Cryptonomicon (68 page)

“Well, if he was a mathematician, he might have had some connection with my grandfather. Is that why you were asking about my family?”

“Check this out,” Doug says, and pings one fingernail against a glass tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written on the back in pencil, but it’s impossible to read because the flaps of the envelope have been spread apart. “May I?” he asks. Doug nods and hands him a couple of latex surgical gloves. “I don’t have to file a diving plan for this, do I?” Randy asks, wiggling his fingers into the gloves.

Doug is not amused. “It is deeper than it looks,” he says.

Randy flips the envelope over, then folds the flaps back together, reassembling the inscription. It says:

WATERHOUSE

LAVENDER ROSE.

T
HROUGH A SMALL DUSTY WINDOW
X
ED WITH MASK
ing tape, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse gazes out at downtown Brisbane. Bustling it ain’t. A taxi limps down the street and pulls into the drive of the nearby Canberra Hotel, which is home to many mid-ranking officers. The taxi smokes and reeks—it is powered by a charcoal burner in the trunk. Marching feet can be heard through the window. It’s not the tromp, tromp of combat boots, but the whack, whack of sensible shoes worn by sensible women: local volunteers. Waterhouse instinctively leans closer to the window to get a look at them, but he’s wasting his time. Dressed in those uniforms, you could march a regiment of pinup girls through all the cabins and gangways of an active battleship
and not draw a single wolf whistle, lewd suggestion, or butt-grab.

A delivery truck creeps out of a side street and backfires alarmingly as it tries to accelerate onto the main drag. Brisbane is still worried about attack from the air, and no one likes sudden loud noises. The truck looks like it is being attacked by an amoeba: on its back is a billowing rubberized-canvas balloon full of natural gas.

He’s on the third floor of a commercial building so nondescript that the most interesting observation one can make about it is that it has four stories. There is a tobacconist on the ground floor. The rest of the place must have been empty until The General—beaten like a red-headed stepchild by those Nips—came to Brisbane from Corregidor, and made this city into the capital of the Southwest Pacific Theater. There must have been an incredible amount of surplus office space around here before The General showed up, because a lot of Brisbaners had fled south, expecting an invasion.

Waterhouse has had plenty of time to familiarize himself with Brisbane and its environs. He’s been here for four weeks, and he’s been given nothing to do. When he was in Britain, they couldn’t shuffle him around fast enough. Whatever his job was at the moment, he did it feverishly—until he received top-secret, highest-priority orders to rush, by any available means of transportation, to his next assignment.

Then they brought him here. The Navy flew him across the Pacific, hopping from one island base to the next in an assortment of flying boats and transports. He crossed the equator and the international date line on the same day. But when he reached the boundary between Nimitz’s Pacific Theater and The General’s Southwest Pacific Theater, it was like he’d glided into a stone wall. It was all he could do to talk himself onboard a troop transport to New Zealand, and then to Fremantle. The transports were almost unbelievably hellish: steel ovens packed with men, baked by the sun, no one allowed to go abovedecks for fear they’d be sighted, and marked for slaughter, by a Nip submarine. Even at night they couldn’t get a breeze through there, because all openings had to be covered with blackout cur
tains. Waterhouse couldn’t really complain; some of the men had traveled this way all the way from the East Coast of the United States.

The important thing was that he made it to Brisbane, as per his orders, and reported to the right officer, who told him to await further orders. Which he’s been doing until this morning, when he was told to show up at this office upstairs of the tobacconist. It is a room full of enlisted men typing up forms, trundling them around in wire baskets, and filing them. In Waterhouse’s experience with the military, he has found that it’s not a good sign when one is ordered to report to a place like this.

Finally he is allowed into the presence of an Army major who has several other conversations, and various pieces of important paperwork, going on at the same time. That is okay; Waterhouse doesn’t need to be a cryptanalyst to get the message loud and clear, which is that he is not wanted here.

“Marshall sent you here because he thinks that The General is sloppy with Ultra,” the major says.

Waterhouse flinches to hear this word spoken aloud, in an office where enlisted men and women volunteers are coming and going. It’s almost as if the major wishes to make it clear that The General is, in fact, quite sloppy with Ultra, and rather likes it that way, thank you very much.

