Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Literature, #U.S.A., #American Literature, #21st Century, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #v.5, #Amazon.com, #Retail
Finally, when my GPS revealed that we were less than ten km. from our mysterious destination, a local instructed us to wait in a nearby village. We remained there for a day & a night resting up and reading books (DMS is never without a milk crate of techno-thrillers) until, at dawn, we were approached by a trio of very young, short men, one of whom carried an
AK-47. He and his brethren climbed on the roof of THE GRACE OF GOD and we proceeded into a jungle track so narrow that I would not have pegged it even as a footpath. A couple of km. into the jungle we reached a point where we spent more time pushing the jeepney than riding in it. Shortly thereafter we left Bong-Bong and Fidel and one of the duffels behind, the four of us taking turns humping the two other duffels. I consulted the GPS & verified that, although we had for a time (alarmingly) moved away from the Destination, we were now moving toward it again. We were eight thousand m(eters) away and proceeding at a rate that varied between about five hundred and a thousand m per hour, depending on whether we were moving steeply uphill or steeply downhill. It was around noon. Those of you with even rudimentary math skills will have anticipated that when the sun went down we were still a few thousand meters away.
The three Filipinos———our guides, guards, captors, or whatever they were———wore the obligatory U.S. t-shirts which make it so easy, nowadays, to underestimate cultural differences. They had not yet, however, attained transethnicity. While in town they were shod in flip-flops, but in the jungle they went barefoot (I have owned pairs of shoes less durable than the calluses on their feet). They spoke a language that apparently had zero in common with the Tagalog I’d heard (“Tagalog” is the old name; the government is ragging on people to call it “Pilipina,” as if to imply that it is in some sense a common language of the archipelago, which, as these guys demonstrated, is
not the case). DMS had to converse with them in English. At one point he gave one a throwaway plastic ballpoint pen and their faces absolutely lit up. Then we had to scrounge up two more pens for his companions. It was like Christmas. Progress halted for several minutes while they marveled at the pens’ handy clicking mechanisms and doodled on the palms of their hands. The American t-shirts were, in other words, not worn as Americans wear them but in the same spirit that the Queen of England wore the exotic Koh-I-Noor Diamond on her crown. Not for the first time I was overtaken by a strong not-exactly-in-Kansas feeling.
We slogged through the inevitable late-afternoon thunderstorm and kept moving into the night. DMS produced U.S. Army MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) from the duffels, only a couple of weeks past their stenciled expiration dates. The Filipino men found these nearly as exciting as the ballpoint pen, and saved the disposable foil trays for later use as roofing material. We started slogging again. The moon came out, which represented a bit of luck. I fell down a couple of times and banged myself up on trees, which ended up being a good thing because it put me into a state of mild shock, dulling the pain and jacking me up on adrenaline. Our guides, at one point, seemed a little uncertain as to which way they should go. I took a fix with the GPS (using the screen’s nightlight function) and established that we were no more than fifty meters away from the destination, almost too small an error for my GPS to resolve. In any event, it told us roughly which direction to pro
ceed, and we trudged through the trees for another few moments. The guides became animated and very cheerful———finally they had gotten their bearings, they knew where we were. I bumped into something heavy, cold, and immovable that nearly broke my knee. I reached down to touch it, expecting to find a rock outcropping, but instead felt something smooth and metallic. It seemed to be a stack of smaller units, maybe comparable in size to loaves of bread. “Is this what we’re looking for?” I asked. DMS turned on a battery-powered lantern and whipped the beam around in my direction.
I was instantly blinded by a thigh-high stack of gold bars, about a meter and a half on a side, sitting out in the middle of the jungle, unmarked and unguarded.
DMS came over and sat down on top of it and lit a cigar. After a while, we counted the bars and measured them. They are trapezoidal in cross-section, about 10 cm wide and 10 high, and about 40 cm in length. This enabled us to estimate their mass at about 75 kg. each, which works out to 2,400 troy ounces. Since gold is normally measured in troy ounces and not in kilograms (!) I’m going to make a wild guess that these bars were intended to weigh an even 2,500 troy ounces apiece. At current rates ($400/troy oz.) this means each bar is worth a million dollars. There are 5 layers of bars in the stack, each layer consisting of 24 bars, and so the value of the stack is $120 million. Both the mass estimate and the value estimate presume that the bars are nearly pure gold. I took a rubbing of the stamp from one of
the bars, which bears the mark of the Bank of Singapore. Each bar is marked with a unique serial number and I copied down as many of those as I could see.
