a pump shotgun.
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe rates the probability of frogman attack rather low
because the gold in the pamboat is only worth two and half million dollars,
an amount that hardly rates anything as elaborate, and expensive, as a
seaborne assault. John Wayne needs to be there in case someone gets the
mistaken impression that they've somehow managed to pack ten or twenty times
that much gold into the pamboat. This seems improbable from a hydrodynamics
standpoint. But Doug says that overestimating the intelligence of the enemy
is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. He, Tom Howard, and
Jackie Woo are up the hill guarding the roadhead with assault rifles. Tom's
been positively strutting. All of his fantasies are coming true in this
little tableau.
A large plastic box thuds into the sand, breaks open, and spills out a
mess of shattered coral. Randy strolls over to it and sees leaves of gold
inside the coral carapace, tiny holes punched into them. To him the holes
are more interesting than the gold.
But everyone's reacting differently. Doug Shaftoe's always
conspicuously cool and sort of pensive in the presence of a very large
amount of gold, like he's always known that it was there, but touching it
makes him think about where it came from and what was done to get it there.
The sight of a single brick almost made Goto Dengo vomit up his Kobe beef.
For Eberhard Föhr, who is out in the cove doing a lazy backstroke, it is the
physical incarnation of monetary value, which for him, and the rest of
Epiphyte, has mostly been a mathematical abstraction a practical application
of one particular sub sub sub branch of number theory. So it has the same
kind of purely intellectual attraction to him as a moon rock or a dinosaur
tooth. Tom Howard sees it in the embodiment of some political principles
that are almost as pure, and as divorced from human reality, as number
theory. Mixed in with that is some sense of personal vindication. For Leon
the Sea Gypsy, it's just a cargo to be hauled from point A to point B, for
which he'll be compensated with something more useful. For Avi it's an
inextricable mixture of the sacred and the satanic. For Randy and if anyone
knew about this, he would be dreadfully embarrassed, and would freely admit
to its cloyingness it is the closest thing he's got right now to a physical
link with his beloved, in that she was pulling these bars out of the wreck
of the submarine just a few days ago. And that is really the only sense in
which he gives a damn about it, anymore. In fact, in the few days since he
decided to hire Leon to smuggle him up the Sulu Sea and into southern Luzon,
he has had to remind himself over and over again that the nominal purpose of
the trip is to open up Golgotha.
After the gold has been unloaded, and Leon has taken on some supplies,
Tom Howard produces a bottle of single malt scotch, finally answering
Randy's question of who patronizes all of those duty free stores in
airports. Everyone gathers on the beach for a toast. Randy's a little edgy
when he joins this circle, because he's not sure what he's going to propose
a toast <I>to</I> if the responsibility falls to him. Unearthing Golgotha? He can't
really drink to that. The meeting of minds between Avi and Goto Dengo was a
spark jumping across an air gap sudden, dazzling, and a little scary and it
hinged around their common understanding that all of this gold is blood
money, that Golgotha is a grave they're preparing to desecrate. So that's
not exactly toast material. How about a toast to abstract lofty principles,
then?
Here Randy's got another hangup, something that's been slowly dawning
on him as he stands on the beach beneath Tom Howard's concrete house: the
perfect freedom that Tom's found in Kinakuta is a cut flower in a crystal
vase. It's lovely, but it's dead, and the reason it's dead is that it has
been alienated from its germinal soil. And what is that soil exactly? To a
first approximation you could just say "America," but it's a little more
complicated than that; America's just the hardest to ignore instantiation of
a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places.
Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta. The closest outpost is really not that
far away: the Filipinos, for all of their shortcomings in the human rights
department, have imbibed the whole Western freedom thing deeply, in a way
that has arguably made them economic laggards compared to Asian countries
where no one gives a shit about human rights.
In the end it's a moot point; Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe purposes a
toast to smooth sailing. Two years ago Randy would have found this to be
banal and simple minded. Now he understands it as Doug's implicit nod to the
world's moral ambiguity, and a pretty deft preemptive strike against any
more inflated rhetoric. Randy downs his Scotch in a gulp and then says,
"let's do it," which is also pretty stunningly banal, but this gathering in
a circle on the beach thing really makes him nervous; he signed on to
participate in a business opportunity, not to join a cabal.