“Marshall’s afraid that the Nips will get wise to us and change their codes. It’s all because of Churchill.” The major refers to General George C. Marshall and Sir Winston Churchill as if they were bullpen staff for a farm league baseball team. He pauses to light a cigarette. “Ultra is Churchill’s baby. Oh yeah, Winnie just luuuuuves his Ultra. He thinks we’re going to blow his secret and ruin it for him because he thinks we’re idiots.” The major takes a very deep lungful of smoke, sits back in his chair, and carefully puffs out a couple of smoke rings. It is a convincing display of insouciance. “So he’s always nagging Marshall to tighten up security, and Marshall throws him a bone every so often, just to keep the Alliance on an even keel.” For the first time, the major looks Waterhouse in the eye. “You happen to be the latest bone. That’s all.”

There is a long silence, as if Waterhouse is expected to say something. He clears his throat. No one ever got court-martialed for following his orders. “My orders state that—”

“Fuck your orders, Captain Waterhouse,” the major says.

There is a long silence. The major tends to one or two other distracting duties. Then he stares out the window for a few moments, trying to compose his thoughts. Finally he says, “Get this through your head. We are not idiots. The General is not an idiot. The General appreciates Ultra as much as Sir Winston Churchill. The General uses Ultra as well as any commander in this war.”

“Ultra’s no good if the Japanese learn about it.”

“As you can appreciate, The General does not have time to meet with you personally. Neither does his staff. So you will not have an opportunity to instruct him on how to keep Ultra a secret,” says the major. He glances down a couple of times at a sheet of paper on his blotter, and indeed he is now speaking like a man who is reading a prepared statement. “From time to time, since we learned that you were being sent to us, your existence has been brought to The General’s attention. During the brief periods of time when he is not occupied with more pressing matters, he has occasionally voiced some pithy thoughts about you, your mission, and the masterminds who sent you here.”

“No doubt,” Waterhouse says.

“The General is of the opinion that persons not familiar with the unique features of the Southwest Pacific Theater may not be entirely competent to judge his strategy,” says the major. “The General feels that the Nips will never learn about Ultra. Never. Why? Because they are incapable of comprehending what has happened to them. The General has speculated that he could go down to the radio station tomorrow and broadcast a speech announcing that we had broken all of the Nip codes and were reading all of their messages, and nothing would happen. The General’s words were something to the effect that the Nips will never believe how totally we have fucked them, because when you get fucked that badly, it’s your own goddamn fucking fault and it makes you look like a fucking shithead.”

“I see,” Waterhouse says.

“But The General said all of that at much greater length and without using a single word of profanity, because that is how The General expresses himself.”

“Thank you for boiling it down,” Waterhouse says.

“You know those white headbands that the Nips tie around their foreheads? With the meatball and the Nip characters printed on them?”

“I’ve seen pictures of them.”

“I’ve seen them for real, tied around the heads of pilots of Nip fighter planes that were about fifty feet away firing machine guns at me and my men,” says the major.

“Oh, yeah! Me too. At Pearl Harbor,” Waterhouse says. “I forgot.”

This appears to be the most irritating thing that Waterhouse has said all day. The major has to spend a moment composing himself. “That headband is called a
hachimaki.
”

“Oh.”

“Imagine this, Waterhouse. The emperor is meeting with his general staff. All of the top generals and admirals in Nippon parade into the room in full dress uniforms and bow down solemnly before the emperor. They have come to report on the progress of the war. Each of these generals and admirals is wearing a brand-new
hachimaki
around his forehead. These
hachimakis
are printed with phrases saying things like, ‘I am a dipshit’ and ‘Through my personal incompetence I killed two hundred thousand of our own men’ and ‘I handed our Midway plans over to Nimitz on a silver platter.’ ”

The major now pauses and takes a phone call so that Waterhouse can savor this image for a while. Then he hangs up, lights another cigarette, and continues. “That’s what it would look like for the Nips to admit at this point in the war that we have Ultra.”

More smoke rings. Waterhouse has nothing to say. So the major continues. “See, we’ve gone over the watershed line of this war. We won Midway. We won North Africa. Stalingrad. The Battle of the Atlantic. Everything changes when you go over the watershed line. The rivers all flow a different direction. It’s as if the force of gravity itself has changed and is now working in our favor. We’ve adjusted to that.
Marshall and Churchill and all those others are still stuck in an obsolete mentality. They are defenders. But The General is not a defender. As a matter of fact, just between you and me, The General is lousy on defense, as he demonstrated in the Philippines. The General is a conqueror.”

