Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  Where the jungle’s dense it is impassable, but there are a fair number of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the undergrowth is only knee-high, and light shines through. By moving from one such place to another they make slow progress in the general direction indicated by Randy’s GPS. Jackie Woo and John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear to be moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live, or even stop moving, there. Just as the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness. The canopy’s tentpoles are huge trees—“Octomelis sumatrana,” says Enoch Root—with narrow buttress roots splayed out explosively in every direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into the earth. Some of them are almost completely obscured by colossal philodendrons winding up their trunks.

  They crest a broad, gentle ridgeline; Randy had forgotten that they were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and moisture condenses on their skins. When the whistlers and the crickets pause, it becomes possible to hear the murmur of a stream down below them. The next hour is devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They cover a total of a hundred meters; at this rate, Randy thinks, it should take them two days, hiking around the clock, to reach Golgotha. But he keeps this observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become aware of, and to be taken aback by, the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be above them—forty or fifty meters above them in many cases. He feels as though he’s at the bottom of the food chain.

  They enter a sunnier zone that consequently is snarled by much heavier undergrowth, and are forced to break out the machetes and hack their way through to the river. Enoch Root explains that this is a place where a small lahar, which had been funneled between the steep walls of the river’s gorge farther upstream, spread out and mowed down a few hectares of ancient trees, clearing the path for smaller, opportunistic vegetation. This is fascinating for about ten seconds and then it’s back to the machete work. Eventually they reach the edge of the river, all of them sticky and greenish and itching from the sap and juice and pulp of the vegetation they have assaulted in order to get here. The river’s bed is shallow and rocky here, with no discernible bank. They sit down and drink water for a while. “What is the point of all this?” asks Enoch Root suddenly. “I don’t mean to sound discouraged by these physical barriers, because I’m not. But I’m wondering whether you have worked out the goal of it in your own mind.”

  “This is fact-finding. Nothing more,” Randy says.

  “But there’s no point in just aimlessly finding facts unless you’re a pure scientist, or a historian. You are representing a business concern here. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so if I were a shareholder in your company I could demand an explanation of why you are sitting here on the edge of this river right now instead of actually doing whatever it is that your company does.”

  “Assuming you were an intelligent shareholder, yes, that’s what you’d be doing.”

  “And what would your explanation be, Randy?”

  “Well—”

  “I know where we are going, Randy.” And Enoch quotes a string of digits.

  “How did you know that?” Randy asks kind of hotly.

  “I’ve known it for fifty years,” Enoch says. “Goto Dengo told me.”

  All Randy can do for a while is fume. Doug Shaftoe’s laughing. Amy just looks distracted. Enoch broods for a few moments, and finally says: “Originally the plan was to buy this land with a smaller cache of gold that was dug up and loaded aboard a certain submarine. We would then wait for the right moment and then dig up the rest. But the submarine sank, and the gold sank with it. I sat on the knowledge for many years. But then people started buying up land around here—people who were obviously hoping to find the Primary. If I’d had the money, I would have bought this land myself. But I didn’t. So I saw to it that the Church bought it.”

  Doug Shaftoe says, “You haven’t answered Enoch’s question yet, Randy: what good are you doing your shareholders here?”

  A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass.

  “We took the gold that you recovered from the submarine and turned it into electronic cash, right?” Randy says.

  “So you claimed. I haven’t actually spent any of that electronic cash yet,” says Doug.

  “We want to do the same thing for the Church—or Wing—or whoever ends up in possession of the gold. We want to deposit it in the Crypt, and make it usable as electronic currency.”

  Amy asks, “Do you understand that, in order to move the gold out of here, it’ll be necessary to travel across land controlled by Wing?”

  “Who says we have to move it?”

  Silence for a minute, or what passes for silence in a jungle.

  Doug Shaftoe says, “You’re right. If the stories are even half true, this facility is far more secure than any bank vault.”

  “The stories are all true—and then some,” Randy says. “The man who designed and built Golgotha is Goto Dengo himself.”

  “Shit!”

  “He drew plans of it for us. And the larger issue of local and national security is not a problem here,” Randy adds. “Of course the government has sometimes been unstable. But any invader who wants to physically seize possession of the gold will have to fight his way across this jungle with tens of millions of heavily armed Filipinos barring his path.”

  “Everyone knows what the Huks did against the Nips,” Doug says, nodding vigorously. “Or the VC against us, for that matter. No one would be stupid enough to try it.”

  “Especially if we put you in charge, Doug.”

  Amy’s been woolgathering through most of the conversation, but at this she turns and grins at her father.

  “I accept,” Doug says.

