Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  This one is only large enough to contain a modest one-story house. The conveyor passes right through the middle of it and disappears down another hole; the muck is coming from deeper yet in the mountain. It’s still too loud in here to talk. The floor has been leveled by pouring in concrete, and conduits rise from it every few meters with orange cables dangling from their open tops: optical fiber lines.

  Tom walks towards another opening in the wall. It appears that several subsidiary caverns branch away from this one. Tom leads Randy through the opening, then turns to put a hand on his arm and steady him: they are at the top of a steep wooden staircase that has been built down a nearly vertical shaft that descends a good five meters or so.

  “What you just saw is the main switch room,” Tom says. “That’ll be the largest router in the world when it’s finished. We’re using some of these other chambers to install computers and mass storage systems. The world’s largest RAID, basically, buffered with a big, big RAM cache.”

  RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; it is a way to store vast quantities of information cheaply and reliably, and exactly the kind of thing you would want to have in a data haven.

  “So we’re still cleaning out some of these other chambers,” Tom continues. “We discovered something, down here, that I thought you’d find interesting.” He turns around and begins to descend the staircase. “Did you know that these caves were used as an air raid shelter by the Japanese, during the war?”

  Randy has been carrying the map page from his photocopied book around in his pocket. He unfolds it and holds it up near a lightbulb. Sure enough, it includes a site, up in the mountains, labeled ENTRANCE TO AIR RAID SHELTER & COMMAND POST.

  “And a command post?” Randy says.

  “Yeah. How’d you know that?”

  “Interlibrary loan,” Randy says.

  “We didn’t know it until we got here and found all of these old cables and electrical shit strung around the place. We had to tear it out so we could string in our own.”

  Randy begins to descend the steps.

  “This shaft was full of rocks,” Tom says, “but we could see wires going down into it, so we knew something had to be down here.”

  Randy looks nervously at the ceiling. “Why was it full of rocks? Was there a cave-in?”

  “No,” Tom says, “the Japanese soldiers did it. They threw rocks down the shaft until it was full. It took a dozen of our laborers two weeks to pull all the rocks out by hand.”

  “So, what did the wires lead to?”

  “Lightbulbs,” Tom says, “they were just electrical wires—no communications.”

  “Then what was it they were trying to hide down here?” Randy asks. He has almost reached the bottom of the staircase, and he can see that there is a room-sized cavity.

  “See for yourself,” Tom says, and flicks a light switch.

  The cavity is about the size of a one-car garage, with a nice level floor. There is a wooden desk, chair, and filing cabinet, fuzzy with fifty years’ growth of grey-green fungus. And there is a metal footlocker, painted olive-drab, stenciled with Nipponese characters.

  “I forced the lock on this thing,” Tom says. He steps over to the footlocker and flips the lid open. It is filled with books.

  “You were expecting maybe gold bars?” Tom says, laughing at the expression on Randy’s face.

  Randy sits down on the floor and grabs his ankles. He’s staring open-mouthed at the books in the chest.

  “You okay?” Tom asks.

  “Heavy, heavy deja vu,” Randy says.

  “From this?”

  “Yeah,” Randy says, “I’ve seen this before.”

  “Where?”

  “In my grandmother’s attic.”

  Randy finds his way up out of the network of caverns and into the parking lot. The warm air feels good on his skin, but by the time he has reached the Epiphyte Corp. trailer to turn in his hard hat and boots, he has begun to sweat again. He bids good-bye to the three women who work there, and once again is struck by their attentiveness, their solicitousness. Then he remembers that he is not just some interloper. He is a shareholder, and an important officer, in the corporation that employs them—he is paying them or oppressing them, take your pick.

  He trudges across the parking lot, moving very slowly, trying not to get that metabolic furnace het up. A second taxi has pulled alongside the one that is waiting for Randy, and the drivers are leaning out of their windows shooting the breeze.

  As Randy approaches his taxi, he happens to glance back towards the entrance of the cavern. Framed in its dark maw, and dwarfed by the mountainous shapes of the Goto dump trucks, is a solitary man, silver-haired, stooped, but trim and almost athletic-looking in a warmup suit and sneakers. He is standing with his back to Randy, facing the cavern, holding a long spray of flowers. He seems rooted in the mud, perfectly motionless.

  The front door of the Goto Engineering trailer flies open. A young Nipponese man in a white shirt, striped tie, and orange hard hat descends the stairs and moves briskly towards the old man with the flowers. When he is still some distance away, he stops, puts his feet together, and executes a bow. Randy hasn’t spent enough time around Nipponese to understand the minutiae, but this looks to him like an extraordinarily major bow. He approaches the old man with a bright smile and holds one beckoning hand out towards the Goto trailer. The old man seems disoriented—maybe the cavern doesn’t look like it used to—but after a few moments he returns a perfunctory bow and allows the young engineer to lead him out of the stream of traffic.

  Randy gets in his taxi and says, “Foote Mansion,” to the driver.

