, deep in Randy's head. The lowers were so far back in his jaw
that removing them would practically break the jawbone in twain
structurally; from there, one false move would send a surgical steel
demolition pick into his middle ear. The uppers were so deep in his skull
that the roots were twined around the parts of his brain responsible for
perceiving the color blue (on one side) and being able to suspend one's
disbelief in bad movies (on the other) and between these teeth and actual
air, light and saliva lay many strata of skin, meat, cartilage, major nerve
cables, brain feeding arteries, bulging caches of lymph nodes, girders and
trusses of bone, rich marrow that was working just fine thank you, a few
glands whose functions were unsettlingly poorly understood, and many of the
other things that made Randy Randy, all of them definitely falling into the
category of sleeping dogs.
Oral surgeons, it seemed, were not comfortable delving more than elbow
deep into a patient's head. They had been living in big houses and driving
to work in Mercedes Benz sedans long before Randy had dragged his sorry ass
into their offices with his horrifying X ray and they had absolutely nothing
to gain by even attempting to remove these not so much wisdom teeth in the
normal sense as apocalyptic portents from the Book of Revelations. The best
way to remove these teeth was with a guillotine. None of these oral surgeons
would even consider undertaking the extraction until Randy had signed a
legal disclaimer too thick to staple, something that almost had to come in a
three ring binder, the general import of which was that one of the normal
consequences of the procedure was for the patient's head to end up floating
in a jug of formaldehyde in a tourist trap just over the Mexican border. In
this manner Randy wandered from one oral surgeon's office to another for a
few weeks, like a teratomic outcast roving across a post nuclear waste land
being driven out of one village after another by the brickbats of wretched,
terrified peasants. Until one day when he walked into an office and the
nurse at the front desk almost seemed to expect him, and led him back into
an exam room for a private consult with the oral surgeon, who was busy doing
something in one of his little rooms that involved putting a lot of bone
dust into the air. The nurse bade him sit down, proffered coffee, then
turned on the light box and took Randy's X rays and stuck them up there. She
took a step back, crossed her arms, and gazed at the pictures in wonder.
"So," she murmured, "these are the famous wisdom teeth!"
That was the last oral surgeon Randy visited for a couple of years. He
still had that relentless 24 Jam pressure in his head, but now his attitude
had changed; instead of thinking of it as an anomalous condition easily
remedied, it became his personal cross to bear, and really not all that bad
compared to what some people had to suffer with. There, as in many other
unexpected situations, his extensive fantasy role playing game experience
came in handy, as while spinning out various epic scenarios he had inhabited
the minds, if not the bodies, of many characters who were missing limbs or
had been burned over some algorithmically determined percentages of their
bodies by dragon's breath or wizard's fireball, and it was part of the
ethics of the game that you had to think pretty hard about what it would
actually be like to live with such injuries and to play your character
accordingly. By those standards, feeling all the time like you had an
automotive jack embedded in your skull, ratcheting up the pressure one click
every few months, was not even worth mentioning. It was lost in the somatic
noise.
So Randy lived that way for several years, as he and Charlene
insensibly crept upwards on the socioeconomic scale and began finding
themselves at parties with people who had arrived in Mercedes Benzes. It was
at one of these parties where Randy overheard a dentist extolling some
brilliant young oral surgeon who had just moved to the area. Randy had to
bite his tongue not to start asking all kinds of questions about just what
"brilliant" meant in an oral surgery context questions that were motivated
solely by curiosity but that the dentist would be likely to take the wrong
way. Among coders it was pretty obvious who was brilliant and who wasn't,
but how could you tell a brilliant oral surgeon apart from a merely
excellent one? It gets you into deep epistemological shit. Each set of
wisdom teeth could only be extracted once. You couldn't have a hundred oral
surgeons extract the same set of wisdom teeth and then compare the results
scientifically. And yet it was obvious from watching the look on this
dentist's face that this one particular oral surgeon, this new guy, was
brilliant. So later Randy sidled up to this dentist and allowed as how he
might have a challenge he might personally embody a challenge that would put
this ineffable quality of oral surgery brilliance to some good use, and
could he have the guy's name please.
