Cryptonomicon

Chapter 29 PAGES

It has been a long time since horses ran at the Ascot Racetrack in Brisbane. The infield's a commotion of stretched khaki. The grass has died from lack of sun and from the trampling feet of enlisted men. The field has been punctured with latrines, mess tents have been pitched. Three shifts a day, the residents trudge across the track, round back of the silent and empty stables. In the field where the horses used to stretch their legs, two dozen Quonset huts that have popped up like mushrooms. The men work in those huts, sitting before radios or typewriters or card files all day long, shirtless in the January heat.

It has been just as long since whores sunned themselves on the long veranda of the house on Henry Street, and passing gentlemen, on their way to or from the Ascot Racetrack, peered at their charms through the white railing, faltered, checked their wallets, forgot their scruples, turned on their heels, and climbed up the house's front stairs. Now the place is full of male officers and math freaks: mostly Australians on the ground floor, mostly Americans upstairs, and a sprinkling of lucky Brits who were spirited out of Singapore before General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya and the conqueror of that city, was able to capture them and mine their heads for crucial data.

Today the old bordello has been turned upside down; everyone with Ultra clearance is out in the garage, which thrums and roars with the sound of fans, and virtually glows with contained heat. In that garage is a rusted steel trunk, still spattered with riverbank mud that partially obscures the Nipponese characters stenciled on its sides. Had a Nipponese spy glimpsed the trunk during its feverish passage from the port to the whorehouse's garage, he would have recognized it as belonging to the radio platoon of the 20th Division, which is currently lost in the jungles of New Guinea.

The rumor, shouted over the sound of the fans, is that a digger—an Australian grunt—found it. His unit was sweeping the abandoned headquarters of the 20th Division for booby traps when his metal detector went nuts along the banks of a river.

The codebooks are stacked inside as neatly as gold bars. They are wet and mildewed and their front covers are all missing, but this is mint condition by the standards of wartime. Stripped to the waist and streaming with sweat, the men raise the books out one by one, like nurses lifting newborn infants from the bassinette, and carry them to tables where they slice away the rotten bindings and peel the sodden pages off the stacks one by one, hanging them from improvised clotheslines strung overhead. The stench and damp of New Guinea saturate the air as the river water trapped in those pages is lifted out by the rushing air; it all vents to the outside eventually, and half a mile downwind, pedestrians wrinkle their noses. The whorehouse's closets—still redolent of French perfume, powder, hairspray and jism, but now packed to the ceiling with office supplies—are raided for more string. The web of clotheslines grows, new layers crisscrossing above and below the old ones, every inch of string claimed by a wet page as soon as it is stretched. Each page is a grid, a table with hiragana or katakana or kanji in one box, a group of digits or Romanji in another box, and the pages all cross-referenced to other pages in a scheme only a cryptographer could love.

The photographer comes in, trailed by assistants who are burdened with miles of film. All he knows is that each page must be photographed perfectly. The malarial reek practically flattens him the moment he walks in the door, but when he recovers, his eyes scan the garage. All he can see, stretching as if to infinity, are pages dripping and curling, turning white as they dry, casting their grids of information into sharp relief, like the reticules of so many bomb sights, the graven crosshairs of so many periscopes, plunging through cloud and fog to focus, distinctly on the abdomens of Nipponese troopships, pregnant with North Borneo fuel, alive with burning steam.