Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “That’s pretty darn generous,” Waterhouse says.

  “But you studied with Turing at Princeton, did you not?”

  “We were there at the same time, if that’s what you mean. We rode bikes. His work was a lot more advanced.”

  “But Turing was pursuing graduate studies. You were merely an undergraduate.”

  “Sure. But even allowing for that, he’s way smarter than me.”

  “You are too modest, Captain Waterhouse. How many undergraduates have published papers in international journals?”

  “We just rode bikes,” Waterhouse insists. “Einstein wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

  “Dr. Turing has shown himself to be rather handy with information theory,” says a prematurely haggard guy with long limp grey hair, whom Waterhouse now pegs as some sort of Oxbridge don. “You must have discussed this with him.”

  The don turns to the others and says, donnishly, “Information Theory would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid dynamics would inform the hull of a ship.” Then he turns back to Waterhouse and says, somewhat less formally: “Dr. Turing has continued to develop his work on the subject since he vanished, from your point of view, into the realm of the Classified. Of particular interest has been the subject of just how much information can be extracted from seemingly random data.”

  Suddenly all of the other people in the room are exchanging those amused looks again. “I gather from your reaction,” says the Main Guy, “that this has been of continuing interest to you as well.”

  Waterhouse wonders what his reaction was. Did he grow fangs? Drool into his coffee?

  “That’s good,” says the Main Guy before Waterhouse can answer, “because it is of the highest interest to us as well. You see, now that we are making efforts—and I must emphasize the preliminary and unsatisfactory level of these efforts to this point—to coordinate intelligence between America and Britain, we find ourselves in the oddest situation that has ever faced a pair of allies in a war. We know everything, Commander Waterhouse. We receive Hitler’s personal communications to his theater commanders, frequently before the commanders do! This knowledge is obviously a powerful tool. But just as obviously, it cannot help us win the war unless we allow it to change our actions. That is, if, through Ultra, we become aware of a convoy sailing from Taranto to supply Rommel in North Africa, the knowledge does us no good unless we go out and sink that convoy.”

  “Clearly,” Waterhouse says.

  “Now, if ten convoys are sent out and all of them are sunk, even those under cover of clouds and darkness, the Germans will ask themselves how we knew where those convoys could be found. They will realize that we have penetrated the Enigma cypher, and change it, and then this tool will be lost to us. It is safe to say that Mr. Churchill will be displeased by such an outcome.” The Main Guy looks at all of the others, who nod knowingly. Waterhouse gets the feeling that Mr. Churchill has been bearing down rather hard on this particular point.

  “Let us recast this in information theory terms,” says the don. “Information flows from Germany to us, through the Ultra system at Bletchley Park. That information comes to us as seemingly random Morse code transmissions on the wireless. But because we have very bright people who can discover order in what is seemingly random, we can extract information that is crucial to our endeavors. Now, the Germans have not broken our important cyphers. But they can observe our actions—the routing of our convoys in the North Atlantic, the deployment of our air forces. If the convoys always avoid the U-boats, if the air forces always go straight to the German convoys, then it is clear to the Germans—I’m speaking of a very bright sort of German here, a German of the professor type—that there is not randomness here. This German can find correlations. He can see that we know more than we should. In other words, there is a certain point at which information begins to flow from us back to the Germans.”

  “We need to know where that point is,” says the Main Guy. “Exactly where it is. We need then to stay on the right side of it. To develop the appearance of randomness.”

  “Yes,” Waterhouse says, “and it has to be a kind of randomness that would convince someone like Rudolf von Hacklheber.”

  “Exactly the fellow we had in mind,” the don says. “Dr. von Hacklheber, as of last year.”

  “Oh!” Waterhouse says. “Rudy got his Ph.D.?” Since Rudy got called back into the embrace of the Thousand-Year Reich, Waterhouse has assumed the worst: imagining him out there in a greatcoat, sleeping in drifts and besieging Leningrad or something. But apparently the Nazis, with their sharp eye for talent (as long as it isn’t Jewish talent) have given him a desk job.

  Still, it’s touch and go for a while after Waterhouse shows pleasure that Rudy’s okay. One of the Other Guys, trying to break the ice, jokes that if someone had had the foresight to lock Rudy up in New Jersey for the duration, there would be no need for the new category of secret known as Ultra Mega. No one seems to think it’s funny, so Waterhouse assumes it’s true.

  They show him the organizational chart for RAF Special Detachment No. 2701, which contains the names of all of the twenty-four people in the world who are on to Ultra Mega. The top is cluttered with names such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then come some other names that seem oddly familiar to Waterhouse—perhaps the names of these very gents here in this room. Below them, one Chattan, a youngish RAF colonel who (Waterhouse is assured) accomplished some very fine things during the Battle of Britain.

  In the next rank of the chart is the name Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. There are two other names: one is an RAF captain and the other is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. There is also a dotted line veering off to one side, leading to the name Dr. Alan Mathison Turing. Taken as a whole, this chart may be the most irregular and bizarre ad-hocracy ever grafted onto a military organization.