“Well,” Waterhouse finally says, “what do you suggest I do with myself, seeing as how I’m here in Brisbane?”

“I’m tempted to say you should connect up with all of the other Ultra security experts Marshall sent out before you, and get a bridge group together,” the major says.

“I don’t care for bridge,” Waterhouse says politely.

“You’re supposed to be some expert codebreaker, right?”

“Right.”

“Why don’t you go to Central Bureau? The Nips have a zillion different codes and we haven’t broken all of them yet.”

“That’s not my mission.”

“You don’t worry about your fucking mission,” the major says. “I’ll make sure that Marshall thinks you’re doing your mission, because if Marshall doesn’t think that, he’ll give us no end of hassles. So you’re clean with the higher-ups.”

“Thank you.”

“You can consider your mission accomplished,” the major says. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“My mission is to beat the stuffing out of the fucking Nips, and that mission is
not
accomplished just yet, and so I have other matters to attend to,” the major says significantly.

“Shall I just see myself out then?” Waterhouse asks.

O
NCE, WHEN
B
OBBY
S
HAFTOE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD
, he went to Tennessee to visit Grandma and Grandpa. One boring afternoon he began skimming a letter that the old lady had left lying on an end table. Grandma gave him a stern talking to and then recounted the incident to
Grandpa, who recognized his cue and gave him forty whacks. That and a whole series of roughly parallel childhood experiences, plus several years in the Marine Corps, have made him into one polite fellow.

So he doesn’t read others’ mail. It be against the rules.

But here he is. The setting: a plank-paneled room above a pub in Norrsbruck, Sweden. The pub is a sailorly kind of place, catering to fishermen, which makes it congenial for Shaftoe’s friend and drinking buddy: Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich (retired).

Bischoff gets a lot of interesting mail, and leaves it strewn all over the room. Some of the mail is from his family in Germany, and contains money. Consequently Bischoff, unlike Shaftoe, will not have to work even if this war continues, and he remains in Sweden cooling his boilers for another ten years.

Some of the mail is from the crew of U-691, according to Bischoff. After Bischoff got them all here to Norrsbruck in one piece, his second-in-command, Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, cut a deal with the Kriegsmarine in which the crew were allowed to return to Germany, no hard feelings, no repercussions. All of them except for Bischoff climbed on board what was left of U-691 and steamed off in the direction of Kiel. Only days later, the mail began to pour in. Every member of the crew, to a man, sent Bischoff a letter describing the heroes’ welcome they had received: Dönitz himself met them at the pier and handed out hugs and kisses and medals and other tokens in embarrassing profusion. They can’t stop talking about how much they want dear Günter to come back home.

Dear Günter isn’t budging; he’s been sitting in his little room for a couple of months now. His world consists of pen, ink, paper, candles, cups of coffee, bottles of aquavit, the soothing beat of the surf. Every crash of wave on shore, he says, reminds him that he is above sea level now, where men were meant to live. His mind is always back
there
a hundred feet below the surface of the gelid Atlantic, trapped like a rat in a sewer pipe, cringing from the explosions of the depths charges. He lived a hundred years that way, and spent every moment of those hundred years dreaming of the Surface.
He vowed, ten thousand times, that if he ever made it back up to the world of air and light, he would enjoy every breath, revel in every moment.

That’s pretty much what he’s been doing, here in Norrsbruck. He has his personal journal, and he’s been going through it, page by page, filling in all of the details that he didn’t have time to jot down, before he forgets them. Someday, after the war, it’ll make a book: one of a million war memoirs that will clog libraries from Novosibirsk to Gander to Sequim to Batavia.

The pace of incoming mail dropped dramatically after the first weeks. Several of his men still write to him faithfully. Shaftoe is used to seeing their letters scattered around the place when he comes to visit. Most of them are written on scraps of cheap, greyish paper.

Directionless silver light infiltrates the room through Bischoff’s window, illuminating what looks like a rectangular pool of heavy cream on his tabletop. It is some kind of official Hun stationery, surmounted by a raptor clenching a swastika. The letter is handwritten, not typed. When Bischoff sets his wet glass down on it, the ink dissolves.

