Cryptonomicon (56 page)

Smoke is rising from some of the long buildings too. But to get inside one of them, he would have to clamber up its heavy, slanting ladder and then worm through what looks like a rather small doorway. A child, standing inside one of those doorways with a stick, could prevent an intruder from coming in. Hanging outside some of the doorways are sacks, improvised from lengths of fabric (so at least they have textiles!) and filled with big round lumps: coconuts, possibly or some kind of preserved food set up to keep it away from the ants.

Perhaps seventy people are gathered around something of interest in the middle of the clearing. As they move around, Goto Dengo gets occasional momentary glimpses of someone, possibly Nipponese, who is sitting at the base of a palm tree with his hands behind his back. There’s a lot of blood on his face and he’s not moving. Most of these people are men, and they tend to carry spears. They have those fringes of hairy stuff (sometimes dyed red or green) concealing their private parts, and some of the bigger and older ones have decorated themselves by tying strips of fabric around their arms. Some have painted designs on their skin in pale mud. They have shoved various objects, some of them quite large, sideways through their nasal septums.

The bloodied man seems to have captured everyone’s attention, and Goto Dengo reckons that this will be his only chance to steal some food. He picks the longhouse farthest away from where the villagers have gathered, clambers up its ladder, and reaches for the bulging sack that hangs by the entrance. But the fabric is very old and it has rotted from
the damp of the swamp, and maybe from the attacks of the hundreds of flies that buzz around it, and so when he grasps it his fingers go right through. A long swath of it tears away and the contents tumble out around Goto Dengo’s feet. They are dark and sort of hairy, like coconuts, but their shape is more complicated, and he knows intuitively that something is wrong even before he recognizes them as human skulls. Maybe half a dozen of them. Scalp and skin still stuck on. Some of them are dark-skinned with bushy hair, like the natives, and others look distinctly Nipponese.

Sometime later, he is able to think coherently again. He realizes that he does not know how long he might have spent up here, in full view of the villagers, gazing on the skulls. He turns around to look, but all attention is still focused on the wounded man seated at the base of the tree.

From this vantage point Goto Dengo is able to see that it is indeed the Okinawan, and that his arms have been tied together behind the tree trunk. A boy of maybe twelve is standing over him, holding a spear. He steps forward cautiously and suddenly pokes it into the midsection of the Okinawan, who comes awake and thrashes from side to side. The boy’s obviously startled by this, and jumps back. Then an older man, his head decorated with a fringe of cowrie shells, takes a stance behind and beside the boy, showing him how to hold the spear, guiding him forward again. He adds his own strength to the youngster’s and they shove the spear straight into the Okinawan’s heart.

Goto Dengo falls off the house.

The men become very excited and pick the boy up on their shoulders and parade him around the clearing hollering and leaping and twirling, jabbing their spears defiantly into the air. They are pursued by all but the very youngest children. Goto Dengo, bruised but not damaged by the fall onto the mucky ground, belly-crawls into the jungle and looks for a place of concealment. The women of the village carry pots and knives towards the Okinawan’s body and begin to cut it up with the conspicuous skill of a sushi chef dismantling a tuna.

One of them is concentrating entirely on his head. Suddenly she jumps into the air and begins to dance around the
clearing, waving something bright and glittery.
“Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!”
she cries ecstatically. Some women and children begin following her around, trying to get a look at whatever it is she’s holding. Finally she stops and centers her hand in a rare shaft of sunlight coming down through the trees. Resting in the palm of her hand is a gold tooth.

“Ulab!”
say the women and children. One of the kids tries to snatch it out of her hand and she knocks him flat on his ass. Then one of the big spear-carrying men runs up and she hands the booty over to him.

Several of the men now gather round to marvel at the find.

The women go back to working over the Okinawan boy, and soon his body parts are stewing in pots over an open fire.

M
EN WHO BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE ACCOMPLISHING
something
by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a
waste of time.
Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge—how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip—from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desperation spread over such a man’s face as he listens to himself speak.

Men of the other type—the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent—aren’t necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.

Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe’s mind until he met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. He can’t put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a
third category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until now.

Officers are discouraged from fraternizing with enlisted men and noncoms, which has made it more difficult for Shaftoe to pursue his research into the matter. Sometimes, though, circumstances jumble all of the ranks together willy-nilly. A prime example would be this Trinidadian tramp steamer.

