English: BANK OF SINGAPORE.
There is a scuffle behind him. The sergeant stands at the ready as two
of his men jerk the Filipino driver out of the cab of his truck that Goto
Dengo rode in on. Calmly looking almost bored the sergeant bayonets the
driver. The men drop him in the red water and he disappears. "Merry
Christmas" one of the soldiers cracks. Everyone laughs, except for Goto
Dengo.
Chapter 76 PULSE
As Avi walks back through his house, he utters something biblical
sounding in Hebrew that causes his kids to burst into tears, and his nannies
to rise from the kid mat and begin shoving stuff into bags. Devorah emerges
from a back room where she's been sleeping off some morning sickness. She
and Avi embrace tenderly in the hallway and Randy begins to feel like a
fleck of debris lodged in someone's eye. So he heads straight for an exit,
goes out to his car and starts driving. He winds through the hills over the
San Andreas Fault to Skyline and then heads south. Ten minutes later, Avi's
car howls past him in the left lane, doing ninety or a hundred. Randy barely
has time to read the bumper sticker: MEAN PEOPLE SUCK.
Randy's looking for a totally anonymous location where he can patch
into the Internet. A hotel doesn't work because a hotel keeps good records
of outgoing telephone calls. What he should really do is use this packet
radio interface he has for his laptop, but even that requires a place to sit
down and work undisturbed for a while. Which gets him thinking in terms of a
fast food joint, not to be found in the mid peninsular wasteland. By the
time he has reached the northern skirts of the Valley Menlo Park and Palo
Alto he has decided fuck it, he'll just go to the scene of the action. Maybe
he could be of some use there. So he gets off at the El Monte exit and heads
into the business district of Los Altos, a pretty typical mid twentieth
century American downtown gradually being metabolized by franchises.
A major street intersects, at something other than a ninety degree
angle, a smaller commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute angle lots
and two (larger) obtuse angle lots. On one side of the major street, the
obtuse angle lot is occupied by a two storey office building, home of Ordo's
offices and Tombstone. The acute angle lot is occupied by the McDonald's. On
the opposite side of the major street, the acute angle lot is occupied by,
weirdly enough, a 24 Jam, the only one Randy has ever seen in the Western
Hemisphere. The obtuse angle lot is occupied by a Park 'n' Lock, where you
can park for the old fashioned purpose of wandering around the business
district from store to store.
The parking lot of the McDonald's is full, and so Randy pulls through
its drive through window, chooses n, where n is a random number between one
and six, and asks for Value Meal n with super size fries. This having been
secured, he guns the Acura directly across the big street into the Park 'n'
Lock just in time to see its last available space being seized by a minivan
bearing the logo of a San Jose television station. Randy is not planning to
stray far from his car, so he just blocks in another car. But as he is
setting the parking brake, he notices movement inside it, and with a bit of
further attention realizes he is watching a man with long hair and a beard
methodically ramming shells into a pump shotgun. The man catches sight of
Randy in his rearview mirror and turns around with a scrupulously polite
pardon me sir but you seem to have blocked me in look. Randy recognizes him
as Mike or Mark, a graphics card hacker who farms ostriches in Gilroy
(quirky hobbies being de rigueur in the high tech world). He moves the
Acura, blocking in what looks like an abandoned van from the Starsky and
Hutch epoch.
Randy climbs up on the roof of his car with his laptop and his Value
Meal n. Until recently he would never have sat on top of his Acura because
his considerable mass would dimple the sheet metal. But after Amy rammed it
with the truck, Randy became much less anal, and now sees it as a tool to be
used until it is just a moraine of rusted shards. He happens to have a
twelve volt adapter for the laptop, so he runs that down into his cigarette
lighter socket. Finally, he's settled, and gets a chance to take a good look
around.
The parking lot of Novus Ordo Seclorum's office building is filled with
cop cars, and BMWs and Mercedes Benzes that Randy assumes belong to lawyers.