And when Bischoff goes to empty his bladder, Shaftoe can’t keep his eyes away from it. He knows that this is bad manners, but the Second World War has led him into all sorts of uncouth behavior, and there don’t seem to be any angry grandpas lurking in the trenches with doubled belts; no consequences at all for the wicked, in fact. Maybe that will change in a couple of years, if the Germans and the Nips lose the war. But that reckoning will be so great and terrible that Shaftoe’s glance at Bischoff’s letter will probably go unnoticed.

It came in an envelope. The first line of the address is very long, and consists of “Günter BISCHOFF” preceded by a string of ranks and titles, and followed by a series of letters. The return address has been savaged by Bischoff’s letter opener, but it’s somewhere in Berlin.

The letter itself is an impossible snarl of Germanic cursive. It is signed, hugely, with a single word. Shaftoe spends some time trying to make out that word; he whose John Huncock this is. Must have an ego that ranks right up there with The General’s.

When Shaftoe figures out the signature belongs to Dönitz, he gets all tingly. That Dönitz is an important guy—Shaftoe’s even seen him on a newsreel, congratulating a grimy U-boat crew, fresh from a salty spree.

Why’s he writing love notes to Bischoff? Shaftoe can’t read this stuff any better than he could Nipponese. But he can see a few figures. Dönitz is talking numbers. Perhaps tons of shipping sunk, or casualties on the Eastern Front. Perhaps money.

“Oh, yes!” Bischoff says, having somehow reappeared in the room without making any noise. When you’re down in a U-boat, running silent, you learn how to walk quietly. “I have come up with a hypothesis on the gold.”

“What gold?” Shaftoe says. He knows, of course, but having been caught in an act of flagrant naughtiness, his instinct is to play innocent.

“That you saw down in the batteries of U-553,” Bischoff says. “You see, my friend, anyone else would say that you are simply a crazy jughead.”

“The correct term is Jarhead.”

“They would say, first of all, that U-553 sank many months before you claim to have seen it. Secondly, they would say that such a boat could not have been loaded with gold. But I believe that you saw it.”

“So?”

Bischoff glances at the letter from Dönitz, looking mildly seasick. “I must tell you something about the Wehrmacht of which I am ashamed, first.”

“What? That they invaded Poland and France?”

“No.”

“That they invaded Russia and Norway?”

“No, not that.”

“That they bombed England and…”

“No, no, no,” Bischoff says, the very model of forbearance. “Something you did not know about.”

“What?”

“It seems that, while I have been sneaking around the Atlantic, doing my duty—the Führer has come up with a little incentive program.”

“What do you mean?”

“It seems that duty and loyalty are not enough for certain high-ranking officers. That they will not carry out their orders to the fullest unless they receive… special awards.”

“You mean, like medals?”

Bischoff is smiling nervously. “Some generals on the Eastern Front have been given estates in Russia. Very, very large estates.”

“Oh.”

“But not everyone can be bribed with land. Some people require a more liquid form of compensation.”

“Booze?”

“No, I mean liquid in the financial sense. Something you can carry with you, and that is accepted in any whorehouse on the planet.”

“Gold,” says Shaftoe, quietly.

“Gold would suffice,” Bischoff says. It has been a long time since he looked Shaftoe in the eye. He’s staring out the window instead. His green eyes might be a little moist. He takes a deep breath, blinks, and gets the bitter irony under control before continuing: “Since Stalingrad, it has not gone well on the Eastern Front. Let us say that Ukrainian real estate is no longer worth what it used to be, if the deed to the land happens to be written in German and issued in Berlin.”

“It’s getting harder to bribe a general by promising him a chunk of Russian land,” Shaftoe translates. “So Hitler needs lots of gold.”

“Yes. Now, the Japanese have lots of gold—consider that they sacked China. As well as many other places. But they are lacking in certain things. They need wolframite. Mercury. Uranium.”

“What’s uranium?”

“Who the hell knows? The Japanese want it, we provide it. We provide them technology too—blueprints for new turbines. Enigma machines.” At this point Bischoff breaks off and laughs, painfully and darkly, for a long time. When he gets it under control, he continues: “So we have been shipping them these things, in U-boats.”

“And the Nips pay you in gold.”

“Yes. It is a dark economy, hidden beneath the ocean,
trading small but valuable items over vast distances. You got a glimpse of it.”

