reemerges  and turns
imperceptibly toward a line  of taxis. A driver hurls himself bodily towards
Randy  and  tears his  garment  bag  loose  from  his shoulder. "Ministry of
Information," Randy says.
     In the long run,  it  may, or may not, be a good idea for the Sultanate
of  Kinakuta  to  have  a gigantic  earthquake  ,  volcano  , tsunami ,  and
thermonuclear weapon  proof Ministry of Information with a cavernous sub sub
basement  crammed with  high powered computers and data  switches.  But  the
sultan has decided that it would be sort of cool. He has hired some alarming
Germans to design it, and Goto Engineering to  build it. No  one, of course,
is more familiar with staggering  natural disasters than the Nipponese, with
the  possible  exception  of  some peoples who are now extinct and therefore
unable to bid on jobs like this. They also know a thing or two  about having
the shit bombed out of them, as do the Germans.
     There  are  subcontractors, of  course, and  a plethora of consultants.
Through some miraculous feat of fast talking, Avi managed to land one of the
biggest consulting contracts:  Epiphyte(2)  Corporation  is  doing  "systems
integration"  work,  which means plugging together a bunch  of junk made  by
other  people,  and  overseeing  the  installation  of  all  the  computers,
switches, and data lines.
     The  drive to the site is surprisingly short. Kinakuta City  isn't that
big, hemmed in as it is by steep mountain ranges, and the sultan has endowed
it with plenty of eight lane superhighways. The taxi blasts across the plain
of  reclaimed  land on which the  airport is built, swings  wide around  the
stump of Eliza Peak, ignoring two  exits for Technology City, then turns off
at an unmarked exit. Suddenly they are stuck in a queue of empty dump trucks
Nipponese  behemoths emblazoned  with  the word  GOTO  in  fat  macho  block
letters. Coming towards them is  a stream of other trucks that are identical
except  that these are fully laden with stony rubble.  The taxi driver pulls
onto the right shoulder and zooms past trucks for about half a mile. They're
heading  up Randy's  ears pop once.  This  road  is built on the floor  of a
ravine that climbs up into one  of the mountain ranges. Soon they are hemmed
in  by vertiginous  walls of  green, which  act like a  sponge,  trapping an
eternal cloud of mist, through which sparks of brilliant color are sometimes
visible. Randy can't  tell whether they  are  birds or flowers. The contrast
between  the  cloud forest's lush vegetation and the dirt road, battered  by
the house sized tires of the heavy trucks, is disorienting.
     The  taxi stops. The driver  turns  and looks at him expectantly. Randy
thinks for a moment that the driver has gotten lost and is looking to  Randy
for instructions. The road  terminates  here, in  a parking lot mysteriously
placed in the middle  of  the cloud forest. Randy sees half a dozen big  air
conditioned trailers  bearing the logos of  various  Nipponese,  German, and
American firms; a couple of dozen cars; as many buses. All the accoutrements
of a major construction site are here, plus  a few  extras, like two monkeys
with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there
is no construction site. Just a  wall of green at the end of the road, green
so dark it's almost black.
     The empty  trucks are disappearing  into that darkness.  Full ones come
out, their  headlights emerging from  the mist and  gloom first, followed by
the colorful displays that the drivers have built onto the radiator grilles,
followed by the highlights on their chrome and glass, and finally the trucks
themselves. Randy's eyes adjust, and he  can see now that he is staring into
a cavern, lit up by mercury vapor lamps.
     "You want me to wait?" the driver asks.
     Randy glances  at the  meter, does a  quick conversion, and figures out
that the ride  to this point has cost him a dime. "Yes,"  he says, and  gets
out of the taxi. Satisfied, the driver kicks back and lights up a cigarette.
     Randy stands  there  and  gapes into the cavern  for a  minute,  partly
because it's a hell of a thing to look at and partly because a river of cool
air is draining out  of it, which feels good. Then he trudges across the lot
and goes to the trailer marked "Epiphyte."
