thinking of calling it the National Security Agency," Comstock
says. "Of course, even that name is secret."
"I understand."
"There was a similar thing, between the wars, called the Black Chamber.
Which has a nice ring to it. But a bit old fashioned."
"That was disbanded."
"Yes. Secretary of State Stimson did away with it, he said 'Gentlemen
do not read one another's mail.' " Comstock laughs out loud at this. He
laughs for a long time. "Ahh, the world has changed, hasn't it, Waterhouse?
Without reading Hitler's and Tojo's mail, where would we be now?"
"We would be in a heck of a fix," Waterhouse concedes.
"You have seen Bletchley Park. You have seen Central Bureau in
Brisbane. Those places are nothing less than factories. Mail reading on an
industrial scale." Comstock's eyes glitter at the idea, he is staring
through the walls of the building now like Superman with his X ray vision.
"It is the way of the future, Lawrence. War will never be the same. Hitler
is gone. The Third Reich is history. Nippon is soon to fall. But this only
sets the stage for the struggle with Communism. To build a Bletchley Park
big enough for that job, why, hell! We'd have to take over the whole state
of Utah or something. That is, if we did it the old fashioned way, with
girls sitting in front of Typex machines."
For the first time, now, Waterhouse gets it. "The digital computer," he
says.
"The digital computer," Comstock echoes. He sips and grimaces. "A few
roomfuls of that equipment would replace an acre of girls sitting in front
of Typex machines." Comstock now gets a naughty, conspiratorial grin on his
face, and leans forward. A drop of sweat rolls off the point of his chin and
plonks into Waterhouse's coffee. "It would also replace a lot of the stuff
that Electrical Till manufactures. So, you see, there is a confluence of
interests here." Comstock sets his cup down. Perhaps he is finally convinced
that there is no deep stratum of good coffee concealed underneath the bad;
perhaps coffee is a frivolous thing compared to the importance of what he is
about to divulge. "I have been in constant touch with my higher ups at
Electrical Till, and there is intense interest in this digital computer
business. Intense interest. The machinery has already been set in motion for
a business deal and, Waterhouse, I only tell you this because, as we have
established, you are good at keeping secrets."
"I understand, sir."
"A business deal that would bring Electrical Till, the world's
mightiest manufacturer of business machines, together with the government of
the United States to construct a machine room of titanic proportions at Fort
Meade, Maryland, under the aegis of this new Black Chamber: the National
Security Agency. It is an installation that will be the Bletchley Park of
our upcoming war against the Communist threat a threat both internal and
external."
"And you would like me to get mixed up in this somehow?"
Comstock blinks. He draws back. He is suddenly cool and remote. "To be
absolutely frank, Waterhouse, this thing will go forward with or without
you."
Waterhouse chuckles. "I figured that."
"All I'm doing is giving you a greased path, as it were. Because I
respect your skills, and I have a certain, I don't know, fatherly affection
for you as the result of our work together. I hope you don't mind my saying
so.
"Not at all."
"Say! And speaking of that " Comstock stands up, walking around behind
his terrifyingly neat desk, and plucks a single piece of typing paper off
the blotter. "How are you coming with Arethusa?"
"Still archiving the intercepts as they come in. Still haven't broken
it."
"I have some interesting news about Arethusa."
"You do?"
"Yes. Something you're not aware of." Comstock scans the paper. "After
we took Berlin, we scooped up all of Hitler's crypto people and flew thirty
five of them back to London. Our boys there have been interrogating them in
detail. Filling in a lot of blanks for us. What do you know about this
Rudolf von Hacklheber fellow?"
All traces of moisture have disappeared from Waterhouse's mouth. He
sips and does not grimace. "Knew him a little at Princeton. Dr. Turing and I
thought we saw his handiwork in Azure/Pufferfish."
"You were right," Comstock says, rattling the paper. "But did you know
that he was very likely a Communist?"
"I had no knowledge of his political leanings."
"Well, he is a homo, for one thing, and Hitler hated homos, so that
might have pushed him into the arms of the Reds. Also, he was working under
a couple of Russians at Hauptgruppe B. Supposedly they were Czarists, and
pro Hitler, but you never know. Well, anyway, in the middle of the war,
sometime in late '43, he apparently fled to Sweden. Isn't that funny?"
