Cryptonomicon

Chapter 32 SPEARHEAD

The young Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, visiting his grandparents in Dakota, follows a plow across a field. The diving blades of the plow heave the black soil up out of the furrows and pile it into ridges, rough and jumbled when seen up close but mathematically clean and straight, like the grooves of a phonograph record, when viewed from a distance. A tiny surfboard-shaped object projects from the crest of one of those earthen waves. Young Waterhouse bends down and plucks it out. It is an Indian spearhead neatly chipped out of flint.

U-553 is a black steel spear point thrusting into the air about ten miles north of Qwghlm. The grey rollers pick it up and slam it down, but other than that, it does not move; it is grounded on a submerged out cropping known to the locals as Caesar's Reef, or Viking's Grief, or the Dutch-Hammer.

On the prairie, those flint arrowheads can be found lodged in every sort of natural matrix: soil, sod, the mud of a riverbank, the heartwood of a tree. Waterhouse has a talent for finding them. How can he walk across a field salted, by the retreat of the last glacier, with countless stones, and pick out the arrowheads? Why can the human eye detect a tiny artificial form lost in nature's torn and turbulent cosmos, a needle of data in a haystack of noise? It is a sudden, sparking connection between minds, he supposes. The arrowheads are human things broken loose from humanity, their organic parts perished, their mineral forms enduring—crystals of intention. It is not the form but the lethal intent that demands the attention of a selfish mind. It worked for young Waterhouse, hunting for arrowheads. It worked for the pilots of the airplanes that hounded U-553 this morning. It works for the listeners of the Beobachtung Dienst, who have trained their ears to hear what is being said by Churchill and FDR on what are supposed to be scrambled telephones. But it doesn't work very well with crypto. That is too bad for everyone except the British and the Americans, who have devised mathematical systems for picking out arrowheads amid pebbles.

Caesar's Reef gashed the underside of U-553's bow section open while shoving the entire boat up and partly out of the water. Momentum almost carried her over the hump, but she got hung up in the middle, stranded, a wave-battered teeter-totter. Her bows have mostly filled with water now, and so it is the sharp stern that projects up above the crests of the seas. She has been abandoned by her crew, which means that according to the traditions of maritime law, she is up for grabs. The Royal Navy has called dibs. A screen of destroyers patrols the area, lest some sister U-boat slip in and torpedo the wreck.

Waterhouse had been collected from the castle in unseemly haste. Dusk is now falling like a lead curtain, and wolf packs hunt at night. He is on the bridge of a corvette, a tiny escort ship that, in any kind of chop, has the exact hydrodynamics of an empty oil drum. If he stays down below he'll never stop vomiting, and so he stands abovedecks, feet braced wide, knees bent, holding onto a rail with both hands, watching the wreck come closer. The number 553 is painted on her conning tower, beneath a cartoon of a polar bear hoisting a beer stein.

“Interesting,” he says to Colonel Chattan. “Five-five-three is the product of two prime numbers—seven and seventy-nine.”

Chattan manages an appreciative smile, but Waterhouse can tell that it's nothing more than a spectacular display of breeding.

The remainder of Detachment 2702 is, meanwhile, finally arriving. Having just finished with the successful Norway-ramming mission, they were on their way to their new base of operations on Qwghlm when they received word of U-553's grounding. They rendezvoused with Waterhouse right here on this boat—haven't even had a chance to sit down yet, much less unpack. Waterhouse has told them several times how much they are going to like Qwghlm and has run out of other things to say—the crew of this corvette lacks Ultra Mega clearance, and there is nothing that Waterhouse could conceivably talk about with Chattan and the others that is not classified at the Ultra Mega level. So he's trying gamely with prime number chitchat.

Some of the detachment—the Marine lieutenant and most of the enlisted men—were dropped off in Qwghlm so that they could settle into their new quarters. Only Colonel Chattan and a noncom named Sergeant Robert Shaftoe have accompanied Waterhouse to the U-boat.

