Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  Subject matter of interviews could be induced by Yours Truly only by recognizing occasional English words & adopting a basically intuitive pattern-recognition approach not amenable to rational explication here. Most common keywords: Nippon, the Nipponese, the War, Gold, Treasure, Excavations, Yamashita, Mass Executions. Emotional tenor of these conversations consisted of polite but extreme skepticism on part of DMS, while confronted by desperate need to be believed on part of interviewees. In the end DMS did not believe any of them as far as I could discern. They either became obstreperous & had to be shown the door (glancing warily at Jean Nguyen & Jackie Woo) or adopted a wounded & aggrieved stance. DMS was amused by the former & disgusted by the latter. Yours Truly mused silently upon inappropriateness of his own presence in this setting & fondly remembered predictable comforts of home, even of Manila. Upon completion of breakfast & of interviews, DMS divulged, in response to my inquiries, that he had been at it for two hours before I had arrived & that formation of this milling crowd occurs spontaneously before doors of any lodgings he takes in the Philippines owing to his reputation as treasure-hunter. We had avoided it in San Juan only because he goes there frequently and has already interviewed everyone in region with Nipponese War Gold stories, found 99.9% of them lacking credibility, investigating the remaining .1% with occasionally lucrative results.

  THE GRACE OF GOD had been washed and buffed by Fidel Gad in magnificently insouciant gesture of defiance of jungle elements. We proceeded across river. Racial variations were conspicuous on faces, and in physiognomies, of townspeople. Philippines were settled by countless overlapping waves of prehistoric migrants each racially & linguistically incompatible with the last; this in combination with the spatial involution phenom. which I have, I think sufficiently belabored by this point, makes for your basic patchwork of different ethnic groups. The fork in the river around which this town was nucleated was meeting-point of unofficial turfs of three such different cultures. Lure of bright lights, or even dim, flickering ones, has drawn thousands down from mountains in recent generations to establish several distinct barangays. This morning’s interviewees were migrants from the mountains, or their sons or grandsons, who claimed to have first-hand knowledge of sites of Yamashita’s hoards, or to have heard about same from late ancestors.

  After covering about 1.5 LACs through jungle (roads, slopes, & conditions getting worse all the time) we encountered another military roadblock that had (somewhat incredibly to my mind) been established at a pass over a ridge, overlooking some rice terraces that had (even more incredibly) been hacked out of an essentially vertical south-facing slope thousands of years ago by the evidently fearsomely tenacious ancestors of the locals. Here we were thoroughly searched. My testicles were squeezed at some length by a sergeant with a pencil mustache, whose motives did not appear to be sexual, but who simultaneously looked me searchingly in the eye, awaiting a look of submission or hopelessness on the face of the squeezed. The others were subjected to the same treatment and probably endured it with more stoicism than Yours Truly. No lethal weapons were found attached to any of our scrota, but (surprise!) Jean (“John Wayne”) Nguyen and Jackie Woo were discovered to be armed to the teeth, and DMS somewhat less so. This is the part where Yours Truly expected to be shot in the nape of the neck whilst kneeling above a shallow grave, but ironically the authorities were far more interested in my cache of Cap’n Crunch than the weaponry sported by my comrades. Negotiations took place between DMS and the captain in charge of this outpost, in the privacy of a tent. DMS emerged with a thinner wallet and full clearance to proceed, on the conditions that (1) all supplies of Cap’n Crunch be donated to the officers’ mess, and (2) a full inventory of weapons and ammo would be taken upon our return & compared with today’s findings to make sure that we were not smuggling arms to the Nice People Around.

  Three days’ excruciatingly slow travel, comprising maybe another 10 LACs, awaited us. According to my map and GPS we were circumnavigating a cluster of active volcanoes that frequently spew out lahars (mud avalanches) which, when they impact upon ruts in the jungle that I’m here calling roads, cause logistical problems well into the realm of the absurd. We passed entire towns that had been buried and abandoned. Church steeples projected at angles from the grey mud, held up by the same flows that had knocked them askew. Skulls of goats, dogs, etc. protruded from mud that had hardened around living animals like concrete. We bedded down nightly at small settlements after propitiating locals with gifts of penicillin (which Filipinos use like aspirin), batteries, disposable lighters, & whatever else had been left to us by the soldiers at the roadblocks. We slept on benches, floor, roof, or front seats of THE GRACE OF GOD, beneath mosquito nets.