A few days later he was talking to this oral surgeon, who was indeed
young and conspicuously bright and had more in common with other brilliant
people Randy had known mostly hackers than he did with other oral surgeons.
He drove a pickup truck and kept fresh copies of TURING MAGAZINE in his
waiting room. He had a beard, and a staff of nurses and other female
acolytes who were all permanently aflutter over his brilliantness and
followed him around steering him away from large obstacles and reminding him
to eat lunch. This guy did not blanch when he saw Randy's Mercato roentgeno
gram on his light box. He actually lifted his chin up off his hand and stood
a little straighter and spake not for several minutes. His head moved
minutely every so often as he animadverted on a different corner of the
coordinate plane, and admired the exquisitely grotesque situation of each
tooth its paleolithic heft and its long gnarled roots trailing off into
parts of his head never charted by anatomists.
When he finally turned to face Randy, he had this priestlike aura about
him, a kind of holy ecstasy, a feeling of cosmic symmetry revealed, as if
Randy's jaw, and his brilliant oral surgery brain, had been carved out by
the architect of the Universe fifteen billion years ago specifically so that
they could run into each other, here and now, in front of this light box. He
did not say anything like, "Randy let me just show you how close the roots
of this one tooth are to the bundle of nerves that distinguishes you from a
marmoset," or "My schedule is incredibly full and I was thinking of going
into the real estate business anyway," or "Just a second while I call my
lawyer." He didn't even say anything like, "Wow, those suckers are really in
deep." The young brilliant oral surgeon just said, "Okay," stood there
awkwardly for a few moments, and then walked out of the room in a display of
social ineptness that totally cemented Randy's faith in him. One of his
minions eventually had Randy sign a legal disclaimer stipulating that it was
perfectly all right if the oral surgeon decided to feed Randy's entire body
into a log chipper, but this, for once, seemed like just a formality and not
the opening round in an inevitable Bleak House like litigational saga.
And so finally the big day came, and Randy took care to enjoy his
breakfast because he knew that, considering the nerve damage he was about to
incur, this might be the last time in his life that he would be able to
taste food, or even chew it. The oral surgeon's minions all looked at Randy
in awe when he actually walked in the door of their office, like My god he
actually showed up! then flew reassuringly into action. Randy sat down in
the chair and they gave him an injection and then the oral surgeon came in
and asked him what, if anything, was the difference between Windows 95 and
Windows NT. "This is one of these conversations the sole purpose of which is
to make it obvious when I have lost consciousness, isn't it?" Randy said.
"Actually, there is a secondary purpose, which is that I am considering
making the jump and wanted to get some of your thoughts about that," the
oral surgeon said.
"Well," said Randy, "I have a lot more experience with UNIX than with
NT, but from what I've seen, it appears that NT is really a decent enough
operating system, and certainly more of a serious effort than Windows." He
paused to draw breath and then noticed that suddenly everything was
different. The oral surgeon and his minions were still there and occupying
roughly the same positions in his field of vision as they had been when he
started to utter this sentence, but now the oral surgeon's glasses were
askew and the lenses misted with blood, and his face was all sweaty, and his
mask flecked with tiny bits of stuff that very much looked like it had come
from pretty far down in Randy's body, and the air in the room was murky with
aerosolized bone, and his nurses were limp and haggard and looked like they
could use makeovers, face lifts, and weeks at the beach. Randy's chest and
lap, and the floor, were littered with bloody wads and hastily torn open
medical supply wrappers. The back of his head was sore from being battered
against the head rest by the recoil of the young brilliant oral surgeon's
cranial jack hammer. When he tried to finish his sentence ("so if you're
willing to pay the premium I think the switch to NT would be very well
advised") he noticed that his mouth was jammed full of something that
prevented speech. The oral surgeon pulled his mask down off his face and
scratched his sweat soaked beard. He was staring not at Randy but at a point
very far away. He heaved a big, slow sigh. His hands were shaking.