Four days on the pamboat ensue. It putts along at a steady ten
kilometers per hour day and night, and it sticks to shallow coastal waters
along the periphery of the Sulu Sea. They are lucky with the weather. They
stop twice on Palawan and once on Mindoro to take on diesel fuel and to
barter for unspecified commodities. Cargo goes down in the hull, people go
above it on the deck, which is just a few loose planks thrown crosswise over
the gunwales. Randy feels more out and out lonely than he has since he was a
teenaged geek, but he's not sad about it. He sleeps a lot, perspires, drinks
water, reads a couple of books, and dicks around with his new GPS receiver.
Its most salient feature is a mushroom shaped external antenna that can pick
up weak signals, which ought to be useful in triple canopy jungle. Randy has
punched Golgotha's latitude and longitude into its memory, so that by
hitting a couple of buttons he can instantly see how far away it is, along
what heading. From Tom Howard's beach it's almost exactly a thousand
kilometers. When the pamboat finally noses up on a tidal mudflat in southern
Luzon, and Randy sloshes ashore in full MacArthurian style, the distance is
only about forty clicks.
But tumbledown volcanoes rise before him, black and mist shrouded, and
he knows from experience that forty kilometers in boondocks will be much
rougher going than the first nine hundred and sixty.
The bell tower of an old Spanish church rises up above the coconut
palms not far away, carved from blocks of volcanic tuff that are beginning
to glow in the lambency of another damn mind blowing tropical sunset. After
he's snagged some extra bottles of water and said his good byes to Leon and
the family, Randy walks towards it. As he goes, he erases the memory of
Golgotha's location from his GPS, just in case it gets confiscated or ripped
off.
The next thought he has says something about his general frame of mind:
that nuts are the genitalia of trees is never more obvious than when you are
looking at a cluster of swelling young coconuts nestled in the hairy dark
groin of a palm tree. It's surprising that the Spanish missionaries didn't
have the whole species eradicated. Anyway, by the time he's reached the
church, he's picked up a retinue of little bare chested Filipino kids who
apparently aren't used to seeing white men materialize out of nowhere.
Randy's not crazy about this, but he'll settle for no one summoning the
police.
A Nipponese sport utility vehicle of the adorably styled, alarmingly
high center of gravity school is parked in front of the church, ringed by
impressed villagers. Randy wonders if they could have done this any more
conspicuously. A fiftyish driver leans against the front bumper smoking a
cigarette and shooting the breeze with some local dignitaries: a priest and,
for god's sake, a cop with a fucking bolt action rifle. Just about everyone
in sight is smoking Marlboros, which have apparently been distributed as a
goodwill gesture. Randy's got to get himself back into a Philippine frame of
mind: the way to sneak into the country is not to mount some cloak and
dagger operation, crawling up onto an isolated beach in a matte black
wetsuit in the middle of the night, but simply to waltz in and make friends
with all of the people who see you. Because it's not like they're stupid;
they are going to see you.
Randy smokes a cigarette. He had never done this in his life until a
few months ago, when he finally got it through his head that it was a social
thing, that some people take it as an insult when you turn down an offered
cigarette, and that a few smokes weren't going to kill him in any case. None
of these people, except for the driver and the priest, speaks a word of
English, and so this is the only way he can communicate with them. Anyway,
given all the other changes he's gone through, why the hell shouldn't he
become a cigarette smoker while he's at it? Maybe next week he'll be
shooting heroin. For something disgusting and lethal, cigarettes are
amazingly enjoyable.
