Cryptonomicon (16 page)

“Lines of sight,” Randy says.

“Huh!” Avi blurts, as if a medicine ball has just slammed into his belly. “You figured it out.”

T
HE
M
ARINE
R
AIDERS’ BODIES ARE NO LONGER
pressurized with blood and breath. The weight of their gear flattens them into the sand. The accelerating surf has already begun to shovel silt over them; comet trails of blood fade back into the ocean, red carpets for any sharks who may be browsing the coastline. Only one of them is a giant lizard, but all have the same general shape: fat in the middle and tailing off at the ends, streamlined by the waves.

A little convoy of Nip boats is moving down the slot,
towing barges loaded with supplies packed into steel drums. Shaftoe and his platoon ought to be lobbing mortars at them right now. When the American planes show up and begin to kick the shit out of them, the Nips will throw the drums overboard and run away, and hope that some of them will wash ashore on Guadalcanal.

The war is over for Bobby Shaftoe, and hardly for the first or last time. He trudges among the platoon. Waves hit him in the knees, then spread into magic carpets of foam and vegetable matter that skim along the beach so that his footing appears to glide out from under him. He keeps twisting around for no reason and falling on his ass.

Finally he reaches the corpsman’s corpse, and divests it of anything with a red cross on it. He turns his back on the Nip convoy and looks up a long glacis toward the tideline. It might as well be Mt. Everest as seen from a low base camp. Shaftoe decides to tackle the challenge on hands and knees. Every so often, a big wave spanks him on the ass, rushes up between his legs orgasmically and washes his face. It feels good and also keeps him from pitching forward and falling asleep below the high-tide mark.

The next couple of days are a handful of dirty, faded black-and-white snapshots, shuffled and dealt over and over again: the beach under water, positions of corpses marked by standing waves. The beach empty. The beach under water again. The beach strewn with black lumps, like a slice of Grandma Shaftoe’s raisin bread. A morphine bottle half-buried in the sand. Small, dark people, mostly naked, moving along the beach at low tide and looting the corpses.

Hey, wait a sec! Shaftoe is on his feet somehow, clutching his Springfield. The jungle doesn’t want to let go of him; creepers have actually grown over his limbs in the time he has lain there. As he emerges, dragging foliage behind him like a float in a ticker-tape parade, the sun floods over him like warm syrup of ipecac. He can see the ground headed his way. He spins as he falls—momentarily glimpsing a big man with a rifle—and then his face is pressed into the cool sand. The surf roars in his skull: a nice standing ovation from a studio audience of angels, who having all died themselves, know a good death when they see one.

Little hands roll him over onto his back. One of his eyes is frozen shut by sand. Peering through the other he sees a big fellow with a rifle slung over his shoulder standing over him. The fellow has a red beard, which makes it just a bit less probable that he is a Nipponese soldier. But what is he?

He prods like a doctor and prays like a priest—in Latin, even. Silver hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow’s clothing for some kind of insignia. He’s hoping to see a
Semper Fidelis
but instead he reads:
Societas Eruditorum
and
Ignoti et quasi occulti
.

“Ignoti et… what the fuck does that mean?” he asks.

“Hidden and unknown—more or less,” says the man. He’s got a weird accent, sort of Australian, sort of German. He checks out Shaftoe’s insignia in turn. “What’s a Marine Raider? Some kind of new outfit?”

“Like a Marine, only more so,” Shaftoe says. Which might sound like bravado. Indeed it partly is. But this comment is as heavy laden with irony as Shaftoe’s clothes are with sand, because at this particular moment in history, a Marine isn’t just a tough s.o.b. He is a tough S.O.B. stuck out in the middle of nowhere (Guadalcanal) with no food or weapons (owing, as every Marine can tell you, to a sinister conspiracy between General MacArthur and the Nips) totally making everything up as he goes along, improvising weapons from found objects, addled, half the time, by disease and the drugs supplied to keep diseases at bay. And in every one of those senses, a Marine Raider is (as Shaftoe says) like a Marine, only more so.

“Are you some kind of commando or something?” Shaftoe asks, interrupting Red as he is mumbling.

“No. I live on the mountain.”

“Oh, yeah? What do you do up there, Red?”

“I watch. And talk on the radio, in code.” Then he goes back to mumbling.

“Who you talkin’ to, Red?”

“Do you mean, just now in Latin, or on the radio in code?”