  Finally, when my GPS revealed that we were less than ten km. from our mysterious destination, a local instructed us to wait in a nearby village. We remained there for a day & a night resting up and reading books (DMS is never without a milk crate of techno-thrillers) until, at dawn, we were approached by a trio of very young, short men, one of whom carried an AK-47. He and his brethren climbed on the roof of THE GRACE OF GOD and we proceeded into a jungle track so narrow that I would not have pegged it even as a footpath. A couple of km. into the jungle we reached a point where we spent more time pushing the jeepney than riding in it. Shortly thereafter we left Bong-Bong and Fidel and one of the duffels behind, the four of us taking turns humping the two other duffels. I consulted the GPS & verified that, although we had for a time (alarmingly) moved away from the Destination, we were now moving toward it again. We were eight thousand m(eters) away and proceeding at a rate that varied between about five hundred and a thousand m per hour, depending on whether we were moving steeply uphill or steeply downhill. It was around noon. Those of you with even rudimentary math skills will have anticipated that when the sun went down we were still a few thousand meters away.

  The three Filipinos———our guides, guards, captors, or whatever they were———wore the obligatory U.S. t-shirts which make it so easy, nowadays, to underestimate cultural differences. They had not yet, however, attained transethnicity. While in town they were shod in flip-flops, but in the jungle they went barefoot (I have owned pairs of shoes less durable than the calluses on their feet). They spoke a language that apparently had zero in common with the Tagalog I’d heard (“Tagalog” is the old name; the government is ragging on people to call it “Pilipina,” as if to imply that it is in some sense a common language of the archipelago, which, as these guys demonstrated, is not the case). DMS had to converse with them in English. At one point he gave one a throwaway plastic ballpoint pen and their faces absolutely lit up. Then we had to scrounge up two more pens for his companions. It was like Christmas. Progress halted for several minutes while they marveled at the pens’ handy clicking mechanisms and doodled on the palms of their hands. The American t-shirts were, in other words, not worn as Americans wear them but in the same spirit that the Queen of England wore the exotic Koh-I-Noor Diamond on her crown. Not for the first time I was overtaken by a strong not-exactly-in-Kansas feeling.

  We slogged through the inevitable late-afternoon thunderstorm and kept moving into the night. DMS produced U.S. Army MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) from the duffels, only a couple of weeks past their stenciled expiration dates. The Filipino men found these nearly as exciting as the ballpoint pen, and saved the disposable foil trays for later use as roofing material. We started slogging again. The moon came out, which represented a bit of luck. I fell down a couple of times and banged myself up on trees, which ended up being a good thing because it put me into a state of mild shock, dulling the pain and jacking me up on adrenaline. Our guides, at one point, seemed a little uncertain as to which way they should go. I took a fix with the GPS (using the screen’s nightlight function) and established that we were no more than fifty meters away from the destination, almost too small an error for my GPS to resolve. In any event, it told us roughly which direction to proceed, and we trudged through the trees for another few moments. Th
e guides became animated and very cheerful———finally they had gotten their bearings, they knew where we were. I bumped into something heavy, cold, and immovable that nearly broke my knee. I reached down to touch it, expecting to find a rock outcropping, but instead felt something smooth and metallic. It seemed to be a stack of smaller units, maybe comparable in size to loaves of bread. “Is this what we’re looking for?” I asked. DMS turned on a battery-powered lantern and whipped the beam around in my direction.

  I was instantly blinded by a thigh-high stack of gold bars, about a meter and a half on a side, sitting out in the middle of the jungle, unmarked and unguarded.