Avi's Range Rover is parked jauntily on top of some landscaping, and a few
TV camera crews have set up, as well. In front of the building's main
entrance a lot of people are jammed into the smallest possible space
screaming at each other. They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring
of cops, media, and law firm minions collectively, what Tolkien would call
Men and a few non– or post human creatures imbued with peculiar
physiognomies and vaguely magical powers: Dwarves (steady, productive,
surly) and Elves (brilliant in a more ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has
begun to realize that his grandfather may have been an Elf. Avi is a Man
with a strong Elvish glow about him. Somewhere in the center of this whole
thing, presumably, is Gollum.
There is a little window on the screen of Randy's laptop showing a
cheesy 1940s newsreel style animation of a radio tower, with zigzaggy
conceptual radio waves radiating outwards from it over the whole earth,
which is shown ludicrously not to scale in this rendering the diameter of
the earth is about equal to the height of the radio tower. That these Jovian
info bolts are visible and moving is a visual cue that his radio adapter has
managed to patch itself into the packet radio network. Randy opens a
terminal window and types
telnet laundry.org
and in a few seconds bang! he gets a login prompt. Randy now has
another look at the animated window, and notes with approval that the info
bolts have been replaced with gouts of question marks. This means that his
computer has recognized laundry.org as a S/WAN machine running the Secure
Wide Area Network protocol which means that every packet going back and
forth between Randy's laptop and laundry.org is encrypted. Definitely a good
idea when you are about to do something illegal over the radio.
Mike or Mark gets out of his car, cutting a dramatic figure in a long
black Western style coat, a look rather spoiled by the t shirt he's got on
underneath it: black with a fat red question mark in the middle. He hitches
the strap of his shotgun up onto his shoulder and leans into his back door
to retrieve a large black cowboy hat, which he places on the roof of his
car. He thrusts his elbows into the air and gathers his long hair back
behind his ears, staring up at the sky, and then clamps the cowboy hat down
on his head. Tied loosely around his neck is a black bandanna with a
question mark pattern, which he now pulls up over the bridge of his nose so
that just an eye slit shows between it and the cowboy hat. Randy would be
really alarmed if it weren't for the fact that several of his friends, such
as John Cantrell, often go around looking this way. Mike or Mark strides
across the Park 'n' Lock, tracked carefully by a panning cameraman, and jogs
across the street to the 24 Jam.
Randy logs onto laundry.org using ssh "secure shell" a way of further
encrypting communications between two computers. Laundry.org is an
anonymizing service; all packets routed through it to another computer are
stripped of identifying information first, so that anyone down the line who
intercepts one of those packets has no way of knowing where it originated.
Once he's patched into the anonymizer, Randy types
telnet crypt.kk
and hits the return key and then actually, literally, prays. The Crypt
is still going through its shakedown period (which, indeed, is the only
reason that all of Tombstone's contents have not been moved onto it yet).
In the lot of the 24 Jam, Mike or Mark has joined three other
elvishlooking sorts in black cowboy hats and bandannas, whom Randy can
identify based on the length and color of their ponytails and beards.
There's Stu, a Berkeley grad student who is somehow mixed up in Avi's HEAP
project, and Phil, who invented a major programming language a couple of
years ago and goes helicopter skiing in his spare time, and Craig, who knows
everything there is to know about encrypted credit card transactions on the
Net and is a devotee of traditional Nipponese archery. Some of these guys
are wearing long coats and some aren't. There is a lot of Secret Admirers
iconography: t shirts bearing the number 56, which is a code for Yamamoto,
or just pictures of Yamamoto himself, or big fat question marks. They are
having an energetic and very happy conversation though it looks a bit forced
because, to a man, they are carrying long weapons out in plain sight. One of
them has a hunting rifle, and each of the others is slinging a rudimentary
looking gun with a banana clip sticking out of the side. Randy thinks, but
is not sure, that these are HEAP guns.
