Cryptonomicon (77 page)

“Bobby,” Root says, turning around, “I gather you heard.”

“Heard what?”

“That we are in danger.”

“Nah,” Shaftoe says, “this is just how I always answer the door.”

They go into the cabin. Root declines to turn on any lights and keeps looking out the windows like he’s expecting someone. He smells faintly of Julieta’s perfume, a distinctive scent that Otto has been smuggling into Finland by the fifty-five-gallon drum. Somehow, Shaftoe is not surprised by this. He proceeds to make coffee.

“A very complex situation has arisen,” Root says.

“I can see that.”

Root is startled by this, and looks up blankly at Shaftoe, his eyes glowing stupidly in the moonlight. You can be the smartest guy in the world, but when a woman comes into the picture, you’re just like any other sap.

“Did you come all this way to tell me that you’re fucking Julieta?”

“Oh, no, no, no!” Root says. He stops for a moment, furrows his brow. “I mean, I am. And I was going to tell you. But that’s just the first part of a more complicated business.” Root gets up, shoves hands in pockets, walks around the cabin again, looking out the windows. “You have any more of those Finnish guns?”

“In that crate to your left,” Shaftoe says. “Why? We gonna have a shootout?”

“Maybe. Not between you and me! But other visitors may be coming.”

“Cops?”

“Worse.”

“Finns?” Because Otto has his rivals.

“Worse.”

“Who then?” Shaftoe can’t imagine worse.

“Germans. German.”

“Oh, fuck!” Shaftoe hollers disgustedly. “How can you say they’re worse than Finns?”

Root looks taken aback. “If you’re going to tell me that Finns are worse, pound for pound, than Germans, then I agree with you. But the trouble with Germans is that they tend to be in communication with millions of other Germans.”

“Okay,” Shaftoe mutters.

Root hauls the lid off a crate, pulls out a machine pistol, checks the chamber, aims the barrel at the moon, peers through it like a telescope. “In any case, some Germans are coming to kill you.”

“Why?”

“Because you know too much about certain things.”

“What certain things? Günter and his new submarine?”

“Yes.”

“And how, may I ask, do you know this? It has something to do with the fact that you’re fucking Julieta, right?” Shaftoe continues. He’s bored rather than pissed off. This whole Sweden thing is old and tired to him now. He belongs in the Philippines. Anything that doesn’t get him closer to the Philippines just irritates him.

“Right.” Root heaves a sigh. “She thinks highly of you, Bobby, but after she saw that picture of your girlfriend—”

“Snap out of it! She doesn’t give a shit about you or me. She just wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts.”

“What are the bad parts?”

“Having to live in Finland,” Shaftoe says. “So she has to marry someone with a good passport. Which nowadays means American or British. You might have noticed that she didn’t fuck Günter.”

Root looks a little queasy.

“Well, maybe she did then,” Shaftoe says, heaving a sigh. “Shit!”

Root has rooted an ammo clip out of another crate and figured out how to affix it to the Suomi. He says, “You probably know that the Germans have a tacit arrangement with the Swedes.”

“What does ‘tacit’ mean?”

“Let’s just say they have an arrangement.”

“The Swedes are neutral, but they let the Krauts push them around.”

“Yes. Otto has to deal with Germans at each end of his smuggling route, in Sweden and in Finland, and he has to deal with their navy when he’s out on the water.”

“I’m aware that the fucking Germans are all over Europe.”

“Well, to make a long story short, the local Germans have prevailed upon Otto to betray you,” Root says.

“Did he?”

“Yes. He did betray you…”

“Okay. Keep talking, I’m listening to you,” Shaftoe says. He begins to mount a ladder up into the attic.

“. . . but then he thought better of it. I guess you could say he repented,” Root says.

“Spoken like a true man of the cloth,” Shaftoe mutters. He’s into the attic now, crawling on hands and knees over the rafters. He stops and sparks up his Zippo. Most of its light is absorbed by a dark green slab: a crude wooden crate with Cryllic letters stenciled on it.

Root’s voice is filtering up from below: “He came to, uh, the place where Julieta and I, uh, were.”

Were fucking.
“Get me the crowbar,” Shaftoe shouts. “It’s in Otto’s toolbox, under the table.”

A minute later, the crowbar rises up through the hatch, like the head of a cobra emerging from a basket. Shaftoe grabs it and begins assaulting the crate.

“Otto was torn. He had to do what he did, or the German could have shut down his livelihood. But he respects you. He couldn’t bear it. He had to talk to someone. So he came to us, and told Julieta what he had done. Julieta understood.”

“She understood!?”

“But she also was horrified at the same time.”

“That is truly heartwarming.”

“Um, at that point, the Kivistiks broke out the schnapps and began to discuss the situation. In Finnish.”

“I understand,” Shaftoe says. Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours. “Thanks for having the guts to come out here.”

“Julieta will understand.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Oh, I don’t think Otto would hurt me.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh!” Root exclaims. “No, I had to tell you about Julieta sooner or later—”

“No, goddamn it, I mean the Germans.”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t even begin to think about them until I was almost here. It was not courage so much as a lack of foresight.”

Shaftoe’s pretty good at foresight. “Take this.” He hands down a heavy steel tube of coffee-can diameter, a few feet long. “It’s heavy,” he adds, as Root’s knees buckle.

“What is it?”

“A Soviet hundred-and-twenty-millimeter mortar,” Shaftoe says.

“Oh.” Root remains silent for a while, as he lays the mortar down on the table. When he speaks again, his voice sounds different. “I didn’t realize Otto had this kind of stuff.”

“The lethal radius of this bitch is a good sixty feet,” Shaftoe says. He is hauling mortar bombs out of the crate and stacking them next to the hatch. “Or maybe it’s meters, I can’t remember.” The bombs look like fat footballs with tailfins on one end.

