t of Arethusa,
then it will be essentially impossible to break, except for rare lapses such
as this FUNERAL business.
They have a submarine. It cannot be found or sunk, because it is one of
Hitler's new rocket fuel powered babies, and because Günter Bischoff, the
greatest U boat commander in history, is its skipper.
They have, at some level, the backing of the odd brotherhood that Root
belongs too, the ignoti et quasi occulti guys.
And now they are trying to enlist Goto Dengo. The man who, it is safe
to assume, buried the gold.
Three days ago, the intercept boys in Waterhouse's section picked up a
brief flurry of Arethusa messages, exchanged between a hidden transmitter
somewhere in Manila and a mobile one in the South China Sea. Catalinas were
vectored toward the latter, and picked up diminishing radar echoes at first,
but found nothing when they arrived on the scene. A team of journeyman
codebreakers jumped on those messages and started trying to tear them apart
by brute force. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, the old hand, went for a
stroll along the Manila Bay seawall. A breeze suddenly rose from the bay. He
stopped to let it cool his face. A coconut fell from the top of a tree and
smashed into the ground ten feet away. Waterhouse turned on his heel and
went back to the office.
Just before the flurry of Arethusa messages began, Waterhouse had been
sitting in his office listening to Armed Forces Radio. They had broadcast an
announcement that, three days from now, at such and such a time, the funeral
for the hero, Bobby Shaftoe, was going to be held at the big new cemetery
down in Makati.
Sitting down in his office with the fresh Arethusa intercepts, he went
to work, using FUNERAL as a crib: if this group of seven letters decrypts to
FUNERAL, then what does the rest of the message look like? Gibberish? Okay,
how about this group of seven letters?
Even with this gift thrown into his lap, it took him two and a half
days of nonstop work to decrypt the message. The first one, transmitted from
Manila, went: OUR FRIEND'S FUNERAL SATURDAY TEN THIRTY AM US MILITARY
CEMETERY MAKATI.
The response from the submarine: WILL BE THERE SUGGEST YOU INFORM GD.
He aims the spyglass at Goto Dengo again. The Nipponese engineer is
standing with his head bowed and his eyes tightly shut. Perhaps his
shoulders are heaving, perhaps it's just the heat waves that make it seem
so.
But then Goto Dengo straightens up and takes a step in the direction of
the conspirators. He stops. Then he takes another step. Then another. His
posture is straightening up miraculously. He seems to feel better with every
stride. He walks faster and faster, until he is almost running.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is hardly a mind reader, but he can
easily enough tell what Goto Dengo is thinking: I have a burden on my
shoulders, and it has been crushing me. And now I'm going to hand that
burden over to someone else. Hot damn! Bischoff and Rudy von Hacklheber step
forward to meet him, holding out their right hands enthusiastically.
Bischoff, Rudy, Enoch, and Goto Dengo join into a knot, practically on top
of Bobby Shaftoe's grave.
It is a shame. Waterhouse knew Bobby Shaftoe, and would have liked to
attend his funeral standing up not skulking around like this. But Enoch Root
and Rudy would both recognize him. Waterhouse is their enemy.
Or is he? In a decade full of Hitlers and Stalins, it's hard to worry
about a conspiracy that seemingly includes a priest, and that risks its very
existence in order to attend a member's funeral. Waterhouse rolls over and
lies on his back on some dead guy's grave and ponders it. If Mary were here,
he would lay out the dilemma for her and she would tell him what to do. But
Mary's in Brisbane, picking out bridesmaids' dresses and china patterns.
***
The next time he sees any of these fellows is one month later, in a
clearing in the jungle a couple of hours south of Manila. Waterhouse gets
there before they do, and spends a sweaty night under a mosquito net. In the
morning, about half of Bischoff's submarine crew arrives, grumpy from an all
night march. As Waterhouse expected, they are quite nervous about being
ambushed by the local Huk commander known as the Crocodile, and so they post
a number of sentries in the jungle. That is why Waterhouse took pains to get
here before they did: so that he would not have to infiltrate their picket
line.
The Germans who aren't standing guard go to work with shovels, digging
a hole in the ground next to a big piece of red pumice shaped vaguely like
the continent of Africa. Waterhouse squats no more than twenty feet away,
trying to figure out how he can make his presence known without being gunned
down by a nervous white man.