     It is staffed by three tiny Kinakutan women who know exactly who he is,
though they've never met him before, and who give  every indication of being
delighted  to  see him. They wear long,  loose wraps  of brilliantly colored
fabric on top of Eddie Bauer turtlenecks to ward off the nordic chill of the
air conditioners. They are all  fearsomely efficient and  poised. Everywhere
Randy  goes in  Southeast  Asia he  runs into women who ought to be  running
General Motors or  something. Before  long  they  have sent  out word of his
arrival via walkie talkie and cell phone, and presented him  with  a pair of
thick  knee  high  boots,  a  hard hat, and a cellular  phone, all carefully
labeled with his name. After a couple  of minutes, a young  Kinakutan man in
hard  hat  and muddy boots  opens the trailer's door, introduces himself  as
"Steve," and  leads Randy into the entrance of  the  cavern.  They  follow a
narrow pedestrian board walk illuminated by a string of caged lightbulbs.
     For the first hundred meters or so, the cave is just a straight passage
barely wide  enough to admit two Goto  trucks and the pedestrian lane. Randy
trails  his hand  along the wall. The stone is rough and  dusty,  not smooth
like the surface of a natural cavern, and he can see fresh gouges wrought by
jackhammers and drills.
     He can  tell by the echo that something's about  to change. Steve leads
him  out into the  cavern proper. It is, well, <I>cavernous.</I> Big enough  for  a
dozen of the huge trucks to  pull around in a circle  to be laden with  rock
and muck. Randy  looks up, trying to find the ceiling, but all he sees  is a
pattern of bluish white  high intensity lights, like the ones in gymnasiums,
perhaps ten meters above. Beyond that it's darkness and mist.
     Steve goes off in search of  something and leaves Randy alone for a few
minutes, which  is  useful since  it takes a long  time for him  to  get his
bearings.
     Some of the cavern wall is smooth and natural; the rest of it is rough,
marking the enlargements  conceived  by  the  engineers  and executed by the
contractor. Likewise, some of the floor is smooth, and not quite level. Some
places it has been drilled and blasted to bring it down,  others it has been
filled in to bring it up.
     This, the main chamber, looks  to be about finished. The offices of the
Ministry of Information will be here. There are two other, smaller chambers,
deeper inside the  mountain,  still being  enlarged. One  will  contain  the
engineering plant (power generators and so forth) and the other will  be the
systems unit.
     A burly blond  man in  a white hard  hat  emerges from  a hole  in  the
chamber wall: Tom Howard, Epiphyte  Corporation's vice president for systems
technology. He takes  his hard hat off and waves  to Randy, then beckons him
over.
     The passageway that leads to the systems chamber is big enough that you
could drive a delivery van down it, but it's not as straight or as level  as
the main entryway. It is  mostly occupied by a conveyor system of terrifying
power and speed, which  is carrying tons of  dripping grey muck out  towards
the  main chamber to be dumped into  the  Goto trucks. In  terms of apparent
cost and sophistication, it beats the same relationship to a normal conveyor
belt  as an  F  15 does to  a  Sopwith  Camel. It is  possible to speak  but
impossible to be  heard when  you are near it, and so Tom  and Randy and the
Kinakutan who  calls  himself  Steve  trudge silently down  the passage  for
another hundred or so meters until they reach the next cavern.
     This one is only large enough to  contain a modest one story house. The
conveyor passes right through the middle of it  and disappears  down another
hole; the muck is coming from  deeper  yet in the mountain.  It's  still too
loud in here to talk. The floor has been leveled by pouring in concrete, and
conduits rise  from it every  few  meters with  orange  cables dangling from
their open tops: optical fiber lines.
     Tom walks towards another opening in the wall. It appears that  several
subsidiary caverns branch away from this one. Tom  leads  Randy  through the
opening, then turns to put a hand on his arm and steady him: they are at the
top of a steep wooden staircase that has been built down  a nearly  vertical
shaft that descends a good five meters or so.
     "What you just saw is the  main switch room," Tom says. "That'll be the
largest  router in the world when it's  finished. We're using some  of these
other chambers to install  computers and mass  storage systems.  The world's
largest RAID, basically, buffered with a big, big RAM cache."
     RAID means  Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; it is a  way to store
vast quantities of information cheaply and reliably, and exactly the kind of
thing you would want to have in a data haven.
     "So  we're still  cleaning  out  some  of  these  other chambers,"  Tom
continues. "We  discovered something, down here, that  I thought  you'd find
interesting." He turns around and begins to descend  the staircase. "Did you
know that  these  caves  were used  as an air raid shelter by the  Japanese,
during the war?"
     Randy has  been  carrying the map page from his photocopied book around
in his pocket. He unfolds it and holds it up near a lightbulb. Sure  enough,
it  includes  a  site,  up in  the mountains,  labeled ENTRANCE TO  AIR RAID
SHELTER &amp; COMMAND POST.