The driver is named Matthew, and he really turns out to be not so much
a driver as a charismatic fixer/negotiator, a smoother of the way, a human
road grader. Randy just stands there passively while Matthew charmingly and
hilariously extricates them from this impromptu village meeting, a job that
would probably be next to impossible if the priest were not so clearly
complicit. The cop looks to the priest for cues as to what he should do, and
the priest tells him something complicated with a series of looks and
gestures, and in that way, somehow, Randy finds his way into the sport
utility vehicle's passenger seat and Matthew gets behind the wheel. Well
after sunset they trundle out of the village along its execrable one lane
road, trailed by kids who run alongside keeping one hand on the car, like
Secret Service agents in a motorcade. They are able to do this for quite a
while because they've gone a few kilometers before the road gets good enough
for Matthew to shift out of first gear.
This is not a part of the world where it makes any sense at all to
drive at night, but clearly Matthew wasn't interested in an overnight stay
at that village. Randy has a pretty good idea of what's going to happen now:
many hours of driving very slowly on circuitous roads, half blocked by piles
of freshly harvested young coconuts, impeded by hunks of lumber thrown
across the right of way as speed bumps to prevent kids and dogs from being
run over. He leans his seat back.
Bright light is streaming into the car and he thinks: roadblock, cops,
spotlights. The light's blocked by a silhouette. There's a rapping noise on
the window. Randy looks over and sees the driver's seat empty, no keys in
the ignition. The car's cool and dormant. He sits up and rubs his face,
partly because it needs to be rubbed and partly because it's probably smart
to keep one's hands in plain sight. More rapping on the windshield,
growingly impatient. The windows are fogged and he can only see shapes. The
light's reddish. He's got a completely inappropriate erection. Randy gropes
for a window control, but the car's got power windows and they don't work
when it's not running. He gropes around on the door until he's figured out
how to unlock it, and almost instantly it flies open and someone's coming
inside to join him.
She ends up on Randy's lap, lying sideways on top of him, her head on
his chest. "Close the door," Amy says, and Randy does. Then she squirms
around until she's face to face with him, her pelvic center of gravity
grinding mercilessly against the huge generalized region between navel and
thigh that has, in recent months, become one big sex organ for him. She
brackets his neck between her forearms and grabs the carotid supports of the
whiplash arrestor. He's busted. The obvious thing now would be a kiss, and
she feints in that direction, but then reconsiders, as it seems like some
serious looking is in order at this time. So they look at each other for
probably a good minute. It's not a moony kind of look that they share, not a
starry eyed thing by any means, more like a <I>what the fuck have we gotten
ourselves into</I> thing. As if it's really important to both of them that they
mutually appreciate how serious everything is. Emotionally, yes, but also
from a legal and, for lack of a better term, military standpoint. But once
Amy is satisfied that her boy does indeed get it, on all of these fronts,
she permits herself a vaguely incredulous looking sneer that blossoms into a
real grin, and then a chuckle that in a less heavily armed woman might be
characterized as a giggle, and then, just to shut herself up, she pulls hard
on the stainless steel goalposts of the whiplash arrestor and nuzzles her
face up to Randy's and, after ten heartbeats' worth of exploratory sniffling
and nuzzling, kisses him. It's a chaste kiss that takes a long time to open
up, which is totally consistent with Amy's cautious, sardonic approach to
everything, as well as with the hypothesis, alluded to once while they were
driving to Whitman, that she is in fact a virgin.
Randy's life is essentially complete at the moment. He has come to
understand during all of this that the light shining in through the windows
is in fact the light of dawn, and he tries to fight back the thought that
<I>it's a good day to die</I> because it's clear to him that although he might go
on from this point to make a lot of money, become famous, or whatever,
nothing's ever going to top this. Amy knows it too, and she makes the kiss
last for a very long time before finally breaking away with a little gasp
for air, and bowing her head so that her brow is supported on Randy's
breastbone, the curve of her head following that of his throat, like the
coastlines of South America and Africa. Randy almost can't take the pressure
of her on his groin. He braces his feet against the floorboards of the sport
utility vehicle and squirms.