"Why's it funny?"
"If you have the wherewithal to escape from Germany, why not go to
England, and fight for the good guys? No, he went to the east coast of
Sweden directly across the water," Comstock says portentously, "from
Finland. Which borders on the Soviet Union." He slaps the page down on his
desk. "Seems pretty clear cut to me."
"So . . ."
"And now, we have these goddamn Arethusa messages bouncing around. Some
of them emanating from right here in Manila! Some coming from a mysterious
submarine. Not a Nip submarine, evidently. It seems very much like a secret
espionage ring of some description. Wouldn't you say so?"
Waterhouse shrugs. "Interpretation isn't my department."
"It is mine," Comstock says, "and I say it's espionage. Probably
directed from the Kremlin. Why? Because they are using a cryptosystem that,
according to you, is based on Azure/Pufferfish, which was invented by the
Communist homo Rudolf von Hacklheber. I hypothesize that von Hacklheber only
stayed in Sweden long enough to get some shuteye and maybe cornhole some
nice blond boy and then scooted right over to Finland and from there to the
waiting arms of Lavrenti Beria."
"Well, gosh!" Waterhouse says, "what do you think we should do?"
"I have taken this Arethusa thing off the back burner. We have become
lazy and complacent. More than once, our huffduff people observed Arethusa
messages emanating from this general area." Comstock raises his index finger
to a map of Luzon. Then he catches himself, realizing that this would be
more dignified if he used a pointer. He bends down and grabs a long pointer.
Then he realizes he is too close, and has to back up a couple of steps in
order to get the business end of the pointer on the part of the map that his
index finger was touching a moment earlier. Finally situated, he vigorously
circles a coastal region south of Manila, along the strait that separates
Luzon from Mindoro. "South of all these volcanoes, along the coast here.
This is where that submarine has been skulking around. We haven't gotten a
good fix on the bastards yet, because all of our huffduff stations have been
way up north here." The pointer swoops up for a lightning raid on the
Cordillera Central, where Yamashita has gone to ground. "But not anymore."
Down swoops the pointer, vengefully. "I have ordered several huffduff units
to set up in this area, and at the northern end of Mindoro. Next time that
submarine transmits an Arethusa message, we'll have Catalinas overhead
within fifteen minutes."
"Well," Waterhouse volunteers, "maybe I should get cracking on breaking
that darn code, then."
"If you could accomplish that, Waterhouse, it would be brilliant. It
would mean victory in this, our first cryptological skirmish with the
Communists. It would be a splendid kick off for your relationship with
Electrical Till and the NSA. We could set your new bride up with a nice
house in the horse country, a gas stove, and a Hoover that would make her
forget all about the Palouse Hills."
"Sounds pretty darn inviting," Waterhouse says. "I just can't hold
myself back!" And with that, he's out the door.
***
In a stone room in a half ruined church, Enoch Root looks out of a
busted window and grimaces. "I am not a mathematician," he says. "I only did
the calculations that Dengo asked me to do. You will have to ask him to
encrypt the message."
"Find another place for your transmitter," Waterhouse says, "and be
ready to use it on short notice."
***
Goto Dengo is right where he said he would be, sitting on the bleachers
above third base. The ballfield has been repaired, but no one is playing
now. He and Waterhouse have the place to themselves, except for a couple of
poor Filipino peasants, driven down to Manila by the war up north,
scavenging for dropped popcorn.
"What you ask is very dangerous," he says.
"It will be totally secret," Waterhouse says.
"Think into the future," says Goto Dengo. "One day, these digital
computers you speak of will break the Arethusa code. Is this not so?"
"It is so. Not for many years."
"Say ten years. Say twenty years. The code is broken. Then they will go
back and find all of the old Arethusa messages including the message that
you want to send to your friends and read them. So?"
"Yes. It is true."
"And then they will see this message that says, 'Warning, warning,
Comstock has laid a trap, the huffduff stations are waiting for you, do not
transmit.' Then they will know that there was a spy in Comstock's office.
Certainly they will know it was you."
"You're right. You're right. I didn't think of that," Waterhouse says.
