Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  The sky is streaked and mottled by black clouds, like jets of squid ink in a Caribbean cove. For a while, it’s as if he is under water with Bischoff.

  Puckered scars mar the Pacific in loops and lines, and he is reminded of his own naked flesh. But the hard jagged pieces work their way out of the scar tissue like old shrapnel: coral reefs emerging from a shallowing sea. Warmer and warmer. He begins to shiver again.

  Someone has dumped brown dust into the Pacific, made a great pile of it. On the edge of the pile is a city. The city swings around them, comes closer. Warmer and warmer. It’s Brisbane. A runway streaks up and he thinks it’s going to take his ass off, like the world’s biggest belt sander. The plane stops. He smells gasoline.

  The pilot discovers him, loses his temper, and makes ready to call the MPs. “I’m here to work for The General,” Shaftoe mumbles through blue lips. It just makes the pilot want to slug him. But after Shaftoe has uttered these words, everything is different, the angry officers stand a pace or two farther away from him, tone down their language, knock off the threats. Shaftoe knows, from this, that The General does things differently.

  He spends a day recovering in a flophouse, then rises, shaves, drinks a cup of coffee, and strikes out in search of brass.

  To his extreme chagrin, he learns that The General has relocated his headquarters to Hollandia, in New Guinea. But his wife and son, and a bunch of his staff, are still staying at Lennon’s Hotel. Shaftoe goes there and analyzes the traffic pattern: to pull into the hotel’s horseshoe drive, the cars have to come around a particular corner, just up the street. Shaftoe finds a good loitering-place near that corner, and waits. Looking through the windows of the approaching cars, he can see the epaulets, count the stars and eagles.

  Seeing two stars, he decides to make his move. Jogging down the block, he reaches the awning of the hotel just as this general’s door is being hauled open by his driver.

  “ ’Scuse me, General, Bobby Shaftoe reporting for duty, sir!” he blurts, snapping out the perfectest salute in military history.

  “And who the hell might you be, Bobby Shaftoe?” says this general, hardly batting an eye. He talks like Bischoff! This guy actually has a German accent!

  “I’ve killed more Nips than seismic activity. I’m trained to jump out of airplanes. I speak a little Nip. I can survive in the jungle. I know Manila like the back of my hand. My wife and child are there. And I’m kinda at loose ends. Sir!”

  In London, in D.C., he’d never have gotten this close, and if he had he’d have been shot or arrested.

  But this is SOWESPAC, and so the next morning at dawn he’s on a B-17 bound for Hollandia, wearing Army green, no rank.

  New Guinea is a nasty-looking piece of work: a gangrenous dragon with a wicked, rocky spine, covered with ice. Just looking at it makes Shaftoe shiver from a queasy combination of hypothermia and incipient malaria. The whole thing belongs to The General now. Shaftoe can plainly see that such a country could only be conquered by a man who was completely fucking out of his mind. A month in Stalingrad would be preferable to twenty-four hours down there.

  Hollandia is on the north shore of this beast, facing, naturally, towards the Philippines. It is well known throughout Marinedom that The General has caused a palace to be built for himself there. Some credulous fools actually believe the rumor that it is merely a complete 200%-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, built by enslaved Marines, but savvy jarheads know that it is actually a much vaster compound built out of construction materials stolen from Navy hospital ships, dotted with pleasure domes and fuck houses for his string of Asiatic concubines, with a soaring cupola so high that The General can go up there and see what the Nips are doing to his extensive real estate holdings in Manila, 1,500 miles to the northwest.

  Bobby Shaftoe sees no such thing out the windows of the B-17. He glimpses one large and nice-looking house up on a mountain above the sea. He supposes that it is a mere sentry post, marking the benighted perimeter of The General’s domain. But almost immediately the B-17 bounces down on a runway. The cabin is invaded by an equatorial miasma. It’s like breathing Cream O’ Wheat direct from a blurping vat. Shaftoe feels his bowels loosening up already. Of course there are many Marines who feel that Army uniform trousers look best when feces-stained. Shaftoe must put such thoughts out of his head.