This scene, not surprisingly, has caught the attention of the police,
who have surrounded these four with squad cars, and who are standing at the
ready with rifles and shotguns. It is an oddity of the law in many
jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one shot .22 derringer
requires a license, openly carrying (e.g.) a big game rifle is perfectly
legal. Concealed weapons are outlawed or at least heavily regulated, and
unconcealed ones are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers who tend to be gun
nuts have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out
the absurdity of those rules. Their point is this: who gives a shit about
concealed weapons anyway, since they are only useful for defending oneself
against assaults by petty criminals, which almost never happens? The real
reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending
oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your
handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going
to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by
packing something really big.
A bunch of junk scrolls up Randy's screen. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, it
begins, and then there's a paragraph of information about what a great idea
the Crypt is and how anyone who gives a damn about privacy should get an
account here. Randy truncates the commercial message with the whack of a
key, and logs in as Randy. Then he enters the command
telnet tombstone.epiphyte.com
and gets two gratifying messages in return: one saying that a
connection has been established with Tombstone, and the next saying that a
S/WAN link has been automatically negotiated. Finally he gets
tombstone login:
which means that he is now free to log on to the machine right across
the street from him. And now Mr. Randy has a little decision to make.
So far, he's clean. The bits coming out of his laptop are encrypted; so
even if someone is monitoring the local packet radio net, all they know is
that some encrypted bits are flying around. They cannot trace any of those
bits to Randy's machine without bringing in an elaborate radio direction
finding rig and zeroing in on him most conspicuously. Those encrypted bits
are eventually finding their way to laundry.org up in Oakland, which is a
big Internet host that probably has thousands of packets rushing in and out
of it every second. If someone were tapping laundry.org's T3 line, which
would require an enormous investment in computers and communications gear,
they would detect a very small number of encrypted packets going out to
crypt.kk in Kinakuta. But these packets would have been stripped of any
identifying information before leaving laundry.org and so there would be no
way to tell where they originated. Now, crypt.kk is also an anonymizer, and
so an entity tapping its staggeringly enormous T5 line (a job on the order
of eavesdropping on a small country's telecommunications system) might
theoretically be able to detect a few packets going back and forth between
crypt.kk and Tombstone. But again, these would be stripped of identifying
information, and so it would be impossible to trace them even as far back as
laundry.org, to say nothing of tracing them all the way back to Randy's
laptop.
But in order for Randy to get into Tombstone and begin actually
tampering with the evidence, he must now log on. If it were a poorly secured
host of the type that used to be legion on the Internet, he could just
exploit one of its numerous security holes and crack his way into it, so
that if his activities on the machine were discovered, he could claim that
it wasn't him just some cracker who happened to break into the machine at
the very moment it was being seized by the cops. But Randy has spent the
last several years of his life making machines such as this one impregnable
to crackers, and he knows it's impossible.
Furthermore, there's no point in logging on as just any old user like
using a guest account. Guests are not allowed to tamper with system files.
In order to do any meaningful evidence tampering here, Randy has to log on
as the superuser. The name of the superuser account is, inconveniently,
"randy" and you can't actually log in as "randy" without entering a password
that only Randy would know. So after using the very latest in cryptographic
technology and trans oceanic packet switching communications to conceal his
identity, Randy now finds himself faced with the necessity of typing his
name into the fucking machine.
A little scenario flashes up in his head in which he sends an anonymous
broadcast message to all laundry.org users telling them that the password
for the "randy" account on "tombstone.epiphyte.com" is such and such and
urging them to spread this information all over the Internet as fast as
possible. This might have been a decent idea if he had thought of it an hour
ago. Now it is too late; any sentient prosecutor tracing the time stamps on
the messages would be able to prove that it was just a blind.
Besides, time is running low. The discussion across the street, which
is just a shrill hubbub at this distance, is rising to some sort of climax.
Randy has meanwhile booted up his browser and gone to the ordo.net home
page. Usually it's a pretty dull corporate home page, but today all of the
blurbs and quotidian press releases have been obliterated by a window
showing live color video of what is going on in front of the building (or
rather, what was going on a couple of seconds ago; coming over his miserable
low bandwidth radio link, the video changes frames about once every three
seconds). The video is originating from Ordo itself, where they've evidently
aimed a camera out the window and are slamming the images straight out over
their very own T3 line.
