Cryptonomicon

Chapter 17 ALOFT

Any way that livestock can travel, Bobby Shaftoe has too, boxcars, open trucks, forced cross-country marches. Military has now invented the airborne equivalent of these in the form of the Plane of a Thousand Names: DC-3, Skytrain, C-47, Dakota Transport, Gooney Bird. He'll survive. The exposed aluminum ribs of the fuselage are trying to beat him to death, but as long as he stays awake, he can fend them off.

The enlisted men are jammed into the other plane. Lieutenants Ethridge and Root are in this one, along with PFC Gerald Hott and Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe. Lieutenant Ethridge got dibs on all of the soft objects in the plane and arranged them into a nest, up forward near the cockpit, and strapped himself down. For a while he pretended to do paperwork. Then he tried looking out the windows. Now he has fallen asleep and is snoring so loudly that he is, no fooling, drowning out the engines.

Enoch Root has wedged himself into the back of the fuselage, where it gets narrow, and is perusing two books at once. It strikes Shaftoe as typical—he supposes that the books say completely different things and that the chaplain is deriving great pleasure from pitting them against each other, like those guys who have a chessboard on a turntable so that they can play against themselves. He supposes that when you live in a shack on a mountain with a bunch of natives who don't speak any of your half-dozen or so languages, you have to learn to have arguments with yourself.

There's a row of small square windows on each side of the plane. Shaftoe looks out to the right and sees mountains covered with snow and gets scared shitless for a moment thinking maybe they've strayed into the Alps. But off to the left, it still looks like the Mediterranean, and eventually it gives way to Devil's Tower type outcroppings rising up out of stony scrubland, and then after that it is just rocks and sand, or sand without the rocks. Sand puckered here and there, for no particular reason, by clutches of dunes. Damn it, they are still in Africa! You ought to be able to see lions and giraffes and rhinos! Shaftoe goes forward to lodge a complaint with the pilot and copilot. Maybe he can get a card game together. Maybe the view out the front of the plane is something to write home about.

He is, on all counts, thrown back in stinging defeat. He sees immediately that the project of finding a better view is doomed. There are only three things in the whole universe: sand, sea, and sky. As a Marine, he knows how boring the sea is. The other two are little better. There is a line of clouds far ahead of them—a front of some description. That's all there is.

He gets a general notion of their flight plan before the chart is snatched away and stashed out of his view. They seem to be attempting to fly across Tunisia, which is kind of funny, because last time Shaftoe checked, Tunisia was Nazi territory—the anchor, in fact, of the Axis presence on the African continent. Today's general flight plan seems to be that they'll cut across the straits between Bizerta and Sicily, then head east to Malta.

All of Rommel's supplies and reinforcements come across those very straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can strike out east towards Egypt or west towards Morocco. In the several weeks since the British Eighth Army kicked the crap out of him at El Alamein (which is way, way over there in Egypt) he has been retreating westwards back towards Tunis. In the few weeks since the Americans landed in Northwest Africa, he's been fighting on a second front to his west. And Rommel has been doing a damn good job of it, as far as Shaftoe can tell from listening between the stentorian lines of the Movietone newsreels, so laden with sinister cheer, whence the above facts were gleaned.

All this means that down below them, vast forces ought to be spread out across the Sahara in readiness for combat. Perhaps there is even a battle going on right now. But Shaftoe sees nothing. Just the occasional line of yellow dust thrown up by a convoy, a dynamite fuse sputtering across the desert.

So he talks to those flyboys. It's not until he notices them giving each other looks that he realizes he's going on at great length. Those Assassins must've killed their victims by talking them to death.

The card game, he realizes, is completely out of the question. These flyboys don't want to talk. He practically has to dive in and grab the control yoke to get them to say anything. And when they do, they sound funny, and he realizes that these guys are not guys nor fellas. They are blokes. Chaps. Mates. They are Brits.

The only other thing he notices about them, before he gives up and slinks back into the cargo hold, is that they are fucking armed to the teeth. Like they were expecting to have to kill twenty or thirty people on their way from the airplane to the latrine and back. Bobby Shaftoe has met a few of these paranoid types during his tour, and he doesn't like them very much. That whole mindset reminds him too much of Guadalcanal.

He finds a place on the floor next to the body of PFC Gerald Hott and stretches out. The teeny revolver in his waistband makes it impossible for him to lie on his back, so he takes it out and pockets it. This only transfers the center of discomfort to the Marine Raider stiletto holstered invisibly between his shoulder blades. He realizes that he is going to have to curl up on his side, which doesn't work because on one side he has a standard-issue Colt semiautomatic, which he doesn't trust, and on the other, his own six-shooter from home, which he does. So he has to find places to stash those, along with the various ammo clips, speed loaders, and maintenance supplies that go with them. The V-44 “Gung Ho” jungle-clearing, coconut-splitting, and Nip-decapitating knife, strapped to the outside of his lower leg, also has to be removed, as does the derringer that he keeps on the other leg for balance. The only thing that stays with him are the grenades in his front pockets, since he doesn't plan to lie down on his stomach.