Then he realizes something else. "They'll know about you too."
Goto Dengo blanches. "Please. I am so tired."
"One of the Arethusa messages spoke of a person named GD." Goto Dengo
puts his head in his hands and is perfectly motionless for a long time. He
does not have to say it. He and Waterhouse are imagining the same thing:
twenty years in the future, Nipponese police burst into the office of Goto
Dengo, prosperous businessman, and arrest him for being a Communist spy.
"Only if they decrypt those old messages," Waterhouse says.
"But they will. You said that they will decrypt them."
"Only if they have them," Waterhouse says.
"But they do have them."
"They are in my office."
Goto Dengo is shocked, horrified. "You are not thinking to steal the
messages?"
"That's exactly what I'm thinking."
"But this will be noticed."
"No! I will replace them with others."
***
The voice of Alan Mathison Turing shouts above the buzz of the Project
X synchronization tone. The long playing record, filled with noise, spins on
its turntable. "You want the latest in random numbers?"
"Yeah. Some mathematical function that will give me nearly perfect
randomness. I know you've been working on this."
"Oh yes," Turing says. "I can provide a much higher degree of
randomness than what is on these idiotic phonograph records that you and I
are staring at."
"How do you do it?"
"I have in mind a zeta function that is simple to understand, extremely
tedious to calculate. I hope you have laid in a good stock of valves."
"Don't worry about that, Alan."
"Do you have a pencil?"
"Of course."
"Very well then," Turing says, and begins to call out the symbols of
the function.
***
The Basement is suffocatingly hot because Waterhouse shares it with a
coworker who generates thousands of watts of body heat. The coworker both
eats and shits ETC cards. What it does in between is Waterhouse's business.
He spends about twenty four hours sitting there, stripped to the waist,
his undershirt wrapped around his head like a turban so he won't drop sweat
into the works and cause short circuits, flicking switches on the digital
computer's front panel, swapping patch cords on the back, replacing burned
out tubes and bulbs, probing malfunctioning circuits with an oscilloscope.
In order to make the computer execute Alan's random number function, he even
has to design a new circuit board on the fly, and solder it together. The
entire time, he knows, Goto Dengo and Enoch Root are at work somewhere in
Manila with scratch paper and pencils, encrypting the final Arethusa
message.
He doesn't have to wonder whether they've transmitted it. He will be
told.
Indeed, a lieutenant from the Intercept section comes in at about five
in the evening, looking triumphant.
"You got an Arethusa message?"
"Two of them," the lieutenant says, holding up two separate sheets with
grids of letters on them. "A collision!"
"A collision?"
"A transmitter opened up down south first."
"On land, or ?"
"At sea off the northeast end of Palawan. They transmitted this." He
waves one of the sheets. "Then, almost immediately, a transmitter in Manila
came on the air, and sent this." He waves the other sheet.
"Does Colonel Comstock know about this?"
"Oh, yes sir! He was just leaving for the day when the messages came
through. He's been on the horn to his huffduff people, the Air Force, the
whole bit. He thinks we've got the bastards!"
"Well, before you get carried away celebrating, could you do me a
favor?"
"Yes, sir!"
"What did you do with all of the original intercept sheets for the
archived Arethusa messages?"
"They're filed, sir. Do you want to see them?"
"Yes. All of them. I need to check them against the versions on the ETC
cards. If Arethusa works the way I think it does, then even a single
mistranscribed letter could render all of my calculations useless."
"I'll go and fetch them, sir! I'm not going home anyway.
"You're not?"
"Why, no sir! I want to wait around and see how it all comes out with
that darned submarine."
Waterhouse goes to the oven and takes out a brick of hot, blank ETC
cards. He has learned that he has to keep the cards hot, or else they will
soak up the tropical humidity and jam the machinery; so before he moved the
digital computer into this room, he insisted that a whole bank of ovens be
installed.
He drops the hot cards into the hopper of a card punching machine, sits
down at the keyboard, and clips the first intercept sheet up in front of
him. He begins to punch the letters into it, one by one. It is a short
message; it fits onto three cards. Then he begins punching in the second
message.