Randy glances up just in time to see the guy who invented the term
"virtual reality" walking across the lot, deep in conversation with the
executive editor of TURING Magazine. Not far behind them is Bruce, an
operating systems engineer who, in his spare time, records Tierra del Fuegan
folk music and makes it available for free over the Internet.
"Bruce!" Randy shouts.
Bruce falters and looks over in Randy's direction. "Randy," he says.
"Why are you here?"
"Word on the street is that the Feds were raiding Ordo," Bruce says.
"Interesting. . . . any particular Feds?"
"Comstock," Bruce says. Meaning Paul Comstock, who, by virtue of being
Attorney General of the United States, runs the FBI. Randy does not believe
this rumor, but in spite of himself he scans the area for people fitting the
general profile of FBI agents. The FBI hates and fears strong crypto.
Meanwhile another Secret Admirer type shouts, "I heard Secret Service!"
Which is even creepier, in a way, because the Secret Service is part of the
Treasury Department, and is charged with combating wire fraud and protecting
the nation's currency.
Randy says, "Would you be open to the possibility that it's all a Net
rumor? That what's really going on is that a piece of equipment inside
Ordo's offices is being seized as part of a legal squabble?"
"Then why are all these cops here?" Bruce says.
"Maybe the masked men with assault rifles drew them."
"Well, why did the Secret Admirers show up in the first place if it
wasn't a government raid?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's just some kind of spontaneous self organizing
phenomenon like the origin of life in the primordial soup."
Bruce says, "Isn't it just as possible that the legal squabble is a
pretext?"
"In other words that the squabble is sort of like a Trojan horse put
together by Comstock?"
"Yeah."
"Knowing all of the parties involved, I'd rate it as unlikely," Randy
says, "but let me think about it."
The noise and intensity of the argument in the Ordo parking lot spike
upwards. Randy looks at the video window, which unfortunately has no sound
track. The transactions between frames come as isolated blocks of new pixels
slapped up one at a time over the old, like a large billboard being posted
sections. High definition TV it ain't. But Randy definitely recognizes Avi,
standing there tall, pale, and calm, flanked by one guy who's probably Dave
the Ordo president, and another guy who's obviously a lawyer. They are
literally standing in the doorway of the building and facing off against two
cops and none other than Andrew Loeb, who is in rapid motion and hence poses
an insurmountable bandwidth problem. The Internet video gear is smart enough
not to mess with parts of an image that aren't changing very much, and so
the planted cops get refreshed maybe a couple of times a minute, and then
just in a few rectangular image shards. But Andrew Loeb is waving his arms
around, hopping up and down, lunging towards Avi from time to time, pulling
back and taking calls on his cellphone, and waving documents in the air. The
computers have identified him as a bunch of pixels that require a great deal
of attention and bandwidth, and so somewhere some poor algorithm is churning
through the high pressure slurry of compressed pixels that is the image of
Andrew Loeb, and doing its level best to freeze the most rapidly moving
parts into discrete frames and chop them up into checkerboard squares that
can be broadcast as packets over the Net. These packets arrive in Randy's
computer as the radio network passes them along, i.e., sporadically and in
the wrong order. So Andrew Loeb appears as a cubist digital video artifact,
a rectilinear amoeba of mostly trench coat beige pixels. From time to time
his eyes or his mouth will suddenly appear, disembodied, in the center of an
image block, and remain frozen there for a few seconds, crystallized in a
moment of howling rage.
This is weirdly mesmerizing until Randy's startled out of his reverie
by a clunk. He looks over to see that the van he's blocked in wasn't
abandoned after all; it was full of Dwarves, who have now thrown the back
doors open to reveal a nest of cables and wires. A couple of the Dwarves are
heaving a boxy apparatus up onto the roof of the van. Cables run out of it
to another boxy apparatus down below. The apparatus is electrical in nature
and doesn't appear capable of firing projectiles so Randy decides not to pay
it much attention for the moment.
Voices well up across the street. Randy sees some cops climbing out of
a cop van carrying a battering ram.