     "And a command post?" Randy says.
     "Yeah. How'd you know that?"
     "Interlibrary loan," Randy says.
     "We didn't know it until we got here and found  all of these old cables
and  electrical shit strung around the place.  We had to tear  it  out so we
could string in our own."
     Randy begins to descend the steps.
     "This shaft was full of rocks," Tom says, "but we could see wires going
down into it, so we knew something had to be down here."
     Randy looks  nervously at the ceiling. "Why  was it  full of rocks? Was
there a cave in?"
     "No," Tom says, "the Japanese soldiers  did it.  They threw  rocks down
the shaft until  it was  full. It took  a dozen of our laborers two weeks to
pull all the rocks out by hand."
     "So, what did the wires lead to?"
     "Lightbulbs,"  Tom   says,   "they  were   just  electrical   wires  no
communications."
     "Then what was it they  were trying to  hide down here?" Randy asks. He
has almost reached the bottom of the staircase, and he can see that there is
a room sized cavity.
     "See for yourself" Tom says, and flicks a light switch.
     The cavity is  about the  size of a  one car  garage, with a nice level
floor. There is a wooden  desk, chair, and filing cabinet, fuzzy with  fifty
years' growth of grey green fungus. And there is a metal footlocker, painted
olive drab, stenciled with Nipponese characters.
     "I  forced the lock  on this  thing," Tom  says. He steps  over  to the
footlocker and flips the lid open. It is filled with books.
     "You were  expecting maybe  gold  bars?"  Tom  says,  laughing  at  the
expression on Randy's face.
     Randy sits down on the  floor  and grabs  his ankles. He's staring open
mouthed at the books in the chest.
     "You okay?" Tom asks. "Heavy, heavy deja vu," Randy says. "From this?"
     "Yeah," Randy says, "I've seen this before."
     "Where?"
     "In my grandmother's attic."


     <B>***</B>


     Randy  finds  his way up  out  of the  network of caverns and  into the
parking lot. The  warm  air feels good  on his skin,  but by the time he has
reached the Epiphyte Corp. trailer to turn in his hard hat and boots, he has
begun  to sweat  again. He bids good  bye to the three women who work there,
and once again is struck by their attentiveness, their solicitousness.  Then
he remembers that he is  not just some interloper. He is a shareholder,  and
an important officer, in the corporation that employs them he is paying them
or oppressing them, take your pick.
     He trudges  across the parking lot, moving  very  slowly, trying not to
get  that metabolic furnace  het up. A  second taxi has pulled alongside the
one  that  is  waiting for Randy, and the drivers  are  leaning out of their
windows shooting the breeze.
     As  Randy  approaches his taxi,  he happens to glance  back towards the
entrance of  the  cavern.  Framed  in  its  dark  maw,  and  dwarfed  by the
mountainous  shapes of  the  Goto  dump  trucks, is  a solitary man,  silver
haired, stooped, but trim and almost  athletic looking in a warmup suit  and
sneakers. He is standing with his back to  Randy, facing the cavern, holding
a long spray of flowers. He seems rooted in the mud, perfectly motionless.
     The front  door of the  Goto  Engineering  trailer flies open.  A young
Nipponese  man in a white  shirt, striped tie, and orange  hard hat descends
the  stairs and moves briskly towards the old man with  the flowers. When he
is still some distance away, he stops, puts his  feet together, and executes
a  bow.  Randy hasn't spent  enough time  around Nipponese to understand the
minutiae, but  this looks  to  him  like an extraordinarily  major  bow.  He
approaches the old man with a bright smile and holds one beckoning hand  out
towards the Goto  trailer. The old  man seems  disoriented  maybe the cavern
doesn't  look  like it  used  to  but  after a  few  moments  he  returns  a
perfunctory bow and allows the young  engineer to lead him out of the stream
of traffic.
     Randy gets in his taxi and says, "Foote Mansion," to the driver.