The lieutenant comes in carrying a cardboard box. "All of the original
Arethusa intercept sheets."
"Thank you, Lieutenant."
The lieutenant looks over his shoulder. "Can I help you transcribing
those messages?"
"No. The best way for you to help me would be to refill my water
pitcher and then don't bother me for the rest of the night. I have a bee in
my bonnet about this Arethusa business."
"Yes, sir!" says the lieutenant, insufferably cheerful about the fact
that the mystery submarine is, even now, on the run from Catalina bombers.
Waterhouse finishes punching in the second message, though he already
knows what it would say if it were decrypted: "TRAP REPEAT TRAP DO NOT
TRANSMIT STOP HUFFDUFF UNITS NEARBY."
He takes those cards out of the puncher's output tray and places them
neatly in the box along with the cards containing all of the previous
Arethusa messages. He then takes the entire contents of this box a brick of
messages about a foot thick and puts them into his attache case.
He unclips the two fresh intercept slips from the card puncher and puts
them on top of the stack of older slips. The brick of cards in his attache
case, and the pile of slips in his hand, contain exactly the same
information. They are the only copies in all the world. He flips through
them to make sure that they contain all of the critical intercepts such as
the long message giving the location of Golgotha, and the one that mentions
Goto Dengo's initials. He puts the whole stack of slips on top of one of the
ovens.
He dumps a foot thick stack of hot blank cards into the input hopper of
the card punch. He connects the punch's control cable up to the digital
computer, so that the computer can control it.
Then he starts the program he has written, the one that generates
random numbers according to Turing's function. Lights flash, and the card
reader whirrs, as the program is loaded into the computer's RAM. Then it
pauses, waiting for input: the function needs a seed. A stream of bits that
will get it going. Any seed will do. Waterhouse thinks about it for a
moment, and then types in COMSTOCK.
The card punch rumbles into action. The stack of blanks begins to get
shorter. Punched cards skitter into the output tray. When it's finished,
Waterhouse pulls one of them out, holds it up to the light, and looks at the
pattern of tiny rectangular holes punched out of the manila. A constellation
of doorways.
"It'll look like any other encrypted message," he explained to Goto
Dengo, up on the bleachers, "but the, uh, the crypto boys" (he almost said
the NSA) "can run their computers on them forever and never break the code
because there is no code."
He puts this stack of freshly punched cards into the box labeled
ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS, and puts it back in its place on the shelf.
Finally, before leaving the lab, he goes back over to that oven, and
slides the corner of that stack of intercept sheets very close to a pilot
light. It is reluctant to catch, so he gives it some help with a flick of
his Zippo. He stands back and watches the pile burn for a while, until he's
sure that all of the strange information on those sheets has been destroyed.
Then he goes out into the hallway in search of a fire extinguisher.
Upstairs, he can hear Comstock's boys, gathered around the radio, baying
like hounds.
Chapter 101 PASSAGE
When he has picked himself up off the deck, and his ears have stopped
ringing, Bischoff says, "Take her down to seventy five meters."
The dial that tells their depth says twenty. Somewhere, perhaps a
hundred meters above them, crewmen of a circling bomber are setting their
depth charges to explode when they have sunk to a depth of twenty, and so
twenty is a bad place to be for a while.
The dial does not move, though, and Bischoff has to repeat the command.
Everyone on the boat must be deaf.
Either that, or the V Million has sustained damage to her dive planes.
Bischoff presses his skull against a bulkhead, and even though his ears
don't work so well anymore, he can feel the whine of the turbines. At least
they have power. They can move.
But Catalinas can move faster.
Say what you want about those old, clanking diesel U boats, they at
least had guns on them. You could surface, and go out on the decks in the
sun and the air, and fight back. But in the V Million, this swimming rocket,
the only weapon is secrecy. In the Baltic, fine. But this is the Mindoro
Strait, which is an ocean of window glass. V Million might as well be
suspended in midair from piano wires, searchlights crossing on it.
The needle on the dial is moving now, passing down through twenty five
meters. The deck twists under Bischoff's feet as she recoils from another
depth charge. But he can tell from the way it twists that this one has
detonated too high to deal serious damage. From habit he glances at the dial
that tells their speed, and notes it down along with the time: 1746 hours.