Randy types:
randy
and hits the return key. Tombstone answers:
password:
and Randy types it in. Tombstone informs him that he's logged on, and
that he has mail.
The fact that Randy has logged on has now been recorded by the system
in several locations on the hard drive. He has, in other words, just slapped
big greasy fingerprints all over a weapon that the police are moments away
from seizing as evidence. If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops
before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the
very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for
tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe
could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But
then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will
never be aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe
the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in
secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.
Randy could just reformat the hard drive with a single command, but (1)
it would take several minutes to execute and (2) it would not thoroughly
erase the incriminating bits, which could be lifted from the hard drive by a
motivated technician. Because he knows which files have recorded his log on,
he executes a command that finds those files on the hard drive. Then he
types another command that causes random numbers to be written over those
areas of the hard drive seven times in a row.
The cops are slamming the battering ram against the side door of the
office building when Randy's right pinky slams the Enter key and executes
that command. He is almost certainly safe from the tampering with evidence
charge now. But he hasn't actually tampered yet, which is the whole point of
this exercise. He needs to find all the copies of the e mail message that
specifies the latitude and longitude of the wreck, and do the same multiple
erase trick on them. If the damn things were not encrypted, he could search
for the critical strings of digits. As it is, he will have to search for
files that were created during a certain time period, around the time that
Randy was out on Glory, anchored over the wreck. Randy knows roughly what
day that was, and so he sets the limits of the search to give him any files
created five days either side of that, just to be safe, and limits it to
only those directories used for e mail.
The search takes forever, or maybe it just seems that way because the
cops have smashed the side door off its hinges now and are inside the
building. The video window catches Randy's eye as it changes dramatically;
he gets a veering montage of grainy frozen images of a room; a doorway; a
hallway; a reception area; and finally a barricade. The Ordo guys have
yanked their video camera out of the window and restationed it at their
front desk, recording a barrier built of cheap modular office furniture
piled against the glass entrance to the reception. The camera tilts up to
show that one of the four glass door slabs has already been crystallized by
(one supposes) the impact of the battering ram.
Randy's "find" command finally returns with a list of about a hundred
files. The half dozen or so critical ones are on the list somewhere, but
Randy doesn't have time to go through the list figuring out which is which.
He has the system generate a list of the disk blocks occupied by those
files, so that he can go back later and do a super erase. Once he's got that
information, he does a "rm" or "remove" command on all of them. This is a
paltry and miserable way to expunge secrets from a hard drive, but Randy's
afraid he may not have time to do it more thoroughly. The "rm" only takes a
few moments and then Randy goes back and has the system write random numbers
on top of those disk blocks seven times in a row, just as he did earlier. By
this time the barricade has been scattered all over Ordo's lobby and the
cops are inside. They have weapons drawn and pointed at the ceiling and they
don't look very happy.
There is one thing left to do. Actually it's a pretty big thing. The
Epiphyte people use Tombstone for all kinds of purposes, and there's no way
of telling whether other copies of that latitude and longitude exist on it
somewhere. Most of Epiphyte is made up of inveterate computer users who
would be just the sort to write little scripts to back up all of their old e
mail messages to an archive every week. So he whips up his own script that
will just write random information to every sector on the entire hard drive,
then go back and do it again, and again, and again, forever or until the
cops pull the plug. Just after he whacks the Enter key to send this command
in to Tombstone, he hears an electrical buzzing noise from the van that
makes his hair stand on end for a moment. He sees a cop in the video window,
frozen. Then the screen of his computer goes blank.
Randy looks over toward the old van. The Dwarves are high fiving each
other.
There is a screeching of tires, and the sound of a low speed collision,
out on the street. About a dozen cars have rolled quietly to a stop, and
some have been rear ended by others that are still functioning. The
McDonald's has gone dark. Television technicians are cursing inside their
mobile units. Police officers and lawyers are pounding their walkie talkies
and cellphones against their hands.
"Pardon me," Randy says to the Dwarves, "but would you gentlemen like
to share anything with me?"
