Cryptonomicon

Chapter 24 LIZARD

Bobby Shaftoe and his buddies are just out for a nice little morning drive through the countryside.

In Italy.

Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?

Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.

In the good old days, back on Guadalcanal, his commanding officer would say something like “Shaftoe, eradicate that pillbox!” and from there on out, Bobby Shaftoe was a free agent. He could walk, run, swim or crawl. He could sneak up and lob in a satchel charge, or he could stand off at a distance and hose the objective down with a flame thrower. Didn't matter as long as he accomplished the goal.

The goal of this little mission is completely beyond Shaftoe's comprehension. They awaken him; Lieutenant Enoch Root; three of the other Marines, including the radio man; and several of the SAS blokes in the middle of the night, and hustle them down to one of the few docks in Malta that hasn't been blasted away by the Luftwaffe. A submarine waits. They climb aboard and play cards for about twenty-four hours. Most of the time they are on the surface, where submarines can go a hell of a lot faster, but from time to time they dive, evidently for the best of reasons.

When next they are allowed up on the flat top of the submarine, it is the middle of the night again. They are in a little cove in a parched, rugged coastline; Shaftoe can see that much by the moonlight. Two trucks are waiting for them. They open hatches in the sub's deck and begin to take stuff out: into one of the trucks, the U.S. Marines load a bunch of cloth sacks bulging with what appears to be all kinds of trash. Meanwhile, the British Special Air Service are at work with wrenches, rags, grease and much profanity in the back of the other truck, assembling something from crates that they have brought up from another part of the submarine. This is covered up by a tarp before Shaftoe can get a good look, but he recognizes it as something you'd rather have pointed away from you.

There are a couple of dark men with mustachioes hanging around the dock smoking and arguing with the skipper of the submarine. After all of the stuff is unloaded, the skipper appears to pay them with more crates from the submarine. The men pry a couple of them open for inspection, and appear to be satisfied.

At this point Shaftoe still doesn't even know what continent they are on. When he first saw the landscape he figured Northern Africa. When he saw the men, he figured Turkey or something.

It is not until the sun comes up on their little convoy, and (lying in the back of the truck on top of the sacks of trash, peeking out from under the tarp) he is able to see road signs and Christian churches, that he realizes it has to be Italy or Spain. Finally he sees a sign pointing the way to ROMA and figures it's Italy. The sign points away from the midmorning sun, so they must be somewhere south or southeast of Rome. They are also south of some burg called Napoli.

But he doesn't spend a lot of time looking. It is not encouraged. The truck is being driven by some fellow who speaks the language, and who stops from time to time to converse with the natives. Some of the time this sounds like friendly banter. Sometimes it sounds like arguments over highway etiquette. Sometimes it is quieter, more guarded. Shaftoe figures out, slowly, that during these exchanges the truck driver is bribing someone to let them go through.

He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle of the greatest war in history—in a country run by belligerent Fascists for God's sake—two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five-dollar tarps. Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this? He feels like leaping to his feet, casting the tarp aside, and giving these Eyties a good dressing-down. The whole place needs a good scrubbing with toothbrushes anyway. It's like these people aren't even trying. Now, the Nips, think of them what you will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.

He resists the temptation to upbraid the Italians. He thinks it goes against the orders he had thoroughly memorized before the shock of figuring out that he was driving around in an Axis country jangled everything loose from his brain. And if they hadn't come from the lips of Colonel Chattan himself—the chap or bloke who's the commanding officer of Detachment 2702—he wouldn't have believed them anyway.

They are going to be putting in some bivouac time. They are going to play a lot of cards for a while. During this time, the radio man is going to be very busy. This phase of the operation might last as long as a week. At some point, it is likely that strenuous, concerted efforts to kill them will be made by a whole lot of Germans and, if they happen to be feeling impetuous that day, Italians. When this happens, they are to send out a radio message, torch the joint, drive to a certain field that passes for an airstrip, and be picked up by those jaunty SAS flyboys.

Shaftoe didn't believe a word of it at first. He pegged it as some kind of British humor thing, some kind of practical joke/hazing ritual. In general he doesn't know what to make of the Brits because they appear (in his personal observation) to be the only other people on the face of the earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of humor. He has heard rumors that some Eastern Europeans can do it, but he hasn't met any of them, and they don't have much to yuk it up about at the moment. In any case, he can never quite make out when these Brits are joking.