     He has been harboring an illusion that he will read Sean Daniel McGee's
war memoir slowly and thoroughly, from beginning to end,  but  this  has now
gone the way of all illusions. He hauls the photocopied stack out of his bag
during the  drive to the hotel and begins ruthless  triage. Most  of it  has
nothing to do  with Kinakuta at all it's about McGee's  experiences fighting
in New Guinea and the Philippines. McGee is no Churchill, but he does have a
distant  blarney tinged narrative talent, which  makes  even banal anecdotes
readable. His skills as  raconteur must have made  him  a big hit around the
bar at  the NCOs' Club; a  hundred tipsy sergeants must have  urged  him  to
write some of this shit down if he ever made it back to South Boston alive.
     He did make it back, but unlike most of the other GIs who  were  in the
Philippines on V J  day, he didn't go  straight back home. He took  a little
detour  to  the  Sultanate of Kinakuta, which was still home to  almost four
thousand  Nipponese troops. This explains an oddity about  his book. In most
war memoirs, V E Day or V J Day happens on the last page, or at least in the
last chapter, and then our  narrator goes home and buys a Buick. But V J day
happens about two  thirds of the way through Sean Daniel  McGee's book. When
Randy sets aside  the  pre August 1945 material, an ominously thick stack of
pages remains. Clearly, Sergeant McGee has something to get off his chest.
     The Nipponese garrison on Kinakuta had  long since been bypassed by the
war, and  like the other bypassed garrisons, had turned  what  energies they
had  left  to vegetable  farming,  and  waiting for the  extremely  sporadic
arrivals of  submarines, which, towards  the close of the war, the Nipponese
used to haul the most extremely vital cargo and to ferry certain desperately
needed specialists, like airplane mechanics, from one place to another. When
they got Hirohito's broadcast  from Tokyo, ordering  them to  lay down their
arms, they did so dutifully but (one has to suspect) gladly.
     The only  hard part was finding someone to surrender to. The Allies had
concentrated on planning the invasion of the  Nipponese home islands, and it
took them a while to get troops out to the bypassed garrisons like Kinakuta.
McGee's account of the confusion  in Manila is mordant at this point  in the
book McGee  starts to lose his patience, and  his charm.  He starts to rail.
Twenty pages  later, he's sloshing  ashore  at Kinakuta  City.  He stands at
attention while his company captain accepts the  surrender of  the Nipponese
garrison. He posts a guard around  the entrance  to the  cavern, where a few
diehard  Nips  have  refused  to  surrender.  He  organizes  the  systematic
disarming of the Nipponese soldiers, who are terribly emaciated, and sees to
it  that their rifles and ammunition are dumped into the ocean even as  food
and medical  supplies are  brought ashore.  He helps a  small contingent  of
engineers  string  barbed  wire  around  the  airfield,  turning  it into an
internment camp.
     Randy flips through  all of  this during the drive to  the hotel. Then,
words like "impaled" and  "screams" and "hideous" catch his eye, so he flips
back a few pages and begins to read more carefully.


     <B>***</B>


     The upshot is  that the Nipponese had, since 1940, marched thousands of
tribesmen out  of  the  cool,  clean  interior  of  the island to  its  hot,
pestilential edge, and put  them to work. These slaves had enlarged  the big
cavern where the  Nipponese  built their air raid shelter  and command post;
improved the  road  to the top of Eliza Peak, where  the radar and direction
finding stations were perched; built another runway at the air field; filled
in  more of  the harbor; and died  by  thousands  of malaria,  scrub typhus,
dysentery, starvation, and overwork. These same tribesmen, or their bereaved
brothers, had then watched, from their redoubts high  in  the  mountains, as
Sean Daniel McGee and his comrades came  and stripped the Nipponese of their
armaments and concentrated them all in the airfield, guarded by a  few dozen
exhausted GIs  who were frequently drunk  or asleep.  Those tribesmen worked
around the clock, up there in the jungle, making spears, until the next full
moon illuminated the sleeping Nipponese like a searchlight. Then they poured
out  of the forest  in what  Sean  Daniel  McGee describes as "a  horde," "a
plague of wasps," "a howling army," "a black legion unleashed from the gates
of Hell," "a screaming mass," and in other ways he could never get away with
now. They flattened and disarmed the GI's, but did not hurt them. They flung
tree limbs over the barbed  wire until the fence had  become a highway,  and
then swarmed  into  the  airfield with  their  spears  at the ready. McGee's
account goes  on for about twenty pages, and, as much  as  anything else, is
the story  of  the night that one affable sergeant  from South Boston became
permanently unhinged.
     "Sir?"