"We just took out the whole building," says one of the Dwarves.
"Took it out, in what sense?"
"Nailed it with a big electromagnetic pulse. Fried every chip within
range.
"So it's a scorched earth kind of deal? Go ahead and confiscate that
gear, you damn Feds, it's all worthless junk now?"
"Yeah."
"Well, it certainly worked on those cars," Randy says, "and it
definitely worked on this piece of junk that used to be my computer."
"Don't worry it has no effect on hard drives," the Dwarf says, "so all
of your files are intact."
"I know you are expecting me to take that as good news," Randy says.
Chapter 77 BUDDHA
A car is coming. The engine noise is expensively muffled, but it sounds
like a diesel. Goto Dengo is awake, waiting for it, and so is the rest of
the camp. No one stirs at Bundok during the day anymore, except for the
radio men and those manning the anti aircraft guns. They have not been told
that MacArthur is on Luzon, but they all sense The General's presence. The
American planes rip across the sky all day long, glittering and proud, like
starships from a distant future that none of them will ever see, and the
earth rings like a bell from the impacts of distant naval guns. The
shipments have become smaller but more frequent: one or two broken down
lorries every night, their rear bumpers practically scraping the road under
crippling burdens of gold.
Lieutenant Mori has placed anther machine gun at the front gate,
concealed in the foliage, just in case some Americans happen to blunder up
this road in a jeep. Somewhere out there in the dark, the barrel of that
weapon is tracking this car as it jounces up the road. The men know every
dip and rise in that road, and can tell where the vehicles are by listening
for the scrape of their undercarriages against the hardpan, a signature
pattern of metallic dots and dashes.
The car's headlamps are off, of course, and the guards at the gate dare
not shine bright lights around. One of them risks opening up a kerosene
lantern, and aims its beam at the visitor. A silver Mercedes Benz hood
ornament springs forth from the blackness, supported by a chrome plated
radiator grille. The beam of the lantern fondles the car's black fenders,
its sweeping silver exhaust pipes, its running boards, clotted with the meat
of young coconuts it must have sideswiped a pile on its way up here. In the
driver's side window is the face of a Nipponese man in his forties, so
haggard and tired he looks as though he is about to burst into tears. But he
is just a driver. Next to him is a sergeant with a sawed off shotgun,
Nipponese rifles being generally too long to wield in the front seat of a
luxury car. Behind them, a drawn curtain conceals whatever, or whoever, is
in the backseat.
"Open!" demands the guard, and the driver reaches up behind his head
and parts the curtain. The lantern beam falls through the opening and
bounces back sharply from a pale face in the back seat. Several of the
soldiers shout. Goto Dengo steps back, rattled, then moves in for a better
look.
The man in the backseat has a very large head. But the strange thing
about him is that his skin is a rich yellow color not the normal Asian
yellow and it glitters. He is wearing a peculiar, pointed hat, and he has a
calm smile on his face an expression the likes of which Goto Dengo has not
seen since the war began.
More lantern beams come on, the ring of soldiers and officers closes in
on the Mercedes. Someone pulls the rear door open and then jumps back as if
he has burned his hand on it.
The passenger is sitting crosslegged on the backseat, which has been
crushed into a broad V beneath his weight.
It is a solid gold Buddha, looted from somewhere else in the Greater
East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere, coming to meditate in serene darkness atop
the hoard of Golgotha.
It turns out to be small enough to fit through the entrance, but too
big to go in one of the little railway cars, and so the strongest Filipino
men must spend the next hours shoving it down the tunnel one inch at a tame.
The early shipments were neatly crated, and the crates were stenciled
with labels identifying the contents as machine gun ammunition or mortar
rounds or the like. The crates that come later don't have the stencils. At a
certain point, the gold begins to arrive in cardboard boxes and rotten
steamer trunks. They fall open all the time, and the workers patiently
gather the gold up and carry it to the tunnel entrance in their arms and
throw it into the hand cars. The bars tumble end over end and smash into the
sheet metal with a din that scares clouds of birds out of the overhanging
trees. Goto Dengo cannot help looking at the bars. They come in different
sizes, some of them so large that it takes two men to carry one. They are
stamped with the names of central banks from a few places Goto Dengo has
been and many he's only heard of: Singapore, Saigon, Batavia, Manila,
Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton. There is French gold that was
apparently shipped to Cambodia, and Dutch gold shipped to Jakarta, and
British gold shipped to Singapore all to keep it out of the hands of the
Germans.