“Feet, meters… the distinction is important,” Root says.

“Maybe it’s overkill. But we have to get back to Norrsbruck and take care of Julieta.”

“What do you mean, take care of her?” Root says warily.

“Marry her.”

“What?”

“One of us has to marry her, and fast. I don’t know about you, but I kind of like her, and it’d be a shame if she spent the rest of her life sucking Russian dick at gunpoint,” Shaftoe says. “Besides, she might be pregnant with one of our kids. Yours, mine, or Günter’s.”

“We, the conspiracy, have an obligation to look after our offspring,” Root agrees. “We could establish a trust fund for them in London.”

“There should be plenty of money for that,” Shaftoe agrees. “But I can’t marry her, because I have to be available to marry Glory when I get to Manila.”

“Rudy can’t do it,” Root says.

“Because he’s a fag?”

“No, they marry women all the time,” Root says. “He can’t do it because he’s German, and what’s she going to do with a German passport?”

“It would not be savvy exactly,” Shaftoe agrees.

“That leaves me,” Root says. “I’ll marry her, and she’ll have a British passport. Best in the world.”

“Huh,” Shaftoe says, “how does that square with your being a celibate monk or priest or whatever the fuck you supposedly are?”

Root says, “I’m supposed to be celibate—”

“But you’re not,” Shaftoe reminds him.

“But God’s forgiveness is infinite,” Root fires back, winning the point. “So, as I was saying, I’m supposed to be celibate—but that doesn’t mean I can’t get married. As long as I don’t consummate the marriage.”

“But if you don’t consummate it, it doesn’t count!”

“But the only person, besides me, who will know that we didn’t consummate it, is Julieta.”

“God will know,” Shaftoe says.

“God doesn’t issue passports,” Root says.

“What about the church? They’ll kick you out.”

“Maybe I deserve to be kicked out.”

“So let me get this straight,” Shaftoe says, “when you really
were
fucking Julieta, you said you
weren’t
and so you were able to remain a priest. Now you’re going to marry her and
not
fuck her and say that you
are.
”

“If you’re trying to say that my relationship with the Church is very complicated, I already knew that, Bobby.”

“Let’s go, then,” Shaftoe says.

Shaftoe and Root haul the mortar and a boxload of bombs down onto the beach, where they can take cover behind a stone retaining wall a good five feet high. But the surf makes it impossible to hear anything, so Root goes up and hides in the trees along the road, and leaves Shaftoe to fiddle with the Soviet mortar.

There turns out to be not much fiddling necessary. An unlettered tundra farmer with bilateral frostbite could get this thing up and running in ten minutes. If he’d stayed up late the night before—celebrating the fulfillment of the last five-year plan with a jug of wood alcohol—maybe fifteen minutes.

Shaftoe consults the instructions. It does not matter that these are printed in Russian, because they are made for il
literates anyway. A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison. Shaftoe scans the terrain, picks out his killing zone, then climbs up and paces off the distance, assuming one meter per pace.

He’s back down on the beach, adjusting the tube’s angle, when he’s startled by a bulky form vaulting over the wall, so close it almost knocks him down. Root’s breathing fast. “Germans,” he says, “coming in from the main road.”

“How do you know they’re Germans? Maybe it’s Otto.”

“The engines sound like diesels. Huns love diesels.”

“How many engines?”

“Probably two.”

Root turns out to be right on the money. Two large black Mercedes issue from the forest, like bad ideas emerging from the dim mind of a green lieutenant. Their headlights are not illuminated. Each stops and then sits there for a moment, then the doors open quietly, Germans climb out and stand up. Several of them are wearing long black leather coats. Several are carrying those keen submachine guns that are the trademark of German infantry, and the envy of Yanks and Tommies, who must go burdened with primeval hunting rifles.

This is the moment, then. Nazis are right over there and it is the job of Bobby Shaftoe, and to a lesser degree Enoch Root, to kill them all. Not just a job but a moral requisite, because they are the living avatars of Satan, who publicly acknowledge being just as bad and vicious as they really are. It is a world, and a situation, to which Shaftoe and a lot of other people are perfectly adapted. He heaves a bomb up out of the box, introduces it to the muzzle of the fat tube, lets it go, and plugs his ears.

The mortar coughs like a kettledrum. The Germans look towards them. An officer’s monocle glints in the moonlight. A total of eight Germans have gotten out of the cars. Three of them must be combat veterans because they are down on
their stomachs in a microsecond. The trench-coated officers remain standing, as do a couple of civilian-clad goons, who immediately open fire in their general direction with their submachine guns. This makes a lot of noise but only impresses Shaftoe insofar as it is an impressive display of stupidity. The bullets sail far over their heads. Before they have had time to pepper the Gulf of Bothnia, the mortar bomb has exploded.

Shaftoe peeks over the top of the seawall. As he more or less expected, all of the people who were standing up are now draped over the nearest Mercedes, having been bodily lifted off their feet and flung sideways by a moving curtain of shrapnel. But two of the survivors—the veterans—are belly-crawling towards Otto’s cabin, whose thick log walls look extremely reassuring in these circumstances. The third survivor is blasting away with his submachine gun, but he has no idea where they are.

The ground is convex in a way that makes it hard to see those belly-crawling Germans. Shaftoe fires a couple more mortar rounds without much effect. He hears the two Germans kicking down the door to Otto’s cabin.

Since it is only a one-room cabin, this would be a fine moment to be armed with grenades. But Shaftoe has none, and he doesn’t really want to blow the place up anyway. “Why don’t you kill the one German up there,” he tells Root, and then heads down the beach, hugging the seawall in case the Germans are looking out the windows.