She moves suddenly and decisively, grabbing the hem of the left leg of
his baggy shorts and yanking it almost up to his navel, taking his boxer
shorts along with. Randy pops free and takes aim at her, straining upwards,
bobbing slightly with each beat of his heart, glowing healthily (he thinks
modestly) in the dawn light. Amy's in a sort of light wrap around skirt,
which she suddenly flings over him, producing a momentary tent pole effect.
But she's on the move, reaching up beneath to pull her underwear out of the
way, and then before he can even believe it's happening she sits down on
him, hard, producing a nearly electrical shock. Then she stops moving daring
him.
Randy's toe knuckles pop audibly. He lifts himself and Amy into the
air, experiences some kind of synaesthetic hallucination very much like the
famous "jump into hyperspace" scene from <I>Star Wars.</I> Or perhaps the air bag
has accidentally detonated? Then he pumps something like an Imperial pint of
semen it's a seemingly open ended series of ejaculations, each coupled to
the next by nothing more than a leap of faith that another one is coming and
in the end, like all schemes built on faith and hope, it lapses, and then
Randy sits utterly still until his body realizes it has not drawn breath in
quite a while. He fills his lungs all the way, stretching them out, which
feels almost as good as the orgasm, and then he opens his eyes she's staring
down at him in bemusement, but (thank god!) not horror or disgust. He
settles back into the bucket seat, which squeezes his butt in a not
unpleasant gesture of light harassment. Between that, and Amy's thighs, and
other penetrations, he is not going anywhere for a while, and he's
moderately afraid of what Amy's going to say she has a lengthy menu of
possible responses to all of this, most of them at Randy's expense. She
plants a knee, levers herself up, grabs the tail of his Hawaiian shirt and
cleans herself off a bit. Then she shoves the door open, pats him twice on
his whiskery cheek, says "Shave," and exits stage left. Randy can now see
that the air bag has not, in fact, deployed. And yet he has the same feeling
of a major sudden life change that one might get after surviving a car
crash.
He is a mess. Fortunately his bag's in the backseat, with another
shirt. A few minutes later he finally emerges from the fogged up car and
gets a look at his surroundings. He's in a community built on a canted
plateau with a few widely spaced, very high coconut palms scattered about.
Downslope, which appears to be roughly south, there is a pattern of
vegetation that Randy recognizes as a tri leveled cash crop thing:
pineapples down on the ground, cacao and coffee at about head level,
coconuts and bananas above that. The yellowish green leaves of the banana
trees are especially appealing, seemingly big enough to stretch out and
sunbathe on. To the north, and uphill, a jungle is attempting to tear down a
mountain.
This compound that he's in is obviously a recent thing, laid out by
actual surveyors, designed by people with educations, subsidized by someone
who can afford brand new sheets of corrugated tin, ABS drainpipe, and proper
electrical wiring. It has something in common with a normal Philippine town
in that it's built around a church. In this case the church is small Enoch
called it a chapel but that it was designed by Finnish architecture students
would be obvious to Randy even if Root hadn't divulged it. It has a bit of
that Bucky Fuller tensegrity thing going for it lots of exposed, tensioned
cables radiating from the ends of tubular struts, all collaborating to
support a roof that's not a single surface but a system of curved shards. It
looks awfully well designed to Randy, who now judges buildings on the sole
criterion of their ability to resist earthquakes. Root told him it was built
by the brothers of a missionary order, and by local volunteers, with
materials contributed by a Nipponese foundation that is still trying to make
amends for the war.
Music is coming out of the church. Randy checks his watch and discovers
that it's Sunday morning. He avoids participating in the Mass, on the excuse
that it's already underway and he doesn't want to interrupt it, and ambles
toward a nearby pavilion a corrugated roof sheltering a concrete floor slab
with some plastic tables where breakfast is being laid out. He arouses
violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling
across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his
way; they're scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate
that fear into a coherent plan of action. Several miles away, a helicopter
is flying in from the sea, shedding altitude as it homes in on a pad
somewhere up in the jungle. It is a big and gratuitously loud cargo carrying
chopper with unfamiliar lines, and Randy vaguely suspects that it was built
in Russia for Chinese customers and that it is part of Wing's operations.