Any thought that this was just a joke evaporated when he saw the quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the military is infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And most of the weapons they do pass out are for shit. It is for this reason that Marines have long found it necessary to buy their own tommy guns from home: the Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won't give them the stuff they need!

But this Detachment 2702 thing is a whole different outfit. Even the grunts are carrying trench brooms! And if that didn't get their attention, the cyanide capsules sure did. And the lecture from Chattan on the correct way to blow your own head off (“you would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure”).

Now, Shaftoe realizes that there is an unspoken codicil to Chattan's orders: oh, yeah, and if any of the Italians, who actually live in Italy, and who run the place, and who are Fascists and who are at war with us—if any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan, whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn't work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you'll probably do a neater job of it than the Fascists will. Don't forget suntan lotion!

Actually, Shaftoe doesn't mind this mission. It is certainly no worse than Guadalcanal. What bothers him (he decides, making himself comfortable on the sacks of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not understanding the purpose of it all.

The rest of the platoon may or may not be dead; he thinks he can still hear some of them crying out, but it's hard to tell between the pounding of the incoming surf and the relentless patter of the machine gun. Then he realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue to fire their gun.

Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies. He is the only one who has a chance.

It is at this point that Shaftoe makes his Big Decision. It is surprisingly easy—but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.

He crawls along the log to the point that is closest to the machine gun. Then he draws a few deep breaths in a row, rises to a crouch, and vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet-shaped muzzle flash of the machine gun tesselated by the black grid of the net that they put up to reject incoming grenades. It is all remarkably clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.

Suddenly he realizes they are still firing the gun, not because any of his buddies are alive, but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.

Then the muzzle swings abruptly towards him—he has been sighted. He is in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they will sweep it with fire until he is dead. Bobby Shaftoe plants his feet, aims his .45 into the cave, and begins pulling the trigger. The barrel of the machine gun is pointing at him now.

But it does not fire.

His .45 clicks. It's empty. Everything is silent except for the surf, and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.

The voice that is doing the screaming is unfamiliar. It's not one of Shaftoe's buddies.

A Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above the level of Shaftoe's head. The pupil of Shaftoe's right eye, the sights of his revolver, and this Nip are all arranged briefly along the same line for a moment, during which Shaftoe pulls the trigger a couple of times and almost certainly scores a hit.

The Imperial Marine gets caught in the netting and plunges to the ground in front of him.

A second Nip dives out of the cave a moment later, grunting incoherently, apparently speechless with horror. He lands wrong and breaks one of his leg bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He begins running towards the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on the bad leg. He completely ignores Shaftoe. There is terrible bleeding from his neck and shoulder, and loose chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.

Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.

Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise of the jungle.

Then he sees the flash of red again, and it disappears again. It was shaped like a sharpened Y. It was shaped like the forked tongue of a reptile.

Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake and topple as it moves.

It is out, free and clear, on the beach. It is low to the ground, moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty feet distant.

Sand erupts into the air, like smoke from the burning tires of a drag racer, and the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then the lizard is dragging the dead Nip back up onto the land. It stretches him out there among the dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and finally starts to eat him.

“Sarge! We're here!” says Private Flanagan. Before he even wakes up, Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking in a normal voice and does not sound scared or excited. Wherever “here” is, it's not someplace dangerous. They are not under attack.

Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. “Shit!” he says.

“What's wrong, Sarge?”

“I just always say that when I wake up,” Shaftoe says.

Their new home turns out to be an old stone farm building in an olive farm, plantation, orchard or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives are grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly collapsed into the building under the killing weight of its red clay tiles, and the windows and doorways yawn, open to the elements. It's a big structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are able to drive one of the trucks inside and conceal it from airborne snoops. They unload the sacks of trash from the other truck. Then the Italian guy drives it away and never comes back.

Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy clambering up olive trees and stringing copper wires around the place. The blokes of the SAS go out and reconnoiter while the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash and start spreading them around. There are several months' worth of Italian newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly refolded. Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in pencil. Chattan's orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe's brain; he heaps these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest ones first, newer ones on top.

There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully smoked to the nub. They are of a Continental brand unfamiliar to Shaftoe. Like a farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries this sack around the premises tossing handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where people will actually work: Corporal Benjamin's table and another makeshift table they have set up for eating and playing poker. Likewise with a salad of wine corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one by one, into a dark and unused corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe can see that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over, and flings those bottles like a Green Bay Packer quarterback firing spiral passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.

