Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  Then he has the latrines filled in, and the area around the lake cleared of workers. They can do nothing now but contaminate the place with evidence. Summer has arrived, the rainy season on Luzon, and he is worried that rain will find the ruts worn into the soil by the Chinese workers’ feet and turn them into gullies, impossible to conceal. But the unusually dry weather holds, and vegetation rapidly takes root on the bare ground.

  Goto Dengo is faced with a challenge that would seem familiar to the designer of a garden back home: he needs to create an artificial formation that seems natural. It needs to look as though a boulder rolled down the mountain after an earthquake and wedged itself in a bottleneck of the Yamamoto River. Other rocks, and the logs of dead trees, piled up against it, forming a natural dam that created the lake.

  He finds the boulder he needs sitting in the middle of the riverbed about a kilometer upstream. Dynamite would only shatter it, and so he brings in a stout crew of workers with iron levers, and they get it rolling. It goes a few meters and stops.

  This is discouraging, but the workers have the idea now. Their leader is Wing—the bald Chinese man who helped Goto Dengo bury the corpse of Lieutenant Ninomiya. He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving the boulder. Of course, they have to move it, because Goto Dengo has let it be known that he wants it moved, and if they don’t, Lieutenant Mori’s guards will shoot them on the spot. But above and beyond this, they seem to welcome the challenge. Certainly standing in cool running water beats working down in the mineshafts of Golgotha.

  The boulder is in place three days later. The water divides around it. More boulders follow, and the river begins to pool. Trees do not naturally sprout from lakes, and so Goto Dengo has workers fell the ones that are standing here—not with axes, though. He shows them how to excavate the roots one at a time, like archaeologists digging up a skeleton, so that it looks as if the trees were uprooted during a typhoon. These are piled up against the boulders, and smaller stones and gravel follow. Suddenly the level of Lake Yamamoto begins to rise. The dam leaks, but the leaks peter out as more gravel and clay are dumped in behind it. Goto Dengo is not above plugging troublesome holes with sheets of tin, as long as it’s down where no one will ever see it. When the lake has reached its desired level, the only sign it’s manmade is a pair of wires trailing up onto its shore, rooted in demolition charges molded into the concrete plug on its bottom.

  Golgotha is cut into a ridge of basalt that is flung out from the base of the mountain—like a buttress root from the trunk of a jungle tree—that separates the watersheds of the Yamamoto and Tojo Rivers. Moving southwards from the summit of Calvary, then, one would pass through the teeming bowl of its extinct crater first, over the remains of its southern rim, and then onto the gradual downward slope of a much larger mountain on which Calvary’s cinder cone is just a blemish, like a wart on a nose. The small Yamamoto River runs generally parallel to the Tojo on the other side of the basalt ridge, but descends more gradually, so that its elevation gets higher and higher above that of the Tojo River as both work their way down the mountain. At the site of Lake Yamamoto, it is fifty meters above the Tojo. By drilling the connecting tunnel in a southeasterly direction rather than straight east underneath the ridge, one can bypass a chain of rapids and a waterfall on the Tojo which drop that river’s elevation to almost a hundred meters beneath the bottom of the lake.

  When The General comes to inspect the works, Goto Dengo astonishes him by taking him up the Tojo River in the same Mercedes he used to drive down from Manila. By this point, the workers have constructed a single-lane road that leads from the prison camp up the rocky bed of the river to Golgotha. “Fortune has smiled on our endeavor by giving us a dry summer,” Goto Dengo explains. “With the water low, the riverbed makes an ideal roadway—the rise in altitude is gentle enough for the heavy trucks that we will be bringing in. When we are finished, we will create a low dam near the site that will conceal the most obvious signs of our work. When the river rises to its normal height, there will be no visible trace that men were ever here.”

  “It is a good idea,” The General concedes, then mumbles something to his aide about using the same technique at the other sites. The aide nods and hais and writes it down.

  A kilometer into the jungle, the banks rise up into vertical walls of stone that climb higher and higher above the water’s level until they actually overhang the river. There is a hollow in the stony channel where the river broadens out; just upstream is the waterfall. At this point the road makes a left turn directly into the rock wall, and stops. Everyone gets out of the Mercedes: Goto Dengo, The General, his aide, and Captain Noda. The river runs over their feet, ankle-deep.

  A mouse-hole has been dug into the rock here. It has a flat bottom and an arched ceiling. A six-year-old could stand upright in here, but anyone taller will have to stoop. A pair of iron rails runs into the opening. “The main drift,” says Goto Dengo.

  “This is it?”

  “The opening is small so that we can conceal it later,” Captain Noda explains, cringing, “but it gets wider inside.”

  The General looks pissed off and nods. Led by Goto Dengo, all four men squat and duck-walk into the tunnel, pushed by a steady current of air. “Notice the excellent ventilation,” Captain Noda enthuses, and Goto Dengo grins proudly.