He almost gets close enough to tap Rudy on the shoulder. Then he slips
on a slimy rock. Rudy hears him, turns, and sees nothing except for a swatch
of undergrowth being torn down by Waterhouse's falling body.
"Is that you, Lawrence?"
Waterhouse stands up cautiously, keeping his hands in plain sight.
"Very good! How did you know?"
"Don't be stupid. There aren't that many people who could have found
us."
They shake hands. Then they think better of it, and embrace. Rudy gives
him a cigarette. The German sailors look on incredulously. There are some
others: a Negro and an Indian, and a grizzled, dark man who looks like he
wants to kill Waterhouse on the spot.
"You must be the famous Otto!" Waterhouse exclaims. But Otto does not
seem eager to make new friends, or even acquaintances, at this juncture in
his life, and turns away sourly. "Where's Bischoff?" Waterhouse asks.
"Minding the submarine. It is risky, lurking in the shallows. How did
you find us, Lawrence?" He answers his own question before Waterhouse can.
"By decrypting the long message, obviously."
"Yes."
"But how did you do that? Did I miss something? Is there a back door?"
"No. It wasn't easy. I broke one of your messages, a while back."
"The FUNERAL one?"
"Yes!" Waterhouse laughs.
"I could have killed Enoch for sending out a message with such an
obvious crib." Rudy shrugs. "It is hard to teach crypto security, even to
intelligent men. Especially to them."
"Maybe he wanted me to decrypt it," Waterhouse muses.
"It is possible," Rudy admits. "Perhaps he wanted me to break
Detachment 2702's one time pad, so that I would come and join him."
"I guess he figures if you're smart enough to break hard codes, you're
automatically going to be on his side," Waterhouse says.
"I'm not sure that I agree . . . it is naive."
"It's a leap of faith," Waterhouse says.
"How did you break Arethusa? I am naturally curious," Rudy says.
"Because Azure/Pufferfish employs a different key every day, I assumed
that Arethusa did the same."
"I call them by different names. But yes, continue."
"The difference is that the daily key for Azure/Pufferfish is simply
the numerical date. Very easy to exploit, once you have figured it out."
"Yes. I intended it that way," Rudy says. He lights up another
cigarette, taking extravagant pleasure in it.
"Whereas the daily key for Arethusa is something I haven't been able to
put my finger on yet. Perhaps a pseudo random function of the date, perhaps
random numbers you are taking from a one time pad. In any case it is not
predictable, which makes Arethusa harder to break."
"But you did break the long message. Would you explain how?"
"Well, your meeting at the cemetery was brief. I guess you had to get
out of there pretty fast."
"It did not seem a good place to linger."
"So, you and Bischoff went away back to the submarine, I figured. Goto
Dengo went back to his post at The General's headquarters. I knew that he
couldn't have told you anything substantive at the cemetery. That would have
to come later, and it would have to be in the form of an Arethusa encrypted
message. You are justifiably proud of Arethusa."
"Thank you," Rudy says briskly.
"But the drawback of Arethusa, as with Azure/Puffeffish, is that it
requires a great deal of computation. This is fine if you happen to have a
computing machine, or a room full of trained abacus operators. I assume you
have a machine on board the submarine?"
"That we do," Rudy says diffidently, "nothing very special. It still
requires a great deal of manual calculation."
"But Enoch Root in Manila, and Goto Dengo, could not have had such a
thing. They would have to encrypt the message by hand doing all of the
calculations on sheets of scratch paper. Enoch already knew the algorithm,
and could tell it to Goto Dengo, but you would have to agree on a key to put
into that algorithm. The only time you could have decided on the key was
while you were all together at the cemetery. And during your conversation
there, I saw you pointing at Shaftoe's headstone. So I figured that you were
using that as a key maybe his name, maybe his dates of birth and death,
maybe his military serial number. It turned out to be the serial number."
"But still you did not know the algorithm."
"Yes, but I had some idea that it was related to the Azure/Pufferfish
algorithm, which in turn is related to the zeta functions that we studied at
Princeton. So I just sat down and said to myself if Rudy were going to build
the ultimate cryptosystem on this basis, and if Azure/Pufferfish is a
simplified version of that system, then what is Arethusa? That gave me a
handful of possibilities."
"And out of that handful you were able to pick the right one."
"No," Waterhouse says, "it was too hard. So I went to the church where
Enoch was working, and looked through his wastebasket. Nothing. I went to
Goto Dengo's office and did the same. Nothing. Both of them were burning
their scratch paper as they went along."