     Randy is  startled to realize that the  taxi's door is open.  He  looks
around and finds that  he's under the awning of the Hotel Foote Mansion. The
door is being held open for him by a  wiry  young bellhop  with  a different
look  than  most of  the  Kinakutans Randy has encountered so far. This  kid
perfectly matches Sean Daniel McGee's description  of  a  tribesman from the
interior.
     "Thank  you," Randy  says,  and  makes a  point  of tipping the  fellow
generously.
     His  room is  all  done  up  in furniture designed  in  Scandinavia but
assembled locally from various endangered hardwoods. The view is towards the
interior mountains, but if he goes onto his tiny balcony he can see a bit of
water, a containership being unloaded, and most of the memorial garden built
by the Nipponese on the site of the massacre.
     Several  messages  and faxes  await him:  mostly  the  other members of
Epiphyte Corp., notifying  him that they  have arrived, and letting him know
in which room they can be found. Randy unpacks his bags, takes a shower, and
sends  his shirts down to the  laundry for tomorrow. Then  he  makes himself
comfortable at his little table, boots his laptop, and pulls up the Epiphyte
(2) Corporation Business Plan.


     <B>Chapter 24 LIZARD</B>


     Bobby Shaftoe and  his buddies  are  just out for a nice little morning
drive through the countryside.
     In Italy.
     Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?
     Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It
has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.
     In the good old days, back on Guadalcanal, his commanding officer would
say something like "Shaftoe, eradicate that pillbox!" and from there on out,
Bobby Shaftoe was  a free agent. He could walk, run, swim or crawl. He could
sneak up and lob in a satchel  charge,  or he could stand  off at a distance
and hose the  objective down with a flame thrower. Didn't matter as long  as
he accomplished the goal.
     The  goal  of  this  little  mission  is  completely  beyond  Shaftoe's
comprehension. They awaken him; Lieutenant Enoch  Root;  three  of the other
Marines,  including the  radio  man; and several of  the  SAS blokes  in the
middle of the night, and hustle  them down to one of the  few docks in Malta
that  hasn't  been blasted away by  the  Luftwaffe. A submarine  waits. They
climb aboard and play  cards  for about twenty four hours. Most  of the time
they are on the surface, where submarines can go a hell of a lot faster, but
from time to time they dive, evidently for the best of reasons.
     When next they are allowed up  on the  flat top of the submarine, it is
the middle  of  the  night  again. They are  in a  little cove in a parched,
rugged coastline; Shaftoe can see that much by the moonlight. Two trucks are
waiting  for them. They  open  hatches in the sub's  deck  and begin to take
stuff  out: into one of the trucks, the U.S. Marines  load a bunch  of cloth
sacks bulging with what  appears to be  all kinds  of trash. Meanwhile,  the
British Special Air Service are at work with wrenches, rags, grease and much
profanity  in the back of  the other truck, assembling something from crates
that  they  have  brought  up from  another part of  the submarine.  This is
covered up by  a tarp before Shaftoe can get a good look, but he  recognizes
it as something you'd rather have pointed away from you.
     There are a couple of dark men with mustachioes hanging around the dock
smoking  and arguing  with the skipper  of the submarine. After all  of  the
stuff is unloaded, the skipper appears to pay them with more crates from the
submarine. The men  pry a couple of them open for inspection, and appear  to
be satisfied.
     At  this point Shaftoe still  doesn't even know what continent they are
on. When he first saw the landscape he  figured Northern Africa. When he saw
the men, he figured Turkey or something.
     It is  not until the sun comes up on their little convoy, and (lying in
the back of the  truck on  top of the sacks of trash, peeking out from under
the  tarp) he is  able  to see road signs and  Christian churches,  that  he
realizes it has to  be Italy or Spain. Finally  he sees a sign pointing  the
way to ROMA and figures it's Italy. The sign points away from the midmorning
sun, so  they must be somewhere south  or  southeast of  Rome. They are also
south of some burg called Napoli.
     But he doesn't  spend a  lot of time looking. It is not encouraged. The
truck is being  driven by some fellow who speaks the language, and who stops
from time to time to converse with the natives. Some of the time this sounds
like  friendly  banter. Sometimes  it  sounds  like arguments  over  highway
etiquette.  Sometimes it is  quieter,  more guarded.  Shaftoe  figures  out,
slowly, that during these  exchanges the truck driver is  bribing someone to
let them go through.