“Both I reckon.”

“On the radio in code, I talk to the good guys.”

“Who are the good guys?”

“Long story. If you live, maybe I’ll introduce you to some of them,” says Red.

“How about just now in Latin?”

“Talking to God,” Red says. “Last rites, in case you
don’t
live.”

This makes him think of the others. He remembers why he made that insane decision to stand up in the first place. “Hey! Hey!” He tries to sit up, and finding that impossible, twists around. “Those bastards are looting the corpses!”

His eyes aren’t focusing and he has to rub sand out of the one.

Actually, they are focusing just fine. What looked like steel drums strewn around the beach turn out to be—steel drums strewn around the beach. The natives are pawing them out of the sucking sand, digging with their hands like dogs, rolling them up the beach and into the jungle.

Shaftoe blacks out.

When he wakes up there’s a row of crosses on the beach—sticks lashed together with vines, draped with jungle flowers. Red is pounding them in with the butt of his rifle. All the steel drums, and most of the natives, are gone. Shaftoe needs morphine. He says as much to Red.

“If you think you need it now,” Red says, “just wait.” He tosses his rifle to a native, strides up to Shaftoe, and heaves him up over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Shaftoe screams. A couple of Zeroes fly overhead, as they stride into the jungle. “My name is Enoch Root,” says Red, “but you can call me Brother.”

O
NE MORNING,
R
ANDY
W
ATERHOUSE RISES EARLY,
takes a long hot shower, plants himself before the mirror of his Manila Hotel suite, and shaves his face bloody. He was thinking of farming this work out to a specialist: the barber in the hotel’s lobby. But this is the first time Randy’s face will be visible in ten years, and Randy wants to be the first person to see it. His heart actually thumps, partly out
of primal brute fear of the knife, and partly from the sheer anticipation. It is like the scene in corny old movies where the bandages are finally taken off of the patient’s face, and a mirror proffered.

The effect is, first of all, intense deja vu, as if the last ten years of his life were but a dream, and he now has them to live over again.

Then he begins to notice subtle ways in which his face has been changing since it was last exposed to air and light. He is mildly astonished to find that these changes are not entirely bad. Randy has never thought of himself as especially good-looking, and has never especially cared. But the blood-spotted visage in the mirror is, arguably, better looking than the one that faded into the deepening shade of stubble a decade ago. It looks like a grownup’s face.

It has been a week since he and Avi laid out the entire plan for the high officials of the PTA: the Post and Telecoms Authority. PTA is a generic term that telecom businessmen slap, like a yellow stickynote, onto whatever government department handles these matters in whatever country they happen to be visiting this week. In the Philippines, it is actually called something else.

Americans brought, or at least accompanied, the Philippines into the twentieth century and erected the apparatus of its central government. Intramuros, the dead heart of Manila, is surrounded by a loose ring of giant neoclassical buildings, very much after the fashion of the District of Columbia, housing various parts of that apparatus. The PTA is headquartered in one of those buildings, just south of the Pasig.

Randy and Avi get there early because Randy, accustomed to Manila traffic, insists that they budget a full hour to cover the one- or two-mile taxi ride from the hotel. But traffic is perversely light and they end up with a full twenty minutes to kill. They stroll around the side of the building and up onto the green levee. Avi draws a bead on the Epiphyte Corp. building, just to reassure himself that their line of sight is clear. Randy is already satisfied of this, and just stands there with arms crossed, looking at the river. It is
choked, bank to bank, with floating debris: some plant material but mostly old mattresses, cushions, pieces of plastic litter, hunks of foam, and, most of all, plastic shopping bags in various bright colors. The river has the consistency of vomit.

Avi wrinkles his nose. “What’s that?”

Randy sniffs the air and smells, among everything else, burnt plastic. He gestures downstream. “Squatter camp on the other side of Fort Santiago,” he explains. “They sieve plastic out of the river and burn it for fuel.”

“I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago,” Avi says. “They have plastic forests there!”

“What does that mean?”

“Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can’t get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors.”

Randy shrugs his blazer off, rolls up his sleeves; Avi does not seem to notice the heat. “So that’s Fort Santiago,” Avi says, and starts walking towards it.

“You’ve heard of it?” Randy asks, following him, and heaving a sigh. The air is so hot that when it comes out of your lungs it has actually cooled down by several degrees.

“It’s mentioned in the video,” Avi says, holding up a videotape cassette and wiggling it.