  DMS came over and sat down on top of it and lit a cigar. After a while, we counted the bars and measured them. They are trapezoidal in cross-section, about 10 cm wide and 10 high, and about 40 cm in length. This enabled us to estimate their mass at about 75 kg. each, which works out to 2,400 troy ounces. Since gold is normally measured in troy ounces and not in kilograms (!) I’m going to make a wild guess that these bars were intended to weigh an even 2,500 troy ounces apiece. At current rates ($400/troy oz.) this means each bar is worth a million dollars. There are 5 layers of bars in the stack, each layer consisting of 24 bars, and so the value of the stack is $120 million. Both the mass estimate and the value estimate presume that the bars are nearly pure gold. I took a rubbing of the stamp from one of the bars, which bears the mark of the Bank of Singapore. Each bar is marked with a unique serial number and I copied down as many of those as I could see.

  Then we went back to Manila. All along the way, I tried to imagine the logistics of getting even a single one of those gold bars from the jungle out to the nearest bank where it could be turned into something useful, like cash.

  Let me transition to a Q&A format here.

  Q: Randy, I get the feeling that you are about to lay out in detail all of the hassles that would be involved in moving this gold overland, so let’s just cut to the chase and talk about helicopters.

  A: There is no place for a helicopter to land. Terrain is extremely rugged. The nearest sufficiently flat place is about one km. away. It would have to be cleared. In Vietnam this was accomplished using “blockbuster” bombs, but this is probably not an option here. Trees would have to be cut down, creating a gap in the jungles conspicuous from the air.

  Q: Who cares if it’s conspicuous? Who’s going to see it?

  A: As should be obvious from my anecdote, the people who control this gold have connections in Manila. We may assume that the area is overflown by the Philippine Air Force regularly, and kept under radar surveillance.

  Q: What would be involved in getting the bars to the nearest decent road?

  A: They would have to be carried over the jungle trails I have described. Each bar weighs as much as a full-grown man.

  Q: Couldn’t they be cut up into smaller pieces?

  A: DMS rates it as unlikely that the current owners would permit this.

  Q: Is there any chance of smuggling the gold through the military checkpoints?

  A: Obviously not in the case of a mass shipment. The gold weighs a total of around ten tons, and would require a truck that could not negotiate most of the roads we saw. Concealing ten tons of goods from the inspectors at these checkpoints is not possible.

  Q: How about smuggling the bars out one at a time?

  A: Still very tricky. Might be possible to hike the bars out to an intermediate point somewhere, melt or chop them down, and somehow secrete them in the body of a jeepney or other vehicle, then drive the vehicle to Manila and extract the gold. This operation would have to be repeated a hundred times. Driving the same vehicle past one of these checkpoints a hundred (or even two) times would strike them as, to put it mildly, odd. Even if this were possible, there is the payment issue.

  Q: What is the payment issue?

  A: Obviously the people who control the gold want to be paid for it. Paying them in more gold, or in precious gems, would be ludicrous. They do not have bank accounts. They have to be paid in Philippine pesos. Anything bigger than about a 500-peso note is useless in this area. A 500-peso note is worth about $20, and so it would be necessary to bring six million of them into the jungle to perform the transaction. Based on some rudimentary calculations I have made here using a mechanic’s caliper and the contents of my wallet, the stack of 500-peso notes would be about (please wait while I switch my calculator over to the “scientific notation” mode) 25,000 inches high. Or, if you prefer the metric system, something like two-thirds of a kilometer. If you stacked the bills a meter high, you would need six or seven hundred such stacks, which if jammed close together would cover an area about three meters on a side. Basically we are talking about a large Ryder box truck full of money. This would have to be transported into the middle of the jungle, and obviously, melting down cash and secreting it inside of a truck is not an option.

  Q: Since the military seems to be the big obstacle here, why not simply cut a deal with them? Let them keep a big cut of the proceeds in exchange for not hassling us.

  A: Because the money would go to the NPA which would use it to buy weapons for the purpose of killing people in the military.

  Q: There must be some way to use the value of this gold to leverage some kind of extraction operation.

