Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “What have you told them recently?”

  “Nothing. Except for the serial number on the morphium bottle.”

  “And how long after you told them that did they send you the message to stop extracting information from us?”

  “About forty-five minutes,” Beck says. “So, yes, I would very much like to ask you where that bottle came from. But it is against orders.”

  “I might consider answering your question about Enigma,” Shaftoe says, “if you tell me whether this pipe bomb is carrying any gold.”

  Bischoff’s brow furrows; he’s having translation problems. “You mean money? Geld?”

  “No. Gold. The expensive yellow metal.”

  “A little, maybe,” Bischoff says.

  “Not petty cash,” Shaftoe says. “Tons and tons.”

  “No. U-boats don’t carry tons of gold,” Bischoff says flatly.

  “I’m sorry you said that, Bischoff. Because I thought you and I were starting a good relationship. Then you went and lied to me—you fuck!”

  To Shaftoe’s surprise and mounting irritation, Bischoff thinks that it’s absolutely hilarious to be called a fuck. “Why the hell should I lie to you? For god’s sake, Shaftoe! Since you bastards broke Enigma and put radar on everything that moves, virtually every U-boat that’s put to sea has been sunk! Why would the Kriegsmarine load tons of gold onto a ship that they know is doomed!?”

  “Why don’t you ask the guys who loaded it on board U-553?”

  “Ha! This only proves you are full of shit!” Bischoff says. “U-553 was sunk a year ago, during a convoy attack.”

  “Not so. I was on board it just a couple of months ago,” Shaftoe says, “off Qwghlm. It was full of gold.”

  “Bullshit,” Bischoff says. “What was painted on its conning tower?”

  “A polar bear holding a beer stein.”

  Long silence.

  “You want to know more? I went into the captain’s cabin,” Shaftoe said, “and there was a photo of him with some other guys, and now that I think of it, one of them looked like you.”

  “What were we doing?”

  “You were all in swimming trunks. You all had whores on your laps!” Shaftoe shouts. “Unless those were your wives—in which case I’m sorry your wife is a whore!”

  “Oh, ho ho ho ho ho!” Bischoff says. He rolls onto his back and stares up into the plumbing for a while, considering this, and then continues. “Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho!”

  “What, did I just say something secret? Fuck you and your mother if I did,” Shaftoe says.

  “Beck!” Bischoff screams. “Achtung!”

  “What’re you doing?” Shaftoe asks.

  “Getting you your morphine.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  Half an hour later, the skipper’s there. Pretty punctual by officer standards. He and Bischoff talk for a while in German. Shaftoe hears the word morphium several times. Finally, the skipper summons the medic, who pokes the needle into Shaftoe’s arm and injects about half of it.

  “You have something to say?” the skipper asks Shaftoe. Seems like a nice enough guy. They all seem like pretty nice guys, now.

  First, Shaftoe addresses Bischoff. “Sir! I’m sorry I used harsh language on you, sir!”

  “It’s okay,” Bischoff replied, “she was a whore, like you said.”

  The skipper clears his throat impatiently.

  “Yeah. I was just wondering,” Shaftoe says turning to the skipper, “you have any gold on this U-boat?”

  “The yellow metal?”

  “Yeah. Bars of it.”

  The captain is still nonplussed. Shaftoe is beginning to feel a certain mischievous satisfaction. Playing with officers’ minds isn’t as good as having a brain saturated with highly refined opiates, but it will do in a pinch. “I thought all these U-boats carried it,” he says.

  Beck dismisses the medic. Then he and Bischoff talk about Shaftoe for a while in German. In the middle of this conversation, Beck drops some kind of a bomb on Bischoff. Bischoff is stunned, and refuses to believe it for a while, and Beck keeps telling him it’s true. Then Bischoff goes back into that strange ho-ho-ho thing.

  “He can’t ask you questions,” Bischoff says. “Orders from Berlin. Ho, ho! But I can.”

  “Shoot,” Shaftoe says.

  “Tell us more about gold.”

  “Give me more morphine.”

  Beck summons the medic again, and the medic gives him the rest of the syringe. Shaftoe’s never felt better. What a fucking deal! He’s getting morphine out of the Germans in exchange for telling them German military secrets.