The sun must be lower and lower in the sky, its light glancing off the tops
of the waves, forcing the pilots of the Catalinas to peer down through a
screen of bright noise. Another hour and V Million will be completely
invisible. Then, if Bischoff has kept careful records of their speed and
course, dead reckoning will tell them approximately where they are, and
enable them to run down the Palawan Passage in the night, or to cut west
across the South China Sea if that seems like a good idea. But really he is
hoping to find some nice pirate cove on the north coast of Borneo, marry a
nice orangutan, and raise a little family.
The face of the depth dial says Tiefenmesser in that old fashioned
Gothic lettering that the Nazis loved so much. Messer means a gauge or
meter, but it also means knife. Das Messer sitzt mir an der Kehle. The knife
is at my throat; I am face to face with doom. When the knife is at your
throat, you don't want it to move the way the needle on the Tiefenmesser is
moving now. Every tick on the dial's face is another meter of water between
Bischoff and the sun and the air.
"I would like to be a Messerschmidt," Bischoff mutters. A man who
smashes Messers with a hammer, but also a beautiful thing that flies.
"You will see light, and breathe fresh air again, Günter," says Rudolf
von Hacklheber, a civilian mathematician who really has no place on the
bridge of a U boat during a fight to the death. But there's no good place
for him to be, and so here he is.
Now this is a fine thing for Rudy to say, a lovely show of support for
Günter. But saving the life of everyone on the U boat, and getting its cargo
of gold to safety, now depends on Günter's emotional stability, and
especially on his confidence. Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe
tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap
of faith faith in your U boat, and your crew beside which the saints'
religious epiphanies amount to nothing.
So Rudy's promise is soon forgotten or at least it is forgotten by
Bischoff. Bischoff derives strength from having heard it, and from similar
things that members of his crew say to him, and from their grins and thumbs
up and slaps on the shoulder, and their displays of pluck and initiative,
the clever repairs that they make to broken plumbing and overtaxed engines.
Strength gives him faith, and faith makes him into a good U boat skipper.
Some would say the best who ever lived. But Bischoff knows many others,
better than him, whose bodies are trapped in knuckles of imploded metal on
the floor of the North Atlantic.
It comes together like this: the sun has gone down, as it can be relied
on to do every day, even when you are a beleaguered U boat. The V Million
has reamed a tunnel through the Palawan Passage, screaming along, for
several hours, at the completely unreasonable speed of twenty nine knots
four times as fast as U boats are supposed to be capable of going.
The Americans will have drawn a small circle around the point in the
ocean where the mysterious U boat was last sighted. But the speed of the V
Million is four times as great as they think it is. The real circle is four
times as wide as the one they've drawn. The Yanks won't expect them to
surface where they are.
But they have to surface because the V Million wasn't made to run at
twenty nine knots forever; she burns fuel, and hydrogen peroxide, at a
ridiculous rate when both of her six thousand horsepower turbines are
spinning. There is plenty of fuel remaining. But she runs out of hydrogen
peroxide at about midnight. She has a few miserable batteries, and electric
motors, that just barely suffice to get her up to the surface. But then she
has to breathe air for a while, and run her diesels.
So the V Million, and a few crew members, get to enjoy some fresh air.
Bischoff doesn't, because he is dealing with new complexities that have
arisen in the engine room. This probably saves his life, because he doesn't
even know they're being strafed until he hears the cannon rounds drumming
against the outer hull.
Then it is the same old drill, the crash dive, which was so exciting
when he was a young man practicing it in the Baltic, and has become so
tedious for him now. Looking up through a hatch he gets a moment's glimpse
of a single star in the sky before the view is blocked by a mutilated
crewman being fed down from above.
Only five minutes later the depth charge scores a direct hit on the
stern of the V Million and tears a hole through both the outer and the
pressure hull. The deck angles beneath Bischoff's feet, and his ears begin
to pop. On a submarine, both of these are bad omens. He can hear hatches
clanging shut as the crew try to stem the advance of the water towards the
bow; each one seals the fate of whomever happens to be aft of it. But
they're all dead anyway, it is just a question of timing now. Those hatches
are not meant to stem five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten atmospheres of
pressure. They give way, the pressure spikes upwards as the bubble of air in
the front of the V Million suddenly halves its volume, then halves it again,
and again. Each wave of pressure comes as sudden crushing pressure on
Bischoff's thorax, driving all the air out of his lungs.