Then we went back to Manila. All along the way, I tried to imagine the logistics of getting even a single one of those gold bars from the jungle out to the nearest bank where it could be turned into something useful, like cash.
Let me transition to a Q&A format here.
Q: Randy, I get the feeling that you are about to lay out in detail all of the hassles that would be involved in moving this gold overland, so let’s just cut to the chase and talk about helicopters.
A: There is no place for a helicopter to land. Terrain is extremely rugged. The nearest sufficiently flat place is about one km. away. It would have to be cleared. In Vietnam this was accomplished using “blockbuster” bombs, but this is probably not an option here. Trees would have to be cut down, creating a gap in the jungles conspicuous from the air.
Q: Who cares if it’s conspicuous? Who’s going to see it?
A: As should be obvious from my anecdote, the people who control this gold have connections in Manila. We may assume that the area is overflown by the Philippine Air Force regularly, and kept under radar surveillance.
Q: What would be involved in getting the bars to the nearest decent road?
A: They would have to be carried over the jungle trails I have described. Each bar weighs as much as a full-grown man.
Q: Couldn’t they be cut up into smaller pieces?
A: DMS rates it as unlikely that the current owners would permit this.
Q: Is there any chance of smuggling the gold through the military checkpoints?
A: Obviously not in the case of a mass shipment. The gold weighs a total of around ten tons, and would require a truck that could not negotiate most of the roads we saw. Concealing ten tons of goods from the inspectors at these checkpoints is not possible.
Q: How about smuggling the bars out one at a time?
A: Still very tricky. Might be possible to hike the bars out to an intermediate point somewhere, melt or chop them down, and somehow secrete them in the body of a jeepney or other vehicle, then drive the vehicle to Manila and extract the gold. This operation would have to be repeated a hundred times. Driving the same vehicle past one of these checkpoints a hundred (or even two) times would strike them as, to put it mildly, odd. Even if this were possible, there is the payment issue.
Q: What is the payment issue?
A: Obviously the people who control the gold want to be paid for it. Paying them in more gold, or in precious gems, would be ludicrous. They do not have bank accounts. They have to be paid in Philippine pesos. Anything bigger than about a 500-peso note is useless in this area. A 500-peso note is worth about $20, and so it would be necessary to bring six million of them into the jungle to perform the transaction. Based on some rudimentary calculations I have made here using a mechanic’s caliper and the contents of my wallet, the stack of 500-peso notes
would be about (please wait while I switch my calculator over to the “scientific notation” mode) 25,000 inches high. Or, if you prefer the metric system, something like two-thirds of a kilometer. If you stacked the bills a meter high, you would need six or seven hundred such stacks, which if jammed close together would cover an area about three meters on a side. Basically we are talking about a large Ryder box truck full of money. This would have to be transported into the middle of the jungle, and obviously, melting down cash and secreting it inside of a truck is not an option.
Q: Since the military seems to be the big obstacle here, why not simply cut a deal with them? Let them keep a big cut of the proceeds in exchange for not hassling us.
A: Because the money would go to the NPA which would use it to buy weapons for the purpose of killing people in the military.
Q: There must be some way to use the value of this gold to leverage some kind of extraction operation.
A: The gold is worthless to a bank until it has been assayed. Until then it is only a blurry Polaroid of a stack of yellow objects in what seems to be a jungle. In order to perform an assay you need to go into the jungle, find the gold, bore out a sample, and transport it safely back to a large city. But this proves nothing. Even if the potential backers believe that your assay really came from the jungle (i.e., that you did not switch samples along the way) all they know now is the purity of one end of one bar in the stack. Basically it is not possible to obtain
full value for this gold until the entire stack has been extracted and taken to a vault where it can be systematically assayed.
Q: Could you maybe just get the gold to some local bank and then sell it at steep discount, so that the burden of transporting it would be on someone else’s shoulders?
A: DMS relates the tale of one such transaction, in a provincial town in north Luzon, which was interrupted when local entrepreneurs literally blew one of the bank’s walls off with dynamite, came in, and grabbed both the gold and the cash that was going to be used to pay for the gold. DMS asserts he would rather slit his own throat quietly than walk into a small-town bank with anything worth more than a few tens of thousands of dollars.
Q: Is the situation basically impossible then?
A: It is basically impossible.
Q: Then what was the point of the whole exercise?