     He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle
of the greatest war in history in a country run by  belligerent Fascists for
God's  sake  two truckloads of  heavily  armed enemy soldiers can just drive
around freely, protected  by  nothing except a couple of  five dollar tarps.
Criminy!  What kind of  a  sorry operation is this? He feels like leaping to
his feet, casting the tarp aside, and giving  these  Eyties a good  dressing
down. The whole place needs a good scrubbing with  toothbrushes anyway. It's
like these people aren't even trying. Now,  the Nips, think of them what you
will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.
     He resists  the temptation to  upbraid  the Italians. He thinks it goes
against the orders he had thoroughly memorized  before the shock of figuring
out  that he was driving around  in an Axis country jangled everything loose
from his  brain. And if  they  hadn't come from the lips of  Colonel Chattan
himself the chap or bloke who's the commanding officer of Detachment 2702 he
wouldn't have believed them anyway.
     They are going to be putting  in  some bivouac time. They  are going to
play a lot of cards for a while. During this time, the radio man is going to
be very busy. This phase of the operation might last as long  as a week.  At
some point, it is likely that strenuous, concerted efforts to kill them will
be made  by  a  whole lot  of  Germans and,  if  they happen  to  be feeling
impetuous that day,  Italians. When this happens,  they are  to  send  out a
radio message, torch  the joint, drive to a certain field that passes for an
airstrip, and be picked up by those jaunty SAS flyboys.
     Shaftoe didn't believe a word of it at first. He pegged it as some kind
of  British  humor  thing, some  kind of  practical  joke/hazing ritual.  In
general  he doesn't know  what to make of  the Brits because they appear (in
his personal observation) to  be  the  only other people on the face  of the
earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of  humor. He has heard rumors
that some Eastern  Europeans can do it, but he hasn't  met  any of them, and
they don't have much to yuk it up about at the  moment. In any case, he  can
never quite make out when these Brits are joking.
     Any  thought  that  this was  just a  joke evaporated when he  saw  the
quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an
organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the
military  is  infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And  most of
the  weapons  they  do  pass out  are for  shit. It is  for this reason that
Marines have long found it necessary to buy their  own tommy guns from home:
the Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won't give them the stuff
they need!
     But this Detachment 2702  thing is  a whole different outfit. Even  the
grunts are carrying  trench brooms!  And if that didn't get their attention,
the cyanide capsules sure did. And the  lecture from Chattan  on the correct
way  to blow  your  own  head off  ("you  would  be astonished  at how  many
otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure").
     Now, Shaftoe realizes  that there is  an unspoken codicil to  Chattan's
orders:  oh, yeah,  and if  any of the Italians, who actually <I>live</I> in Italy,
and  who <I>run</I> the  place, and who are <I>Fascists</I> and who  are at <I>war</I> with us if
any of them <I>notice</I> you and, for some  reason, <I>object</I>  to  your little  plan,
whatever the <I>fuck</I> it  is, then  by all means kill  them. And if that doesn't
work,  please,  by  all means, kill  yourself, because you'll probably  do a
neater job of it than the Fascists will. Don't forget suntan lotion!
     Actually, Shaftoe doesn't  mind this mission. It is certainly  no worse
than  Guadalcanal. What bothers him  (he decides, making himself comfortable
on the sacks  of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not
understanding the purpose of it all.
     The rest of the platoon may or  may not be dead; he thinks he can still
hear some of them crying out, but it's hard to tell between  the pounding of
the  incoming surf  and the relentless  patter of  the machine gun.  Then he
realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue
to fire their gun.
     Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies.  He
is the only one who has a chance.
     It  is  at  this  point  that  Shaftoe  makes his Big  Decision. It  is
surprisingly easy but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.
     He crawls  along  the log to the point that is  closest to  the machine
gun. Then he  draws  a few deep  breaths  in a row, rises to a  crouch,  and
vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet
shaped muzzle flash of the  machine gun tesselated  by the black grid of the
net  that  they put up  to reject incoming  grenades.  It is  all remarkably
clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.
     Suddenly he realizes they are  still firing the gun, not because any of
his buddies are alive,  but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that
they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.
     Then the muzzle  swings abruptly towards him he has been sighted. He is
in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they
will sweep it with fire  until  he is  dead. Bobby Shaftoe  plants his feet,
aims his  .45 into the cave, and begins pulling  the  trigger. The barrel of
the machine gun is pointing at him now.