"What day is it?" Randy mumbled through cotton.
"As I told you before," the brilliant young oral surgeon said, "we
charge for wisdom tooth extractions on a sliding scale, depending on the
degree of difficulty." He paused for a moment, groping for words. "In your
case I'm afraid that we will be charging you the maximum on all four." Then
he got up and shambled out of the room, weighed down, Randy thought, not so
much by the stress of his job as by the knowledge that no one was ever going
to give him a Nobel prize for what he had just accomplished.
Randy went home and spent, about a week lying on his couch in front of
the TV eating oral narcotics like jellybeans and moaning with pain, and then
he got better. The pressure in his skull was gone. Just totally gone. He
cannot even remember now what it used to feel like.
Now as he rides in the police car to his new private jail cell, he
remembers the whole wisdom tooth extraction saga because of its many points
in common with what he just went through emotionally with young America
Shaftoe. Randy's had a few girlfriends in his life not many but all of them
were like oral surgeons who just couldn't cut the mustard. Amy's the only
one who had the skill and the sheer balls to just look at him and say "okay"
and then tunnel into his skull and come back with the goods. It was probably
exhausting for her. She will extract a high price from him in exchange. And
it will leave Randy lying around moaning with pain for a good long while.
But he can tell already that the internal pressure has been relieved and he
is glad, so glad, that she came into his life, and that he finally had the
good sense and, arguably, guts to do this. He completely forgets, for a few
hours, that he has been marked for death by the Philippine government.
From the fact that he's in a car, he infers that his new, private cell
is in a different building. No one explains anything to him because he is,
after all, a prisoner. Since the bust at NAIA he's been in a jail down
south, a newish concrete block number on the edge of Makati, but now they
are taking him north into older parts of Manila, probably into some more
stylish and gothic prewar facility. Fort Santiago, on the banks of the
Pasig, had cells that were in the intertidal zone, so that prisoners locked
into them at low tide would be dead by high. Now it's a historical site, so
he knows they're not headed there.
The new jail cell is indeed in a big scary old building somewhere in
the torus of major governmental institutions that surrounds the dead hole of
Intramuros. It is not in, but it is right next to, a major court building.
They drive through alleys among these big old stone buildings for a while
and then present credentials at a guardhouse and wait for a big iron gate to
be rolled aside, and then they drive across a paved courtyard that hasn't
been swept out in a while and present more credentials and wait for an
actual portcullis to be winched up, clearing an orifice that ramps them down
beneath the building itself. Then the car stops and they are abruptly
surrounded by men in uniforms.
The process is uncannily like pulling up to the main entrance of an
Asian business hotel, except that the men in the uniforms carry guns and
don't offer to tote Randy's laptop. He has a chain around his waist and
manacles attached to that chain in front, and leg chains that shorten his
stride. The chain between his ankles is supported in the middle by another
chain that goes up to his waist so that it will not scrape the ground as he
walks. He has just enough manual dexterity to grip the laptop and keep it
pressed up against his lower abdomen. He's not just any chained wretch, he
is a digital chained wretch, Marley's Ghost on the Information Superhighway.
That a man in his situation is being allowed to have the laptop is so
grotesquely implausible that it causes him to doubt even his own supremely
cynical assessment of it, namely that Someone presumably the same Someone
who is Sending Him a Message has already discovered that everything on the
hard drive is encrypted, and is now trying to gull him into firing the
machine up and using it so that so that what? Maybe they've rigged up a
camera in his cell and will be peering over his shoulder. But that would be
easy for him to defeat; he just has to not be completely stupid.