They make their way around the headland just in time to avoid being washed out to sea by the implacable tide. In front of them is a muddy tidal flat, forming the floor of a box-shaped cove. The walls of the box are formed by the headland they've just gone round, another, depressingly similar headland a few hundred yards along the shore, and a cliff rising straight up out of the mudflats. Even if it were not covered with relentlessly hostile tropical jungle, this cliff would seal off access to the interior of Guadalcanal just because of its steepness. The Marines are trapped in this little cove until the tide goes back out.

Which is more than enough time for the Nip machine gunner to kill them all.

They all know the sound of the weapon by now and so they throw themselves down to the mud instantly. Shaftoe takes a quick look around. Marines lying on their backs or sides are probably dead, those on their stomachs are probably alive. Most of them are on their stomachs. The sergeant is conspicuously dead; the gunner aimed for him first.

The Nip or Nips have only one gun, but they seem to have all the ammunition in the world—the fruits of the Tokyo Express, which has been coming down the Slot with impunity ever since Shaftoe and the rest of the Marines landed early in August. The gunner rakes the mudflats leisurely, zeroing in quickly on any Marine who tries to move.

Shaftoe gets up and runs towards the base of the cliff.

Finally, he can see the muzzle flashes from the Nip gun. This tells him which way it's pointed. When the flashes are elongated it's pointed at someone else, and it's safe to get up and run. When they become foreshortened, it is swinging around to bear on Bobby Shaftoe—He cuts it too close. There is very bad pain in his lower right abdomen. His scream is muffled by mud and silt as the weight of his web and helmet drive him face-first into the ground.

He loses consciousness for a while, perhaps. But it can't have been that long. The firing continues, implying that the Marines are not all dead yet. Shaftoe raises his head with difficulty, fighting the weight of the helmet, and sees a log between him and the machine gun—a piece of wave-burnished driftwood flung far up the beach by a storm.

He can run for it or not. He decides to run. It's only a few steps. He realizes, halfway there, that he's going to make it. The adrenaline is finally flowing; he lunges forward mightily and collapses in the shelter of the big log. Half a dozen bullets thunk into the other side of it, and wet, fibrous splinters shower down over him. The log is rotten.

Shaftoe has gotten himself into a bit of a hole, and cannot see forward or back without exposing himself. He cannot see his fellow Marines, only hear some of them screaming.

He risks a peek at the machine gun nest. It is well concealed by jungle vegetation, but it is evidently built into a cave a good twenty feet above the mudflat. He's not that far from the base of the cliff—he might just reach it with another sprint. But climbing up there is going to be murder. The machine gun probably can't depress far enough to shoot down at him, but they can roll grenades at him until the cows come home, or just pick him off with small arms as he gropes for handholds.

It is, in other words, grenade launcher time. Shaftoe rolls onto his back, extracts a flanged metal tube from his web gear, fits it onto the muzzle of his ought-three. He tries to clamp it down, but his fingers slip on the bloody wing nut. Who's the pencil-neck that decided to use a fucking wing-nut in this context? No point griping about it here and now. There is actually blood all over the place, but he is not in pain. He drags his fingers through the sand, gets them all gritty, tightens that wing nut down.

Out of its handy pouch comes one Mark II fragmentation grenade, a.k.a. pineapple, and with a bit more groping he's got the Grenade Projection Adapter, M1. He engages the former into the latter, yanks out the safety pin, drops it, then slips the fully prepped and armed Grenade Projection Adapter, Ml, with its fruity payload, over the tube of the grenade launcher. Finally: he opens up one specially marked cartridge case, fumbles through bent and ruptured Lucky Strikes, finds one brass cylinder, a round of ammunition sans payload, crimped at the end but not endowed with an actual bullet. Loads same into the Springfield's firing chamber.

He creeps along the log so that he can pop up and fire from an unexpected location and perhaps not get his head chewed off by the machine gun. Finally raises this Rube Goldberg device that his Springfield has become, jams the butt into the sand (in grenade-launcher mode the recoil will break your collarbone), points it toward the foe, pulls the trigger. Grenade Projection Adapter, M1 is gone with a terrible pow, trailing a damn hardware store of now-superfluous parts, like a soul discarding its corpse. The pineapple is now soaring heavenward, even its pin and safety lever gone, its chemical fuse aflame so that it even has a, whattayoucallit, an inner light. Shaftoe's aim is true, and the grenade is heading where intended. He thinks he's pretty damn smart—until the grenade bounces back, tumbles down the cliff, and blows up another rotten log. The Nips have anticipated Bobby Shaftoe's little plan, and put up nets or chicken wire or something.

He lies on his back in the mud, looking up at the sky, saying the word “fuck” over and over. The entire log throbs, and something akin to peat moss showers down into his face as the bullets chew up the rotten wood. Bobby Shaftoe says a prayer to the Almighty and prepares to mount a banzai charge.

Then the maddening sound of the machine gun stops, and is replaced by the sound of a man screaming. His voice sounds unfamiliar. Shaftoe levers himself up on his elbow and realizes that the screaming is coming from the direction of the cave.

He looks up into the big, sky-blue eyes of Enoch Root.

The chaplain has moved from his nook at the back of the plane and is squatting next to one of the little windows, holding onto whatever he can. Bobby Shaftoe, who has rolled uncomfortably onto his stomach, looks out a window on the opposite side of the plane. He ought to see the sky, but instead he sees a sand dune wheeling past. The sight makes him instantly nauseated. He does not even consider sitting up.

Brilliant spots of light are streaking wildly around the inside of the plane, like ball lightning, but—and this is far from obvious at first—they are actually projected against the wall of the plane, like flashlight beams. He back-traces the beams, taking advantage of a light haze of vaporized hydraulic fluid that has begun to accumulate in the air; and finds that they originate in a series of small circular holes that some asshole has punched through the skin of the plane while he was sleeping. The sun is shining through these holes, always in the same direction of course; but the plane is going every which way.

He realizes that he has actually been lying on the ceiling of the airplane ever since he woke up, which explains why he was on his stomach. When this dawns on him, he vomits.

The bright spots all vanish. Very, very reluctantly, Shaftoe risks a glance out the window and sees only greyness.

He thinks he is on the floor now. He is next to the corpse, at any rate, and the corpse was strapped down.

He lies there for several minutes, just breathing and thinking. Air whistles through the holes in the fuselage, loud enough to split his head.

Someone—some madman—is up on his feet, moving about the plane. It is not Root, who is in his little nook dealing with a number of facial lacerations that he picked up during the aerobatics. Shaftoe looks up and sees that the moving man is one of the British flyboys.

The Brit has yanked off his headgear to expose black hair and green eyes. He's in his mid-thirties, an old man. He has a knobby, utilitarian face in which all of the various lumps, knobs and orifices seem to be there for a reason, a face engineered by the same fellows who design grenade launchers. It is a simple and reliable face, by no means handsome. He is kneeling next to the corpse of Gerald Hott and is examining it minutely with a flashlight. He is the very picture of concern; his bedside manner is flawless.

Finally he slumps back against the ribbed wall of the fuselage. “Thank god,” he says, “he wasn't hit.”

“Who wasn't?” Shaftoe says.

“This chap,” the flyboy says, slapping the corpse.

“Aren't you going to check me?”

“No need to.”

“Why not? I'm still alive.”

“You weren't hit,” the flyboy says confidently. “If you'd been hit, you'd look like Lieutenant Ethridge.”

For the first time, Shaftoe hazards movement. He props himself up on one elbow, and finds that the floor of the plane is slick and wet with red fluid.

He had noticed a pink mist in the cabin, and supposed that it was produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky-dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product. It is the same red fluid that figured so prominently in Shaftoe's nightmare. It is streaming downhill from the direction of Lieutenant Ethridge's cozy nest, and the Lieutenant is no longer snoring.

Shaftoe looks at what is left of Ethridge, which bears a striking resemblance to what was lying around that butcher shop earlier today. He does not wish to lose his composure in the presence of the British pilot, and indeed, feels strangely calm. Maybe it's the clouds; cloudy days have always had a calming effect on him.

“Holy cow,” he finally says, “that Kraut twenty-millimeter is something else.”

“Right,” the flyboy says, “we've got to get spotted by a convoy and then we'll proceed with the delivery.”

Cryptic as it is, this is the most informative statement Bobby's ever heard about the intentions of Detachment 2702. He gets up and follows the pilot back to the cockpit, both of them stepping delicately around several quivering giblets that were presumably flung out of Ethridge.

“You mean, by an allied convoy, right?” Shaftoe asks.

“An allied convoy?” the pilot asks mockingly. “Where the hell are we going to find an allied convoy? This is Tunisia.”

“Well, then, what do you mean, we've got to get spotted by a convoy? You mean we have to spot a convoy, right?”

“Very sorry,” the flyboy says, “I'm busy.”

When he turns back, he finds Lieutenant Enoch Root kneeling by a relatively large piece of Ethridge, going through Ethridge's attache case. Shaftoe cops a look of exaggerated moral outrage and points the finger of blame.

“Look, Shaftoe,” Root shouts, “I'm just following orders. Taking over for him.”

He pulls out a small bundle, all wrapped in thick, yellowish plastic sheeting. He checks it over, then glances up reprovingly, one more time, at Shaftoe.

“It was a fucking joke!” Shaftoe says. “Remember? When I thought those guys were looting the corpses? On the beach?”

Root doesn't laugh. Either he's pissed off that Shaftoe successfully bullshitted him, or he doesn't enjoy corpse-looting humor. Root carries the wrapped bundle back to that other body, the one in the wetsuit. He stuffs the bundle inside the suit.

Then he squats by the body and ponders. He ponders for a long time. Shaftoe kind of gets a kick out of watching Enoch ponder, which is like watching an exotic dancer shake her tits.

The light changes again as they descend from the clouds. The sun is setting, shining redly through the Saharan haze. Shaftoe looks out a window and is startled to see that they are over the sea now. Below them is a convoy of ships each making a neat white V in the dark water, each lit up on one side by the red sun.

The airplane banks and makes a slow loop around the convoy. Shaftoe hears distant pocking noises. Black flowers bloom and fade in the sky around them. He realizes that the ships are trying to hit them with ack-ack. Then the plane ascends once more into the shelter of the clouds, and it gets nearly dark.

He looks at Enoch Root for the first time in a while. Root is sitting back in his little nook, reading by flashlight. A bundle of papers is open on his lap. It is the plastic-wrapped bundle that Root took out of Ethridge's attache case and shoved into Gerald Hott's wetsuit. Shaftoe figures that the encounter with convoy and ack-ack finally pushed Root over the edge, and that he yanked the bundle right back out again to have a look at it.

Root glances up and locks eyes with Shaftoe. He does not seem nervous or guilty. It is a strikingly calm and cool look.

Shaftoe holds his gaze for a long moment. If there were the slightest trace of guilt or nervousness there, he would turn the chaplain in as a German spy. But there isn't—Enoch Root ain't working for the Germans. He ain't working for the Allies either. He's working for a Higher Power. Shaftoe nods imperceptibly, and Root's gaze softens.

“They're all dead, Bobby,” he shouts. “Those islanders. The ones you saw on the beach on Guadalcanal.”

So that explains why Root is so touchy about corpse-looting jokes. “Sorry,” Shaftoe says, moving aft so they don't have to scream at each other. “How'd it happen?”

“After we got you back to my cabin, I transmitted a message to my handlers in Brisbane,” Root says. “Enciphered it using a special code. Told them I'd picked up one Marine Raider, who looked like he might actually live, and would someone please come round and collect him.”

Shaftoe nods. He remembers that he'd heard lots of dots and dashes, but he had been out of whack with fevers and morphine and whatever home remedies Root had pulled out of his cigar box.

“Well, they responded,” Root went on, “and said 'We can't go there, but would you please take him to such-and-such place and rendezvous with some other Marine Raiders.' Which, as you'll recall, is what we did.”

“Yeah,” Shaftoe says.

“So far so good. But when I got back to the cabin after handing you over, the Nipponese had been through. Killed every islander they could find. Burned the cabin. Burned everything. Set booby traps around the place that nearly killed me. I just barely got out of the damn place alive.”

Shaftoe nods, as only a guy who's seen the Nips in action can nod.

“Well they evacuated me to Brisbane where I started making a stink about codes. That's the only way they could have found me—obviously our codes had been broken. And after I'd made enough of a stink, someone apparently said, 'You're British, you're a priest, you're a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse code, and most importantly of all, you're a fucking pain in the ass—so off you go!' And next thing I know, I'm in that meat locker in Algiers.”

Shaftoe glances away and nods. Root seems to get the message, which is that Shaftoe doesn't know anything more than he does.

Eventually, Enoch Root wraps the bundle up again, just like it was before. But he doesn't put it back in the attache case. He stuffs it into Gerald Hott's wetsuit.

Later they emerge from the clouds again, close to a moonlit port, and dip down very close to the ocean, going so slow that even Shaftoe, who knows nothing about planes, senses they are about to stall. They open the side door of the Dakota and, one-two-three-NOW, throw the body of PFC Gerald Hott out into the ocean. He makes what would be a big splash in the Oconomowoc town pool, but in the ocean it doesn't come to much.

An hour or so later they land the same Gooney Bird on an airstrip in the midst of a stunning aerial bombardment. They abandon the Skytrain at the end of the airstrip, next to the other C-47, and run through darkness, following the lead of the British pilots. Then they go down a stairway and are underground—in a bomb shelter, to be precise. They can feel the bombs now but can't hear them.

“Welcome to Malta,” someone says. Shaftoe looks around and sees that he is surrounded by men in British and American uniforms. The Americans are familiar—it's the Marine Raider squad from Algiers, flown in on that other Dakota. The Brits are unfamiliar, and Shaftoe pegs them as the SAS men that those fellows in Washington were telling him about. The only thing they all have in common is that each man, somewhere on his uniform, is wearing the number 2702.