“You knew this was going on but you didn’t know about U-553,” Shaftoe points out.

“Ah, Bobby, there are many, many things going on in the Third Reich that a mere U-boat captain does not know about. You are a soldier, you know this is true.”

“Yes,” Shaftoe says, recalling the peculiarities of Detachment 2702. He looks down at the letter. “Why is Dönitz telling you all of this now?”

“He is not telling me anything,” Bischoff says reprovingly. “I have figured this out myself.” He gnaws on a lip for a while. “Dönitz is making me a proposition.”

“I thought you’d retired.”

Bischoff considers it. “I have retired from killing people. But the other day I sailed a little sloop around the inlet.”

“So?”

“So it seems that I have not retired from going down to the sea in ships.” Bischoff heaves a sigh. “Unfortunately, all of the really interesting ships are owned by major governments.”

Bischoff is getting a little spooky, so Shaftoe opts for a little change in the subject. “Hey, speaking of really interesting things…” and he tells the story of the Heavenly Apparition that he saw while he was walking down here.

Bischoff is delighted by the story, which revives the hunger for excitement that he has kept pickled in salt and alcohol ever since reaching Norrsbruck. “You are sure it was manmade?” he asks.

“It whined. Chunks of shit were falling out of it. But I’ve never seen a meteor so I don’t know.”

“How far away?”

“It crashed seven kilometers from where I was standing. So, ten clicks from here.”

“But ten kilometers is nothing for an Eagle Scout and a Hitler Youth!”

“You weren’t a Hitler Youth.”

Bischoff broods over this for a moment. “Hitler—so embarrassing. I hoped that if I ignored him he would go away. Perhaps if I had joined the Hitler Youth, they would have given me a surface ship.”

“Then you’d be dead.”

“Right!” Bischoff’s mood brightens considerably. “Ten kilometers is still nothing. Let’s go!”

“It’s already dark.”

“We will follow the flames.”

“They will have gone out.”

“We will follow the trail of debris, like Hansel and Gretel.”

“It didn’t work for Hansel and Gretel. Didn’t you even read the fucking story?”

“Don’t be such a defeatist, Bobby,” says Bischoff, diving into a hearty fisherman’s sweater. “Normally you are not like this. What is troubling you?”

Glory.

It is October and the days are growing short. Shaftoe and Bischoff, both mired in the yet-to-be-discovered emotional dumps of Seasonal Affective Disorder, are like two brothers trapped in the same pit of quicksand, each keeping a sharp eye on the other.

“Eh?
Was ist los,
buddy?”

“Guess I’m just feeling at loose ends.”

“You need an adventure. Let’s go!”

“I need an adventure like Hitler needs an ugly little toothbrush mustache,” says Bobby Shaftoe. But he drags himself up out of his chair and follows Bischoff out the door.

Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a pair of lost souls trying to find the side entrance to Limbo. They take turns carrying the kerosene lantern, which has an effective range about as long as a grown man’s arm. Sometimes they go for a whole hour without talking, each man alone with his own struggle against suicidal depression. Then one of them (usually Bischoff) will perk up and say something, like:

“Haven’t seen Enoch Root recently. What has he been up to since he finished curing you of your morphine addiction?” Bischoff asks.

“Don’t know. He was such a fucking pain in the ass during that project that I never wanted to see him again. But I
think he got a Russian radio transmitter from Otto and took it into that church basement where he lives; he’s been messing around with it ever since.”

“Yes. I remember. He was changing the frequencies. Did he ever get it to work?”

“Beats me,” Shaftoe says, “but when big pieces of burning shit start falling out of the sky in my neighborhood, makes me wonder.”

“Yes. Also he goes to the post office quite frequently,” Bischoff says. “I chatted with him there once. He is carrying on a heavy correspondence with others around the world.”

“Other
what?
”

“That is my question, too.”

Eventually they find the wreck only by following the sound of a hacksaw, which reverberates through the pines like the shriek of some extraordinarily stupid and horny bird. This enables them to home in on it in a general way. Final coordinates are provided by a sudden, strobelike flashing light, devastating noise, and a sap-scented rain of amputated foliage. Shaftoe and Bischoff both hit the dirt and lie there listening to fat pistol slugs ricocheting from tree trunk to tree trunk. The hacksawing noise continues with no break in rhythm.