The guards lead Randy down a corridor and through some prisoner check
in stuff that doesn't really apply to him since he has already filled out
the forms and turned over his personal effects at another jail. Then the
great big scary metal doors commence, and corridors that don't smell so
good, and he hears the generalized hubbub of a jail. But they take him past
the hubbub and into other corridors that seem to be older and less used, and
finally through an old fashioned jailhouse door of iron bars and into a long
vaulted stone room containing a single row of maybe half a dozen cells, with
a guard's passageway running along past the doors of the iron cages. Like a
theme park simulacrum of a jail. They take him all the way down to the last
cell and put him there. A single iron bedstead awaits him, a thin cotton
mattress with stained but clean sheets and an army blanket folded and
stacked on top of it. An old wooden filing cabinet and folding chair have
been moved into the cell and placed in one corner, right against the stone
wall that is the terminus of this long room. The filing cabinet is evidently
meant to serve as Randy's work table. The drawers are locked shut. This
cabinet has actually been locked into place with a few turns of heavy chain
and a padlock, so it's very clear that he is expected to use the computer
there, in that corner of the cell, and nowhere else. As Attorney Alejandro
promised, an extension cord has been plugged into a wall outlet near the
cellblock entrance and run down the passageway and securely knotted around a
pipe out of Randy's reach and the tail end of it allowed to trail across in
the direction of the filing cabinet. But it does not quite reach into
Randy's cell, so the only way to plug the computer in is to set it up on
that cabinet and stick the power cord into the back and then toss the other
end out through the iron bars to a guard, who can mate it with the extension
cord.
At first this appears to be just one of these maddening control freak
things, an exercise of power for the pure sadistic pleasure of it. But after
Randy's been unchained, and locked in his cell, and left alone for a few
minutes to run through it in his head, he thinks otherwise. Of course
normally Randy could leave the computer on the card table while the
batteries charged and then carry it over to his bed and use it there until
the batteries ran down. But the batteries were removed from the machine
before Attorney Alejandro gave it to him, and there don't seem to be any
ThinkPad battery packs lying around his cell. So he will have to keep it
plugged in all the time, and because of the way they have set up the filing
cabinet and the extension cord, he is forced by certain immutable properties
of three dimensional Euclidean spacetime to use the machine in one and only
one place: right there on top of that damn filing cabinet. He does not think
this is an accident.
He sits down on that filing cabinet and scans the wall and ceiling for
over the shoulder video cameras, but he doesn't look very hard and he
doesn't really expect to see one. To make out text on a screen they would
have to be very high resolution cameras, which would imply big and obvious;
subtle pinhole cameras wouldn't do it. There aren't any big cameras around
here.
Randy becomes almost certain that if he could unlock that filing
cabinet, he would find some electronic gear inside it. Directly underneath
his laptop there is probably an antenna to pick up Van Eck signals emanating
from the screen. Below that, there is some gear to translate those signals
into a digital form and transmit the results to a listening station nearby,
probably right on the other side of one of these walls. Down in the bottom
are probably some batteries to make it all run. He rocks the cabinet back
and forth as much as the chains will allow, and finds that it is indeed
rather bottom heavy, as if there's a car battery sitting in the bottom
drawer. Or maybe it's just his imagination. Maybe they are letting him have
his laptop just because they are nice guys.
So this is it then. This is the setup. This is the deal. It is all very
clean and simple. Randy fires up the laptop just to prove that it still
works. Then he makes his bed and goes and lies down on it, just because it
feels really good to lie down. It is the first time he's had anything like
privacy in at least a week. Notwithstanding Avi's bizarre admonition against
self abuse on the beach in Pacifica, it is high time that Randy took care of
something. He needs to concentrate really hard now, and a certain
distraction must be done away with. Replaying his last conversation with Amy
is enough to give him a good erection. He reaches down into his pants and
then abruptly falls asleep.