The blokes come back from reconnoitering and there is a swappage of roles; the Marines now go out to familiarize themselves with the territory while the SAS continue unloading garbage. In an hour's worth of wandering around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north—south. To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after a few miles, down towards the sea. To the north, the plateau dead-ends in some nasty, impassable scrubland, and to the south it opens up on more farming territory.

Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as possible to the barn. Toward sunset, Shaftoe finds it: a rocky outcropping on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour's walk northeast of the barn and maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.

He and his Marines almost don't find their way back to the barn because it has been so well hidden by this point. The SAS have put up blackout shades over every opening, even the small chinks in the collapsed roof. On the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space. With all of the litter (now enhanced with chicken feathers and bones, tonsorial trimmings and orange peels) it looks like they've been living there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.

Corporal Benjamin has about a third of the place to himself. The SAS blokes keep calling him a lucky sod. He has his transmitter set up now, the tubes glowing warmly, and he has an unbelievable amount of paperwork. Most of it's old and fake, just like the cigarette butts. But after dinner, when the sun is down not only here but in London, he begins tapping out the Morse code.

Shaftoe knows Morse code, like everyone else in the place. As the guys and the blokes sit around the table, anteing up for what promises to be an all-night Hearts marathon, they keep one ear cocked towards Corporal Benjamin's keying. What they hear is gibberish. Shaftoe goes and looks over Benjamin's shoulder at one point, just to verify that he isn't crazy, and sees he's right:

and so on and so forth, for pages and pages.

The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway with a couple of barrels of genuine U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure certified Shit. As per Chattan's instructions, they pour the shit in a dollop at a time, throwing in handfuls of crumpled Italian newspapers after each dollop to make it look like it got there naturally. With the possible exception of being interviewed by Lieutenant Reagan, this is the worst nonviolent job Shaftoe has ever had to do in the service of his country. He gives everyone the rest of the day off, except for Corporal Benjamin, who stays up until two in the morning banging out random gibberish.

The next day they make the observation post look good. They take turns marching up there and back, up and back, up and back, wearing a trail into the ground, and they scatter some cigarette butts and beverage containers up there along with some general issue shit and general issue piss. Flanagan and Kuehl hump a footlocker up there and hide it in the lee of a volcanic rock. The locker contains books of silhouettes of various Italian and German naval and merchant ships, and similar spotter's guides for airplanes, as well as some binoculars, telescopes, and camera equipment, empty notepads, and pencils.

Even though Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe is for the most part running this show, he finds it uncannily difficult to arrange a moment alone with Lieutenant Enoch Root. Root has been avoiding him ever since their eventful flight on the Dakota. Finally, on about the fifth day, Shaftoe tricks him; he and a small contingent leave Root alone at the observation point, then Shaftoe doubles back and traps him there.

Root is startled to see Shaftoe come back, but he doesn't get particularly upset. He lights up an Italian cigarette and offers Shaftoe one. Shaftoe finds, irritatingly enough, that he is the nervous one. Root's as cool as always.

“Okay,” Shaftoe says, “what did you see? When you looked through the papers we planted on the dead butcher—what did you see?”

“They were all written in German,” Root says.

“Shit!”

“Fortunately,” Root continues, “I am somewhat familiar with the language.”

“Oh, yeah—your mom was a Kraut, right?”

“Yes, a medical missionary,” Root says, “in case that helps dispel any of your preconceptions about Germans.”

“And your Dad was Dutch.”

“That is correct.”

“And they both ended up on Guadalcanal why?”

“To help those who were in need.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I also learned some Italian along the way. There's a lot of it going around in the Church.”

“Fuck me,” Shaftoe exclaims.

“But my Italian is heavily informed by the Latin that my father insisted that I learn. So I would probably sound rather old-fashioned to the locals. In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth-century alchemist or something.”

“Could you sound like a priest? They'd eat that up.”

“If worse comes to worst,” Root allows, “I will try hitting them with some God talk and we'll see what happens.”

They both puff on their cigarettes and look out across the large body of water before them, which Shaftoe has learned is called the Bay of Naples. “Well anyway,” Shaftoe says, “what did it say on those papers?”

“A lot of detailed information about military convoys between Palermo and Tunis. Evidently stolen from classified German sources,” Root says.

“Old convoys, or…”

“Convoys that were still in the future,” Root says calmly. Shaftoe finishes his cigarette, and does not speak for a while. Finally he says, “Fuckin' weird.” He stands up and begins walking back towards the barn.