He recognizes Jackie Woo lounging at one of the tables, drinking tea
and reading a bright magazine. Amy's in the adjacent kitchen, embroiled in
Tagalog girl talk with a couple of middle aged ladies who are handling the
preparations for the meal. This place seems pretty safe, and so Randy stops
in the open, punches in the digits that only he and Goto Dengo know, and
takes a GPS reading. According to the machine, they are no more than 4500
meters away from the main drift of Golgotha. Randy checks the heading and
determines that it is uphill from here. Although the jungle blurs the
underlying shape of the earth, he thinks that it's going to be up in the
valley of a nearby river.
Forty five hundred meters seems impossibly close, and he's still
standing there trying to convince himself that his memory is sound when the
ragged voices of the worshippers suddenly spill out across the compound as
the chapel's door is pushed open. Enoch Root emerges, wearing (inevitably)
what Randy would describe as a wizard's robe. But as he walks across the
compound he shucks it off to reveal sensible khakis underneath, and hands
the robe to a young Filipino acolyte who scurries back inside with it. The
singing trails off and then Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe emerges from the
church, followed by John Wayne and several people who appear to be locals.
Everyone drifts towards the pavilion. The alertness that comes with being in
a new place, combined with the neurological aftermath of that shockingly big
and long orgasm, has left Randy's senses sharper, and his mind clearer, than
they've ever been, and he's impatient to get going. But he can't dispute the
wisdom of getting a good breakfast, so he shakes hands all around and sits
down with the others. There is a bit of small talk about how his pamboat
voyage went.
"Your friends should have come into the country that way," says Doug
Shaftoe, and then goes on to explain that Avi and both of the Gotos were
supposed to be here yesterday, but they were detained at the airport for
some hours and eventually had to fly back to Tokyo while some mysterious
immigration hassles were ironed out. "Why didn't they go to Taipei or Hong
Kong?" Randy wonders aloud since both those cities are much closer to
Manila. Doug stares at him blankly and observes that both of those are
Chinese cities, and reminds him that their presumed adversary now is General
Wing, who has a lot of pull in places like that.
Several backpacks have already been prepared, laden mostly with bottled
water. After everyone's had a chance to digest breakfast, Douglas MacArthur
Shaftoe, Jackie Woo, John Wayne, Enoch Root, America Shaftoe, and Randall
Lawrence Waterhouse all don packs. They begin to stroll uphill, passing out
of the compound and into a transitional zone of big leaved traveler trees
and giant clusters of bamboo: ten centimeter thick trunks spraying out and
up from central roots, like frozen shell bursts, to heights of at least ten
meters, the poles striped green and brown where the husky leaves are peeling
away. The canopy of the jungle looms higher and higher, accentuated by the
fact that it's uphill from here, and emits a fantastic whistling noise, like
a phaser on overload. As they enter the shade of the canopy the racket of
crickets is added to that whistling noise. It sounds as though there must be
millions of crickets and millions of whatever's making the whistling noise,
but from time to time the sound will suddenly stop and then start up again,
so if there are a lot of them, they are all following the same score.
The place is filled with plants that in America are only seen in pots,
but that grow to the size of oak trees here, so big that Randy's mind can't
recognize them as, for example, the same kind of Diefenbachia that
Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs
bathroom. There is an incredible variety of butterflies, for whom the wind
free environment seems to be congenial, and they weave in and out among huge
spiderwebs that call to mind the design of Enoch Root's chapel. But it is
clear that the place is ultimately ruled by ants; in fact it makes the most
sense to think of the jungle as a living tissue of ants with minor
infestations of trees, birds, and humans. Some of them are so small that
they are, to other ants, as those ants are to people; they prosecute their
ant activities in the same physical space but without interfering, like many
signals on different frequencies sharing the same medium. But there are a
fair number of ants carrying other ants, and Randy assumed that they are not
doing it for altruistic reasons.