Because the bow is pointed straight up, like a needle on a meter,
there's no deck to stand on, and every time a bulkhead yields, and the water
level shoots up towards the bow, it leaves them suddenly submerged, with
crushed and evacuated lungs, and they must swim up and find the air bubble
again.
But finally the mangled stern of the boat spikes into the seafloor and
the V Million settles down, the forwardmost cabin rotating around them,
tremendous rock crushing noises all around as a coral reef is destroyed by
the boat's falling hull. And then it's finished. Günter Bischoff and Rudolf
von Hacklheber are together in a safe cozy bubble of compressed air, all of
the air that used to be in the V Million reduced to a pocket the size of a
car. It's dark.
He hears Rudy undoing the latches on his aluminum briefcase.
"Don't strike a match," Bischoff says. "This air is compressed, it will
burn like a flare."
"That would be terrible," Rudy says, and instead turns on a flashlight.
The light comes on and immediately dims and goes brown and shrinks to a tiny
red speck: the glowing remains of the filament in the bulb.
"Your light bulb has imploded," Bischoff explains. "But at least I got
a little glimpse of you, with that silly look on your face."
"You too have looked better," Rudy says. Bischoff can hear him closing
up the briefcase, snapping the latches into place. "Do you think my
briefcase will float here forever?"
"Eventually the pressure hull above us will corrode. The air will
escape from it in a thin line of bubbles that will grow into gyrating
nebulas of foul air as they rush towards the surface. The water level will
rise and press your briefcase up against what is left of the pressure hull's
forward dome, and it will fill with water. But still there will be a little
pocket of air in one corner of your briefcase, perhaps."
"I was thinking of leaving a note in it."
"If you do, better address it to the United States government."
"Department of the Navy, you think?"
"Department of Spying. What do they call it? The OSS."
"Why do you say this?"
"They knew where we were, Rudy. The Catalinas were waiting for us."
"Maybe they found us with radar."
"I allowed for radar. Those planes came even faster. You know what it
means?"
"Tell me."
"It means that those who were hunting us knew how fast the V Million
could go."
"Ah . . . so that is why you think of spies."
"I gave Bobby the plans, Rudy."
"The plans for the V Million?"
"Yes . . so that he could buy forgiveness from the Americans."
"Well, in retrospect maybe you shouldn't have done that. But I do not
blame you for it, Günter. It was a magnificent gesture."
"Now they will come down and find us."
"After we're dead, you mean.
"Yes. The whole plan is ruined. Ah well, it was a nice conspiracy while
it lasted. Perhaps Enoch Root will display some adaptability."
"You really think spies will come down to go through this wreck?"
"Who knows?" Bischoff says. "Why are you worrying about it?"
"I have the coordinates of Golgotha here in my briefcase," Rudy says.
"But I know for certain that they are not written down anywhere else in V
Million."
"You know that because you're the one who decrypted that message."
"Yes. Maybe I should burn the message now."
"It would kill us," Bischoff says, "but at least we would die with some
warmth and some light."
"You are going to be on a sandy beach, sunning yourself, in a few
hours, Günter," Rudy says.
"Stop it!"
"I made a promise which I intend to keep," Rudy says. There is a
movement in the water, the strangled splash of a kicking foot being drawn
under the surface.
"Rudy? Rudy?" Bischoff says. But he is alone in a black dome of
silence.
A minute later a hand grips his ankle.
Rudy climbs up his body like a ladder and thrusts his head above the
surface and howls for air. But this air is the good stuff, sixteen times as
much oxygen in a single lungful. He feels better quickly. Bischoff holds him
while he calms down.
"The hatch is open," Rudy says. "I saw light through it. The sun is up,
Günter!"
"Let's go, then!"
"You go. I'll stay and burn the message." Rudy's opening his briefcase
again, feeling through papers with his hands, taking something out, closing
the briefcase again.
Bischoff cannot move.