Rudy's face suddenly relaxes. "Oh, good. I was afraid they were doing
something incredibly stupid."
"Not at all. So, you know what I did?"
"What did you do, Lawrence?"
"I went and had an interview with Goto Dengo."
"Yes. He told us that much."
"I told him about the research I had been doing into Azure/Pufferfish,
but I didn't tell him I had broken it. I got him talking, in a very general
way, about what he was doing on Luzon during the last year. He told me the
same story that he has stuck to all along, which is that he was building
some minor fortifications somewhere, and that after escaping from that area
he wandered lost in the jungle for several days before emerging near San
Pablo and joining up with some Air Force troops who were heading north
towards Manila.
" 'It's a good thing you got out of there,' I told him, 'because ever
since then, the Hukbalahap leader who calls himself the Crocodile has been
ransacking the jungle he's convinced that you Nipponese buried a fortune in
gold there.' "
As soon as the word "crocodile" emerges from Waterhouse's mouth, Rudy's
face screws up in disgust and he turns away.
"So when the long message was finally transmitted last week, from the
transmitter that Enoch has hidden on the top of that church's bell tower, I
had two cribs. First of all, I suspected that the key was a number from the
tombstone of Bobby Shaftoe. Secondly, I was confident that the words
'Hukbalahap,' 'crocodile,' and probably 'gold' or 'treasure' would appear
somewhere in the message. I also looked for obvious candidates like
'latitude' and 'longitude.' With all of that to go on, breaking the message
wasn't that hard."
Rudy von Hacklheber heaves a big sigh. "So. You win," he says. "Where
is the cavalry?"
"Cavalry, or calvary?" Waterhouse jokes.
Rudy smiles tolerantly. "I know where Calvary is. Not far from
Golgotha."
"Why do you think the cavalry is coming?"
"I know they are coming," Rudy says. "Your efforts to break the long
message must have required a whole room full of computers. They will talk.
Surely the secret is out." Rudy stubs out his half smoked cigarette, as if
preparing to leave. "So, you have been sent to give us an offer surrender in
a civilized way and we will get good treatment. Something like that."
"Au contraire, Rudy. No one knows except me. I did leave a sealed
envelope in my desk, to be opened if I should die mysteriously on this
little trip to the jungle. That Otto character has a fearsome reputation."
"I don't believe you. It is impossible," Rudy says.
"You of all people. Don't you see? I have a machine, Rudy! The machine
does the work for me. So I don't need a room full of computers human ones,
leastways. And as soon as I read the decrypted message, I burned all of the
cards. So I am the only one who knows."
"Ah!" Rudy says, stepping back and looking into the sky, adjusting his
mind to these new facts. "So, I gather that you have come here to join us?
Otto will be troublesome about it, but you are quite welcome."
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse actually has to think about it. This
surprises him a little.
"Most of it is going to help victims of the war, in one way or
another," Rudy says, "but if we take a tenth of a percent as commission, and
distribute it among the entire crew of the submarine, we are all among the
richest men in the world."
Waterhouse tries to imagine himself one of the richest men in the
world. It doesn't seem to fit.
"I've been exchanging letters with a college in Washington State," he
says. "My fiancée put me on to them."
"Fiancée? Congratulations."
"She's Qwlghmian Australian. It seems that there's a colony of
Qwghlmians in the Palouse Hills as well, where Washington and Oregon and
Idaho all come together. Sheepherders mostly. But there is this little
college there, and they need a mathematics professor. I could be chairman of
the department within a few years." Waterhouse stands there in the
Philippine jungle smoking his cigarette and imagining this. Nothing sounds
more exotic. "It sounds like a nice life!" he exclaims, as if this were the
first time he had thought of such a thing. "It sounds perfectly all right to
me."
The Palouse Hills seem very far away. He is impatient to begin covering
the distance.
"That it does," says Rudy von Hacklheber.
"You don't sound very convincing, Rudy. I know it wouldn't be so great
for you. But for me it's the cat's pajamas."
"So, are you telling me you don't want in?"
"I'll tell you this. You said most of the money was going to charity.
Well, the college can always use a donation. If your plan works out, how
about endowing a chair for me at this college? That's all I really want."
