Cryptonomicon, Page 56

  Avi skids to a stop and clutches his water bottle in both hands as if he’s afraid he might drop it. “Sunken treasure, like, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum? Pieces of six? That kind of thing?”

  “Pieces of eight. Same basic idea,” Randy says. “The Shaftoes are treasure hunters. Doug is obsessed with the idea that there are vast hoards of treasure in and around the Philippines.”

  “From where? Those Spanish galleons?”

  “No. Well, yes, actually. But that’s not what Doug’s after.” He and Avi have begun walking again. “Most of it is either much older than that—pottery from sunken Chinese junks—or much more recent—Japanese war gold.”

  As Randy had expected, the mention of Japanese war gold makes a huge impact on Avi. Randy keeps talking. “Rumor has it that the Nipponese left a lot of gold in the area. Supposedly, Marcos recovered a big stash buried in a tunnel somewhere—that’s where he got all his money. Most people think Marcos was worth something like five, six billion dollars, but a lot of people in the Philippines think he recovered more like sixty billion.”

  “Sixty billion!” Avi’s spine stiffens. “Impossible.”

  “Look, you can believe the rumors or not, I don’t care,” Randy says. “But since it looks like one of Marcos’s bag men is going to be a founding depositor in the Crypt, it is the kind of thing you should know.”

  “Keep talking,” Avi says, suddenly ravenous for data.

  “Okay. So people have been running all over the Philippines ever since the war, digging holes and dredging the seafloor, trying to find the legendary Nipponese war gold. Doug Shaftoe is one of those people. Problem is, making a thorough sidescan sonar survey of the whole area is quite expensive—you can’t just go out and do it on spec. He saw an opportunity when we came along.”

  “I see. Very smart,” Avi says approvingly. “He would do the survey work that we needed anyway, in order to lay the cables.”

  “Perhaps a bit more than was strictly necessary, as long as he was out there.”

  “Right. Now I remember some angry mail from the Dentist’s due diligence harpies because the survey was costing too much and taking too long. They felt we could have hired a different company and gotten the same results quicker and cheaper.”

  “They were probably right,” Randy admits. “Anyway, Doug wanted to cut a deal that gave us ten percent of whatever he found. More, if we wanted to underwrite recovery operations.”

  All of a sudden Avi’s eyes go wide and he swallows a big gulp of air. “Oh, shit,” he says. “He wanted to keep the whole thing a secret from the Dentist.”

  “Exactly. Because the Dentist would end up taking all of it. And because of the Dentist’s peculiar domestic situation, that means that the Bolobolos would know everything about it too. These guys would happily kill to get their hands on gold.”

  “Wow!” Avi says, shaking his head. “Y’know, I don’t want to seem like one of those hackneyed Jews that you see in heartwarming movies. But at times like this, all I can say is ‘Oy, gevalt!’ ”

  “I never told you about this deal, Avi, for two reasons. One of them is just our general policy of not blabbing about things. The other reason is that we decided to hire Semper Marine Services anyway—just on their own merits—so Doug Shaftoe’s proposition was irrelevant.”

  Avi thinks this one over. “Correction. It was irrelevant, as long as Doug Shaftoe didn’t find any sunken treasure.”

  “Right. And I assumed that he wouldn’t.”

  “You assumed wrong.”

  “I assumed wrong,” Randy admits. “Shaftoe has found the remains of an old Nipponese submarine.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “If he found a Chinese junk he was going to send me a joke about Ferdinand Marcos. If he found World War II stuff, it was going to be Imelda. If it was a surface ship, it was going to be about Imelda’s shoes. If it was a submarine, her sexual habits. He sent me a joke about Imelda’s sexual habits.”

  “Now, did you ever formally respond to Doug Shaftoe’s proposition?” Avi says.

  “No. Like I said, it wasn’t relevant, we were going to hire him anyway. But then, after the contracts were all signed and we were drawing up the survey schedule, he told me about this code involving the Marcos jokes. I realized then he believed that by hiring him, we had implicitly said yes to his proposition.”