"I strike the match in thirty seconds," Rudy says.
Bischoff launches himself towards Rudy's voice and wraps his arms
around him in the dark.
"I'll find the others," Bischoff says. "I'll tell them that some
fucking American spy is onto us. And we'll get that gold first, and we'll
keep it out of their hands."
"Go!" Rudy cries. "I want everything to happen fast now."
Bischoff kisses him once on each cheek and then dives.
Ahead of him is faint blue green light, coming from no particular
direction.
Rudy swam to the hatch, opened it, and swam back, and was almost dead
when he returned. Bischoff has to find that hatch and then swim all the way
to the surface. He knows that it will be impossible.
But then much brighter, warmer light floods the interior of the V
Million. Bischoff looks back and up, and sees the forward end of the
pressure hull turned into a dome of orange fire, the silhouette of a man
centered in it, lines of welds and rivets spreading away from that center
like the meridians of a globe. It's bright as day. He turns around and swims
easily away down the gangway, into the control room, and finds the hatch: a
disk of cyan light.
A life ring is pressed up against what is now the ceiling of this room.
He grabs it and wrestles it down into the middle of the cabin, then shoves
it before him through the hatch, and kicks his way through.
There's coral all around him, and it's beautiful. He'd love to stay and
sightsee, but he's got responsibilities above. He keeps a grip on the life
preserver, and although he doesn't feel himself moving, he sees the coral
dropping away below. There's a big grey thing lying on it, bubbling and
bleeding, and this gets smaller and smaller, like a rocket flying away into
the sky.
He looks up into the water that is streaming over his face. Both of
Bischoff's arms are above his head, gripping the rim of the life ring, and
he sees a disk of sunlight through it, getting brighter and redder as he
ascends.
His knees begin to hurt.
Chapter 102 LIQUIDITY
The rest of it all seems like history to Randall Lawrence Waterhouse.
He knows that technically speaking it is the present, and all of the really
important stuff is future. But what's important to him is finished and
settled. He would like to get on with his life, now that he's got one.
They carry Amy back to the missionary compound and the doctor who is
there does some work on her leg, but they can't get her out to the hospital
in Manila because Wing has blockaded them in there. This ought to seem
threatening, but actually just seems stupid and annoying to them after
they've had a little while to get used to it. The people who are doing it
are Chinese Communist geronto apparatchiks backed up by a few bootlicking
cronies within the local government, and none of them has the slightest
appreciation of things like encrypted spread spectrum packet radio, which
makes it easy for people like Doug and Randy to communicate with the outside
world and explain precisely what is going on. Randy's blood type is
compatible with Amy's and so he lets the doctor suck him nearly dry. The
lack of blood seemingly halves his IQ for a day or two, but even so, when he
sees Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe drawing up the shopping list of men and gear
that they need to dig up Golgotha, he has enough presence of mind to say:
strike all of that stuff. Forget the trucks and jackhammers and dynamite,
the end loaders and excavators and tunnel boring machines, and just give me
a drill, a couple of pumps, and a few thousand gallons of fuel oil. Doug
gets it right away, as indeed how could he not, since he basically gave
Randy the idea by telling him old war legends about his father. They get the
shopping list out to Avi and Goto Dengo with no trouble at all.
Wing keeps them blockaded in the compound for a week; the subterranean
explosions continue to shake the earth; Amy's leg gets infected and the
doctor comes this close to sawing it off to save her life. Enoch Root spends
some time alone with her and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains
that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about
it.
Meanwhile the rest of them kill time by clearing mines from around
Golgotha, and trying to localize those explosions. The verdict seems to be
that Wing still has most of a kilometer of hard rock to tunnel through in
order to get access to Golgotha, and he's only making a few dozen meters per
day.
They know that all hell is breaking loose in the outside world because
media and military helicopters keep flying over the place. One day a Goto
Engineering chopper lands in the compound. It's got earth imaging sonar
gear, and more importantly it's got antibiotics, which have a nearly magical
impact on the jungle bugs in Amy's leg, which have never even met
penicillin, much less this state of the art stuff that makes penicillin look
like chicken noodle soup. Amy's fever breaks in a couple of hours and she's
hobbling within a day. The road gets opened up again and then their problem
becomes trying to keep people out it is jammed with media, opportunistic
gold seekers, and nerds. All of them apparently think they are present at
some kind of radical societal watershed, as if global society has gotten so
screwed up that the only thing to do is shut down and reboot it.