Where the jungle's dense it is impassable, but there are a fair number
of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the under growth
is only knee high, and light shines through. By moving from one such place
to another they make slow progress in the general direction indicated by
Randy's GPS. Jackie Woo and John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear to be
moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to
visit, but you wouldn't want to live, or even stop moving, there. Just as
the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the
insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended
food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an
unforgeable guarantee of freshness. The canopy's tentpoles are huge trees
"Octomelis sumatrana," says Enoch Root with narrow buttress roots splayed
out explosively in every direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into
the earth. Some of them are almost completely obscured by colossal
philodendrons winding up their trunks.
They crest a broad, gentle ridgeline; Randy had forgotten that they
were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and moisture condenses
on their skins. When the whistlers and the crickets pause, it be comes
possible to hear the murmur of a stream down below them. The next hour is
devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They cover a
total of a hundred meters; at this rate, Randy thinks, it should take them
two days, hiking around the clock, to reach Golgotha. But he keeps this
observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become aware of,
and to be taken aback by, the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be
above them forty or fifty meters above them in many cases. He feels as
though he's at the bottom of the food chain.
They enter a sunnier zone that consequently is snarled by much heavier
undergrowth, and are forced to break out the machetes and hack their way
through to the river. Enoch Root explains that this is a place where a small
lahar, which had been funneled between the steep walls of the river's gorge
farther upstream, spread out and mowed down a few hectares of ancient trees,
clearing the path for smaller, opportunistic vegetation. This is fascinating
for about ten seconds and then it's back to the machete work. Eventually
they reach the edge of the river, all of them sticky and greenish and
itching from the sap and juice and pulp of the vegetation they have
assaulted in order to get here. The river's bed is shallow and rocky here,
with no discernible bank. They sit down and drink water for a while. "What
is the point of all this?" asks Enoch Root suddenly. "I don't mean to sound
discouraged by these physical barriers, because I'm not. But I'm wondering
whether you have worked out the goal of it in your own mind."
"This is fact finding. Nothing more," Randy says.
"But there's no point in just aimlessly finding facts unless you're a
pure scientist, or a historian. You are representing a business concern
here. Correct?"
"Yes."
"And so if I were a shareholder in your company I could demand an
explanation of why you are sitting here on the edge of this river right now
instead of actually doing whatever it is that your company does."
"Assuming you were an intelligent shareholder, yes, that's what you'd
be doing."
"And what would your explanation be, Randy?"
"Well "
"I know where we are going, Randy." And Enoch quotes a string of
digits.
"How did you know that?" Randy asks kind of hotly.
"I've known it for fifty years," Enoch says. "Goto Dengo told me."
All Randy can do for a while is fume. Doug Shaftoe's laughing. Amy just
looks distracted. Enoch broods for a few moments, and finally says:
"Originally the plan was to buy this land with a smaller cache of gold that
was dug up and loaded aboard a certain submarine. We would then wait for the
right moment and then dig up the rest. But the submarine sank, and the gold
sank with it. I sat on the knowledge for many years. But then people started
buying up land around here people who were obviously hoping to find the
Primary. If I'd had the money, I would have bought this land myself. But I
didn't. So I saw to it that the Church bought it."
Doug Shaftoe says, "You haven't answered Enoch's question yet, Randy:
what good are you doing your shareholders here?"
A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings
moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability
distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum
mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport
from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a
couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between.
There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in
the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of
serious evolutionary badass.
"We took the gold that you recovered from the submarine and turned it
into electronic cash, right?" Randy says.
"So you claimed. I haven't actually <I>spent</I> any of that electronic cash
yet," says Doug.
"We want to do the same thing for the Church or Wing or whoever ends up
in possession of the gold. We want to deposit it in the Crypt, and make it
usable as electronic currency."
Amy asks, "Do you understand that, in order to move the gold out of
here, it'll be necessary to travel across land controlled by Wing?"
"Who says we have to move it?"
Silence for a minute, or what passes for silence in a jungle.
Doug Shaftoe says, "You're right. If the stories are even half true,
this facility is far more secure than any bank vault."