  A: The gold is worthless to a bank until it has been assayed. Until then it is only a blurry Polaroid of a stack of yellow objects in what seems to be a jungle. In order to perform an assay you need to go into the jungle, find the gold, bore out a sample, and transport it safely back to a large city. But this proves nothing. Even if the potential backers believe that your assay really came from the jungle (i.e., that you did not switch samples along the way) all they know now is the purity of one end of one bar in the stack. Basically it is not possible to obtain full value for this gold until the entire stack has been extracted and taken to a vault where it can be systematically assayed.

  Q: Could you maybe just get the gold to some local bank and then sell it at steep discount, so that the burden of transporting it would be on someone else’s shoulders?

  A: DMS relates the tale of one such transaction, in a provincial town in north Luzon, which was interrupted when local entrepreneurs literally blew one of the bank’s walls off with dynamite, came in, and grabbed both the gold and the cash that was going to be used to pay for the gold. DMS asserts he would rather slit his own throat quietly than walk into a small-town bank with anything worth more than a few tens of thousands of dollars.

  Q: Is the situation basically impossible then?

  A: It is basically impossible.

  Q: Then what was the point of the whole exercise?

  A: To come full circle to the first thing DMS said. It was to send us a message.

  Q: What is the message?

  A: That money is not worth having if you can’t spend it. That certain people have a lot of money that they badly want to spend. And that if we can give them a way to spend it, through the Crypt, that these people will be very happy, and conversely that if we screw up they will be very sad, and that whether they are happy or sad they will be eager to share these emotions with us, the shareholders and management team of Epiphyte Corp.

  And now I am going to e-mail this to all of you and then summon the flight attendant and demand the array of alcoholic beverages I so richly deserve. Cheers.

  —R

  Randall Lawrence Waterhouse

  Current meatspace coordinates, hot from the GPS receiver card in my laptop:

  27 degrees, 14.95 minutes N latitude 143 degrees, 17.44 minutes E longitude

  Nearest geographical feature: the Bonin Islands

  ROCKET

  * * *

  JULIETA HAS RETREATED SOMEWHERE FAR UP BEyond the Arctic Circle. Shaftoe has been pursuing her like a dogged Mountie, slogging across the sexual tundra on frayed snowshoes and leaping heroically from floe to floe. But she remains about as distant, and about as reachable, as Polaris. She has spent more time lately with Enoch Root than w
ith him—and Root’s a celibate priest or something. Or is he?!

  On the few occasions Bobby Shaftoe has actually gotten Julieta to crack a smile, she has immediately begun to ask difficult questions: Did you have sex with Glory, Bobby? Did you use a condom? Is it possible that she might have become pregnant? Can you absolutely rule out the possibility that you have a child in the Philippines? How old would he or she be right now? Let’s see, you fucked her on Pearl Harbor Day, so the child would have been born in early September of ’42. Your child would be fourteen, fifteen months old now—perhaps just learning to walk! How precious!

  It always gives Shaftoe the willies when tough girls like Julieta get all fluttery and slip into baby talk. At first, he figures it’s all a ruse to keep him at arm’s length. This smug gler’s daughter, this atheist guerilla intellectual—what does she care about some girl in Manila? Snap out of it, woman! There’s a war on!

  Then he comes up with a better explanation: Julieta’s pregnant.

  The day begins with the sound of a ship’s horn in the harbor at Norrsbruck. The town is a jumble of neat, wide houses packed onto a spur of rock that sticks out into the Gulf of Bothnia, forming the southern shore of a slender but deep inlet lined with wharves. Half the town now turns out beneath an unsettling, turbulent peach-and-salmon dawn to see this quaint harbor being deflowered by an inexorable steel phallus. It comes complete with spirochetes: several score men in black dress uniforms stand on the top of the thing, lined up neat as stanchions. As the blast of the horn fades away, echoing back and forth between the stony ridges, it becomes possible to hear the spirochetes singing: belting out a bawdy German sea chanty which Bobby Shaftoe last heard during a convoy attack in the Bay of Biscay.