Where do they get this stuff?
wonders Shaftoe. Does the U.S. government keep a bunch of Trinidadian tramp steamers riding at anchor at a naval yard somewhere, just in case one is needed?

He thinks not. This one shows signs of a very recent and hasty change of ownership. It is a mother lode of yellowed, ragged, multiethnic pornography, some of it very run-of-the-mill and some so exotic that he mistook it for medical literature at first. There is a lot of stray paperwork on the bridge and in certain cabins, most of which Shaftoe only sees out of the corner of his eye as these areas tend to be the domain of officers. The heads are still littered with their predecessors’ curly black pubic hairs, and the storage lockers are sparsely stocked with exotic Caribbean foodstuffs, much of them rapidly going bad. The cargo hold is filled with bales and bales of coarse brown fibrous material—raw material for life preservers or bran muffins, he supposes.

None of them much cares, because Detachment 2702 has been freezing its ass off in the Far North ever since they left Italy a few months ago, and now they are running around shirtless, of all things. One little airplane ride, that’s all it took, and they were in the balmy Azores. They did not get any R and R there—they went straight from the airfield to the Trinidadian ship, in the dead of night, huddled under tarps in a covered truck. But even the warm air that streamed in underneath the tarp felt like an exotic massage in a tropical whorehouse. And once they steamed out of sight of port, they were allowed to come up abovedecks and take in some sun.

This gives Bobby Shaftoe the opportunity to strike up a few conversations with Enoch Root, partly just for the hell of it and partly so that he can try to figure out this whole
business about the third category of men. Progress comes slowly.

“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as
‘Morphiumsüchtig.’
The verb
suchen
means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.

“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leak
ing
when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”

“So what’s the point?” Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order seems to be forthcoming, because that’s not Root’s agenda. Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.

Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads—and not in the slow way of a man saying “no,” but in the sudden convulsive way of a dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct orders, so men of the first category don’t know what to make of him. But apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as they go, but Waterhouse’s conversation doesn’t go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of
making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you’ll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.

After they’ve been out to sea for a day, the captain (Commander Eden—the same poor son of a bitch who got the job of ramming his previous command into Norway) staggers out of his cabin, making use of every railing or other handhold that comes within flailing distance. He announces in a slurred voice that from here on out, according to orders from On High, anyone going abovedecks must wear black turtlenecks, black gloves, and black ski masks
underneath
their other clothes. These articles are duly issued to the men. Shaftoe gets the skipper really pissed off by asking him three times whether he’s sure he has the order worded correctly. One of the reasons Shaftoe is so highly regarded by the enlisted men is that he knows how to ask these kinds of questions without technically violating the rules of military etiquette. The skipper, to his credit, doesn’t just pull rank and yell at him. He takes Shaftoe back to his cabin and shows him a khaki-covered Army manual, printed in black block letters:

TACTICAL NEGRO IMPERSONATION

VOLUME III: NEGROES OF THE CARIBBEAN

It is a pretty interesting order, even by Detachment 2702 standards. Commander Eden’s drunkenness is also kind of disturbing—not the fact that he is drunk, but the particular
type
of drunk—the sort of drunk of say, a Civil War soldier who knows that the surgeon is about to remove his femur with a bucksaw.

After Shaftoe has finished getting the turtlenecks, gloves, and ski masks passed out to the men, and told them to simmer down and do the lifeboat drills again, Shaftoe finds Root in what passes for the sickbay. Because he figures it is time to have one of those open-ended conversations in which you try to figure out a bunch of shit, Root is his man.

“I know you’re expecting me to ask for morphine, but I’m not gonna,” Shaftoe says. “I just want to talk.”

“Oh,” Root says. “Should I put on my chaplain hat, then?”

“I’m a fucking Protestant. I can talk to God myself whenever I goddamn well feel like it.”

Root is startled and bewildered by Shaftoe’s burst of hostility. “Well, what do you want to talk about, Sergeant?”

“This mission.”

“Oh. I don’t know anything about the mission.”

“Well, let’s try to figure it out, then,” Shaftoe says.

“I thought you were just supposed to follow orders,” Root says.

“I’ll follow ’em, all right.”

“I know you will.”

“But in the meantime I got a lot of time to kill, so I might as well use that time to figure out what the fuck is going on. Now, the skipper says to wear this stuff if we are abovedecks, where we might be seen. But who the hell is going to see us, out here?

“An observation plane?”

“Germans don’t have no observation planes, not out there.”

“Another ship?” Root asks rhetorically, getting into the spirit of the thing.