  In the bottom row of the chart are two groups of half a dozen names, clustered beneath the names of the RAF captain and the Marine captain respectively. These are the squads that represent the executive wing of the organization: as one of the guys at the Broadway Building puts it, “the men at the coal-face,” and as the one American Guy translates it for him, “this is where the rubber meets the road.”

  “Do you have any questions?” the Main Guy asks.

  “Did Alan choose the number?”

  “You mean Dr. Turing?”

  “Yes. Did he choose the number 2701?”

  This level of detail is clearly several ranks beneath the station of the men in the Broadway Buildings. They look startled and almost offended, as if Waterhouse has suddenly asked them to take dictation.

  “Possibly,” says the Main Guy. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” Waterhouse says, “the number 2701 is the product of two primes, and those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation, are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other.”

  All heads swivel toward the don, who looks put out. “We’d best change that,” he says, “it is the sort of thing that Dr. von Hacklheber would notice.” He stands up, withdraws a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket, and amends the organizational chart so that it reads 2702 instead of 2701. As he is doing this, Waterhouse looks at the other men in the room and thinks that they look satisfied. Clearly, this is just the sort of parlor trick they have hired Waterhouse to perform.

  CORREGIDOR

  * * *

  THERE IS NO FIXED BOUNDARY BETWEEN THE WATER of Manila Bay and the humid air above it, only a featureless blue-grey shroud hanging a couple of miles away. Glory IV maneuvers cautiously through an immense strewing of anchored cargo ships for about half an hour, then picks up speed and heads out into the center of the bay. The air thins a bit, allowing Randy a good view of Bata’an off to starboard: black mountains mostly veiled in haze and speckled by the mushroom-cap-shaped clouds of ascending thermals. For the most part, it has no beaches, just red cliffs plummeting the last few yards into the
sea. But as they work their way out to the end of the peninsula, the land tails off more gently and supports a few pale green fields. At the very tip of Bata’an are a couple of stabbing limestone crags that Randy recognizes from Avi’s video. But by this point he has eyes mostly for Corregidor itself, which lies a few miles off the end of the peninsula.

  America Shaftoe, or Amy as she likes to be called, spends most of the voyage bustling around on the deck, engaging the Filipino and American divers in bursts of serious conversation, sometimes sitting cross-legged on the deck plates to go over papers or charts. She has donned a frayed straw cowboy hat to protect her head from solar radiation. Randy’s in no hurry to expose himself. He ambles around the air-conditioned cabin, sipping his coffee and looking at the photographs on the walls.

  He is naively expecting to see pictures of divers landing submarine cables on beaches. Semper Marine Services does a fair amount of cable work—and does it well, he checked their references before hiring them—but they apparently do not consider that kind of work interesting enough to photograph. Most of these pictures are of undersea salvage operations: divers, with enormous grins on their leathery faces, triumphantly holding up barnacle-encrusted vases, like hockey players brandishing the Stanley Cup.

  From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows that it is really a sperm-shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.

  Amy storms past and throws the cabin door open. “Come to the bridge,” she says, “you should see this.”

  Randy follows her. “Who’s the guy in most of those pictures?” he asks.

  “Scary, crew cut?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s my father,” she says. “Doug.”

  “Would that be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe?” Randy asks. He’s seen the name on some of the documents that he’s exchanged with Semper Marine.

  “The same.”

  “The ex-SEAL?”

  “Yeah. But he doesn’t like to be referred to that way. It is such a cliche.”

  “Why does he seem familiar to me?”

  Amy sighs. “He had his fifteen minutes of fame back in 1975.”

  “I’m having trouble remembering.”

  “You know Comstock?”

  “Attorney General Paul Comstock? Hates crypto?”

  “I’m talking about his father. Earl Comstock.”

  “Cold War policy guy—the brains behind the Vietnam War—right?”

  “I’ve never heard him described that way, but yeah, we’re talking about the same guy. You might remember that back in 1975, Earl Comstock fell, or was pushed, off a ski lift in Colorado, and broke his arms.”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s sort of coming back to me.”

  “My pop—” Amy does a little head-fake towards one of the photographs “—happened to be seated right next to him at the time.”

  “By accident, or—”

  “Total chance. Not planned.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Randy says, “but on the other hand, if Earl Comstock went skiing frequently, the probability was actually rather high that sooner or later he’d find himself sitting, fifty feet off the ground, next to a Vietnam combat veteran.”

  “Whatever. All I’m saying is—I don’t want to talk about it, actually.”

  “Am I going to get to meet this character?” Randy asks, looking at the photograph.

  Amy bites her lip and squints at the horizon. “Ninety percent of the time his presence is a sign that something really weird is going on.” She opens the hatch to the bridge and holds it for him, pointing out the high step.

  “The other ten percent?”

  “He’s bored, or on the outs with his girlfriend.”