"I will do that," Rudy says, "and I'll endow one for Alan too, at
Cambridge, and I'll provide both of you with laboratories full of electrical
computers." Rudy's eyes wander back to the hole in the ground, where the
Germans having withdrawn most of their sentries are making steady progress.
"You know that this is nothing more than one of the outlying caches. Seed
capital to finance the Golgotha work."
"Yes. Just as the Nips planned it."
"We'll dig it up soon enough. Sooner, now that we no longer have to
worry about the Crocodile!" Rudy says, and laughs. It is an honest, genuine
laugh, the first time Waterhouse has ever seen him drop his guard. "Then we
will go to ground until the war is over. In the meantime, maybe there will
be enough left over to give you and your Qwghlmian bride a nice wedding
present."
"Our china pattern is Lavender Rose by Royal Albert," Waterhouse says.
Rudy takes an envelope out of his pocket and writes that down. "It was
very good of you to come out and say hello," he mumbles around his
cigarette.
"Those bicycle rides in New Jersey might as well have taken place on a
different planet," Waterhouse says, shaking his head.
"They did," Rudy says. "And when Douglas MacArthur marches into Tokyo,
it's going to be a different planet yet again. See you there, Lawrence."
"See you, Rudy. Godspeed."
They embrace one more time. Waterhouse backs away and watches the
shovels biting into the red mud for a few moments, then turns his back on
all of the money in the world and starts walking.
"Lawrence!" Rudy shouts.
"Yes?"
"Don't forget to destroy that sealed envelope you left in your office."
Waterhouse laughs. "Aw, I was just lying about that. In case someone
wanted to kill me."
"That's a relief."
"You know how people are always saying 'I can keep a secret' and they
are always wrong?"
"Yes."
"Well," Waterhouse says, "I can keep a secret."
Chapter 99 CAYUSE
Another shock wave passes silently through the ground, setting up a
pattern of waves, and reflections of waves, in the water that laps around
their knees.
"Things are going to happen very slowly now for a while. Get used to
it," says Doug Shaftoe. "Everyone needs a probe a long knife or a rod. Even
a stick."
Doug's got a big knife, he being that kind of guy, and Amy has her
kris. Randy pulls the lightweight aluminum frame of his backpack apart to
produce a couple of tubes; this takes a while but, as Doug said, everything
is happening slowly now. Randy tosses one of the tubes to Enoch Root, who
snatches a basically poorly aimed throw out of the air. Now that everyone is
equipped, Doug Shaftoe gives them a tutorial on how to probe one's way
through a minefield. Like every other lesson Randy's ever imbibed, this one
is sort of interesting, but only until Doug divulges the main point, which
is that you can poke a mine from the side and it won't blow up; you just
can't poke it vertically. "The water is bad because it makes it hard to see
what the hell we're doing," he says. Indeed, the water has a milky look,
probably from suspended volcanic ash; you can see clearly for a foot, hazily
for another foot, and below that you can see vague, greenish shapes at best;
everything is covered in a uniform brown jacket of silt. "On the other hand,
it's good because if a mine gets detonated by something other than your
foot, the water's going to absorb some of the blast by flashing into steam.
Now: tactically our problem is that we are exposed to an ambush from above
left: the west bank. Poor old Jackie Woo is down and he can't protect that
flank anymore. You can bet that John Wayne is covering things on the right
as best as he can. Since it is the left bank that's most vulnerable, we will
now head for the bank on that side, and try to reach the protection of the
overhang. We should not all converge on the same point; we spread out so
that if one of us detonates a mine it won't hit anyone else."
Each one of them picks a destination on the west bank and tells
everyone else what it is, so that they won't converge on the same place, and
then each begins probing his or her way towards it. Randy tries to resist
the temptation to look up. He says, after about fifteen minutes: "I know
what's going on with the explosions. Wing's people are tunneling their way
toward Golgotha. They're going to remove the gold through some kind of an
underground conduit. It'll look like they are excavating it from their own
property. But they'll actually be taking it from here."
Amy grins. "They're robbing the bank."
Randy nods, mildly annoyed that she's not taking it more seriously.
"Wing must have been too busy with the Long March and the Great Leap Forward
to buy this real estate when it was available," Enoch says.
A few minutes later, Doug Shaftoe says, "To what extent do you give a
shit, Randy?"
"What do you mean?"
"Would you be willing to die to prevent Wing from getting that gold?"
"Probably not."