"The stories are all true and then some," Randy says. "The man who
designed and built Golgotha is Goto Dengo himself."
"Shit!"
"He drew plans of it for us. And the larger issue of local and national
security is not a problem here," Randy adds. "Of course the government has
sometimes been unstable. But any invader who wants to physically seize
possession of the gold will have to fight his way across this jungle with
tens of millions of heavily armed Filipinos barring his path."
"Everyone knows what the Huks did against the Nips," Doug says, nodding
vigorously. "Or the VC against us, for that matter. No one would be stupid
enough to try it."
"Especially if we put you in charge, Doug."
Amy's been woolgathering through most of the conversation, but at this
she turns and grins at her father.
"I accept," Doug says.
Randy's slowly becoming aware that most of the birds and bugs who live
here move so fast that you can't even turn your head fast enough to center
them in your vision. They exist only as slicing movements in your peripheral
vision. The only exception would seem to be a species of gnat that has
evolved into the specific niche of plunging into the left eyeballs of human
beings at something just under the speed of sound. Randy has taken about
four hits in the left eye, none in the right. He takes another one now, and
as he's recovering from it, the earth jumps underneath them. It is a little
like an earthquake in its psychological effect: a feeling of disbelief, and
then betrayal, that the solid ground is having the temerity to move around.
But it's all over by the time the sensation has moved up their spines to
their brains. The river's still running, and the dragonfly is still hunting.
"That felt exactly like high explosive going off," says Doug Shaftoe,
"but I didn't hear anything. Did anyone hear anything?"
No one heard anything.
"What that means," Doug continues, "is that someone is setting off
explosives deep underground."
They start working their way up the riverbed. Randy's GPS indicates
that Golgotha is less than two thousand meters upstream. The river begins to
develop proper banks that get steadily higher and steeper. John Wayne
clambers up onto the left bank and Jackie Woo onto the right, so that the
high ground on either side will be guarded, or at least reconnoitered. They
pass back into the shade of the canopy. The ground here is some kind of
sedimentary rock with granite boulders embedded in it from place to place,
like mixed nuts in half melted chocolate. It must be nothing more than a
scab of congealed ash and sediment on top of an underlying monolith of hard
rock. Those who are down in the streambed move very slowly now. Part of the
time they are down in the river, struggling upstream against a powerful
current, and part of the time they are picking their way from boulder to
boulder, or sidestepping. along crumbling ledges of harder rock that
protrude from the banks here and there. Every few minutes, Doug looks up and
makes visual contact with Jackie Woo and John Wayne who must be contending
with challenges of their own, because sometimes they fall behind the main
group. The trees only seem to get higher as they work their way up into the
mountains, and now their height is accentuated by the fact that they are
rooted in the top of a bank that rises above the stream two, five, ten, then
twenty and thirty meters. The bank actually overhangs them now: the river's
gorge is a tube mostly buried in the earth, open to the sky only through a
narrow slot in the top. But it's close to midday and the sun is shining
nearly straight down through it, illuminating all of the stuff that makes
its way down from the heights. The corpse of a murdered insect drifts down
from the upper canopy like winter's first snowflake. Water seeping from the
rims of the overhanging bank forms a drip curtain, each drop glittering like
a diamond and making it nearly impossible to see the dark cavity behind.
Yellow butterflies weave among those falling drops but never get hit.
They come around a gentle bend in the river and are confronted by a
waterfall some twenty meters high. At the base of the falls there's a still
and relatively shallow pool, filling the bottom of a broad melon shaped
cavity formed by the concave, overhanging banks. The vertical sun beams
straight down on the cloud of white foam at the base of the falls, which
radiates the light back at blinding power, forming a sort of natural light
fixture that illuminates the whole inside of the cavity. The stone walls,
sweating and dripping and running with groundwater, glisten in its light.
The undersides of the ferns and big leaved plants epiphytes sprouting from
invisible footholds in the walls flicker and dapple in the weirdly bluish
foam glow.