  Glory’s pilot is concentrating intensely and ignores them, which Randy takes to be a sign of professionalism. The bridge has many counters fashioned from doors or thick plywood, and all of the available space is covered with electronic gear: a fax, a smaller machine that spews out weather bulletins, three computers, a satellite phone, a few GSM phones socketed into their chargers, depth-sounding gear. Amy leads him over to a machine with a big screen that is showing what looks like a black-and-white photo of rugged terrain. “Sidescan sonar,” she explains, “one of our best tools for this kind of work. Shows us what’s on the bottom.” She checks one of the computer screens for their current coordinates and then runs a quick calculation in her head. “Ernesto, change course five degrees to starboard please.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Ernesto says, and makes it happen.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “This is a freebie—like the cigarettes at the hotel,” Amy explains. “Just an extra added bonus for doing business with us. Sometimes we like to play tour guide. See? Check that out.” She uses her pinkie to point out something that is just becoming visible on the screen. Randy hunches over and peers at it. It is clearly a manmade shape: a jumble of straight lines and right angles.

  “Looks like a heap of debris,” he says.

  “It is now,” Amy says, “but it used to be a good chunk of the Filipino treasury.”

  “What?”

  “During the war,” Amy says, “after Pearl Harbor, but before the Japanese took Manila, the government emptied out the treasury. They put all the gold and silver into crates and shipped it to Corregidor for safekeeping—supposedly.”

  “What do you mean, supposedly?”

  She shrugs. “This is the Philippines,” she says. “I have the feeling a lot of it ended up elsewhere. But a lot of the silver ended up there.” She straightens up and nods out the window at Corregidor. “At the time they thought Corregidor was impregnable.”

  “When was this, roughly?”

  “December ’41 or January ’42. Anyway, it became obvious that Corregidor was going to fall. A submarine came and took away the gold at the beginning of February. Then another sub came and took off guys they couldn’t allow to be captured, like codebreakers. But they didn’t have enough subs to carry away all the silver. MacArthur left in March. They started taking the silver out, in crates, in the middle of the night, and dropping it into the water.”

  “You’re shitting me!”

  “They could always come back later and try to recover it,” Amy says. “Better to lose it all than let the Japanese take it, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “The Japanese recovered a lot of that silver—they captured a bunch of American divers on Bata’an and Corregidor, and made them go down, right down below where we are at this moment, and recover it. But those same divers managed to hide a lot of silver from their guards and get it to Filipinos, who smuggled it into Manila, where it became so common that it totally debased the Japanese occupation currency.”

  “So what are we seeing right now?”

  “The remains of old crates that burst open when they hit the seafloor,” Amy says.

  “Was there any of that silver left when the war ended?”

  “Oh, sure,” Amy says breezily. “Most of it was dumped here, and those divers got it, but some was dumped in other areas. My dad recovered some of it as late as the 1970s.”

  “Wow. That doesn’t make any sense!”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t believe that piles of silver just sat on the bottom of the ocean for thirty years, free for the taking.”

  “You don’t know the Philippines very well,” Amy says.

  “I know that it’s a poor country. Why didn’t someone come out and get that silver?”

  “Most of the treasure hunters in this part of the world are looking for much bigger game,” Amy says, “or easier.”

  Randy’s nonplussed. “A pile of silver on the bottom of the bay seems big and easy to me.”

  “It’s not. Silver’s not worth that much. A Sung Dynasty vase, cleaned up, can go for mo
re than its weight in gold. Gold. And it’s easier to find the vase—you just scan the seafloor, looking for something shaped like a junk. A sunken junk makes a distinctive image on sonar. Whereas an old crate, all busted up and covered with coral and barnacles, tends to look like a rock.”

  As they draw closer to Corregidor, Randy can see that the tail of the island is lumpy, with big stacks of rock protruding from it here and there. The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green and then a sere reddish-brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer. Randy’s gaze is fixed on one of those rocky crags, which is surmounted by a new steel tower. Atop the tower is a microwave horn aimed east, toward Epiphyte’s building in Intramuros.

  “See those caves along the waterline?” Amy says. She seems to regret having mentioned sunken treasure in the first place, and now wants to get off the subject.

  Randy tears himself away from admiring the microwave antenna, of which he is part owner, and looks in the direction Amy’s pointing. The limestock flank of the island, which drops vertically the last few meters into the water, is riddled with holes.

  “Yeah.”

  “Built by Americans to house beach defense guns. Enlarged by the Japanese as launch sites for suicide boats.”

  “Wow.”

  Randy notices a deep gargling noise, and looks over to see that a boat has fallen in alongside them. It is a canoe-shaped affair maybe forty feet long, with long outriggers on either side. A couple of ragged flags fly from a short mast, and bright laundry flaps gaily from various lines strung here and there. A big, naked diesel engine sits in the middle of the hull flailing the atmosphere with black smoke. Forward of that, several Filipinos, including women and children, are gathered in the shade of a bright blue tarpaulin, eating. Aft, a couple of men are fiddling with diving equipment. One of them is holding something up to his mouth: a microphone. A voice blares from Glory’s radio, speaking Tagalog. Ernesto stifles a laugh, picks up the mike, and answers briefly. Randy doesn’t know what they are saying, but he suspects it is something like “Let’s horse around later, our client is on the bridge right now.”