He wakes up to the sound of the cellblock door clanging open. A new
prisoner is being led in. Randy tries to sit up and finds that his hand is
still in his pants, having failed to accomplish its mission. He pulls it out
of there reluctantly and sits up. He swings his feet down off the bed and
onto the stone floor. Now he's got his back to the adjacent cell, which is a
mirror image of his; i.e., the beds and the toilets of the two cells are
right next to each other along their shared partition. He stands up and
turns around and watches this other prisoner being led into the cell next to
his. The new guy is a white man, probably in his sixties, maybe even
seventies, though you could make a case for fifties or eighties. Quite
vigorous, anyway. He's wearing a prison coverall just like Randy's, but
accessorized differently: instead of a laptop, he's got a crucifix dangling
from a rosary with great big fat amber beads, and some sort of medallion on
a silver chain, and he's clutching several books to his belly: a Bible, and
something big and in German, and a current bestselling novel.
The guards are treating him with extreme reverence; Randy assumes the
guy is a priest. They are talking to him in Tagalog, asking him questions
being, Randy thinks, solicitous to his needs and desires and the white man
answers them in reassuring tones and even tells a joke. He makes a polite
request; a guard scurries out and returns moments later with a deck of
cards. Finally the guards back out of the cell, practically bowing and
scraping, and lock him in with apologies that start to get a little
monotonous. The white man says something, forgiving them wittily. They laugh
nervously and leave. The white man stands there in the middle of his cell
for a minute, staring at the floor contemplatively, maybe praying or
something. Then he snaps out of it and starts looking around. Randy leans
into the partition and sticks his hand through the bars. "Randy Waterhouse,"
he says.
The white man frisbees his books onto the bed, glides towards him, and
shakes his hand. "Enoch Root," he says. "It's a pleasure to meet you in
person, Randy." His voice is unmistakably that of Pontifex
root@eruditorum.org.
Randy freezes up for a long time, like a man who has just realized that
a colossal practical joke is being played on him, but doesn't know just how
colossal it is, or what to do about it. Enoch Root sees that Randy is
paralyzed, and steps smoothly into the gap. He flexes the deck of cards in
one hand and shoots them across to the other; the queue of airborne cards
just hangs there between his hands for a moment, like an accordion. "Not as
versatile as ETC cards, but surprisingly useful," he muses. "With any luck,
Randy, you and I can make a bridge as long as you are just standing there
pontificating anyway."
"Make a bridge?" Randy echoes, feeling and probably sounding rather
stupid.
"I'm sorry, my English is a bit rusty I meant bridge as in a card game.
Are you familiar with it?"
"Bridge? No. But I thought it took four people."
"I have come up with a version that is played by two. I only hope this
deck is complete the game requires fifty four cards."
"Fifty four," Randy muses. "Is your game anything like Pontifex?"
"One and the same."
"I think I have the rules for Pontifex squirreled away on my hard drive
somewhere," Randy says.
"Then let's play," says Enoch Root.
Chapter 87 FALL
Shaftoe jumps out of the airplane. The air is bracingly cold up here,
and the wind chill factor is something else. It is the first time in a year
that he has not been loathsomely hot and sweaty.
Something jerks mightily on his back: the static line, still attached
to the airplane God forbid that American fighting men should be entrusted to
pull their own ripcords. He can just imagine the staff meeting where they
dreamed up the concept of the static line: "For God's sake, General, they're
just enlisted men! As soon as they jump out of the airplane they'll probably
start daydreaming about their girlfriends, take a few hits from their pocket
flasks, catch forty winks, and before you know it they'll all pile into the
ground at a couple of hundred miles an hour!"
The drogue chute flutters out, catches air, and then eviscerates his
main pack in one jerk. There's a bit of flopping and buffeting as Bobby
Shaftoe's body pulls the disorganized cloud of silk downwards, then it
thunks open and he is left hanging in space, his dark body forming a small
perfect bullseye in the center of the off white canopy for any Nipponese
riflemen down below.
No wonder those paratroopers think they are gods among men: they get
such a nice view of things, so much better than a poor Marine grunt stuck
down on the beach, who is always looking uphill into courses of pillboxes.