A: To come full circle to the first thing DMS said. It was to send us a message.
Q: What is the message?
A: That money is not worth having if you can’t spend it. That certain people have a lot of money that they badly want to spend. And that if we can give them a way to spend it, through the Crypt, that these people will be very happy, and conversely that if we screw up they will be very sad, and that whether they are happy or sad they will be eager to share these emotions with us, the shareholders and management team of Epiphyte Corp.
And now I am going to e-mail this to all of you and then summon the flight attendant and demand the array of alcoholic beverages I so richly deserve. Cheers.
—R
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
Current meatspace coordinates, hot from the GPS receiver card in my laptop:
27 degrees, 14.95 minutes N latitude 143 degrees, 17.44 minutes E longitude
Nearest geographical feature: the Bonin Islands
J
ULIETA HAS RETREATED SOMEWHERE FAR UP BE
yond the Arctic Circle. Shaftoe has been pursuing her like a dogged Mountie, slogging across the sexual tundra on frayed snowshoes and leaping heroically from floe to floe. But she remains about as distant, and about as reachable, as Polaris. She has spent more time lately with Enoch Root than with him—and Root’s a celibate priest or something.
Or is he?!
On the few occasions Bobby Shaftoe has actually gotten Julieta to crack a smile, she has immediately begun to ask difficult questions: Did you have sex with Glory, Bobby? Did you use a condom? Is it possible that she might have become pregnant? Can you absolutely rule out the possibility that you have a child in the Philippines? How old would he or she be right now? Let’s see, you fucked her on Pearl Harbor Day, so the child would have been born in early September of ’42. Your child would be fourteen, fifteen months old now—perhaps just learning to walk! How precious!
It always gives Shaftoe the willies when tough girls like Julieta get all fluttery and slip into baby talk. At first, he figures it’s all a ruse to keep him at arm’s length. This smug
gler’s daughter, this atheist guerilla intellectual—what does she care about some girl in Manila? Snap out of it, woman! There’s a war on!
Then he comes up with a better explanation: Julieta’s pregnant.
The day begins with the sound of a ship’s horn in the harbor at Norrsbruck. The town is a jumble of neat, wide houses packed onto a spur of rock that sticks out into the Gulf of Bothnia, forming the southern shore of a slender but deep inlet lined with wharves. Half the town now turns out beneath an unsettling, turbulent peach-and-salmon dawn to see this quaint harbor being deflowered by an inexorable steel phallus. It comes complete with spirochetes: several score men in black dress uniforms stand on the top of the thing, lined up neat as stanchions. As the blast of the horn fades away, echoing back and forth between the stony ridges, it becomes possible to hear the spirochetes
singing:
belting out a bawdy German sea chanty which Bobby Shaftoe last heard during a convoy attack in the Bay of Biscay.
Two other people in Norrsbruck will recognize that tune. Shaftoe looks for Enoch Root in his church cellar, but he is not present, his bed and lamp are cold. Maybe the local chapter of
Societas Eruditorum
holds its meetings before dawn—or maybe he’s found another welcoming bed. But trusty old Günter Bischoff can be seen, leaning out the window of his seaside garret, elbows in the air and his trusty Zeiss 735 binoculars clamped over his face, scanning the lines of the invading ship.
The Swedes stand with arms folded for a minute or so, regarding this apparition. Then they make some kind of collective decision that it does not exist, that nothing has happened here. They turn their backs, pad grumpily into their houses, begin to boil coffee. Being neutral is no less strange, no less fraught with awkward compromises, than being a belligerent. Unlike most of Europe, they can rest assured that the Germans are not here to invade them or sink their ships. On the other hand, the vessel’s presence is a violation of their sovereign territory and they ought to run down there with pitchforks and flintlocks and fight the Huns
off. On the third hand, this boat was probably made out of Swedish iron.
Shaftoe fails, at first, to recognize the German vessel as a U-boat because it is shaped all wrong. A regular U-boat is shaped like a surface vessel, except longer and skinnier. Which is to say it has a sort of V-shaped hull and a flat deck, studded with guns, from which rises a gigantic conning tower that is covered with junk: ack-ack guns, antennas, stanchions, safety lines, spray shields. The Krauts would put cuckoo clocks up there too if they had room. As a regular U-boat plunges through the waves, thick black smoke spews from its diesel engines.