  Bischoff starts interrogating Shaftoe in depth, while Beck watches. Shaftoe tells the whole story of U-553 about three times over. Bischoff is fascinated, Beck looks sad and scared.

  When Shaftoe mentions that the gold bars had Chinese characters stamped on them, both Beck and Bischoff are floored. Their faces come aglow, as if lit up by the scanning beam of a Leigh light on a moonless night. Beck begins to sniffle, as if he’s caught a cold, and Shaftoe’s startled to realize that he’s actually crying. He is crying tears of shame. But Bischoff is still fascinated and focused.

  Then a mate bursts in and hands Beck a message. The mate is clearly shocked and scared out of his wits. He keeps looking, not at Beck, but at Bischoff.

  Beck gets a grip on himself and reads the message. Bischoff lunges out of his bunk, hooks his chin over Beck’s shoulder, and reads it at the same time. They look like a two-headed circus geek who hasn’t bathed since the Hoover Administration. Neither speaks for at least a minute. Bischoff is silent because his mental wheels are spinning like the gyroscope of a torpedo. Beck is silent because he’s on the verge of blacking out. Outside the cabin, Shaftoe can hear the news, whatever it is, traveling up and down the length of the U-boat with the speed of sound. Some of the men are shouting in rage, some sobbing, some laughing hysterically. Shaftoe figures a big battle must have been won, or lost. Maybe Hitler’s been assassinated. Maybe Berlin’s been sacked.

  Beck is now visibly terrified.

  The medic enters. He has adopted an erect military posture—the first time Shaftoe’s seen such formality on the U-boat. He addresses Beck briefly in German. Beck nods continuously while the medic is talking. Then he helps the doctor get Bischoff out of his straitjacket.

  Bischoff’s a bit stiff, a bit unsteady, but he limbers up fast. He’s shorter than average, with a strong frame and a trim waist, and as he pounces from bunk to deck, he reminds Shaftoe of a jaguar deploying itself from a tree. He shakes hands heartily with the medic, and with the miserable Beck. Then he opens the hatch that leads towards the control room. Half the crew is jammed into the gangway, watching that door, and when they see Bischoff, ecstasy floods over their faces and they erupt into wild cheering. Bischoff accepts handshakes from all of them, making his way towards his duty station like a politician through an adoring crowd. Beck slinks out the other hatch and loses himself among the hammering diesels.

  Shaftoe has no idea what the fuck’s going on until Root shows up a quarter of an hour later. Root picks the message up off the deck and reads it. His perpetually bemused affect, normally so annoying, serves him well at times like this. “This is a broadcast to all ships at sea from German supreme naval command, Tirpitzufer, Berlin. It says that U-691—which is this boat we’re on, Bobby—has been boarded and captured by Allied commandos, and has already attacked and sunk a milchcow in the Atlantic. Now it appears to be on its way towards continental Europe where it will presumably try to infiltrate German naval bases and sink more ships. All German naval and air forces are ordered to be on the lookout for U-691 and to destroy it on sight.”

  “Shit,” Shaftoe says.

  “We are on the wrong boat at the wrong time,” Root says.

  “What’s the deal with that Bischoff character?”

  “He was relieved of command earlier. Now he’s back.”

  “That maniac’s running the boat?”

 
; “He is the captain,” Root says.

  “Well, where’s he going to take us?”

  “I’m not sure if even he knows that.”

  * * *

  Bischoff goes to his cabin and pours himself a slug of that Armagnac. Then he goes to the chart room, which he’s always preferred to his cabin. The chart room is the only civilized place on the whole boat. It’s got a beautiful sextant in a polished wooden box, for example. Speaking tubes converge here from all over the boat, and even though no one is speaking into them directly, he can hear snatches of conversation from them, the distant clamor of the diesels, the zap of a deck of cards being shuffled, the hiss of fresh eggs hitting the griddle. Fresh eggs! Thank god they managed to rendezvous with the milchcow before she was sunk.

  He unrolls a small-scale chart that encompasses the whole Northeast Atlantic, divided into numbered and lettered grid-squares for convoy-hunting. He should be looking at the southern part of the chart, which is where they are now. But eyes are drawn, again and again, northwards—to the Qwghlm Archipelago.