  Randy’s slowly becoming aware that most of the birds and bugs who live here move so fast that you can’t even turn your head fast enough to center them in your vision. They exist only as slicing movements in your peripheral vision. The only exception would seem to be a species of gnat that has evolved into the specific niche of plunging into the left eyeballs of human beings at something just under the speed of sound. Randy has taken about four hits in the left eye, none in the right. He takes another one now, and as he’s recovering from it, the earth jumps underneath them. It is a little like an earthquake in its psychological effect: a feeling of disbelief, and then betrayal, that the solid ground is having the temerity to move around. But it’s all over by the time the sensation has moved up their spines to their brains. The river’s still running, and the dragonfly is still hunting.

  “That felt exactly like high explosive going off,” says Doug Shaftoe, “but I didn’t hear anything. Did anyone hear anything?”

  No one heard anything.

  “What that means,” Doug continues, “is that someone is setting off explosives deep underground.”

  They start working their way up the riverbed. Randy’s GPS indicates that Golgotha is less than two thousand meters upstream. The river begins to develop proper banks that get steadily higher and steeper. John Wayne clambers up onto the left bank and Jackie Woo onto the right, so that the high ground on either side will be guarded, or at least reconnoitered. They pass back into the shade of the canopy. The ground
here is some kind of sedimentary rock with granite boulders embedded in it from place to place, like mixed nuts in half-melted chocolate. It must be nothing more than a scab of congealed ash and sediment on top of an underlying monolith of hard rock. Those who are down in the streambed move very slowly now. Part of the time they are down in the river, struggling upstream against a powerful current, and part of the time they are picking their way from boulder to boulder, or sidestepping along crumbling ledges of harder rock that protrude from the banks here and there. Every few minutes, Doug looks up and makes visual contact with Jackie Woo and John Wayne—who must be contending with challenges of their own, because sometimes they fall behind the main group. The trees only seem to get higher as they work their way up into the mountains, and now their height is accentuated by the fact that they are rooted in the top of a bank that rises above the stream two, five, ten, then twenty and thirty meters. The bank actually overhangs them now: the river’s gorge is a tube mostly buried in the earth, open to the sky only through a narrow slot in the top. But it’s close to midday and the sun is shining nearly straight down through it, illuminating all of the stuff that makes its way down from the heights. The corpse of a murdered insect drifts down from the upper canopy like winter’s first snowflake. Water seeping from the rims of the overhanging bank forms a drip curtain, each drop glittering like a diamond and making it nearly impossible to see the dark cavity behind. Yellow butterflies weave among those falling drops but never get hit.

  They come around a gentle bend in the river and are confronted by a waterfall some twenty meters high. At the base of the falls there’s a still and relatively shallow pool, filling the bottom of a broad melon-shaped cavity formed by the concave, overhanging banks. The vertical sun beams straight down on the cloud of white foam at the base of the falls, which radiates the light back at blinding power, forming a sort of natural light fixture that illuminates the whole inside of the cavity. The stone walls, sweating and dripping and running with groundwater, glisten in its light. The undersides of the ferns and big-leaved plants—epiphytes—sprouting from invisible footholds in the walls flicker and dapple in the weirdly bluish foam-glow.

  Most of the cavity’s walls are hidden behind vegetation: fragile, cascading veils of moss growing from the rock, and vines depending from the branches of the trees hundreds of feet above them and dangling halfway down into the gorge, where they have become entangled with protruding tree roots and formed a natural trellis for a finer network of creepers that is itself the warp and woof of a matted carpet of moss saturated with flowing ground water. The gorge is alive with butterflies burning with colors of radioactive purity, and down closer to the rustling water are damselflies, mostly black with aqua bodies that flash in the sun—their wings revealing glimpses of salmon and coral-red on the underside as they orbit around each other. But mostly the air is filled with this continual slow progress of things that didn’t survive, making their way down through the column of air and into the water, which flushes them away: dead leaves and the exoskeletons of insects, sucked dry and eviscerated in some silent combat hundreds of feet above their heads.

  Randy’s keeping an eye on the display of his GPS, which has been having a hard time locking onto any satellites down in this gorge. But finally some numbers come up. He has it calculate the distance from here to Golgotha, and the answer comes up immediately: a long row of zeroes with a few insignificant digits trailing off the end.

  Randy says, “This is it.” But most of what he says is obscured by a sharp explosion from high above them on the bank. A few seconds later, a man begins to scream.

  “No one move,” says Doug Shaftoe, “we are in a minefield.”

  CRIBS

  * * *

  ON A GRASSY KNOLL, A MAN CROUCHES BEHIND A tombstone, peering through a telescope on a tripod, and tracking the steady pace of a robed and hooded figure across the grass.

  FUNERAL. That’s the crib that broke these guys.