     But it does not fire.
     His .45  clicks. It's empty. Everything is silent except  for the surf,
and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.
     The voice that is doing the  screaming is unfamiliar.  It's  not one of
Shaftoe's buddies.
     A  Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above
the level of Shaftoe's head. The pupil of Shaftoe's right eye, the sights of
his revolver, and this Nip  are all arranged briefly along the same line for
a  moment, during  which  Shaftoe pulls the  trigger  a  couple of times and
almost certainly scores a hit.
     The  Imperial  Marine  gets  caught  in the netting and plunges  to the
ground in front of him.
     A   second  Nip  dives  out  of  the  cave  a  moment  later,  grunting
incoherently, apparently speechless with horror.  He lands wrong and  breaks
one of his leg  bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He  begins running  towards
the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on  the bad leg. He completely ignores
Shaftoe. There  is terrible bleeding from his neck and  shoulder, and  loose
chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.
     Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and
plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.
     Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way
and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise
of the jungle.
     Then he sees  the flash of red  again, and it  disappears again. It was
shaped like  a  sharpened  Y. It was shaped  like the  forked  tongue  of  a
reptile.
     Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave
and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake  and topple
as it moves.
     It  is out, free  and clear,  on the beach. It is low  to  the  ground,
moving on  all fours. It  pauses for a moment and flicks its  tongue towards
the Imperial Marine  who is  now  hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty
feet distant.
     Sand erupts  into the air, like smoke from the burning  tires of a drag
racer, and  the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance
to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of
the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then  the lizard  is  dragging
the dead Nip  back up onto  the land.  It stretches him out there  among the
dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and
finally starts to eat him.
     "Sarge! We're here!" says Private Flanagan.  Before he even  wakes  up,
Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking  in  a normal voice and does
not  sound  scared  or  excited.  Wherever  "here"  is, it's  not  someplace
dangerous. They are not under attack.
     Shaftoe opens his eyes just as  the tarp is being peeled back from  the
open top of the  truck. He stares straight up  into a blue  Italian sky torn
around  the edges by the scrabbling branches of  desperate trees. "Shit!" he
says.
     "What's wrong, Sarge?"
     "I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.


     <B>***</B>


     Their new home  turns out  to be an old stone farm building in an olive
farm, plantation, orchard or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives
are  grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by
would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly
collapsed into the building under the killing weight of  its red clay tiles,
and the  windows and  doorways  yawn,  open  to  the elements.  It's  a  big
structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are
able to drive one  of the trucks inside and conceal it from airborne snoops.
They unload the  sacks of trash from the other  truck. Then  the Italian guy
drives it away and never comes back.
     Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy  clambering up  olive trees
and stringing  copper wires around the place. The blokes of the  SAS  go out
and  reconnoiter while  the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash
and start spreading them around. There are several  months' worth of Italian
newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly  refolded.
Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in  pencil.
Chattan's orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe's brain; he heaps
these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest  ones  first, newer ones
on top.
     There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully  smoked to
the nub. They  are of a  Continental brand  unfamiliar to  Shaftoe.  Like  a
farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries  this sack around the premises tossing
handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where  people  will
actually work:  Corporal  Benjamin's table and another makeshift  table they
have  set up  for  eating and playing poker.  Likewise with a salad of  wine
corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one
by  one,  into a dark and unused  corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe  can see
that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over,
and flings  those bottles like a Green Bay  Packer quarterback firing spiral
passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.
     The blokes come  back from reconnoitering  and there  is a  swappage of
roles; the Marines now  go out to familiarize themselves  with the territory
while  the SAS continue  unloading garbage. In an hour's worth  of wandering
around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this
olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north south.
To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks
suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after  a few miles, down
towards  the  sea.  To the  north,  the plateau  dead ends  in  some  nasty,
impassable  scrubland,  and  to  the  south  it  opens  up on  more  farming
territory.
     Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as
possible to the barn. Toward sunset,  Shaftoe finds  it: a rocky outcropping
on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour's walk northeast of the  barn and
maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.
     He and his Marines almost don't find their way back to the barn because
it has been  so well  hidden  by this point. The  SAS  have put  up blackout
shades over every opening, even  the  small chinks in the collapsed roof. On
the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space.