  Ten meters in, they are able to stand up. Here, the drift has the same vaulted shape, but it’s six feet high and six wide, buttressed by reinforced-concrete arches that they have poured in wooden forms on the floor. The iron rails run far away into blackness. A train of three mine cars sits on them—sheet metal boxes filled with shattered basalt. “We remove waste by hand tramming,” Goto Dengo explains. “This drift, and the rails, are perfectly level, to keep the cars from running out of control.”

  The General grunts. Clearly he has no respect for the intricacies of mine engineering.

  “Of course, we will use the same cars to move the, er, material into the vault when it arrives,” Captain Noda says.

  “Where did this waste come from?” The General demands. He is pissed off that they are still digging at this late stage.

  “From our longest and most difficult tunnel—the inclined shaft to the bottom of Lake Yamamoto,” says Goto Dengo. “Fortunately, we can continue to extend that shaft even while the material is being loaded into the vault. Outgoing cars will carry waste from the shaft work, incoming cars will carry the material.”

  He stops to thrust his finger into a drill hole in the ceiling. “As you can see, all of the holes are ready for the demolition charges. Not only will those charges bring down the ceiling, but they will leave the surrounding rock so rotten as to make horizontal excavation very difficult.”

  They walk down the main drift for fifty meters. “We are in the heart of the ridge now,” Goto Dengo says, “halfway between the two rivers. The surface is a hundred meters straight up.” In front of them, the string of electric lights terminates in blackness. Goto Dengo gropes for a wall switch.

  “The vault,” he says, and hits the switch.

  The tunnel has abruptly broadened into a flat-bottomed chamber with an arched ceiling, shaped like a Quonset hut, lined with concrete, the concrete massively ribbed every couple of meters. The floor of the vault is perhaps the size of a tennis court. The only opening is a small vertical shaft rising up from the middle of the ceiling, just barely big enough to contain a ladder and a human body.

  The General folds his arms and waits while the aide goes around with a tape measure, verifying the dimensions.

  “We go up,” says Goto Dengo, and, without waiting for The General to bristle, mounts the ladder up into the shaft. It only goes up for a few meters, and then they are in another drift with another narrow-gauge railway on the floor. This one’s shored up with timbers hewn from the surrounding jungle.

  “The ha
ulage level, where we move rock around,” Goto Dengo explains, when they have all convened at the top of the ladder. “You asked about the waste in those cars. Let me show you how it got there.” He leads the group down the tracks for twenty or thirty meters, past a train of battered cars. “We are headed northwest, towards Lake Yamamoto.”

  They reach the end of the drift, where another narrow shaft pierces the ceiling. A fat reinforced hose runs up into it, compressed air keening out through tiny leaks. The sound of drills can be heard, from very far away. “I would not recommend that you look up this shaft, because stray rocks occasionally come down from where we are working,” he warns. “But if you looked straight up, you would see that, about ten meters above us, this shaft comes up into the floor of a narrow inclined shaft that goes uphill that way—” he motions northwest “—towards the lake, and downhill that way—” he turns a hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the vault.

  “Toward the fool’s chamber,” The General says, with relish.

  “Hai!” answers Goto Dengo. “As we extend the shaft up toward the lake, we rake the broken rock downhill with an iron hoe drawn by a winch, and when it reaches the top of this vertical shaft that you see here, it falls down into waiting cars. From here we can drop it down into the main vault and from there hand-tram it to the exit.”

  “What are you doing with all the waste?” asks The General.

  “Spreading some of it down the riverbed, using it to make the roadway that we drove up on. Some of it is stored above to backfill various ventilation shafts. Some is being crushed into sand for a trap which I will explain later.” Goto Dengo leads them back in the direction of the main vault, but they pass by the ladder and turn into another drift, then another. Then the drifts become narrow and cramped again, like the one at the entrance. “Please forgive me for leading you into what seems like a three-dimensional maze,” Goto Dengo says. “This part of Golgotha is intentionally confusing. If a thief ever manages to break into the fool’s chamber from above, he will expect to find a drift through which the material was loaded into it. We have left one there for him to find—a false drift that seems to lead away toward the Tojo River. Actually, a whole complex of false drifts and shafts that will all be demolished by dynamite when we are finished. It will be so difficult, not to mention dangerous, for the thief to work his way through so much rotten rock, that he will probably be satisfied with what he finds in the fool’s chamber.”

  He keeps pausing and looking back at The General, expecting him to tire of this, but clearly The General is getting a second wind. Captain Noda, taking up the rear, gestures him onwards impatiently.

  The maze takes some time to negotiate and Goto Dengo, like a prestidigitator, tries to fill up the time with some convincing patter. “As I’m sure you understand, shafts and drifts must be engineered to counteract lithostatic forces.”

  “What?”

  “They must be strong enough to support the rock overhead. Just as a building must be strong enough to hold up its own roof.”

  “Of course,” says The General.

  “If you have two parallel drifts, one above the other like storeys in a building, then the rock in between them—the floor or the ceiling, depending on which way you look at it—must be thick enough to support itself. In the structure we are walking through, the rock is just barely thick enough. But when the demolition charges have been set off, the rock will be shattered so that reconstructing these drifts will be a physical impossibility.”