"Would you be willing to kill?"
"Well," says Randy, a bit taken aback, "I said I wouldn't be willing to
die. So "
"Don't give me that golden rule shit," Doug says. "If someone broke
into your house in the middle of the night and threatened your family, and
you had a shotgun in your hands, would you use it?"
Randy involuntarily looks towards Amy. Because this is not only an
ethical conundrum. It's also a test to determine whether Randy is fit to be
Doug's daughter's husband, and the father of his grandchildren. "Well, I
should hope so," Randy says. Amy's pretending not to listen.
The water all around them makes a spattering, searing noise. Everyone
cringes. Then they realize that a handful of small pebbles was tossed into
the water from above. They look up at the rim of the overhang, and see a
tiny, reciprocating movement: Jackie Woo, standing on the top of the bank,
waving his hand at them.
"My eyes are going," Doug says. "Does he look intact to you?"
"Yes!" Amy says. She beams her pearlies are very white in the sun and
waves back.
Jackie's grinning. He's carrying a long, muddy rod in one hand: his
mine probe. In the other, he's got a dirty canister about the size of a clay
pigeon. He holds it up and waggles it in the air. "Nip mine!" he shouts
gleefully.
"Well, put it the fuck down, you asshole!" Doug hollers, "after all
these years it's going to be incredibly unstable." Then he gets a look of
incredulous confusion. "Who the hell set off the other mine if it wasn't
you? Someone was screaming up there."
"I haven't found him," Jackie Woo says. "He stopped screaming."
"Do you think he's dead?"
"No."
"Did you hear any other voices?"
"No."
"Jesus Christ," Doug says, "someone's been shadowing us the whole way."
He turns around and looks up at the opposite bank, where John Wayne has now
probed his way to the edge and is taking this all in. Some kind of hand
gesture passes between them (they brought walkie talkies, but Doug scorns
them as a crutch for lightweights and wannabes). John Wayne settles down
onto his belly and gets out a pair of binoculars with objective lenses as
big as saucers and begins scanning Jackie Woo's side.
The group in the riverbed probes onwards in silence for a while. None
of them can figure out what is going on, and so it's good that they have
this mine probing thing to keep their hands and minds busy. Randy's probe
hits something flexible, buried a couple of inches deep in silt and gravel.
He flinches so hard he almost topples back on his ass, and spends a minute
or two trying to get his composure back. The silt gives everything the blank
but suggestive look of sheet covered corpses. Trying to identify the shapes
makes his mind tired. He clears some gravel aside and runs his hand lightly
over this thing. Dead leaves tumble through the water and tickle his
forearms. "Got an old tire down here," he says. "Big. Truck sized. And bald
as an egg."
Every so often a colored bird will descend from the shade of the
overhanging jungle and flash into the sun, never failing to scare the shit
out of them. The sun is brutal. Randy was only a few yards away from the
shade of the bank when all of this started, and now he's pretty sure that
he's going to pass out from sunstroke before he gets there.
Enoch Root starts muttering in Latin at one point. Randy looks over at
him and sees that he's holding up a dripping, muddy human skull.
An irridescent bright blue bird with a yellow scimitar beak mounted in
a black and orange head shoots out of the jungle, seizes control of a nearby
rock, and cocks its head at him. The earth shakes again; Randy flinches and
a bead curtain of sweat falls out of his eyebrows.
"Down under the rocks and mud there's reinforced concrete," Doug says.
"I can see the rebar sticking out."
Another bird or something flashes out of the shadows, headed nearly
straight down toward the water at tremendous speed. Amy makes a funny
grunting sound. Randy's just turning to look her way when a tremendous,
hammering racket opens up from above. He looks up to see a blossom of flame
strobing out of the slotted flash arrestor on the muzzle of John Wayne's
assault rifle. Seems like he's shooting directly across the river. Jackie
Woo gets off a few shots too. Randy, who's squatting, loses his balance from
all of this head turning and has to put out a hand to steady himself, which
fortunately doesn't come down on top of a mine. He looks over at Amy; only
her head and shoulders are showing out of the water, and she's staring at
nothing in particular, with a look in her eyes that Randy doesn't like at
all. He rises to his feet and takes a step towards her.
"Randy, don't do that," says Doug Shaftoe. Doug has already reached the
shade, and is only a couple of paces from the curtain of vegetation that
hangs over the riverbank.