“Oh, yeah.”

Soon they are standing before the fort’s entrance, which is flanked by carvings of a pair of guards cut into the foamy volcanic tuff: halberd-brandishing Spaniards in blousy pants and conquistador helmets. They have been standing here for close to half a millennium, and a hundred thousand tropical thundershowers have streamed down their bodies and polished them smooth.

Avi is working on a much shorter time horizon—he has eyes only for the bullet craters that have disfigured these soldiers far worse than time and water. He puts his hands in them, like doubting Thomas. Then he steps back and begins to mutter in Hebrew. Two ponytailed German tourists stroll through the gate in rustic sandals.

“We have five minutes,” Randy says.

“Okay, let’s come back here later.”

Charlene wasn’t totally wrong. Blood seeps out of tiny, invisible painless cuts on Randy’s face and neck for ten or fifteen minutes after he has shaved. Moments ago, that blood was accelerating through his ventricles, or seeping through the parts of his brain that make him a conscious entity. Now the same stuff is exposed to the air; he can reach up and wipe it off. The boundary between Randy and his environment has been annihilated.

He gets out a big tube of heavy waterproof sunblock and greases his face, neck, arms, and the small patch of scalp on the top of his head where the hair is getting thin. Then he pulls on khakis, boat shoes, and a loose cotton shirt, and a beltpack containing his GPS receiver and a couple of other essentials like a wad of toilet paper and a disposable camera. He drops his key off at the front desk, and the employees all do double-takes and grin. The bellhops seem particularly delighted by his makeover. Or perhaps it is just that he is wearing leather shoes for once: topsiders, which he’s always thought of as the mark of effete preppies, but which are actually a reasonable thing for him to wear today. Bellhops make ready to haul the front door open, but instead, Randy cuts across the lobby towards the back of the hotel, skirts the swimming pool, and walks through a line of palm trees to a stone railing along the top of a seawall. Below him is the hotel’s dock, which sticks out into a small cove that opens onto Manila Bay.

His ride isn’t here yet, so he stands at the railing for a minute. One side of the cove is accessible from Rizal Park. A few gnarly Filipino squatter types are lazing on the benches, staring back at him. Down below the breakwater, a middle-aged man, wearing only boxer shorts, stands in knee-deep water with a pointed stick, staring with feline intensity into the lapping water. A black helicopter makes slow, banking circles against a sugar-white sky. It is a Vietnam-vintage Huey, a wappity-wap kind of chopper that also makes a fierce reptilian hissing noise as it slithers overhead.

A boat materializes from the steam rising off the bay, cuts
its engines, and coasts into the cove, shoving a bow wave in front of it, like a wrinkle in a heavy rug. A tall, slender woman is poised on the prow like a living figurehead, holding a coil of heavy rope.

The big satellite dishes on the roof of the PTA’s building are pointed almost straight up, like birdbaths, because Manila is so close to the equator. On its stone walls, spackle is coming loose from the bullet and shrapnel craters into which it was troweled after the war. Window air conditioners centered in the building’s Roman arches drip water onto the limestone balusters below, gradually melting them away. The limestone is blackened with some kind of organic slime, and pitted by the root systems of little plants that have taken root in them—probably grown from seeds conveyed in the shit of the birds that congregate there to bathe and drink, the squatters of the aerial realm.

In a paneled conference room, a dozen people are waiting, equally divided between table-sitting big wheels and wall-crawling minions. As Randy and Avi enter a great flurry of hand-shaking and card-presenting ensues, though most of the introductions zoom through Randy’s short-term memory like a supersonic fighter blowing past shoddy Third World air defense systems. He is left only with a stack of business cards. He deals them out on his patch of table like a senescent codger playing Klondike on his meal tray. Avi, of course, knows all of these people already—seems to be on a first-name basis with most of them, knows their children’s names and ages, their hobbies, their blood types, chronic medical conditions, what books they are reading, whose parties they have been going to. All of them are evidently delighted by this, and all of them, thank god, completely ignore Randy.

Of the half-dozen important people in the room, three are middle-aged Filipino men. One of these is a high-ranking official in the PTA. The second is the president of an upstart telecommunications company called FiliTel, which is trying to compete against the traditional monopoly. The third is the vice president of a company called 24 Jam that runs about half of the convenience stores in the Philippines, as
well as quite a few in Malaysia. Randy has trouble telling these men apart, but by watching them converse with Avi, and by using inductive logic, he is soon able to match business card with face.