With  all  of the  litter (now  enhanced  with  chicken  feathers and bones,
tonsorial trimmings  and  orange  peels)  it looks like they've been  living
there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.
     Corporal  Benjamin has about a  third of the  place to himself. The SAS
blokes keep calling  him a lucky sod. He has his transmitter set up now, the
tubes  glowing warmly, and he has an unbelievable amount of  paperwork. Most
of it's old and fake, just like the cigarette butts. But after  dinner, when
the sun is down not only here but in London, he begins tapping out the Morse
code.
     Shaftoe knows Morse code, like  everyone else in the place. As the guys
and  the blokes sit around the table, anteing up for what promises to  be an
all  night Hearts  marathon,  they  keep  one  ear  cocked  towards Corporal
Benjamin's keying. What they hear  is gibberish. Shaftoe goes and looks over
Benjamin's shoulder  at one point, just to verify that  he  isn't crazy, and
sees he's right:
     XYHEL ANAOG GFQPL TWPKI AOEUT
     and so on and so forth, for pages and pages.
     The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway
with a couple of barrels of genuine  U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure
certified  Shit. As  per  Chattan's  instructions,  they pour the  shit in a
dollop at a time, throwing in handfuls of crumpled  Italian newspapers after
each dollop to make it  look like it got there  naturally. With the possible
exception  of  being interviewed  by Lieutenant Reagan,  this  is the  worst
nonviolent job Shaftoe has ever had to do in the service of his  country. He
gives  everyone the rest  of  the day off, except for Corporal Benjamin, who
stays up until two in the morning banging out random gibberish.
     The next day they make  the observation post look good. They take turns
marching up there and back, up and back, up and back, wearing  a  trail into
the ground, and they scatter some cigarette butts and beverage containers up
there along with  some  general issue shit and  general issue piss. Flanagan
and  Kuehl hump a footlocker up there and hide it in the  lee  of a volcanic
rock. The locker contains books of silhouettes of various Italian and German
naval  and merchant ships,  and similar spotter's  guides for  airplanes, as
well as some binoculars, telescopes,  and camera equipment,  empty notepads,
and pencils.
     Even though Sergeant  Bobby Shaftoe is for the  most part  running this
show, he  finds  it  uncannily difficult  to arrange  a  moment  alone  with
Lieutenant Enoch Root. Root has been avoiding him  ever since their eventful
flight on  the Dakota. Finally,  on about the fifth day, Shaftoe tricks him;
he and a small contingent leave Root  alone  at the  observation point, then
Shaftoe doubles back and traps him there.
     Root  is  startled  to  see  Shaftoe come  back,  but  he  doesn't  get
particularly  upset.  He lights  up an  Italian cigarette and offers Shaftoe
one. Shaftoe  finds, irritatingly enough, that he is the nervous one. Root's
as cool as always.
     "Okay," Shaftoe  says, "what did  you  see? When you looked through the
papers we planted on the dead butcher what did you see?"
     "They were all written in German," Root says.
     "Shit!"
     "Fortunately,"  Root  continues,  "I  am  somewhat  familiar  with  the
language."
     "Oh, yeah your mom was a Kraut, right?"
     "Yes, a medical missionary," Root says,  "in case that helps dispel any
of your preconceptions about Germans."
     "And your Dad was Dutch."
     "That is correct."
     "And they both ended up on Guadalcanal why?"
     "To help those who were in need."
     "Oh, yeah."
     "I also learned some Italian along the  way. There's a lot of it  going
around in the Church."
     "Fuck me," Shaftoe exclaims.
     "But  my  Italian  is  heavily  informed by  the  Latin that my  father
insisted that I learn. So I would probably sound rather old fashioned to the
locals. In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth century alchemist
or something."
     "Could you sound like a priest? They'd eat that up."
     "If  worse comes  to worst," Root allows, "I will try hitting them with
some God talk and we'll see what happens."
     They both puff on their  cigarettes and look  out across the large body
of water before them, which Shaftoe has learned is called the Bay of Naples.
"Well anyway," Shaftoe says, "what did it say on those papers?"
     "A lot of detailed  information about military  convoys between Palermo
and Tunis. Evidently stolen from classified German sources," Root says.
     "Old convoys, or..."
     "Convoys  that were still  in  the future,"  Root says  calmly. Shaftoe
finishes his  cigarette,  and does not speak for a  while. Finally  he says,
"Fuckin' weird." He stands up and begin