There is a piece of debris riding on the surface of the river not far
from Amy's face, but it is not being moved by the current. It moves when Amy
moves. Randy takes another step towards her, putting his foot down on a big
silt covered boulder whose top he can make out through the milky water. He
squats on that boulder like a bird and focuses again on Amy, who is maybe
fifteen feet away from him. John Wayne fires a series of individual shots
from his rifle. Randy realizes that the piece of debris is made of feathers,
bound to the butt of a narrow stick.
"Amy's been shot with an arrow," Randy says.
"Well that's just fucking great," Doug mutters.
"Amy, where are you hit?" says Enoch Root.
Amy still can't seem to speak. She stands up awkwardly, doing all the
work with her left leg, and as she rises the arrow emerges from the water
and turns out to be lodged squarely in the middle of her right thigh. The
wound is washed clean at first but then blood wells out from around the
arrow's shaft and begins to patrol down her leg in bifurcating streams.
Doug's engaged in some furious exchange of hand signals with the men up
above. "You know," he whispers, "I can tell that this is one of those
classic deals where what was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance suddenly
turns into the actual battle."
Amy grabs the shaft of the arrow with both hands and tries to snap it,
but the wood is green, and won't break cleanly. "I dropped my knife
somewhere," she says. Her voice sounds calm, putting some effort into making
it that way. "I think I can deal with this level of pain for a little," she
says. "But I don't like it at all."
Near Amy, Randy can see another silt covered boulder near the surface,
maybe six feet away. He gathers himself and leaps towards it. But it topples
under the impact of his foot and sends him splashing full length into the
streambed. When he sits up and gets a look at it, the boulder turns out to
be a squat cylindrical object about as big around as a dinner plate and
several inches thick.
"Randy, what you're looking at is a Nip anti tank mine," Doug says. "It
is highly unstable with age, and it contains enough high explosive to
essentially decapitate everyone in our little group here. So if you could
just stop being a complete asshole for a little bit, I'm sure that we would
all appreciate it very much."
Amy shows Randy the palm of one hand. "I'm not looking for you to prove
anything," she says. "If you're trying to say you love me, send me a fucking
valentine."
"I love you," Randy says. "I want you to be okay. I want you to marry
me."
"Well, that's very romantic," Amy says, sarcastically, and then starts
crying.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," Doug Shaftoe says. "You guys can do this later!
Will you ease up? Whoever fired that arrow is long gone. The Huks are
guerrillas. They know how to make themselves scarce."
"It wasn't fired by a Huk," Randy says. "Huks have guns. Even I know
that."
"Who fired it, then?" Amy asks, working hard to get her composure back.
"It looks like a Cayuse arrow," Randy says.
"Cayuse? You think it was fired by a Cayuse?" Doug demands. Randy
admires that Doug, while skeptical, is essentially open to the idea.
"No," Randy says, taking another step towards Amy, and straddling the
antitank mine. "The Cayuse are extinct. Measles. So it was made by a white
man who is an expert in the hunting practices of Northwest Indian tribes.
What else do we know about him? That's he's really good at sneaking around
in the jungle. And that he's so totally fucking crazy that even when he's
been injured by a land mine, he's still crawling around in the undergrowth
taking shots at people." Randy's probing the riverbed as he's talking, and
now he takes another step. Only six feet away from Amy now. "Not just anyone
he took a shot at Amy. Why? Because he's been watching. He saw Amy sitting
next to me when we took that break, resting her head on my shoulder. He
knows that if he wants to hurt me, the best thing he could possibly do is
take a shot at her."
"Why does he want to hurt you?" Enoch asks.
"Because he's evil."
Enoch looks tremendously impressed.
"Well, who the hell is it?" Amy hisses. She's irritated now, which he
takes to be a good sign.
"His name is Andrew Loeb," Randy says. "And Jackie Woo and John Wayne
are never going to find him."
"Jackie and John are very good," Doug demurs.
Another step. He can almost reach out and touch Amy. "That's the
problem," Randy says. "They're way too smart to run around in a minefield
without probing every step. But Andrew Loeb doesn't give a shit. Andrew's
totally out of his fucking mind, Doug. He's going to run around up there at
will. Or crawl, or hop, or whatever. I'd wager that Andy with one foot blown
off, and not caring whether he lives or dies, can move through a minefield
faster than Jackie, when Jackie does care."