  “It’s a funny way to do business,” Avi says, wrinkling his nose. “You’d think he would have been more explicit.”

  “He is the kind of guy who does deals on a handshake. On personal honor,” Randy says. “Once he had made the proposition, he would never withdraw it.”

  “The problem with those honorable men,” Avi says, “is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way.”

  “It is true.”

  “So he believes, now, that we are accomplices in this plan to hide the existence of this sunken treasure from the Dentist and the Bolobolos,” Avi says.

  “Unless we come clean to them right away.”

  “In which case we are betraying Doug Shaftoe,” Avi says.

  “Cravenly backstabbing the ex-SEAL who served six years of combat duty in Vietnam, and who has scary and well-connected friends all over the world,” Randy adds.

  “Damn, Randy! I thought I was going to freak you out by telling you about the HEAP.”

  “You did.”

  “And then you spring this on me!”

  “Life’s rich pageant. And all that,” Randy says.

  Avi thinks for a minute. “Well, I guess it comes down to whom would we rather have on our side in a bar fight.”

  “The answer can only be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe,” Randy says. “But that doesn’t mean we’ll make it out of the bar alive.”

  SEEKY

  * * *

  THEY HAVE STUFFED him into the narrow gap between the U-boat’s slotted outer hull and the pressure hull within, so that bitterly cold, black water streams through with the bludgeoning force of a firehose and wracks him with malarial chills: bones cracking, joints freezing, muscles knotting. He is wedged in tightly between uneven surfaces of hard rough steel, bending him in ways he’s not supposed to bend, and punishing him when he tries to move. Barnacles are beginning to grow on him: sort of like lice but bigger and capable of burrowing deeper into the flesh. Somehow he is able to fight for breath anyway, just enough to stay alive and really savor just how unpleasant the situation is. He’s been breathing cold seawater for a long time, it has made his windpipe raw, and he suspects that plankton or something are eating his lungs from the inside out. He pounds on the pressure hull but the impact makes no noise. He can sense the warmth and heat inside, and he would like to get in and enjoy both of them. Finally some kind of dream-logic thing happens and he finds a hatch. The current sweeps Shaftoe out, leaving him suspended alone in the watery cosmos, and the U-boat hisses away and abandons him. Shaftoe is lost now. He cannot tell up from down. Something bashes him on the head. He sees a few black drumlike things moving inexorably through the water with parallel comet-trails of bubbles behind them. Depth charges.

  Then Shaftoe comes awake and knows that this was all just his body desiring morphine. He is certain for a moment that he is back in Oakland and that Lieutenant Reagan is looming over him, preparing for Phase 2 of the interview.

  “Good afternoon, Sergeant Shaftoe,” Reagan says. He has adopted a heavy German accent for some reason. A joke. These actors! Shaftoe smells meat, and other things not so inviting. Something heavy, but not especially hard, thuds into his face. Then it draws back. Then it hits him again.

  “Your companion is morphium-seeky?” says Beck.

  Enoch Root is a bit taken aback; they’ve only been on the boat for eight hours. “Is he already making a nuisance of himself?”

  “He is semiconscious,” Beck says, “and has a great deal to say about giant lizards—among other subjects.”

  “Oh, that’s normal for him,” Root says, relieved. “What makes you think he
is morphium-seeky?”

  “The morphium bottle and hypodermic syringe that were in his pocket,” Beck says with that deadpan Teutonic irony, “and the needle marks in his arms.”

  Root observes that the U-boat is like a tunnel bored out of the sea and lined with hardware. This cabin (if that’s not too grand a word for it) is by far the largest open space Root has seen, meaning that he can almost stretch his arms out without hitting someone or inadvertently tripping a switch or a valve. It even sports some wooden cabinetry, and has been sealed off from the corridor by a leather curtain. When they first brought Root in here, he thought it was a storage closet. But as he looks around the place, he begins to realize that it’s the nicest place on the whole boat: the captain’s private cabin. This is confirmed when Beck unlocks a desk drawer and produces a bottle of Armagnac.