This one is just a torpedo as long as a football field. Instead of a conning tower there’s a streamlined bulge on the top, hardly noticeable. No guns, no antennas, no cuckoo clocks; the whole thing’s as smooth as a river rock. And it’s not making smoke or noise, just venting a little bit of steam. The diesels don’t rumble. The fucking thing doesn’t even seem to
have
diesels. Instead there is a dim whine, like the sound that came out of Angelo’s Messerschmidt.
Shaftoe intercepts Bischoff just as the latter is coming down the steps of the inn carrying a duffel bag the size of a dead sea lion. He’s panting with exertion, or maybe excitement. “That’s the one,” he gasps. He sounds like he’s talking to himself, but he’s speaking English, so he must be addressing Shaftoe. “That’s the rocket.”
“Rocket?”
“Runs on rocket fuel—hydrogen peroxide, eighty-five percent. Never has to recharge its verdammt batteries! Clocks twenty-eight knots—
submerged!
That’s my baby.” He’s as fluttery as Julieta.
“Can I help you carry anything?”
“Footlocker—upstairs,” Bischoff says.
Shaftoe stomps up the narrow staircase to find Bischoff’s room stripped to the bedsprings, and a pile of gold coins on the table, weighing down a thank-you note addressed to the owners. The black locker rests in the middle of the floor like a child’s coffin. A wild hollering noise reaches his ears through the open window.
Bischoff is down there, heading for the pier beneath his
duffel bag, and his men, up on the rocket, have caught sight of him. The U-boat has launched a dinghy, which is surging towards the pier like a racing scull.
Shaftoe heaves the locker up onto his shoulder and trudges down the stairs. It reminds him of shipping out, which is what Marines are supposed to do, and which he has not actually done in a long time. Vicarious excitement is not as good as the real thing, he finds.
He follows Bischoff’s tracks through a film of snow, down the cobblestone street, and onto the pier. Three men in black scramble out of the launch, onto the ladder, up to the pier. They salute Bischoff and then two of them embrace him. Shaftoe’s close enough and the salmon light is bright enough, that he can recognize these two: members of Bischoff’s old crew. The third guy is taller, older, gaunter, grimmer, better-dressed, more highly decorated. All in all, more of a Nazi.
Shaftoe can’t believe himself. When he picked up the locker he was just being considerate to his friend Günter—an ink-stained retiree with pacifist leanings. Now, all of a sudden, he’s aiding and abetting the enemy! What would his fellow Marines think of him if they knew?
Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. He is actually participating in the conspiracy that he, Bischoff, Rudy von Hacklheber, and Enoch Root created in the basement of that church. He comes to a dead stop and slams the locker down right there, in the middle of the pier. The Nazi is startled by the noise and raises his blue eyes in the direction of Shaftoe, who prepares to stare him down.
Bischoff notices this. He turns towards Shaftoe and shouts something cheerful in Swedish. Shaftoe has the presence of mind to break eye contact with the chilly German. He grins and nods back. This conspiracy thing is going to be a real pain in the ass if it means backing down from casual fistfights.
A couple of sailors have come up the ladder now to handle Bischoff’s luggage. One of them strides down the pier to get the footlocker. Shaftoe recognizes him, and he recognizes Shaftoe, at the same moment. Damn! The guy’s surprised, but not unpleasantly so, to see Shaftoe here. Then
something occurs to him and his face freezes up in horror and his eyes dart sideways, back toward the tall Nazi. Shit! Shaftoe turns his back on all of this, makes like he’s strolling back into town.
“Jens! Jens!” Bischoff hollers, and then says something else in Swedish. He’s running after Shaftoe. Shaftoe keeps his back prudently turned until Bischoff throws one arm around him with a final “JENS!” Then, sotto voce, in English: “You have my family’s address. If I don’t see you in Manila, let’s get in touch after the war.” He starts pounding Shaftoe on the back, pulls some paper money out of his pocket, stuffs it into Shaftoe’s hand.
“Goddamn it, you’ll see me there,” Shaftoe says. “What is this shit for?”
“I am tipping the nice Swedish boy who carried my luggage,” Bischoff says.
Shaftoe sucks his teeth and grimaces. He can tell he is not cut out for this cloak-and-dagger nonsense. Questions come to his mind, among them
How is that big torpedo full of rocket fuel safer than what you were riding around in before?
but he just says, “Good luck, I guess.”