Randy sees people holding up banners with his name on them, and tries
not to think about what this implies. The truckloads of equipment almost
cannot make it through this traffic jam, but they do, and there's another
really frustrating and tedious week of hauling all of the shit through the
jungle. Randy spends most of his time hanging around with the earth imaging
sonar crew; they have this very cool gear that Goto Engineering uses to do
CAT scans of the earth that they are about to dig into. By the time all of
the heavy equipment is in place, Randy's got the entirety of Golgotha imaged
down to a resolution of about a meter; he could fly through it in virtual
reality if he were into that kind of thing. As it is, all he needs is to
decide where to drill his three holes: two from the top down into the main
vault, and then one from the side, coming in almost horizontally from the
riverbank, but at a gentle upward angle, until it enters what he thinks is
the lowest sump in the main chamber. The drain hole.
Someone arrives from the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the
cover of both Time and Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news.
He knows that he's got a new life. He had a particular mental image of what
that new life is: mostly, being married to Amy and minding his own business
until he dies of old age. It did not enter his calculations that being on
the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners
with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he never
wants to leave the jungle.
The pumps are mighty, house sized things; they have to be to fight the
back pressure that they are going to engender. Goto Dengo's young engineers
see to it that they are mated into the two vertical holes on top: one to
supply compressed air, the other pressurized fuel oil. Doug Shaftoe would
like to be involved in this, but he knows it's over his head technically,
and he's got other duties: securing the defensive perimeter against gold
seekers and whatever creepy crawly individuals Wing might have sent out to
harass and sabotage them. But Doug has put the Word out, and a whole lot of
Doug's very interesting and well traveled friends have converged on Golgotha
from all over the world and are now camped out in foxholes in the jungle,
guarding a defensive perimeter strung with monofilament tripwires and other
stuff that Randy doesn't even want to know about. Doug just tells him to
stay away from the perimeter, and he does. But Randy can sense Doug's
interest in the central project here, and so when the big day comes, he lets
Doug be the one to throw the switch.
There is a lot of praying first: Avi's brought in a rabbi from Israel,
and Enoch Root has brought in the Archbishop of Manila, and Goto Dengo has
flown in some Shinto priests, and various Southeast Asian countries have
gotten in on the act too. All of them pray or chant for the memory of their
departed, though the prayers are practically drowned out by the choppers
overhead. A lot of people don't want them disturbing Golgotha at all, and
Randy thinks they are basically right. But he's gone out and earth imaged
Wing's tunnel, this subterranean tentacle of air reaching towards the hoard,
and released three dimensional maps of everything to the media, and made the
case reasonably well, he thinks that it's better to do something
constructive than to let it get ripped off by the likes of Wing. Some people
have come around to his side and some haven't, but none of the latter group
is on the cover of Time and Newsweek.
Doug Shaftoe is the last guy to take the floor. He removes his mesh
back cap, puts it over his heart, and with tears streaming down his face
says something about his father, whom he just barely remembers. He speaks of
the Battle of Manila and of how he saw his father for the first time in the
wreckage of the Church of San Agustin, and how his father carried him up and
down the stairway there before going off to bring hellfire down upon the
Nipponese. He speaks about forgiveness and certain other abstractions, and
the words are all chopped up and blurred by the helicopters overhead, which
only makes it more powerful as far as Randy's concerned, since it's
basically all about a bunch of memories that are all chopped up and blurred
in Doug's memory to begin with. Finally Doug works his way around to some
kind of resolution that is very clear in his heart and mind but poorly
articulated, and hits the switch.
The pumps take a few minutes to pressurize Golgotha with a highly
combustible mixture of air and fuel oil, and then Doug hits another switch
that sets off a small detonation down below. Then the world shudders and
rumbles before settling down into a kind of suppressed throbbing howl. A jet
of white hot flame shoots out of the drain hole down below, digs itself into
the river very close to where Andrew Loeb came to