  The Nipponese man in the American uniform, whom Enoch Root is leaving behind, must be that Goto Dengo fella. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has seen that name punched on so many ETC cards that he no longer even has to read the printed letters at the top of the card: he can identify a “Goto Dengo” from arm’s length simply by glancing at the pattern of punched-out rectangles. The same is true of some two dozen other Nipponese mining engineers and surveyors who were brought to Luzon in ’43 and ’44, in response to Azure/Pufferfish messages emanating from Tokyo. But, as far as Waterhouse can tell, all of the others are dead. Either that, or they retreated north with Yamashita. Only one of them is alive, well, and living in what is left of Manila, and that’s Goto Dengo. Waterhouse was going to rat him out to Army Intelligence, but that doesn’t seem like such a good idea now that the unkillable Nip engineer has become a personal protegé of The General.

  Root is heading in the direction of those two mysterious white men who attended Bobby Shaftoe’s funeral. Waterhouse peers at them through the scope, but mediocre optics, combined with the heat waves rising from the grass, complicate this. One of them seems oddly familiar. Odd because Waterhouse doesn’t know that many bearded men with long swept-back blond hairdoes and black eyepatches.

  An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous. Waterhouse stifles a giggle and tries not to get overly excited. The dull, tedious, bureaucratic part of his mind is feeling testy, and wants a few shreds of supporting evidence.

  This is quickly supplied. Waterhouse knows, and has proved to Earl Comstock, that strange information is in the air, dotting and dashing furtively from a small number of feeble transmitters scattered around Luzon and the surrounding waters, encrypted using the Arethusa system. Lawrence and Alan have known for two years now that Rudy invented it, and from the decrypts chattering out of digital computers in Bletchley Park and Manila, they now know other things. They know that Rudy flew the coop late in 1943 and probably went to Sweden. They know that one Günter Bischoff, captain of the U-boat that plucked Shaftoe and Root out of the water, also ended up in Sweden, and that Dönitz persuaded him to take over the gold-running work that had been performed by U-553 until it ran aground off Qwlghm. The Naval Intelligence boys are fascinated by Bischoff, and so he had already been the subject of much research. Waterhouse has seen photos of him from his student days. The shorter of the two men he is peering at now could easily be the same fellow, now middle-aged. And the taller one, the one with the eyepatch, could most definitely be Rudy von Hacklheber himself.

  It is, then, a conspiracy.

  They have secure communications. If Rudy is the architect of Arethusa, then it will be essentially impossible to break, except for rare lapses such as this FUNERAL business.

  They have a submarine. It cannot be found or sunk, because it is one of Hitler’s new rocket-fuel-powered babies, and because Günter Bischoff, the greatest U-boat commander in history, is its skipper.

  They have, at some level, the backing of the odd brotherhood that Root belongs to, the ignoti et quasi occulti guys.

  And now they are trying to enlist Goto Dengo. The man who, it is safe to assume, buried the gold.

  Three days ago, the intercept boys in Waterhouse’s section picked up a brief flurry of Arethusa messages, exchanged between a hidden transmitter somewhere in Manila and a mobile one in the South China Sea. Catalinas were vectored toward the latter, and picked up diminishing radar echoes at first, but found nothing when they arrived on the scene. A team of journeyman codebreakers jumped on those messages and started trying to tear them apart by brute force. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, the old hand, went for a stroll along the Manila Bay seawall. A breeze suddenly rose from the bay. He stopped to let it cool his face. A coconut fell from the top of a tree and smash
ed into the ground ten feet away. Waterhouse turned on his heel and went back to the office.

  Just before the flurry of Arethusa messages began, Waterhouse had been sitting in his office listening to Armed Forces Radio. They had broadcast an announcement that, three days from now, at such-and-such a time, the funeral for the hero, Bobby Shaftoe, was going to be held at the big new cemetery down in Makati.

  Sitting down in his office with the fresh Arethusa intercepts, he went to work, using FUNERAL as a crib: if this group of seven letters decrypts to FUNERAL, then what does the rest of the message look like? Gibberish? Okay, how about this group of seven letters?

  Even with this gift thrown into his lap, it took him two and a half days of nonstop work to decrypt the message. The first one, transmitted from Manila, went: OUR FRIEND’S FUNERAL SATURDAY TEN THIRTY AM US MILITARY CEMETERY MAKATI.

  The response from the submarine: WILL BE THERE SUGGEST YOU INFORM GD.

  He aims the spyglass at Goto Dengo again. The Nipponese engineer is standing with his head bowed and his eyes tightly shut. Perhaps his shoulders are heaving, perhaps it’s just the heat waves that make it seem so.

  But then Goto Dengo straightens up and takes a step in the direction of the conspirators. He stops. Then he takes another step. Then another. His posture is straightening up miraculously. He seems to feel better with every stride. He walks faster and faster, until he is almost running.