All of Luzon stretches out before him. He can see one or two hundred miles
north, across a mat of vegetation as dense as felt, to the mountains in the
far north where General Yamashita, the Lion of Malaya, is holed up with a
hundred thousand troops, each of whom would like nothing better than to
strap lots of explosives to his body, sneak through the lines at night, run
into the middle of a large concentration of American soldiers, and blow
himself up for his emperor. To Shaftoe's starboard is Manila Bay, and even
from this distance, some thirty miles, he can see the jungle suddenly turn
thin and brown as it nears the shore, like a severed leaf that is dying from
the edge inwards that would be what's left of the city of Manila. The fat
twenty mile long tongue of land protruding towards him is Bata'an. Just off
the tip of it is a rocky island shaped like a tadpole with a green head and
a bony brown tail: Corregidor. Smoke jets from many vents on the island,
which has been mostly reconquered by the Americans. Quite a few Nipponese
blew themselves up in their underground bunkers rather than surrender. This
heroic act has given someone in The General's chain of command a nifty idea.
A couple of miles from Corregidor, motionless on the water, is
something that looks like an absurdly squat, asymmetrical battleship, except
much bigger. It is encircled by American gunboats and amphibious landing
forces. From a source on its lid, a long wisp of red smoke trickles
downwind: a smoke bomb dropped out of Shaftoe's plane a few minutes ago, on
a parachute. As Shaftoe descends, and the wind blows him directly towards
it, he can see the grain of the reinforced concrete of which this prodigy is
made. It used to be a dry rock in Manila Bay. The Spanish built a fort
there, the Americans built a chain of gun emplacements on top of that, and
when the Nips showed up they turned the entire thing into a solid reinforced
concrete fortress with walls thirty feet thick, and a couple of double
barreled fourteen inch gun turrets on the top. Those guns have long since
been silenced; Shaftoe can see long cracks in their barrels, and craters,
like frozen splashes in the steel. Even though he is parachuting onto the
roof of an impregnable Nipponese fortress chock full of heavily armed men
who are desperately looking for a picturesque way to die, Shaftoe is
perfectly safe; every time a Nip pokes a rifle barrel or a pair of
binoculars out of a gun slit, half a dozen American antiaircraft gunners
open up on him at point blank range from the nearby ships.
A tremendous racket ensues as a small power boat pops out of a little
cave along the waterline of the island and heads directly towards an
American landing craft. A hundred guns open fire on it simultaneously.
Supersonic bits of metal crash into the water all around the little boat,
ton after ton of them. Each bit makes a splash. All of the splashes combine
into a jagged, volcanic eruption of white water centered on the little boat.
Bobby Shaftoe puts his fingers in his ears. Two thousand pounds of high
explosive packed into the little boat's nose detonate. The shock wave
flashes across the surface of the water, a powdery white ring expanding with
supernatural velocity. It hits Bobby Shaftoe like a baseball to the bridge
of the nose. He neglects to steer his chute for a while, and trusts the
winds to carry him to the right place.
The smoke bomb was dropped as proof of the concept that a man on a
parachute might actually be able to land on the roof of this fortress. Bobby
Shaftoe is, of course, the final and irrefutable test of this proposition.
As he gets closer, and his head clears from the explosion, Shaftoe sees that
the smoke bomb never actually reached the roof: its little chute got tangled
up in the briar patch of antennas growing out of the top of the thing.
All kinds of fucking antennas! Even during his days in Shanghai,
Shaftoe had a weird feeling around antennas. Those Station Alpha pencil
necks, in their little wooden roof shack with all the antennas sprouting
from it those were not soldiers, sailors, or Marines in the normal sense.
Corregidor was covered with antennas before the Nips came and took it. And
everywhere that Shaftoe went during his Detachment 2702 stint, there were
antennas.