Most of the cavity's walls are hidden behind vegetation: fragile,
cascading veils of moss growing from the rock, and vines depending from the
branches of the trees hundreds of feet above them and dangling halfway down
into the gorge, where they have become entangled with protruding tree roots
and formed a natural trellis for a finer network of creepers that is itself
the warp and woof of a matted carpet of moss saturated with flowing ground
water. The gorge is alive with butterflies burning with colors of
radioactive purity, and down closer to the rustling water are damselflies,
mostly black with aqua bodies that flash in the sun their wings revealing
glimpses of salmon and coral red on the underside as they orbit around each
other. But mostly the air is filled with this continual slow progress of
things that didn't survive, making their way down through the column of air
and into the water, which flushes them away: dead leaves and the
exoskeletons of insects, sucked dry and eviscerated in some silent combat
hundreds of feet above their heads.
Randy's keeping an eye on the display of his GPS, which has been having
a hard time locking onto any satellites down in this gorge. But finally some
numbers come up. He has it calculate the distance from here to Golgotha, and
the answer comes up immediately: a long row of zeroes with a few
insignificant digits trailing off the end.
Randy says, "This is it." But most of what he says is obscured by a
sharp explosion from high above them on the bank. A few seconds later, a man
begins to scream.
"No one move," says Doug Shaftoe, "we are in a minefield."
<B>Chapter 98 CRIBS</B>
On a grassy knoll, a man crouches behind a tombstone, peering through a
telescope on a tripod, and tracking the steady pace of a robed and hooded
figure across the grass.
FUNERAL. That's the crib that broke these guys.
The Nipponese man in the American uniform, whom Enoch Root is leaving
behind, must be that Goto Dengo fella. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has
seen that name punched on so many ETC cards that he no longer even has to
read the printed letters at the top of the card: he can identify a "Goto
Dengo" from arm's length simply by glancing at the pattern of punched out
rectangles. The same is true of some two dozen other Nipponese mining
engineers and surveyors who were brought to Luzon in '43 and '44, in
response to Azure/Pufferfish messages emanating from Tokyo. But, as far as
Waterhouse can tell, all of the others are dead. Either that, or they
retreated north with Yamashita.
Only one of them is alive, well, and living in what is left of Manila,
and that's Goto Dengo. Waterhouse was going to rat him out to Army
Intelligence, but that doesn't seem like such a good idea now that the
unkillable Nip engineer has become a personal protegé of The General.
Root is heading in the direction of those two mysterious white men who
attended Bobby Shaftoe's funeral. Waterhouse peers at them through the
scope, but mediocre optics, combined with the heat waves rising from the
grass, complicate this. One of them seems oddly familiar. Odd because
Waterhouse doesn't know that many bearded men with long swept back blond
hairdoes and black eyepatches.
An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This
is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from
tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good
ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot
ignore them just because they are ridiculous. Waterhouse stifles a giggle
and tries not to get overly excited. The dull, tedious, bureaucratic part of
his mind is feeling testy, and wants a few shreds of supporting evidence.
This is quickly supplied. Waterhouse knows, and has proved to Earl
Comstock, that strange information is in the air, dotting and dashing
furtively from a small number of feeble transmitters scattered around Luzon
and the surrounding waters, encrypted using the Arethusa system. Lawrence
and Alan have known for two years now that Rudy invented it, and from the
decrypts chattering out of digital computers in Bletchley Park and Manila,
they now know other things. They know that Rudy flew the coop late in 1943
and probably went to Sweden. They know that one Günter Bischoff, captain of
the U boat that plucked Shaftoe and Root out of the water, also ended up in
Sweden, and that Dönitz persuaded him to take over the gold running work
that had been performed by U 553 until it ran aground off Qwghlm. The Naval
Intelligence boys are fascinated by Bischoff, and so he had already been the
subject of much research. Waterhouse has seen photos of him from his student
days. The shorter of the two men he is peering at now could easily be the
same fellow, now middle aged. And the taller one, the one with the eyepatch,
could most definitely be Rudy von Hacklheber himself.
It is, then, a conspiracy.
They have secure communications. If Rudy is the architec