But some shipments consist entirely of gold from the Bank of Tokyo.
They get five convoys in a row of the stuff. According to the tally that
Goto Dengo is keeping in his head, two thirds of the tonnage stored in
Golgotha ends up coming straight from Nippon's central reserves. All of it
is cold to the touch, and stored in good but old crates. He concludes that
it was shipped to the Philippines a long time ago and has been sitting in a
cellar in Manila ever since, waiting for this moment. They must have shipped
it here at about the same time that Goto Dengo was plucked off the beach in
New Guinea, way back in late 1943.
They have known. They have known for that long that they were going to
lose the war.
By the middle of January, Goto Dengo has begun to look back on the
Christmas Day massacre with something almost like nostalgia, missing the
atmosphere of naive innocence that made the killings necessary. Until that
morning, even he had managed to convince himself that Golgotha was an arms
cache that the emperor's soldiers would someday use to stage a glorious
reconquest of Luzon. He knows that the workers believed it too. Now everyone
knows about the gold, and the camp has changed. Everyone understands that
there will be no exit.
At the beginning of January, the workers are made up of two types:
those who are resigned to die here, and those who aren't. The latter group
make various escape attempts of a desultory and hopeless nature and are shot
by the guards. The era of hoarding ammunition seems to be over, or perhaps
the guards are just too sick and hungry to climb down out of the watch
towers and personally bayonet all of the people who present themselves to be
killed. So it is all done with bullets, and the bodies left to balloon and
blacken. Bundok is immanent with their stench.
Goto Dengo hardly notices, though, because the camp is suffused with
the crazy, sick tension that always precedes a battle. Or so he supposes; he
has seen a lot of excitement in this war, but he has never been in a proper
battle. The same is automatically true of most of the Nipponese here,
because essentially all of the Nipponese who go into battles wind up dead.
In this army you are either a greenhorn or a corpse.
Sometimes, a briefcase arrives along with the gold shipment. The
briefcase is always handcuffed to the wrist of a soldier who has grenades
dangling all over his body so that he can blow himself and it to powder if
the convoy should be assaulted by Huks. The briefcases go straight to the
Bundok radio station and their contents are placed in a safe. Goto Dengo
knows that they must contain codes not the usual books, but some kind of
special codes that are changed every day because every morning, after the
sun has come up, the radio officer performs a ceremony of burning a single
sheet of paper in front of the transmitter shack, and then rubbing the
withered leaf of ash between his hands.
It is through that radio station that they will receive the final
order. All is in readiness, and Goto Dengo goes through the complex once a
day checking everything.
The diagonal tunnel finally reached the stub tunnel at the bottom of
Lake Yamamoto a couple of weeks ago. The stub was filled with water that had
seeped past the concrete plug during the months since it had been put into
place, and so when the two tunnels were finally joined, several tons of
water ran down the diagonal into Golgotha. This was expected and planned
for; all of it went into a sump and drained from there into the Tojo River.
Now it is possible to go all the way up the diagonal and look at the
concrete plug from the underside. Lake Yamamoto is on the other side. Goto
Dengo goes up there every couple of days, ostensibly to check the plug and
its demolition charges, but really to check on the progress being made,
unbeknownst to Captain Noda, by Wing's and Rodolfo's crews. They are mostly
drilling upwards, making more of those short, vertical, dead end shafts, and
enlarging the chambers at their tops. The system (including the new
"ventilation shafts" ordered by The General, and dug from the top down just
to the east of the ridgeline) looks like this now:
Inside the primary storage complex is a small room that Captain Noda
has dubbed the Hall of Glory. It does not look very glorious right now. Most
of it is filled with a snarl of wires which have been run into it from all
parts of the Golgotha complex, and which dangle from the ceiling or trail on
the floor with hand lettered paper tags dangling from them, saying things
like MAIN ENTRANCE DEMOLITION CHARGES. There are several crates of lead acid
batteries to supply power for the detonations, and to give Goto Dengo a few
minutes of electric light by which to read those paper tags. Extra boxes of
dynamite and blasting caps are stacked at one end of the Hall of Glory in
case some tunnels need a little extra destruction, and coils of red fuse
cord in case the electrical system fails completely.