  All the passengers (mostly colonels and better) move as to avoid working up a sweat, even though they are already drenched. Shaftoe wants to kick their fat, waffled butts downstairs—he’s in a hurry to get to Manila.

  Pretty soon he is hitching a ride on the rear bumper of a jeep full of brass. The airfield is still ringed with ack-ack guns, and shows signs of having been bombed and strafed not too long ago. Some of these signs are obvious physical evidence like shell holes, but Shaftoe gets most of his information from watching the men: their posture, their facial expressions as they stare into the sky, tell him exactly what the threat level is.

  No wonder, he thinks, remembering the sight of that big white house up on the mountain. You can probably see that thing by moonlight, for crissakes! It must be visible from Tokyo! It’s just begging to be strafed.

  Then, as the jeep begins to trundle up the mountain in first gear, he figures it out: that thing’s just a decoy. The General’s real command post must be a network of deep tunnels hidden beneath the jungle floor, and that is where you would have to look for your Asiatic concubines, etc.

  The trip up the mountain takes an eon. Shaftoe jumps off and soon outpaces the whining jeep, and the one in front of it. Then he’s on his own, walking through the jungle. He’ll just follow the tracks until they lead him straight to the cleverly camouflaged mineshaft that leads down to The General’s HQ.

  The walk gives him plenty of time to have a couple of smokes and savor the unrelieved nightmarishness of the New Guinea jungle, compared to which Guadalcanal, which he thought was the worst place on earth, seems like a dewy meadow strewn with bunnies and butterflies. Nothing is more satisfying than to consider that the Nips and the United States Army spent a couple of years beating the crap out of each other here. Pity the Aussies had to get mixed up in it, though.

  The tracks take him straight to that big white clay pigeon of a house up on the mountainside. They’ve gone way overboard in trying to make the house look like someone’s actually living there. Shaftoe can see furniture and everything. The walls are crisscrossed by bullet trails. They have even set up a mannequin on the balcony, in a pink silk dressing gown, corncob pipe, and aviator sunglasses, scanning the bay through binoculars! As reluctant as he is to approve of anything done by the Army, Shaftoe cannot keep himself from laughing out loud at this witticism. Military humor at its finest. He can’t believe they got away with it. A couple of press photographers are standing down below, taking pictures of the scene.

  Standing in the middle of the house’s mud parking lot, he plants his feet wide and thrusts his middle finger up at that mannequin. Hey, asshole, this one’s from the Marines on Kwajalein! Damn, this feels good.

  The mannequin swivels and aims its binoculars directly at Bobby Shaftoe, who freezes solid in his bird-flipping posture as if caught in the gaze of a basilisk. Down below, air-raid sirens begin to weep and wail.

  The binoculars come away from the sunglasses. A puff of smoke blurts out of the pipe. The General snaps out a sarcastic salute. Shaftoe remembers to put his finger away, then stands there, rooted like a dead mahogany.

  The General reaches up and removes the pipe from his mouth so he can say, “Magandang gabi.”

  “You mean, ‘magandang umaga,’ “ Shaftoe says. “Gabi means night and umaga means morning.”

  The drone of airplane engines is now getting quite noticeable. The press photographers decide to pack it in, and disappear into the house.

  “When you’re headed north from Manila towards Lingayen and you get to the fork in the road at Tarlac and you take the right fork, there, and head across the cane breaks towards Urdaneta, what’s the first
village you come to?”

  “It’s a trick question,” Shaftoe says. “North of Tarlac there are no cane breaks, just rice paddies.”

  “Hmm. Very good,” The General says grumpily. Down below, the antiaircraft guns open up with a fantastic clattering; from this distance it sounds as if the north coast of New Guinea is being jackhammered into the sea. The General ignores it. If he were only pretending to ignore it, he would at least look at the incoming Zeroes, so that he could stop pretending to ignore them when it got too dangerous. But he doesn’t even do so much as look. Shaftoe forces himself not to look either. The General asks him a big long question in Spanish. He has a beautiful voice. He sounds like he is standing in an anechoic sound booth in New York City or Hollywood, narrating a newsreel about how great he is.

  “If you’re trying to find out if I hablo Español, the answer is, un poquito,” Shaftoe says.