“We’ll see them at the same time they see us, and that’ll give us plenty of time to put that shit on.”

“It would have to be a U-boat that the skipper is worried about, then.”

“Bingo,” Shaftoe says, “because a U-boat could look at us through its periscope, and we’d never know we were being looked at.”

But that day, they don’t get much further in their attempt to figure out the deeper question of why their commanding officers want them to make themselves look like Negroes in the eyes of German U-boat captains.

The next day, the skipper plants himself on the bridge, where he evidently means to keep a close eye on things. He seems less drunk but no happier. He is wearing a colorful short-sleeved madras shirt over a long-sleeved black turtleneck, and rope sandals over black socks. Every so often he
puts on his black gloves and ski mask and goes out to scan the horizon with binoculars.

The ship continues westwards for a few hours after sunrise, then turns north for a short time, then heads east for an hour, then goes north again, then turns back to the west. They are running a search pattern, and Commander Eden does not appear to be looking forward to finding whatever it is that they are searching for. Shaftoe runs another lifeboat drill, then checks the lifeboats himself, making sure that they are lavishly stocked.

Around noon, a lookout hollers. The ship changes course, headed roughly northeast. The skipper emerges from the bridge and, with an air of sepulchral finality, presents Bobby Shaftoe with a crate of dark brown shoe polish and a sealed envelope containing detailed orders.

Minutes later, the men of Detachment 2702, under orders from Sergeant Shaftoe, strip to their briefs and begin coating themselves with shoe polish. They already own black Shinola, which they are ordered to massage into their hair if it’s not already black. Just another example of how the military screws the little man—Shinola ain’t free.

“Do I look like a Negro yet?” Shaftoe asks Root.

“I have traveled a bit,” Root says, “and you don’t look like a Negro to me. But to a German who has never seen the genuine article, and who’s looking through a periscope—what the heck?” Then: “I take it you’ve figured out the mission?”

“I read the fucking orders,” Shaftoe says guardedly.

They are headed towards a ship. As they get closer, Shaftoe checks it out with a borrowed spyglass, and is startled, but not really surprised, to see that it’s not one ship but two ships side by side. Both of these ships have the long fatal lines of U-boats, but one of them is fatter, and he figures it’s a milchcow.

Beneath his feet, he feels the engines throttling back to a dim idle. The sudden quiet, and the palpable loss of momentum and power, are not reassuring. He gets the usual sick, electric, nauseous, hyperactive feeling that always makes combat such a stimulatin’ experience.

*  *  *

The beat-up Trinidadian steamer has plied the waters of the Atlantic without incident throughout the war to date, running back and forth between African and Caribbean ports, and occasionally venturing as far north as the Azores. Perhaps it has been sighted, from time to time, by a patrolling U-boat, and judged to be not worth spending a torpedo on. But today its luck has changed—for the worse. They have, by random chance, blundered across a milchcow—a supply U-boat of the Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich. The steamer’s normally jaunty crew of shoe-brown Negroes has gathered at the rails to peer across the ocean at this peculiar sight—two ships tied together in the middle of the ocean, going nowhere. But as they draw closer, they realize that one of those ships is a killer, and that the other is flying the battle flag of the Kriegsmarine. Too late, they cut their engines.

There is wild confusion for a minute or so—this might be an interesting spectacle to the lowly, deck-swabbing Negroes, but the smart Negroes up on the bridge know they’re in trouble—they’ve seen something they shouldn’t have. They swing her around to the south and make a run for it! For an hour they dash desperately across the seas. But they are trailed implacably by a U-boat, cutting through the waves like a Bowie knife. The U-boat has its whip aerial up, is monitoring the usual frequencies, and hears the Trinidadian steamer fire up her radio and send out an SOS. In a short stream of dits and dahs, the steamer broadcasts her location—and that of the milchcow, and in so doing taps out her own death warrant.

Pesky
untermenschen
! They’ve really gone and done it now! It won’t be twenty-four hours before the milchcow is located and sunk by the Allies. There is a good chance that a few U-boats will be hounded to their deaths as part of the bargain. That is not a good way to die—being chased across the ocean for several days, suffering the death of a thousand cuts from strafings and bombings. Stuff like this really drives home, to the common ordinary Obertorpedomaat, the wisdom of the Führer’s plan to go out and find all of the people who aren’t Germans and kill them.

Meanwhile, our basic Kapitänleutnant has got to be ask
ing himself: what the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean?