Cryptonomicon

Chapter 101 PASSAGE

When he has picked himself up off the deck, and his ears have stopped ringing, Bischoff says, “Take her down to seventy-five meters.”

The dial that tells their depth says twenty. Somewhere, perhaps a hundred meters above them, crewmen of a circling bomber are setting their depth charges to explode when they have sunk to a depth of twenty, and so twenty is a bad place to be for a while.

The dial does not move, though, and Bischoff has to repeat the command. Everyone on the boat must be deaf.

Either that, or the V-Million has sustained damage to her dive planes. Bischoff presses his skull against a bulkhead, and even though his ears don't work so well anymore, he can feel the whine of the turbines. At least they have power. They can move.

But Catalinas can move faster.

Say what you want about those old, clanking diesel U-boats, they at least had guns on them. You could surface, and go out on the decks in the sun and the air, and fight back. But in the V-Million, this swimming rocket, the only weapon is secrecy. In the Baltic, fine. But this is the Mindoro Strait, which is an ocean of window-glass. V-Million might as well be suspended in midair from piano wires, searchlights crossing on it.

The needle on the dial is moving now, passing down through twenty-five meters. The deck twists under Bischoff's feet as she recoils from another depth charge. But he can tell from the way it twists that this one has detonated too high to deal serious damage. From habit he glances at the dial that tells their speed, and notes it down along with the time: 1746 hours. The sun must be lower and lower in the sky, its light glancing off the tops of the waves, forcing the pilots of the Catalinas to peer down through a screen of bright noise. Another hour and V-Million will be completely invisible. Then, if Bischoff has kept careful records of their speed and course, dead reckoning will tell them approximately where they are, and enable them to run down the Palawan Passage in the night, or to cut west across the South China Sea if that seems like a good idea. But really he is hoping to find some nice pirate cove on the north coast of Borneo, marry a nice orangutan, and raise a little family.

The face of the depth dial says Tiefenmesser in that old-fashioned Gothic lettering that the Nazis loved so much. Messer means a gauge or meter, but it also means knife. Das Messer sitzt mir an der Kehle. The knife is at my throat; I am face-to-face with doom. When the knife is at your throat, you don't want it to move the way the needle on the Tiefenmesser is moving now. Every tick on the dial's face is another meter of water between Bischoff and the sun and the air.

“I would like to be a Messerschmidt,” Bischoff mutters. A man who smashes Messers with a hammer, but also a beautiful thing that flies.

“You will see light, and breathe fresh air again, Günter,” says Rudolf von Hacklheber, a civilian mathematician who really has no place on the bridge of a U-boat during a fight to the death. But there's no good place for him to be, and so here he is.

Now this is a fine thing for Rudy to say, a lovely show of support for Günter. But saving the life of everyone on the U-boat, and getting its cargo of gold to safety, now depends on Günter's emotional stability, and especially on his confidence. Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith—faith in your U-boat, and your crew—beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing.

So Rudy's promise is soon forgotten—or at least it is forgotten by Bischoff. Bischoff derives strength from having heard it, and from similar things that members of his crew say to him, and from their grins and thumbs-up and slaps on the shoulder, and their displays of pluck and initiative, the clever repairs that they make to broken plumbing and overtaxed engines. Strength gives him faith, and faith makes him into a good U-boat skipper. Some would say the best who ever lived. But Bischoff knows many others, better than him, whose bodies are trapped in knuckles of imploded metal on the floor of the North Atlantic.

It comes together like this: the sun has gone down, as it can be relied on to do every day, even when you are a beleaguered U-boat. The V-Million has reamed a tunnel through the Palawan Passage, screaming along, for several hours, at the completely unreasonable speed of twenty-nine knots—four times as fast as U-boats are supposed to be capable of going.

The Americans will have drawn a small circle around the point in the ocean where the mysterious U-boat was last sighted. But the speed of the V-Million is four times as great as they think it is. The real circle is four times as wide as the one they've drawn. The Yanks won't expect them to surface where they are.

But they have to surface because the V-Million wasn't made to run at twenty-nine knots forever; she burns fuel, and hydrogen peroxide, at a ridiculous rate when both of her six-thousand-horsepower turbines are spinning. There is plenty of fuel remaining. But she runs out of hydrogen peroxide at about midnight. She has a few miserable batteries, and electric motors, that just barely suffice to get her up to the surface. But then she has to breathe air for a while, and run her diesels.

So the V-Million, and a few crew members, get to enjoy some fresh air. Bischoff doesn't, because he is dealing with new complexities that have arisen in the engine room. This probably saves his life, because he doesn't even know they're being strafed until he hears the cannon rounds drumming against the outer hull.

Then it is the same old drill, the crash dive, which was so exciting when he was a young man practicing it in the Baltic, and has become so tedious for him now. Looking up through a hatch he gets a moment's glimpse of a single star in the sky before the view is blocked by a mutilated crewman being fed down from above.

Only five minutes later the depth charge scores a direct hit on the stern of the V-Million and tears a hole through both the outer and the pressure hull. The deck angles beneath Bischoff's feet, and his ears begin to pop. On a submarine, both of these are bad omens. He can hear hatches clanging shut as the crew try to stem the advance of the water towards the bow; each one seals the fate of whomever happens to be aft of it. But they're all dead anyway, it is just a question of timing now. Those hatches are not meant to stem five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten atmospheres of pressure. They give way, the pressure spikes upwards as the bubble of air in the front of the V-Million suddenly halves its volume, then halves it again, and again. Each wave of pressure comes as sudden crushing pressure on Bischoff's thorax, driving all the air out of his lungs.

Because the bow is pointed straight up, like a needle on a meter, there's no deck to stand on, and every time a bulkhead yields, and the water level shoots up towards the bow, it leaves them suddenly submerged, with crushed and evacuated lungs, and they must swim up and find the air bubble again.

But finally the mangled stern of the boat spikes into the seafloor and the V-Million settles down, the forwardmost cabin rotating around them, tremendous rock-crushing noises all around as a coral reef is destroyed by the boat's falling hull. And then it's finished. Günter Bischoff and Rudolf von Hacklheber are together in a safe cozy bubble of compressed air, all of the air that used to be in the V-Million reduced to a pocket the size of a car. It's dark.

He hears Rudy undoing the latches on his aluminum briefcase.

“Don't strike a match,” Bischoff says. “This air is compressed, it will burn like a flare.”

“That would be terrible,” Rudy says, and instead turns on a flashlight. The light comes on and immediately dims and goes brown and shrinks to a tiny red speck: the glowing remains of the filament in the bulb.

“Your light bulb has imploded,” Bischoff explains. “But at least I got a little glimpse of you, with that silly look on your face.”

“You too have looked better,” Rudy says. Bischoff can hear him closing up the briefcase, snapping the latches into place. “Do you think my briefcase will float here forever?”

“Eventually the pressure hull above us will corrode. The air will escape from it in a thin line of bubbles that will grow into gyrating nebulas of foul air as they rush towards the surface. The water level will rise and press your briefcase up against what is left of the pressure hull's forward dome, and it will fill with water. But still there will be a little pocket of air in one corner of your briefcase, perhaps.”

“I was thinking of leaving a note in it.”

“If you do, better address it to the United States government.”

“Department of the Navy, you think?”

“Department of Spying. What do they call it? The OSS.”

“Why do you say this?”

“They knew where we were, Rudy. The Catalinas were waiting for us.”

“Maybe they found us with radar.”

“I allowed for radar. Those planes came even faster. You know what it means?”

“Tell me.”

“It means that those who were hunting us knew how fast the V Million could go.”

“Ah… so that is why you think of spies.”

“I gave Bobby the plans, Rudy.”

“The plans for the V-Million?”

“Yes… so that he could buy forgiveness from the Americans.”

“Well, in retrospect maybe you shouldn't have done that. But I do not blame you for it, Günter. It was a magnificent gesture.”

“Now they will come down and find us.”

“After we're dead, you mean.”

“Yes. The whole plan is ruined. Ah well, it was a nice conspiracy while it lasted. Perhaps Enoch Root will display some adaptability.”

“You really think spies will come down to go through this wreck?”

“Who knows?” Bischoff says. “Why are you worrying about it?”

“I have the coordinates of Golgotha here in my briefcase,” Rudy says. “But I know for certain that they are not written down anywhere else in V-Million.”

“You know that because you're the one who decrypted that message.”

“Yes. Maybe I should burn the message now.”

“It would kill us,” Bischoff says, “but at least we would die with some warmth and some light.”

“You are going to be on a sandy beach, sunning yourself, in a few hours, Günter,” Rudy says.

“Stop it!”

“I made a promise which I intend to keep,” Rudy says. There is a movement in the water, the strangled splash of a kicking foot being drawn under the surface.

“Rudy? Rudy?” Bischoff says. But he is alone in a black dome of silence.

A minute later a hand grips his ankle.

Rudy climbs up his body like a ladder and thrusts his head above the surface and howls for air. But this air is the good stuff, sixteen times as much oxygen in a single lungful. He feels better quickly. Bischoff holds him while he calms down.

“The hatch is open,” Rudy says. “I saw light through it. The sun is up, Günter!”

“Let's go, then!”

“You go. I'll stay and burn the message.” Rudy's opening his briefcase again, feeling through papers with his hands, taking something out, closing the briefcase again.

Bischoff cannot move.

“I strike the match in thirty seconds,” Rudy says.

Bischoff launches himself towards Rudy's voice and wraps his arms around him in the dark.

“I'll find the others,” Bischoff says. “I'll tell them that some fucking American spy is onto us. And we'll get that gold first, and we'll keep it out of their hands.”

“Go!” Rudy cries. “I want everything to happen fast now.”

Bischoff kisses him once on each cheek and then dives.

Ahead of him is faint blue-green light, coming from no particular direction.

Rudy swam to the hatch, opened it, and swam back, and was almost dead when he returned. Bischoff has to find that hatch and then swim all the way to the surface. He knows that it will be impossible.

But then much brighter, warmer light floods the interior of the V Million. Bischoff looks back and up, and sees the forward end of the pressure hull turned into a dome of orange fire, the silhouette of a man centered in it, lines of welds and rivets spreading away from that center like the meridians of a globe. It's bright as day. He turns around and swims easily away down the gangway, into the control room, and finds the hatch: a disk of cyan light.

A life-ring is pressed up against what is now the ceiling of this room. He grabs it and wrestles it down into the middle of the cabin, then shoves it before him through the hatch, and kicks his way through.

There's coral all around him, and it's beautiful. He'd love to stay and sightsee, but he's got responsibilities above. He keeps a grip on the life preserver, and although he doesn't feel himself moving, he sees the coral dropping away below. There's a big grey thing lying on it, bubbling and bleeding, and this gets smaller and smaller, like a rocket flying away into the sky.

He looks up into the water that is streaming over his face. Both of Bischoff's arms are above his head, gripping the rim of the life-ring, and he sees a disk of sunlight through it, getting brighter and redder as he ascends.

His knees begin to hurt.