  “Excellent!” says The General, and again tells his aide to make a note of it—apparently so that the other Goto Dengos in the other Golgothas can do the same.

  At one point a drift has been plugged by a wall made of rubble stuck together with mortar. Goto Dengo shines his lantern on it, lets The General see the iron rails disappearing beneath the masonry. “To a thief coming down from the fool’s chamber, this will look like the main drift,” he explains. “But if he demolishes that wall, he dies.”

  “Why?”

  “Because on the other side of that wall is a shaft that connects to the Lake Yamamoto pipe. One blow from a sledgehammer and that wall will explode from the water pressure that will be on the other side of it. Then Lake Yamamoto rushes forth from that hole like a tsunami.”

  The General and his aide spend some time cackling over this one.

  Finally they waddle down a drift into a vault, half the dimensions of the main vault, that is illuminated from above by dim bluish sky-light. Goto Dengo turns on some electric lights as well. “The fool’s vault,” he announces. He points up the vertical shaft in the ceiling. “Our ventilation has been courtesy of this.” The General peers upwards and sees, a hundred meters above them, a circle of radiant green-blue jungle quartered by the spinning swastika of a big electric fan. “Of course, we would not want thieves to find the fool’s chamber too easily or it wouldn’t fool anyone. So we have added some features, up there, to make it interesting.”

  “What sorts of features?” asks Captain Noda, stepping crisply into his role as straight man.

  “Anyone who attacks Golgotha will attack from above—to gain horizontal access, the distance is too great. This means they will have to tunnel downwards, either through fresh rock or through the column of rubble with which this ventilation shaft will be filled. In either case, they will discover, when they are about halfway down, a stratum of sand, three to five meters in depth, spread across the whole area. I need hardly remind you that, in nature, pockets of sand are never found in the middle of igneous rock!”

  Goto Dengo begins climbing up the ventilation shaft. Halfway to the surface, it comes up into a network of small, rounded, interconnected chambers, whittled out of the rock, with fat pillars left in place to hold up the ceiling. The pillars are so thick and numerous that it’s not possible to see very far, but when the others have arrived, and Goto Dengo begins leading them from room to room, they learn that this system of chambers extends for a considerable distance.

  He takes them to a place where an iron manhole is set into a hole in the rock wall, sealed in place with tar. “There are a dozen of these,” he says. “Each one leads to the Lake Yamamoto shaft—so pressurized water will be behind it. The only thing holding them in place right now is tar—obviously not enough to hold back the pressure of the lake water. But when we have filled these rooms with sand, the sand will hold the manholes in place. But if a thief breaks in and removes the sand, the manhole explodes out of its seat and millions of gallons of water force their way into his excavation.”

  From there, another climb up the shaft takes them to the surface, where Captain Noda’s men are waiting to move the ventilation fan out of their way, and his aide is waiting with bottles of water and a pot of green tea.

  They sit at a folding table and refresh themselves. Captain Noda and The General talk about goings-on in Tokyo—evidently The General just flew down from there a few days ago. The General’s aide performs calculations on his clipboard.

  Finally, they hike up over the top of the ridge to take a look at Lake Yamamoto. The jungle is so thick that they almost have to fall into it before they can see it. The General pretends to be surprised that it is an artificial body of water. Goto Dengo takes this as a high commendation. They stand, as people often will, at the edge of the water, and say nothing for a few minutes. The General smokes a cigarette, squinting through the smoke across the lake, and then turns to the aide and nods. This seems to communicate much to the aide, who turns to face Captain Noda and pipes up with a question: “What is the total number of workers?”

  “Now? Five hundred.”

  “The tunnels were designed with this assumption?”

  Captain Noda shoots an uneasy look at Goto Dengo. “I reviewed Lieutenant Goto’s work and found that it was compatible with that assumption.”

  “The quality of the work is the highest we have seen,” the aide continues.

  “Thank you!”

  “Or expect to see,” The General adds.


  “As a result, we may wish to increase the amount of material stored at this site.”

  “I see.”

  “Also… the schedule may have to be greatly accelerated.”

  Captain Noda looks startled.

  “He has landed on Leyte with a very great force,” The General says bluntly, as if this had been expected for years.

  “Leyte!? But that is so close.”

  “Precisely.”

  “It is insane,” Noda raves. “The Navy will crush him—it is what we have been waiting for all these years! The Decisive Battle!”

  The General and the aide stand uncomfortably for a few long moments, seemingly unable to speak. Then The General fixes Noda with a long, frigid stare. “The Decisive Battle was yesterday.”

  Captain Noda whispers, “I see.” He suddenly looks about ten years older, and he is not at a point in his life where he can spare ten years.

  “So. We may accelerate the work. We may bring more workers for the final phase of the operation,” says the aide in a soft voice.

  “How many?”

  “The total may reach a thousand.”

  Captain Noda stiffens, grunts out a “Hai!” and turns towards Goto Dengo. “We will need more ventilation shafts.”

  “But sir, with all due respect, the complex is very well ventilated.”

  “We will need more deep, wide ventilation shafts,” Captain Noda says. “Enough for an additional five hundred workers.”