The other three are easy: two Americans and one Nipponese, and one of the Americans is a woman. She is wearing lavender pumps color-coordinated with a neat little skirt suit, and matching nails. She looks as if she might have stepped straight off the set of an infomercial for fake fingernails or home permanents. Her card identifies her as Mary Ann Carson, and claims that she is a V.P. with AVCLA, Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles, which Randy knows dimly as a Los Angeles-based firm that invests in Rapidly Developing Asian Economies. The American man is blond and has a hard-jawed quasi-military look about him. He seems alert, disciplined, impassive, which Charlene’s crowd would interpret as hostility born of repression born of profound underlying mental disorder. He represents the Subic Bay Free Port. The Nipponese man is the executive vice president of a subsidiary of a ridiculously colossal consumer-electronics company. He is about six feet tall. He has a small body and a large head shaped like an upside-down Bosc pear, thick hair edged with grey, and wire-rimmed glasses. He smiles frequently, and projects the serene confidence of a man who has memorized a two-thousand-page encyclopedia of business etiquette.

Avi wastes little time in starting the videotape, which at the moment represents about seventy-five percent of Epiphyte Corp.’s assets. Avi had it produced by a hot multimedia startup in San Francisco, and the contract to produce it accounted for one hundred percent of the startup’s revenue this year. “Pies crumble when you slice them too thin,” Avi likes to say.

It starts with footage—pilfered from a forgotten made-for-TV movie—of a Spanish galleon making headway through heavy seas. Superimpose title: SOUTH CHINA SEA—
A.D
. 1699. The soundtrack has been beefed up and Dolbyized from its original monaural version. It is quite impressive.

(“Half of the investors in AVCLA are into yachting,” Avi explained.)

Cut to a shot (produced by the multimedia company, and seamlessly spliced in) of a mangy, exhausted lookout in a crow’s nest, peering through a brass spyglass, hollering the Spanish equivalent of “Land ho!”

Cut to the galleon’s captain, a rugged, bearded character, emerging from his cabin to stare with Keatsian wild surmise at the horizon. “Corregidor!” he exclaims.

Cut to a stone tower on the crown of a green tropical island, where a lookout is sighting the (digitally inserted) galleon on the horizon. The lookout cups his hands around his mouth and bellows, in Spanish, “It is the galleon! Light the signal fire!”

(“The family of the guy who runs the PTA is really into local history,” Avi said, “they run the Museum of the Philippines.”)

With a lusty cheer, Spaniards (actually, Mexican-American actors) in conquistador helmets plunge firebrands into a huge pile of dry wood which evolves into a screaming pyramid of flame powerful enough to flash-roast an ox.

Cut to the battlements of Manila’s Fort Santiago (foreground: carved styrofoam; background: digitally generated landscape), where another conquistador spies a light flaring up on the horizon. “Mira! El galleon!” he cries.

Cut to a series of shots of Manila townsfolk rushing to the seawall to adore the signal fire, including an Augustinian monk who clasps his rosary-strewn hands and bursts into clerical Latin on the spot (“the family that runs FiliTel endowed a chapel at Manila Cathedral”) as well as a clean-cut family of Chinese merchants unloading bales of silk from a junk (“24 Jam, the convenience store chain, is run by Chinese mestizos”).

A voiceover begins, deep and authoritative, English with a Filipino accent (“The actor is the brother of the godfather of the grandson of the man who runs the PTA”). Subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen in Tagalog (“the PTA people have a heavy political commitment to the native language”).

“In the heyday of the Spanish Empire, the most important event of the year was the arrival of the galleon from Acapulco, laden with silver from the rich mines of Amer
ica—silver to buy the silks and spices of Asia, silver that made the Philippines into the economic fountainhead of Asia. The approach of the galleon was heralded by a beacon of light from the island of Corregidor, at the entrance of Manila Bay.”

Cut (finally!) from the beaming, greed-lit faces of the Manila townsfolk to a 3-D graphics rendering of Manila Bay, the Bata’an Peninsula, and the small islands off the tip of Bata’an, including Corregidor. The point of view swoops and zooms in on Corregidor where a hokily, badly rendered fire blazes up. A beam of yellow light, like a phaser blast in
Star Trek,
shoots across the bay. Our point of view follows it. It splashes against the walls of Fort Santiago.