Shaftoe has a wiry build, bulging Alley Oop forearms and hands, and blond hair in a buzz cut that makes his big blue eyes look bigger. He has a big nose and a big Adam's apple and big acne scars and some other scars around the orbits of his eyes. The large features in the trim body give him an intense presence; it is hard not to keep looking over in his direction. He seems like a man with powerful emotions but an even more powerful discipline that keeps them under control. He stares directly and unblinkingly into the eyes of whoever is talking. When no one is talking, he stares at the horizon and thinks. When he is thinking, he twiddles his fingers incessantly. Everyone else is using their fingers to hold on to something, but Shaftoe is planted on the deck like a fat geezer waiting in line for a movie. He, like Waterhouse, but unlike Chattan, is dressed in heavy foul weather gear that they have borrowed from the stores of this torpedo boat.

It is known, and word has gone out to all present, that the U-boat's skipper—the last man to abandon ship—had the presence of mind to bring the boat's Enigma machine with him. The RAF planes, still circling overhead, watched the skipper rise to a precarious kneel in his life raft and fling the wheels of the machine in different directions, into the steep pitches of hill-sized waves. Then the machine itself went overboard.

The Germans know that the machine will never be recovered. What they do not know is that they will never even be looked for, because there is a place called Bletchley Park that already knows all that there is to know about the four-wheel naval Enigma. The Brits will make a show of looking anyway, in case anyone is watching.

Waterhouse is not looking for Enigma machines. He is looking for stray arrowheads.

The corvette first approaches the U-boat head-on, thinks better of it and swings far around astern of the wreck, then beats upwind towards it. That way, Waterhouse reckons, the wind will tend to blow them away from the reef. Seen from underneath, the U-boat is actually kind of fat-cheeked. The part that's supposed to be above water, when it's surfaced, is neutral grey, and it's as skinny as a knife. The part that's supposed to be below, when it hasn't just crashed into a great big rock, is wide and black. She has been boarded by adventuresome Royal Navy men who have cheekily raised a White Ensign from her conning tower.

They have apparently reached her in a shallow-draft whaler that is tied up alongside, loosely bound to her by a sparse web of lines, kept away by bald tires slung over the rail. The corvette carrying the members of Detachment 2702 edges towards the U-boat cautiously; each rolling wave nearly slams the boats together.

“We're definitely in a non-Euclidean spatial geometry now!” Waterhouse says puckishly. Chattan bends towards him and cups a hand to his ear. “Not only that but it's real time dependent, definitely something that has to be tackled in four dimensions not three!”

“I beg your pardon?”

Any closer and they'll be grounded on the reef themselves. The sailors launch an actual rocket that carries a line between the vessels, and devote some time to rigging up a ship-to-ship transfer system. Waterhouse is afraid they're going to put him on it. Actually he's more resentful than afraid, because he was under the impression that he wouldn't be put in any more danger for the rest of the war. He tries to kill time looking at the underside of the U-boat and watching the sailors. They've formed a sort of bucket brigade to haul books and papers up out of the wreck to the conning tower and from there down into the whaler. The conning tower has a complicated spidery look with gun barrels and periscopes and antennas sticking out all over the place.

Waterhouse and Shaftoe are indeed sent over to U-553 on a sort of trolley contraption that rolls along a stretched cable. The sailors put life jackets on them first, as a sort of hilarious token gesture, so that if they avoid being smashed to bits they can die of hypothermia instead of drowning.

When Waterhouse is halfway across, the trough of a wave passes beneath him, and he looks down into the sucking cavity and sees the top of Caesar's Reef, momentarily exposed, covered with an indigo fur of mussels. You could go down there and stand on it. For an instant. Then thousands of tons of really cold water slams into the cavity and rises up and punches him in the ass.

He looks up at U-553, entirely too much of which is above him. His basic impression is that it's hollow, more colander than warship. The hull is perforated with rows of oblong slots arranged in swirling patterns like streamlines tattooed onto the metal. It seems impossibly flimsy. Then he peers through the slots—light is shining all the way through from more slots in the deck—and perceives the silhouette of the pressure hull nested inside, curved and much more solid-looking than the outer hull. She's got two triple-bladed brass propellers, maybe a yard across, dinged here and there from contact with who knows what. Right now they are thrust up into the air, and looking at them Waterhouse feels the same absurd embarrassment he felt looking at dead guys in Pearl Harbor whose private parts were showing. Diving planes and rudders stick out of the hull downstream of the propellers, and aft of those, near the apex of the stern, are two crude hatchlike slabs of metal which, Waterhouse realizes, must be where the torpedoes come out.