  The General cups a hand to his ear irritably. He can’t hear anything except for the pair of Zeroes converging on him and Shaftoe at three hundred odd miles per hour, liquefying tons of biomass with dense streams of 12.7-millimeter slugs. He keeps a sharp eye on Shaftoe as a trail of bullets thuds across the parking lot, spraying Shaftoe’s trouser legs with mud. The same line of bullets makes a sudden upwards right-angle turn when it reaches the wall of The General’s house, climbs straight up the wall, tears out a chunk of the balcony’s railing about a foot away from where The General’s hand is resting, beats up a bunch of furniture back inside the house, and then clears the roof of the house and vanishes.

  Now that the planes have passed overhead, Shaftoe can look at them without having to worry that he is giving The General the idea that he is some kind of lily-livered pansy. The meatballs on their wings broaden and glower as they bank sharply, sharper than any American plane, and come round for a second try.

  “I said—” The General begins. But then the atmosphere’s riven by a series of bizarre whizzing noises. One of the house’s windows is suddenly punched out of its frame. Shaftoe hears a thud from inside and some crockery breaking. For the first time, The General shows some awareness that a military action is taking place. “Warm up my jeep, Shaftoe,” he says, “I have a bone to pick with my triple-A boys.” Then he turns around and Shaftoe gets a look at the back of his pink silk dressing gown. It is embroidered, in black thread, with a giant lizard, rampant.

  The General suddenly turns around. “Is that you screaming down there, Shaftoe?”

  “Sir, no sir!”

  “I distinctly heard you scream.” MacArthur turns his back on Shaftoe again, giving him another look at the lizard (which on second thought might be some sort of Chinese dragon design) and goes inside the house, mumbling irritably to himself.

  Shaftoe gets into the vehicle indicated and starts the engine.

  The General emerges from the house and begins to plod across the lot cradling an unexploded antiaircraft shell in his arms. The wind makes his pink silk dressing gown billow all around him.

  The Zeroes come back and strafe the parking lot again, cutting a truck nearly in half. Shaftoe feels as if his intestines have dissolved and are about to spurt from his body. He closes his eyes, puckers his anal sphincter, and clenches his teeth. The General takes a seat next to him. “Down the hill,” he orders. “Drive towards the sound of the guns.”

  They have barely gotten onto the road when their progress is blocked by the two jeeps that had been carrying all the brass up from the airfield. They now sit empty on the road, their doors hanging open, engines still running. The General reaches across in front of Shaftoe and honks the horn.

  Colonels and brigadier generals begin to emerge from the shadows of the jungle, like some especially bizarre native tribe, clutching their attache cases talismanically. They salute The General, who ignores them testily. “Move my vehicles!” he intones, jabbing at them with the stem of his pipe. “This is the road. The parking lot is that way.”

  The Zeroes come back for a third pass. Shaftoe now realizes (as perhaps The General has) that these pilots are not the best; it is late in the war and all the good pilots are dead. Consequently they do not line their trajectories up properly with the road; the strafing trails cut across it diagonally. Still, a bullet bores through the engine block of one of the jeeps. Hot oil and steam spray out of it.

  “Come on, push it out of the way!” The General says. Shaftoe instinctively begins to climb out of the jeep, but The General yanks him back with a word: “Shaftoe! I need you to drive this vehicle.”

  Wielding his pipestem like a conductor’s baton, The General gets his staff back out on the road and they begin shoving the ruined jeep into the jungle. Shaftoe makes the mistake of inhaling through his nose and gets a strong diarrheal whiff—at least one of these officers has shit his pants. Shaftoe’s still trying hard not to do the same, and probably would have if he’d pushed the jeep. The Zeroes are trying to line up for another strafing run, but a few American fighter planes have now appeared on the scene, which complicates matters.

  Shaftoe maneuvers them through a gap between the remaining jeep and a huge tree, then guns it down the road. The General hums to himself for a while, then says, “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Gory.”

  “What!?”

  “I mean, Glory.”

  “Ah. Good. Good Filipina name. Filipinas are the most beautiful women in the world, don’t you think?”