  Put it at the center of a clock. Then Great Britain is at five and six o’clock, and Ireland is at seven o’clock. Norway is due east, at three o’clock. Denmark is just south of Norway, at four o’clock, and at the base of Denmark, where it plugs into Germany, is Wilhelmshaven. France, home to so many U-boats, is far, far to the south—completely out of the picture.

  A U-boat that was headed from the open sea towards a safe port on Fortress Europe would just go to the French ports on the Bay of Biscay—Lorient, most likely. Getting to Germany’s North Sea and Baltic ports would be a far longer and more complicated and dangerous trip. The U-boat would have to get around Great Britain somehow. To the south, it would have to make a dash up the Channel, which (setting aside that it’s a bottleneck, crackling with British radar) has been turned into a maze of sunken block-ships and minefields by those Royal Navy spoilsports. There is a lot more room up north.

  Assuming Shaftoe’s story is true—and there must be some truth in it, or else where would he have gotten the morphine bottle—then it should have been a reasonably simple matter for U-553 to get around Great Britain via the northern route. But U-boats almost always had mechanical problems to some degree, especially after they had been at sea for a while. This might cause a skipper to hug the coast rather than taking to the open seas, where there would be no hope of survival if the engines shut down entirely. During the last couple of years, stricken U-boats had been abandoned on the coasts of Ireland and Iceland.

  But supposing that an ailing, coast-hugging U-boat happened to pass near the Royal Navy base at Qwghlm at just the time some other U-boat was staging a raid there, as Shaftoe claimed. Then the dragnet of destroyers and airplanes that was sent out to capture the raiders could quite easily capture U-553, especially if her ability to maneuver were impaired to begin with.

  There are two implausibilities in Shaftoe’s story. One, that a U-boat would be carrying a trove of solid gold. Two, that a U-boat would be headed for German ports instead of one of the French ports.

  But these two together are more plausible than either one of them by itself. A U-boat carrying that much gold might have very good reasons for going straight to the Fatherland. Some highly placed person wanted to keep this gold secret. Not just secret from the enemy, but secret from other Germans as well.

  Why are the Japanese giving gold to Germans? The Germans must be giving them something they need in return: strategic materials, plans for new weapons, advisors, something like that.

  He writes out a message:

  Dönitz!

  It is Bischoff. I am back in command. Thank you for the pleasant vacation. Now I am refreshed.

  How uncivilized for you to order that we should be sunk. There must be a misunderstanding. Can we not discuss it face to face?

  A drunken polar bear told me some fascinating things. Perhaps I will broadcast this information in an hour or so. Since I do not trust the Enigma anyway, I will not bother to encrypt it.

  Yours respectfully.

  Bischoff

  * * *

  A flock of white Vs migrates north from Gibraltar across a sunlit sea. At the apex of each V is a nitlike mote. The motes are ships, hauling megatons of war crap, and thousands of soldiers from North Africa (where their services are no longer needed) to Great Britain. That’s how it looks to the pilots of the airplanes over the Bay of Biscay. All of those pilots and all of those planes are English or American—the Allies own Biscay now and have turned it into a crucible for U-boat crews.

  Most of the Vs track straight parallel courses northwards, but a few of them curl and twist incessantly: these are destroyers, literally running circles around the plodding transports, pinging. Those tin cans will protect the convoys; the pilots of the airplanes who are trying to find U-691 can therefore search elsewhere.

  The powerful sun casts a deep shadow in front of each ship; the eyes of the lookouts, irised down to pinpoints and squinting against the maritime glare, can no more penetrate that shade than they could see through plywood. If they could, they might notice that one of the big transports in the front rank has got some kind of unusual attachment: a pipe sticking vertically out of the water just in front and to one side of its bow. Actually it is a cluster of pipes, one sucking in air, another spewing diesel exhaust, another carrying a stream of information in the form of prismatically reflected light. Follow that data stream a few yards down into the water and you will enter the optic nerve of one Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff. This in turn leads to his brain, which is highly active.

  In the age of sonar, Bischoff’s U-boat was a rat in a dark, cluttered, infinite cellar, hiding from a man who had neither torch nor lantern: only two rocks that would spark when banged together. Bischoff sank a lot of ships in those days.