“Godspeed, my friend,” Bischoff says. “This will remind you to check your mail.” Then he punches Shaftoe in the shoulder hard enough to raise a three-day welt, turns around, and begins walking towards salt water. Shaftoe walks towards snow and trees, envying him. The next time he looks at the harbor, fifteen minutes later, the U-boat is gone. Suddenly this town feels just as cold, empty, and out in the middle of nowhere as it really is.
He’s been getting his mail at the Norrsbruck post office, general delivery. When the place opens up a couple of hours later, Shaftoe’s waiting by the door, venting steam from his nostrils, like he’s rocket-fuel-powered. He receives a letter from his folks in Wisconsin, and one large envelope, posted yesterday from somewhere in Norrsbruck, Sweden, bearing no return address but inscribed in Günter Bischoff’s hand.
It is full of notes and documents concerning the new U-boat, including one or two letters personally signed by John Huncock himself. Shaftoe’s German is slightly better than it was before he went on his own U-boat ride, but he
still can’t follow most of it. He sees a lot of numbers there, a lot of technical-looking stuff.
It is your basic priceless naval intelligence. Shaftoe wraps the papers up carefully, sticks them in his pants, begins walking up the beach towards the Kivistik residence.
It is a long, cold, wet trudge. He has plenty of time to assess his situation: stuck in a neutral country on the other side of the world from where he wants to be. Alienated from the Corps. Lumped in with a vague conspiracy.
Technically speaking, he has been AWOL for several months now. But if he suddenly turns up at the American Embassy in Stockholm, carrying these documents, all will be forgiven. So this is his ticket home. And “home” is a very large country that includes places like Hawaii, which is closer to Manila than is Norrsbruck, Sweden.
Otto’s boat is fresh in from Finland, bobbing on an incoming tide, tied up to his bird’s nest of a jetty. The boat, he knows, is still loaded up with whatever Finns are exchanging for coffee and bullets at the moment. Otto himself is sitting in the cabin, drinking coffee naturally, red-eyed and plumb wrung out.
“Where’s Julieta?” Shaftoe says. He’s starting to worry that she moved back to Finland or something.
Otto turns a bit greyer every time he drives his tub across the Gulf of Bothnia. He looks especially grey today. “Did you see that monster?” he says, then shakes his head in a combination of wonderment, disgust, and world-weariness that can only be attained by hardened Finns. “Those German bastards!”
“I thought they were protecting you from the Russians.”
This elicits a long thunder-roll of dark, chortling laughter from Otto.
“Zdrastuytchye, tovarishch!”
he finally says.
“Say what?”
“That means, ‘Welcome, comrade’ in Russian,” Otto says. “I have been practicing it.”
“You should be practicing the Pledge of Allegiance,” Shaftoe says. “Soon as we get done taking down the Germans, I figure we’ll just kick her into high gear and beat the Russkies all the way back to Siberia.”
More laughter from Otto, who knows naïveté when he
sees it, but is not above finding it charming. “I have buried the German air-turbine in Finland,” he says. “I will sell it to the Russians or the Americans—whoever gets there first.”
“Where’s Julieta?” Shaftoe asks again. Speaking of naïveté.
“In town,” Otto says. “Shopping.”
“So you’ve got cash.”
Otto looks seasick. Tomorrow is payday.
Then Shaftoe’s going to be on a bus, headed for Stockholm.
Shaftoe sits down across from Otto and they drink coffee and talk about weather, smuggling, and the relative merits of various small fully automatic weapons for a while. Actually, what they are talking about is whether Shaftoe will get paid, and how much.
In the end, Otto issues a guarded promise to pay, provided that Julieta does not spend all of the money on her “shopping” trip, and provided that Shaftoe unloads the boat.
So Bobby Shaftoe spends the rest of the day carrying Soviet mortars, rusty tins of caviar, bricks of black tea from China, Lapp folk art, a couple of icons, cases of pine-flavored Finnish schnapps, coils of vile sausages, and bundles of pelts up out of the hold of Otto’s boat, down the dock, into the cabin.
Meanwhile, Otto goes into town, and still has not come back long after night has fallen. Shaftoe sacks out in the cabin, tosses and turns for about four hours, sleeps for about ten minutes, and then is awakened by a knocking at the door.
He approaches the door on hands and knees, gets the Suomi machine pistol out of its hiding place, then crawls to the far end of the cabin and exits silently through a trap door in the floor. There is ice on the rocks below, but his bare feet give him enough traction to clamber around and get a good view of whoever is standing there, pounding on the door.
It is Enoch Root himself, nowhere to be seen this last week or so.
“Yo!” Shaftoe says.