  Experienced world traveler Bobby Shaftoe screws up his face and begins to review his experiences in a systematic way. Then he realizes that The General probably does not actually want his considered opinion.

  Of course, The General’s wife is American, so this could be tricky. “I guess the woman you love is always the most beautiful,” Shaftoe finally says.

  The General looks mildly pissed off. “Of course, but…”

  “But if you don’t really give a shit about them, the Filipinas are the most beautiful, sir!” Shaftoe says.

  The General nods. “Now, your boy. What’s his name, then?”

  Shaftoe swallows hard and thinks fast. He doesn’t even know if he has a kid—he fabricated that to make his line sound better—and even if he does, the chances are only fifty-fifty that it’s a boy. But if he does have a boy, he knows already what the name will be. “His name—well, sir, his name—and I hope you don’t mind this—but his name is Douglas.”

  The General grins delightedly and cackles, slapping the antiaircraft shell in his lap for emphasis. Shaftoe flinches.

  When they arrive at the airfield, a full-fledged dogfight is in progress overhead. The place is deserted because everyone except them is hiding behind sandbags. The General has Shaftoe drive up and down the length of the field, stopping at each gun emplacement so that he can peer over the barrier.

  “There’s the fellow!” The General finally says, pointing his swagger stick at a gun on the opposite side of the runway. “I just saw him poking his head out, yammering on the telephone.”

  Shaftoe guns it across the runway. A flaming Zero, traveling at about half the speed of sound, impacts the runway a few hundred feet away and disintegrates into a howling cloud of burning spare parts that comes skittering and rolling and bounding across the runway in their general direction. Shaftoe falters. The General yells at him. Reckoning that he can’t avoid what he can’t see, Shaftoe turns into the storm. Having seen this kind of thing happen before, he knows that the first thing to come their way will be the engine block, a red-hot tombstone of fine Mitsubishi iron. And indeed there it is, one of its exhaust manifolds still dangling from it like a broken wing, spinning end-over-end and spading huge divots out of the runway with each bounce. Shaftoe swings wide around it. He identifies the fuselage and sees that it has plowed to a stop already. He looks for the wings; they broke up into a few large pieces that are slowing down rapidly, but the tires broke loose from the landing gear and are bounding along towards them, burning wheels of red fire. Shaftoe maneuvers the jeep between them, guns it across a small pa
tch of flaming oil, then makes another hard turn and continues towards their objective.

  The explosion of the Zero sent everyone back down behind their sandbags. The General has to climb out of the jeep and peer over the top of the barrier. He holds the antiaircraft shell up above his head. “Say, Captain,” he says in his perfect radio-announcer voice, “this arrived on my end table with no return address, but I believe it came from your unit.” The captain’s helmeted head pops into view over the top of the sandbags as he jumps to attention. He is gaping at the shell. “Would you please look after it, and make sure that it has been properly defused?” The General tosses the shell at him sideways, like a watermelon, and the captain barely has the presence of mind to catch it. “Carry on,” The General says, “let’s see if we can actually shoot down some Nips next time.” He waves disparagingly at the burning wreckage of the Zero and climbs into the jeep with Shaftoe. “All right, back up the hill, Shaftoe!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Now, I know that you hate me because you are a Marine.”

  Officers like it when you pretend to be straight with them. “Yes, sir, I do hate you, sir, but I do not feel that this need be an impediment to our killing some Nips together, sir!”

  “We agree. But in the mission I have in mind for you, Shaftoe, killing Nips will not be the primary objective.”

  Shaftoe’s a bit off balance now. “Sir, with all due respect, I believe that killing Nips is my strong point.”

  “I don’t doubt it. And that is a fine skill for a Marine. Because in this war, a Marine is a first-rate fighting man under the command of admirals who don’t know the first thing about ground warfare, and who think that the way to win an island is to hurl their men directly into the teeth of the Nips’ prepared defenses.”

  The General pauses here, as if giving Shaftoe an opportunity to respond. But Shaftoe says nothing. He is remembering the stories that his brothers told him on Kwajalein, about all the battles they had fought on small Pacific islands, precisely as The General describes.