He slides the last twenty feet at terrifying speed and is caught and held, in various places, by eight strong hands who lift him to what passes for safety: the deck of the U-boat, just aft of the conning tower, sort of nestled underneath an antiaircraft gun. Way up at the boat's stern, there's a big T-shaped stanchion with cables coming out of the ends of the crossbar and stretched tight all the way to the conning-tower railing, near to hand. Following the example of a Royal Navy officer who appears to be his appointed guardian, Waterhouse climbs uphill—i.e. towards the stern—using one of those cables as a sort of banister, and follows him down a hatch in the afterdeck and into the interior of the boat. Shaftoe follows a few moments later.

It is the worst place Waterhouse has ever been. Like the corvette he has just left, it rises smoothly on each roller, but unlike the corvette it comes down with a crash on the rocks, nearly throwing him to the deck. It is like being sealed up in a garbage can that is being beaten with a sledgehammer. U-553 is about half full of a rich brew of cheap wine, diesel fuel, battery acid, and raw sewage. Because of the way she is pitched, this soup quickly gets deeper as you go forward, but it rolls aft in a drenching tsunami every time her midsection slams down on the rocks. Fortunately, Waterhouse is now far beyond nausea, in some kind of transcendent state where his mind has become even more divorced from his body than usual.

The officer in charge waits for the noise to subside and then says, in a startlingly quiet voice, “Is there anything in particular you'd like to inspect, sir?”

Waterhouse is still trying to get some idea of where he is by shining his flashlight beam around the place, which is kind of like peering through a soda straw. He can't get any synoptic view of his surroundings, just narrow glimpses of pipes and wires. Finally he tries holding his head still and sort of scribbling the flashlight beam around really fast. A picture emerges: they are in a narrow crawl space, obviously designed by and for engineers, intended to give access to a few thousand linear miles of pipes and wires that have been forced through some kind of bottleneck.

“We are looking for the skipper's papers,” Waterhouse says. The boat goes into free fall again; he leans against something slippery, claps his hands over his ears, closes his eyes and mouth, and exhales through his nose so that none of the soup will force its way into his body. The thing he's leaning against is really hard and cold and round. It's greasy. He shines his light on it; it's made of brass. The light-scribbling trick produces the image of a brass spaceship of some sort, nestled underneath (unless he's mistaken) a bunk. He's just on the verge of making a total ass of himself by asking what it is, when he identifies it as a torpedo.

In the next quiet interlude, he asks, “Is there anything like a private cabin where he might have…”

“It's forward,” the officer says. Forward is not an encouraging view.

“Fuck!” Sergeant Shaftoe says. It's the first thing he has said in about half an hour. He begins to slosh forward, and the British officer has to hurry to catch up. The deck falls out from beneath their feet again and they stop and turn around so that the wave of sewage will hit them in the backs.

They travel downhill. Every step's a pitched battle vs. prudence and sound judgment, and they take a lot of steps. What Waterhouse had pegged as a bottleneck goes on and on—all the way, apparently, to the bow. Eventually they find something that gives them an excuse to stop: a cabin, or maybe (at about four by six feet) a corner of a cabin. There's a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be in shockingly poor taste until he remembers it's a German boat. The mean high-tide level of the sewage angles across the cabin and cuts it approximately in half. Papers and other bureaucratic detritus are floating every where, written in the occult Gothic script that Waterhouse associates with Rudy.

“Take it all,” Waterhouse says, but Shaftoe and the officer are already sweeping their arms through the brew and bringing them up wrapped in dripping papier-mâché. They stuff it all into a canvas sack.

The skipper's bunk is on the aft or uphill end of the cabin. Shaftoe strips it, looks under the pillow and under the mattress, finds nothing.

The fold-out table is on the totally submerged end. Waterhouse wades into it carefully, trying not to lose his footing. He finds the desk with his feet, reaches down into the murk with his hands, explores as a blind man would. He finds a few drawers which he is able to pull out of the desk entirely and hand off to Shaftoe, who dumps their contents into the sack. Within a short time he is pretty sure that there's nothing left in the desk.