  One day, while he was on the surface, trying to make some time across the Caribbean, a Catalina appeared out of nowhere. It came from a clear blue sky and so Bischoff had plenty of time to dive. The Catalina dropped a few depth charges and then went away; it must have been at the end of its range.

  Two days later, a front moved in, the sky became mostly cloudy, and Bischoff made the mistake of relaxing. Another Catalina found them: this one used the clouds to conceal his approach, waited until U-691 was crossing a patch of sunlit water, and then dove, centering his own shadow on the U-boat’s bridge. Fortunately, Bischoff had double sun sector air lookouts. This was a jargonic way of saying that at any given moment, two shirtless, stinking, unshaven, sunburned men were standing on the deck, casting shadows over their eyes with their outstretched hands. One of these men said something in a quizzical tone of voice, which alerted Bischoff. Then both lookouts were torn apart by a rocket. Five more of Bischoff’s men were wounded by cannon fire and rockets before Bischoff could get the boat under the surface.

  The next day, the front had covered the sky with low blue-grey clouds from horizon to horizon. U-691 was far out of sight of land. Even so, Bischoff had Holz, his chief engineer, take her up to periscope depth first. Bischoff scanned the horizon meticulously. Satisfied that they were perfectly alone, he had Holz bring her to the surface. They fired up the diesels and pointed the boat east. Their mission was finished, their boat was damaged, it was time to go home.

  Two hours later a flying boat bellied down through the cloud layer and dropped a skinny black egg on them. Bischoff was up on the bridge, enjoying some fresh air, and had the presence of mind to scream something about evasive action into the speaking tube. Metzger, the helmsman, instantly took it hard to starboard. The bomb plunged into the water exactly where the deck of U-691 would have been.

  It continued in that vein until they got far away from land. When they finally limped back to their base at Lorient, Bischoff told this story to his superiors in tones of superstitious awe, when they finally broke the news to him that the enemy had this new thing called radar.

  Bischoff studied it and read the intelligence reports: the Allies were even putti
ng the shit on airplanes now! It could see your periscope!

  His U-boat is no longer a rat in a dark cellar. Now it is a wingless horsefly dragging itself across an immaculate tablecloth in the streaming light of the afternoon sun.

  Dönitz, bless him, is trying to build new U-boats that can stay submerged all the time. But he has to beg for every ton of steel and for the services of every engineer. In the meantime there is this stopgap measure, the Schnorkel, which is just plumbing: a pipe that sticks up out of the water and enables you to run on diesel power, just beneath the surface. Even the Schnorkel will show up on radar, but less brilliantly. Every time U-691 surfaces for more than an hour, Holz is up there working on the Schnorkel, welding new bits on, grinding old bits off, wrapping it in rubber or some other stuff that he hopes will absorb the radar. The engineers who installed the Schnorkel in Lorient six months ago wouldn’t recognize it now because it has evolved, like shrews evolving into tigers. If Bischoff can just get U-691 back to a safe port, others can learn from Holz’s innovations, and the few U-boats that haven’t been sunk can derive some benefit from the experiment.

  He snaps out of it. This must be how officers die, and get their men killed: they spend more time reviewing the past than planning for the future. It is nothing short of masturbation for Bischoff to be thinking about all of this. He must concentrate.

  He doesn’t have to worry so much about being sunk by Germans. As soon as he sent Dönitz the message threatening to broadcast the information about the gold, Dönitz retracted his general order to sink U-691. But there is the possibility that some ship might have received the first order but missed the second one, so he still has to watch himself.

  Big deal. There is hardly any German Navy left to sink him anyway. He can worry about being sunk by the Allies instead. They will be intently irritated when they figure out that he has been shadowing this convoy for two whole days. Bischoff is pretty irritated himself; it is a fast convoy that protects itself by zigzagging, and if U-691 does not zigzag in perfect unison with the ship above it, it will either be crushed by her, or blunder out of her shadow and be noticed. This has put quite a strain on skipper and crew, and quite a drain on the boat’s supply of benzedrine. But they’ve covered five hundred miles! Soon, fatal Biscay will be behind them, Brittany will be off to starboard, and Bischoff will have a choice: hang a right into the English Channel, which would be suicidal; head north between Britain and Ireland, which would be suicidal; or veer to the west around Ireland, which would be suicidal.