  He has been harboring an illusion that he will read Sean Daniel McGee’s war memoir slowly and thoroughly, from beginning to end, but this has now gone the way of all illusions. He hauls the photocopied stack out of his bag during the drive to the hotel and begins ruthless triage. Most of it has nothing to do with Kinakuta at all—it’s about McGee’s experiences fighting in New Guinea and the Philippines. McGee is no Churchill, but he does have a distant blarney-tinged narrative talent, which makes even banal anecdotes readable. His skills as raconteur must have made him a big hit around the bar at the NCOs’ Club; a hundred tipsy sergeants must have urged him to write some of this shit down if he ever made it back to South Boston alive.

  He did make it back, but unlike most of the other GIs who were in the Philippines on V-J day, he didn’t go straight back home. He took a little detour to the Sultanate of Kinakuta, which was still home to almost four thousand Nipponese troops. This explains an oddity about his book. In most war memoirs, V-E Day or V-J Day happens on the last page, or at least in the last chapter, and then our narrator goes home and buys a Buick. But V-J day happens about two-thirds of the way through Sean Daniel McGee’s book. When Randy sets aside the pre-August 1945 material, an ominously thick stack of pages remains. Clearly, Sergeant McGee has something to get off his chest.

  The Nipponese garrison on Kinakuta had long since been bypassed by the war, and like the other bypassed garrisons, had turned what energies they had left to vegetable farming, and waiting for the extremely sporadic arrivals of submarines, which, towards the close of the war, the Nipponese used to haul the most extremely vital cargo and to ferry certain desperately needed specialists, like airplane mechanics, from one place to another. When they got Hirohito’s broadcast from Tokyo, ordering them to lay down their arms, they did so dutifully but (one has to suspect) gladly.

  The only hard part was finding someone to surrender to. The Allies had concentrated on planning the invasion of the Nipponese home islands, and it took them a while to get troops out to the bypassed garrisons like Kinakuta. McGee’s account of the confusion in Manila is mordant—at this point in the book McGee starts to lose his patience, and his charm. He starts to rail. Twenty pages later, he’s sloshing ashore at Kinakuta City. He stands at attention while his company captain accepts the surrender of the Nipponese garrison. He posts a guard around
the entrance to the cavern, where a few diehard Nips have refused to surrender. He organizes the systematic disarming of the Nipponese soldiers, who are terribly emaciated, and sees to it that their rifles and ammunition are dumped into the ocean even as food and medical supplies are brought ashore. He helps a small contingent of engineers string barbed wire around the airfield, turning it into an internment camp.

  Randy flips through all of this during the drive to the hotel. Then, words like “impaled” and “screams” and “hideous” catch his eye, so he flips back a few pages and begins to read more carefully.

  The upshot is that the Nipponese had, since 1940, marched thousands of tribesmen out of the cool, clean interior of the island to its hot, pestilential edge, and put them to work. These slaves had enlarged the big cavern where the Nipponese built their air raid shelter and command post; improved the road to the top of Eliza Peak, where the radar and direction-finding stations were perched; built another runway at the airfield; filled in more of the harbor; and died by thousands of malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery, starvation, and overwork. These same tribesmen, or their bereaved brothers, had then watched, from their redoubts high in the mountains, as Sean Daniel McGee and his comrades came and stripped the Nipponese of their armaments and concentrated them all in the airfield, guarded by a few dozen exhausted GIs who were frequently drunk or asleep. Those tribesmen worked around the clock, up there in the jungle, making spears, until the next full moon illuminated the sleeping Nipponese like a searchlight. Then they poured out of the forest in what Sean Daniel McGee describes as “a horde,” “a plague of wasps,” “a howling army,” “a black legion unleashed from the gates of Hell,” “a screaming mass,” and in other ways he could never get away with now. They flattened and disarmed the GI’s, but did not hurt them. They flung tree limbs over the barbed wire until the fence had become a highway, and then swarmed into the airfield with their spears at the ready. McGee’s account goes on for about twenty pages, and, as much as anything else, is the story of the night that one affable sergeant from South Boston became permanently unhinged.

  “Sir?”

  Randy is startled to realize that the taxi’s door is open. He looks around and finds that he’s under the awning of the Hotel Foote Mansion. The door is being held open for him by a wiry young bellhop with a different look than most of the Kinakutans Randy has encountered so far. This kid perfectly matches Sean Daniel McGee’s description of a tribesman from the interior.

  “Thank you,” Randy says, and makes a point of tipping the fellow generously.

  His room is all done up in furniture designed in Scandinavia but assembled locally from various endangered hardwoods. The view is towards the interior mountains, but if he goes onto his tiny balcony he can see a bit of water, a containership being unloaded, and most of the memorial garden built by the Nipponese on the site of the massacre.

  Several messages and faxes await him: mostly the other members of Epiphyte Corp., notifying him that they have arrived, and letting him know in which room they can be found. Randy unpacks his bags, takes a shower, and sends his shirts down to the laundry for tomorrow. Then he makes himself comfortable at his little table, boots his laptop, and pulls up the Epiphyte (2) Corporation Business Plan.

  LIZARD

  * * *

  BOBBY SHAFTOE AND his buddies are just out for a nice little morning drive through the countryside.