But the demolition order hasn't yet come, so Goto Dengo does the things
soldiers do while waiting to die. He writes letters to his family that will
never be delivered or even mailed. He smokes. He plays cards. He goes and
checks his equipment another time, and then another. A week goes by without
any gold deliveries. Twenty prisoners try to escape together. The ones who
don't get sprayed across the killing ground by mines get tangled in barbed
wire and are each shot by a team of two guards, one aiming a flashlight and
the other aiming a rifle. Captain Noda spends all night, every night, pacing
back and forth in front of the main gate and smoking cigarettes, then drinks
himself to sleep at dawn. The radio men sit in front of their rig watching
the tubes glow, jerking like electrified frog legs whenever a feeble string
of beeps comes in on their frequency. But the order does not come.
One night, then, the trucks come again, just as they did the first
time. The convoy must contain all that's left of the Nipponese motor pool on
Luzon. They all come together, making a rumble that can be heard half an
hour before they actually reach the gate. When their cargo has been taken
out and stacked on the ground, the soldiers guarding this convoy remain
behind at Bundok. The only people who leave are the drivers.
It takes two days to move this last hoard into the tunnels. One of
their shuttle trucks has broken down for good and been cannibalized to keep
the other one going. It is running on half of its cylinders and is so feeble
that it has to be pushed up the riverbed road by teams of workers and hauled
over the rough patches on ropes. It has finally begun to rain, and the Tojo
River is rising.
The main vault is nearly full of treasure, and so is the fool's vault.
The new shipment has to be packed in wherever it will fit; they break it out
of its crates and jam it into crannies. The crates are stenciled with double
headed eagles and swastikas, and the gold bars inside come from Berlin,
Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, Riga, Copenhagen, Budapest,
Bucharest, Milan. There are also cardboard boxes filled with diamonds. Some
of the crates are still damp, and smell of the sea. Seeing this, Goto Dengo
knows that a big submarine must have arrived from Germany, filled with Nazi
treasure. So that explains the two week lull: they've been awaiting the
arrival of this U boat.
He works in the tunnels for two days, wearing a miner's headlamp,
shoving jewels and gold bars into crevices. He goes into a sort of trance
that is finally interrupted by a heavy thud reverberating through the rock.
Artillery, he thinks. Or a bomb from one of MacArthur's planes.
He comes up the main ventilation shaft to the top of the ridge, where
it's broad daylight. He is crushed to discover that there is no battle
underway. MacArthur isn't going to rescue him. Lieutenant Mori has brought
almost all of the workers up here, and they are hauling on ropes, dragging
Bundok's heavy equipment up and throwing it down into the recently dug
"ventilation shafts." Both of the trucks are up here, and men with torches
and sledgehammers are breaking them up into pieces small enough to drop down
the shafts. Goto Dengo arrives just in time to see the engine block of the
radio station's generator tumbling down a shaft into blackness. The rest of
the radio gear follows it directly.
Somewhere nearby, concealed in the trees, someone is grunting heavily,
doing some kind of hard physical labor. It is a practiced martial arts type
of grunt, from way down in the diaphragm.
"Lieutenant Goto!" says Captain Noda. He is daft with alcohol. "Your
duties are below."
"What was that loud noise?"
Noda beckons him over to an outcropping from which they can see down
into the valley of the Tojo River. Goto Dengo, unsteady for any number of
reasons, suffers a spell of dizziness and nearly falls off. The problem is
disorientation: he does