Finally, Randy's there. He crouches down before Amy, who leans forward,
places a hand on each of his shoulders, and rests her weight on him, which
feels good. The end of her ponytail paints the back of his neck with warm
river water. The arrow's practically in his face. Randy takes his
multipurpose tool out and turns it into a saw and cuts through the shaft of
the arrow while Amy holds it steady with one fist. Then Amy splays her hand
out, winds up, screams in Randy's ear, and slams the butt of the shaft. It
disappears into her leg. She collapses over Randy's back and sobs. Randy
reaches around behind her leg, cuts his hand on the edge of the arrowhead,
grabs the shaft and yanks it out.
"I don't see evidence of arterial bleeding," says Enoch Root, who has a
good view of her from behind.
Randy rises to his feet, lifting Amy into the air, collapsed over his
shoulder like a sack of rice. He's embarrassed that Amy's body is basically
shielding his from any further arrow attacks now. But she's making it clear
that she's in no mood for walking.
The shade is only four steps away: shade, and shelter from above. "A
land mine just takes a leg or a foot, right?" Randy says. "If I step on one,
it won't kill Amy."
"Not one of your better ideas, Randy!" Doug shouts, almost
contemptuously. "Just calm down and take your time."
"I just want to know my options," Randy says. "I can't poke around for
mines while I'm carrying her."
"Then I'll work my way over to you," says Enoch Root. "Oh, to hell with
it!" Enoch stands up and just walks over to them in half a dozen strides.
"Fucking amateurs!" Doug bellows. Enoch Root ignores him, squats down
at Randy's feet and begins probing.
Doug rises up out of the stream onto a few boulders strewn along the
bank. "I'm going to ascend the wall here," he says, "and go up and reinforce
Jackie. He and I'll find this Andrew Loeb together." It's clear that "find"
here is a euphemism for probably a long list of unpleasant operations. The
bank is made of soft eroded stone with lumps of hard black volcanic rock
jutting out of it frequently, and by clambering from one outcropping to the
next, Doug is able to make his way halfway up the bank in the time it takes
Enoch Root to locate one safe place to plant their feet. Randy wouldn't want
to be the guy who just shot an arrow into Doug Shaftoe's daughter. Doug is
stymied for a moment by the overhang; but by traversing the bank a short
distance he's able to reach a tangle of tree roots that's almost as good as
a ladder to the top.
"She's shivering," Randy announces. "Amy's shivering."
"She's in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high," says Enoch Root.
Randy shifts Amy around, nearly losing his grip on a blood greased leg.
One of the things that Goto Dengo spoke of during their dinner in Tokyo
was the Nipponese practice of tuning streams in gardens by moving rocks from
place to place. The sound of a brook is made by patterns in the flow of
water, and those patterns encode the presence of rocks on the streambed.
Randy found in this an echo of the Palouse winds thing, and said so, and
Goto Dengo either thought it was terribly insightful or else was being
polite. In any case, several minutes later there is a change in the sound of
the water that is flowing around them, and so Randy naturally looks upstream
to see that a man is standing in the water about a dozen feet away from
them. The man has a shaved head that is sunburned as red as a three ball.
He's wearing what used to be a decent enough business suit, which has
practically become one with the jungle now: it is impregnated with red mud,
which has made it so heavy that it pulls itself all out of shape as he
totters to a standing position. He's got a great big pole, a wizard's staff.
He has planted it in the riverbed and is sort of climbing up it hand over
hand. When he gets fully upright, Randy can see that his right leg
terminates just below the knee, although the bare tibia and fibula stick out
for a few inches. The bones are scorched and splintered. Andrew Loeb has
fashioned a tourniquet from sticks and a hundred dollar silk necktie that
Randy's pretty sure he has seen in the windows of airport duty free shops.
This has throttled back the flow of blood from the end of his leg to a rate
comparable to what you would see coming out a Mr. Coffee during its brew
cycle. Once Andy has gotten himself fully upright, he smiles brightly and
begins to move towards Randy and Amy and Enoch, hopping on his intact leg
and using the wizard's staff to keep from falling down. In his free hand he
is carrying a great big knife: Bowie sized, but with all of the extra
spikes, saw blades, blood grooves, and other features that go into a really
top of the line fighting and survival knife.