  “Conquering France hath its privileges,” Beck says.

  “Yeah,” Root says, “you blokes really know how to sack a place.”

  Lieutenant Reagan is back again, molesting Bobby Shaftoe with a stethoscope that appears to have been kept in a bath of liquid nitrogen until ready for use. “Cough, cough, cough!” he keeps saying. Finally he takes the instrument away.

  Something is fucking with Shaftoe’s ankles. He tries to get up on his elbows to look, and smashes his face into a blistering hot pipe. When he’s recovered from that, he peeks carefully down the length of his body and sees a goddamn hardware store down there. The bastards have put him in leg irons!

  He lies back down and gets slugged in the face by a dangling ham. Above him is a firmament of pipes and cables. Where has he seen this before? On the Dutch-Hammer, that’s where. Except the lights are on in this U-boat, and it doesn’t appear to be sinking, and it’s full of Germans. The Germans are calm and relaxed. None of them is bleeding or screaming. Damn! The boat rocks sideways, and a giant Blutwurst socks him in the belly.

  He begins looking around, trying to get his bearings. There’s not much else to see except hanging meat. This cabin is a six-foot-long slice of U-boat, with a narrow gangway down the center, hemmed in by bunks. Or maybe they are bunks. The one directly across from him is occupied by a dirty canvas sack.

  Fuck that. Where is the box with the purple bottles?

  “It is amusing to read my communications from Charlottenburg,” Beck says to Root, changing the subject to the message decrypts on his table. “They were perhaps written by that Jew Kafka.”

  “How so?”

  “It seems that they do not expect that we will ever make it home alive.”

  “What makes you say that?” Root says, trying not to savor the Armagnac too much. When he brings it up to his nose and inhales, its perfume nearly obliterates the reek of urine, vomit, rotten food, and diesel that suffuses everything on the U-boat down to the atomic level.

  “They are pressing us for information about our prisoners. They are very interested in you guys,” Beck says.

  “In other words,” Root says carefully, “they want you to question us now.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And send the results in by radio?”

  “Yes,” Beck says. “But I really should be concentrating on how to keep us alive—the sun will be up soon, and then we are in for some very bad trouble. You’ll remember that your ship radioed our coordinates before I sunk it. Every allied plane and ship is now out looking for us.”

  “So, if I cooperate,” Root says, “you can get back to the business of keeping us all alive.”

  Beck tries to control a smile. His little tactic was crude and obvious to begin with, and Root has already seen through it. Beck is, if anything, more uncomfortable than Root with this whole interrogation business.

  “Suppose I tell you everything I know,” Root says. “If you send it all back to Charlottenburg, you’ll be running your radio, on the surface, for hours. Huffduff will pick you out in a few seconds and then every destroyer and bomber within a thousand miles will jump on you.”

  “On us,” Beck corrects him.

  “Yes. So if I really want to stay alive, it’s best if I shut up,” Root says.

  “Are you looking for this?” says the German with the stethoscope, who (Shaftoe has learned) is not a real doctor—just the guy who happens to be in charge of the box of medical stuff. Anyway, he is holding up just the thing. The very thing.

  “Gimme that!” Shaftoe says, making a weak grab for it. “That’s mine!”

  “Actually, it’s mine,” the medic says. “Yours is with the captain. I might share some of mine with you, if you are cooperative.”

  “Fuck you,” Shaftoe says.

  “Very well then,” the medic says, “I will by-leave it.” He puts the syringe full of morphine on the bunk opposite and one level below Shaftoe’s, so that Shaftoe, by peering between a couple of Knockwursts, can see it. But he can’t reach it. Then the medic leaves.

  “Why was Sergeant Shaftoe carrying a German morphine bottle and a German syringe?” says Beck quizzically, doing his best to make it sound conversational and not interrogational. But the effort is too much for him and that smile tries to seize control of his lips again. It is the smile of a whipped dog. Root finds this somewhat alarming, since Beck’s the guy in charge of keeping everyone on the boat alive.