  In Italy.

  Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?

  Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.

  In the good old days, back on Guadalcanal, his commanding officer would say something like “Shaftoe, eradicate that pillbox!” and from there on out, Bobby Shaftoe was a free agent. He could walk, run, swim, or crawl. He could sneak up and lob in a satchel charge, or he could stand off at a distance and hose the objective down with a flame thrower. Didn’t matter as long as he accomplished the goal.

  The goal of this little mission is completely beyond Shaftoe’s comprehension. They awaken him; Lieutenant Enoch Root; three of the other Marines, including the radio man; and several of the SAS blokes in the middle of the night, and hustle them down to one of the few docks in Malta that hasn’t been blasted away by the Luftwaffe. A submarine waits. They climb aboard and play cards for about twenty-four hours. Most of the time they are on the surface, where submarines can go a hell of a lot faster, but from time to time they dive, evidently for the best of reasons.

  When next they are allowed up on the flat top of the submarine, it is the middle of the night again. They are in a little cove in a parched, rugged coastline; Shaftoe can see that much by the moonlight. Two trucks are waiting for them. They open hatches in the sub’s deck and begin to take stuff out: into one of the trucks, the U.S. Marines load a bunch of cloth sacks bulging with what appears to be all kinds of trash. Meanwhile, the British Special Air Service are at work with wrenches, rags, grease, and much profanity in the back of the other truck, assembling something from crates that they have brought up from another part of the submarine. This is covered up by a tarp before Shaftoe can get a good look, but he recognizes it as something you’d rather have pointed away from you.

  There are a couple of dark men with mustachioes hanging around the dock smoking and arguing with the skipper of the submarine. After all of the stuff is unloaded, the skipper appears to pay them with more crates from the submarine. The men pry a couple of them open for inspection, and appear to be satisfied.

  At this point Shaftoe still doesn’t even know what continent they are on. When he first saw the landscape he figured Northern Africa. When he saw the men, he figured Turkey or something.

  It is not until the sun comes up on their little convoy, and (lying in the back of the truck on top of the sacks of trash, peeking out from under the tarp) he is able to see road signs and Christian churches, that he realizes it has to be Italy or Spain. Finally he sees a sign pointing the way to ROMA and figures it’s Italy. The sign points away from the midmorning sun, so they must be somewhere south or southeast of Rome. They are also south of some burg called Napoli.

  But he doesn’t spend a lot of time looking. It is not encouraged. The truck is being driven by some fellow who speaks the language, and who stops from time to time to converse with the natives. Some of the time this sounds like friendly banter. Sometimes it sounds like arguments over highway etiquette. Sometimes it is quieter, more guarded. Shaftoe figures out, slowly, that during these exchanges the truck driver is bribing someone to let them go through.

  He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle of the greatest war in history—in a country run by belligerent Fascists for God’s sake—two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five-dollar tarps. Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this? He feels like leaping to his feet, casting the tarp aside, and giving these Eyties a good dressing-down. The whole place needs a good scrubbing with toothbrushes anyway. It’s like these people aren’t even trying. Now, the Nips, think of them what you will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.

  He resists the temptation to upbraid the Italians. He thinks it goes against the orders he had thoroughly memorized before the shock of figuring out that he was driving around in an Axis country jangled everything loose from his brain. And if they hadn’t come from the lips of Colonel Chattan himself—the chap or bloke who’s the commanding officer of Detachment 2702—he wouldn’t have believed them anyway.

  They are going to be putting in some bivouac time. They are going to play a lot of cards for a while. During this time, the radio man is going to be very busy. This phase of the operation might last as long as a week. At some point, it is likely that strenuous, concerted efforts to kill them will be made by a whole lot of Germans and, if they happen to be feeling impetuous that day, Italians. When this happens, they are to send out a radi
o message, torch the joint, drive to a certain field that passes for an airstrip, and be picked up by those jaunty SAS flyboys.

  Shaftoe didn’t believe a word of it at first. He pegged it as some kind of British humor thing, some kind of practical joke/hazing ritual. In general he doesn’t know what to make of the Brits because they appear (in his personal observation) to be the only other people on the face of the earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of humor. He has heard rumors that some Eastern Europeans can do it, but he hasn’t met any of them, and they don’t have much to yuk it up about at the moment. In any case, he can never quite make out when these Brits are joking.

  Any thought that this was just a joke evaporated when he saw the quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the military is infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And most of the weapons they do pass out are for shit. It is for this reason that Marines have long found it necessary to buy their own tommy guns from home: the Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won’t give them the stuff they need!

  But this Detachment 2702 thing is a whole different outfit. Even the grunts are carrying trench brooms! And if that didn’t get their attention, the cyanide capsules sure did. And the lecture from Chattan on the correct way to blow your own head off (“you would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure”).

  Now, Shaftoe realizes that there is an unspoken codicil to Chattan’s orders: oh, yeah, and if any of the Italians, who actually live in Italy, and who run the place, and who are Fascists and who are at war with us—if any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan, whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn’t work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you’ll probably do a neater job of it than the Fascists will. Don’t forget suntan lotion!