Neither Enoch nor Amy sees Andrew. Randy has this insight now that Doug
pointed him in the direction of earlier, namely that the ability to kill
someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means;
a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more
dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. Randy feels certain, all of a
sudden, that he's got the mental stance now. But he doesn't have the means.
And that is the problem right there in a nutshell. The bad guys tend to
have the means.
Andy's looking him right in the eye and smiling at him, precisely the
same smile you would see on the face of some old acquaintance you had just
accidentally run into on an airport concourse. As he approaches, he's kind
of shifting the big knife around in his hand, getting it into the right grip
for whatever kind of attack he's about to make. It is this detail that
finally breaks Randy out of his trance and causes him to shrug Amy off and
drop her into the water behind him. Andrew Loeb takes another step forward
and plants his wizard's staff, which suddenly flies into the air like a
rocket, leaving a steaming crater behind in the water, which instantly fills
in, of course. Now Andy's standing there like a stork, having miraculously
kept his balance. He bends his one remaining knee and hops towards Randy,
then does it again. Then he is dead and toppling backwards and Randy is
deaf, or maybe it happens in some other order. Enoch Root has become a
column of smoke with a barking, spitting white fire in the center. Andrew
Loeb has become a red, comet shaped disturbance in the stream, marked by a
single arm thrust out of the water, a French cuff that is still uncannily
white, a cuff link shaped like a little honey bee, and a spindly fist
gripping the huge knife.
Randy turns around and looks at Amy. She's levered herself up on one
arm. In her opposite hand she's got a sensible, handy sort of revolver which
she is aiming in the direction of where Andrew Loeb fell.
Something's moving in the corner of Randy's eye. He turns his head
quickly. A coherent, wraith shaped cloud of smoke is drifting away from
Enoch over the surface of the river, just coming into the sun where it is
suddenly brilliant. Enoch is just standing there holding a great big old .45
and moving his lips in the unsettled cadences of some dead language.
Andrew's fingers loosen, the knife falls, and the arm relaxes, but does
not disappear. An insect lands on his thumb and starts to eat it.
Chapter 100 BLACK CHAMBER
"Well," Waterhouse says, "I know a thing or two about keeping secrets."
"I know that perfectly well," says Colonel Earl Comstock. "It is a fine
quality. It is why we want you. After the war."
A formation of bombers flies over the building, rattling its
shellshocked walls with a drone that penetrates into their sinuses. They
take this opportunity to heave their massive Buffalo china coffee cups off
their massive Buffalo china saucers and sip weak, greenish Army coffee.
"Don't let that kind of thing fool you," Comstock hollers over the
noise, glancing up toward the bombers, which bank majestically to the north,
going up to blast hell out of the incredibly tenacious Tiger of Malaya.
"People in the know think that the Nips are on their last legs. It's not too
early to think about what you will be doing after the war."
"I told you, sir. Getting married, and "
"Yeah, teaching math at some little school out west." Comstock sips
coffee and grimaces. The grimace is as tightly coupled to the sip as recoil
is to the pull of a trigger. "Sounds delightful, Waterhouse, it really does.
Oh, there's all kinds of fantasies that sound great to us, sitting here on
the outskirts of what used to be Manila, breathing gasoline fumes and
swatting mosquitoes. I've heard a hundred guys mostly enlisted men
rhapsodize about mowing the lawn. That's all those guys can talk about, is
mowing the lawn. But when they get back home, will they want to mow the
lawn?"
"No."
"Right. They only talk like that because mowing the lawn sounds great
when you're sitting in a foxhole picking lice off your nuts."
One of the useful things about military service is that it gets you
acclimatized to having loud, blustery men say rude things to you. Waterhouse
shrugs it off. "Could be I'll hate it," he concedes.
At this point Comstock sheds a few decibels, scoots closer, and gets
fatherly with him. "It's not just you," he says. "Your wife might not be
crazy about it either."
"Oh, she loves the open countryside. Doesn't care for cities."
"You wouldn't have to live in a city. With the kind of salary we are
talking about here, Waterhouse " Comstock pauses for effect, sips, grimaces,
and lowers his voice another notch " you could buy a nice little Ford or a
Chevy." He stops to let that sink in. "With a V 8 that would give you power
to burn! You could live ten, twenty miles away, and drive in every morning
at a mile a minute!"
"Ten or twenty miles away from where? I'm not clear, yet, on whether I
would be working in New York for Electrical Till, or in Fort Meade for this,
uh, this new thing "
"We're