  “That’s news to me,” Root says.

  “Morphine is closely regulated,” Beck says. “Each bottle has a number. We have already radioed the number on Sergeant Shaftoe’s bottle to Charlottenburg, and soon they’ll know where it came from. Even though they may not tell us.”

  “Good work. That should keep them busy for a while. Why don’t you go back to running the ship?” Root suggests.

  “We are in the calm before the storm,” Beck says, “and I have not so much to do. So I try to satisfy my own curiosity about you.”

  * * *

  “We’re fucked, aren’t we!?” says a German voice.

  “Huh?” Shaftoe says.

  “I said, we’re fucked! You guys broke the Enigma!”

  “What’s the Enigma?”

  “Don’t play stupid,” says the German.

  Shaftoe feels prickly on the back of his neck. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing a German would say before commencing torture.

  Shaftoe composes his face into the cool, heavy-lidded, dopey expression that he always uses when he’s trying to irritate an officer. As best he can when his legs are bolted down, he rolls over on his side, towards the sound of the voice. He is expecting to see an aquiline SS officer in a black uniform, jackboots, death’s-head insignia, and riding crop, perhaps twiddling a pair of thumbscrews in his black leather gloves.

  Instead he sees no one at all. Shit! Hallucinations again!

  Then the dirty canvas sail bag in the bunk opposite him begins to move around. Shaftoe blinks and resolves a head sticking out of one end: straw-blond but prematurely half bald, contrasting black beard, catlike pale green eyes. The man’s canvas garment is not exactly a bag, but a voluminous overcoat. He has his arms crossed over his body.

  “Oh, well,” the German mutters, “I was just trying to make conversation.” He turns his head and scratches his nose by nuzzling his pillow for a while. “You can tell me any secret you want,” he says. “See, I’ve already notified Dönitz that the Enigma is shit. And it made no difference. Except he ordered me a new overcoat.” The man rolls over, exposing his back to Shaftoe. The sleeves of the garment are sewn shut at the ends and tied together behind his back. “It is more comfortable than you would think, for the first day or two.”

  A mate pulls the leather curtain aside, nods apologetically, and hands Beck a fresh message decrypt. Beck reads it, raises his eyebrows, and blinks tiredly. He sets it down on the table and stares at the wall for fifteen seconds. Then he picks it up and reads it again, carefully.

  “It says that I am not to ask you any more questions.”

  “What!?”

  “Under no circumstances,” Beck says, “am I to extract any more information from you.�
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  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Probably that you know something I am not authorized to know,” Beck says.

  It has been about two hundred years, now, since Bobby Shaftoe had a trace of morphine in his system. Without it, he cannot know pleasure or even comfort.

  The syringe gleams like a cold star on the shelf underneath the crazy German in the straitjacket. He’d rather that they just tore his fingernails out or something.

  He knows he’s going to crack. He tries to think of a way to crack that won’t kill any Marines.

  “I could bring you the syringe in my teeth,” suggests the man, who has introduced himself as Bischoff.

  Shaftoe mulls it over. “In exchange for?”

  “You tell me whether the Enigma has been decrypted.”

  “Oh.” Shaftoe’s relieved; he was afraid maybe Bischoff was going to demand a blow job. “That’s the code machine thingamajig you were telling me about?” He and Bischoff have had a lot of time to shoot the breeze.

  “Yeah.”

  Shaftoe’s desperate. But he’s also highly irritable, which serves him well now. “You expect me to believe that you are just a crazy guy who is curious about Enigma, and not a German naval officer who’s dressed up in a straitjacket to trick me?”

  Bischoff is exasperated. “I already said that I’ve told Dönitz that Enigma is crap! So if you tell me it’s crap, that doesn’t make any difference!”

  “Let me ask you a question, then,” Root says.

  “Yes?” Beck says, making a visible effort to raise his eyebrows and look like he cares.

  “What have you told Charlottenburg about us?”

  “Names, ranks, serial numbers, circumstances of capture.”

  “But you told them that yesterday.”

  “Correct.”