The boat rises and slams down. As the sewage rolls forward, it exposes, for just a moment, something in the corner of the cabin, something attached to the forward bulkhead. Waterhouse wades over to identify it.

“It's a safe!” he says. He spins the dial. It's heavy. A good safe. German. Shaftoe and the British officer look at each other.

A British sailor appears in the open hatchway. “Sir!” he announces. “Another U-boat has been sighted in the area.”

“I'd love to have a stethoscope,” Waterhouse hints. “This thing have a sickbay?”

“No,” says the British officer. “Just a box of medical gear. Should be floating around somewhere.”

“Sir! Yes sir!” Shaftoe says, and vanishes from the room. A minute later he's back holding a German stethoscope up above his head to keep it clean. He tosses it across the cabin to Waterhouse, who snares it in the air, sockets it into his ears, and thrusts the business end down through the sewage to the front of the safe.

He has done a little of this before, as an exercise. Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto. The manager of the grocery store in Moorhead, Minnesota, used to let the young Waterhouse play with his safe. He broke the combination, to the manager's great surprise, and wrote a report about the experience for school.

This safe is a lot better than that one was. Since he can't see the dial anyway, he closes his eyes.

He is vaguely conscious that the other fellows on the submarine have been shouting and carrying on about something for a while, as if some sensational news has just come in. Perhaps the war is over. Then the head of the stethoscope is wrenched loose from his grasp. He opens his eyes to see Sergeant Shaftoe lifting it to his mouth as if it were a microphone. Shaftoe stares at him coolly and speaks into the stethoscope: “Sir, torpedoes in the water, sir.” Then Shaftoe turns and leaves Waterhouse alone in the cabin.

Waterhouse is about halfway up the conning tower ladder, looking up at a disk of greyish-black sky, when the whole vessel jerks and booms. A piston of sewage rises up beneath him and propels him upwards, vomiting him out onto the top deck of the boat, where his comrades grab him and very considerately prevent him from rolling off into the ocean.

The movement of the U-553 with the waves has changed. She's moving a lot more now, as if she's about to break free from the reef.

It takes Waterhouse a minute to get his bearings. He is starting to think he may have suffered some damage during all of that. Something is definitely wrong with his left arm, which is the one he landed on.

Powerful light sweeps over them: a searchlight from the British corvette that brought them here. The British sailors curse. Waterhouse levers himself up on his good elbow and sights down the hull of the U-boat, following the beam of the searchlight to a bizarre sight. The boat has been blown open just beneath the waterline, shards of her hull peeled back from the wound and projecting jaggedly into the air. The foul contents of the hull are draining out, staining the Atlantic black.

“Fuck!” Sergeant Shaftoe says. He shrugs loose from a small but heavy-looking knapsack that he's been carrying around, pulls it open. His sudden activity draws the attention of the Royal Navy men who help out by pointing their flashlights at his furious hands.

Waterhouse, who may be in some kind of delirium by this point, can't quite believe what he sees: Shaftoe has pulled out a bundle of neat brownish-yellow cylinders, as thick as a finger and maybe six inches long. He also takes out some small items, including a coil of thick, stiff red cord. He jumps to his feet so decisively that he nearly knocks someone down, and runs to the conning tower and disappears down the ladder.

“Jesus,” an officer says, “he's going to do some blasting.” The officer thinks about this for a very small amount of time; the ship moves terrifyingly with the waves and makes scraping noises which might indicate it's sliding off the reef. “Abandon ship!” he hollers.

Most of them get into the whaler. Waterhouse is bundled back onto the trolley contraption. He is about halfway across to the torpedo boat when he feels, but scarcely hears, a sharp shock.

For the rest of the way over he can't really see diddly, and even after he's back on the torpedo boat, all is confusion, and someone named Enoch Root insists on taking him below and working on his arm and his head. Waterhouse did not know until now that his head was damaged, which stands to reason, in that your head is where you know things, and if it's damaged, how can you know it? “You'll get at least a Purple Heart for this,” Enoch Root says. He says it with a marked lack of enthusiasm, as if he couldn't care less about Purple Hearts, but is condescending to suppose that it will be a big thrill for Waterhouse. “And Sergeant Shaftoe probably has another major decoration coming too, damn him.”