He is going to spend the next few moments concentrating very hard on
those antennas, and so he turns his head for a moment to get a bearing on
the American LCM the landing craft that the Nip suicide boat was hoping to
destroy. It is exactly where it is supposed to be halfway between the
encircling force of naval ships and the sheer, forty foot high wall of the
fortress. Even if Shaftoe didn't already know the plan, he would, at a
glance, identify this vessel as a Landing Craft, Mechanized (Mark 3), a
fifty foot long steel shoebox designed to cough a medium sized tank up onto
a beach. It has a couple of fifty caliber machine guns on it which are
pounding away dutifully at various targets on the wall of the fortress which
Shaftoe cannot see. But from his vantage point On High he can see something
that the Nipponese can't: the LCM is not carrying a tank, in the sense of a
vehicle on caterpillar treads with a gun turret. It is carrying, rather, a
tank in the sense of a large steel container with pipes and hoses and stuff
attached to it.
The Nips in the fortress are taking potshots at the approaching LCM,
but the only target at which they have to aim is its front door, a piece of
metal that can flop down to become a ramp, and which was designed,
incredibly enough, on the assumption that doomed Nips would spend a lot of
time trying to blow holes in it with various projectile weapons. So the
defenders are not getting anywhere. Antiaircraft gunners on other ships have
begun raking the walls of the fortress insanely, making it hard for the
Nipponese to poke their heads and their gun barrels out. Shaftoe notes
fragments of antennas skittering and bouncing across the roof of the
fortress, and occasional streaks of tracers, and hopes that the men on those
ships have the presence of mind to hold their fire before he lands on the
fucking thing, which will be in a few seconds.
Shaftoe realizes that his mental concept of what this mission was going
to be like, as he reviewed it with the officers in the LCM, bears no
relationship to the reality. This is only about the five thousandth time
Shaftoe has experienced this phenomenon in the course of the Second World
War; you'd think he would no longer be surprised by it. The antennas, which
looked wispy and inconsequential on the reconnaissance photos, are in fact
sizable engineering works. Or they were until they got de engineered by the
naval gunfire that silenced those big guns. Now they are just wreckage of a
sort that is going to be peculiarly nasty to parachute down on top of. The
antennas were, and the wreckage is, made of all kinds of different shit:
spars of Philippine mahogany, sturdy columns of bamboo, welded steel
trusses. The most common bits are the ones that catch a parachutist's eye:
long metal poky things, and miles and miles of guy wire, snarled into a
briarpatch, some of it taut enough to cut a plummeting Marine's head off and
some of it all loose and tangly with sharp hovering ends.
It dawns on Shaftoe that this pile isn't just a gun emplacement; it's a
Nip intelligence headquarters. "Waterhouse, you fucking son of a bitch!"
Shaftoe hollers. As far as he knows, Waterhouse is still in Europe. But he
realizes, as he's clapping his hands protectively over his eyes and falling
into the nightmare, that Waterhouse must have something to do with this.
Bobby Shaftoe has landed. He tries to move and the wreckage moves with
him; he is one with it.
He opens his eyes carefully. His head is wrapped up in a snarl of heavy
wire a guy wire that broke under tension and whipped around him. Peering
between loops of wire, he sees three lengths of quarter inch metal tubing
projecting out of his torso. Another one has gone through his thigh, and yet
another through his upper arm. He's pretty sure he has a broken leg too.
He lies there for a while, listening to the sound of the guns all
around him.
There is work that needs to be done. All he can think of is the boy. He
gropes for the wire cutter with his free hand and begins to cut himself
loose from the snarl.
The jaws of the wire cutter just barely fit over the metal tubing of
the antenna. He reaches behind himself finds the places where the tubes poke
into his back, and cuts them off, snip, snip, snip. He cuts the tube that
has impaled his arm. He leans forward and cuts the one that goes through his
leg. Then he pulls the tubes out of his flesh and drops them on the
concrete, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink. Lots of blood follows.
He doesn't even try to walk. He just begins to drag himself across the
concrete r