Cryptonomicon

Chapter 37 SKIPPING

It's a hot cloudy day in the Bismarck Sea when Goto Dengo loses the war. The American bombers come in low and level. Goto Dengo happens to be abovedecks on a fresh-air-and-calisthenics drill. To breathe air that does not smell of shit and vomit makes him feel euphoric and invulnerable. Everyone else must be feeling the same way, because he watches the airplanes for a long time before he begins to hear warning klaxons.

The emperor's soldiers are supposed to feel euphoric and invulnerable all the time, because their indomitable spirit makes them so. That Goto Dengo only feels that way when abovedecks, breathing clean air, makes him ashamed. The other soldiers never doubt, or at least never show it. He wonders where he went astray. Perhaps it was his time in Shanghai, where he was polluted with foreign ideas. Or maybe he was polluted from the very beginning—the ancient family curse.

The troop transports are slow—there is no pretence that they are anything other than boxes of air. They have only the most pathetic armaments. The destroyers escorting them are sounding general quarters.

Goto Dengo stands at the rail and watches the crews of the destroyers scrambling to their positions. Black smoke and blue light sputter from the barrels of their weapons, and much later he hears them opening fire.

The American bombers must be in some kind of distress. He speculates that they are low on fuel, or desperately lost, or have been chased down below the cloud cover by Zeros. Whatever the reason, he knows they have not come here to attack the convoy because American bombers attack by flying overhead at a great altitude, raining down bombs. The bombs always miss because the Americans' bombsights are so poor and the crews so inept. No, the arrival of American planes here is just one of those bizarre accidents of war; the convoy has been shielded under heavy clouds since early yesterday.

The troops all around Goto Dengo are cheering. What good fortune that these lost Americans have blundered straight into the gunsights of their destroyer escort! And it is a good omen for the village of Kulu too, because half of the town's young men just happen to be abovedecks to enjoy the spectacle. They grew up together, went to school together, at the age of twenty took the military physical together, joined the army together and trained together. Now they are on their way to New Guinea together. Together they were mustered up onto the deck of the transport only five minutes ago. Together they will enjoy the sight of the American planes softening into cartwheels of flame.

Goto Dengo, at twenty-six, is one of the old hands here—he came back from Shanghai to be a leader and an example to them—and he watches their faces, these faces he has known since he was a child, never happier than at this moment, glowing like cherry petals in the grey world of cloud, ocean, and painted steel.

Fresh delight ripples across their faces. He turns to look. One of the bombers has apparently decided to lighten its load by dropping a bomb straight into the ocean. The boys of Kulu break into a jeering chant. The American plane, having shed half a ton of useless explosives, peels sharply upward, self-neutered, good for nothing but target practice. The Kulu boys howl at its pilot in contempt. A Nipponese pilot would have crashed his plane into that destroyer at the very least!

Goto Dengo, for some reason, watches the bomb instead of the air plane. It does not tumble from the plane's belly but traces a smooth flat parabola above the waves, like an aerial torpedo. He catches his breath for a moment, afraid that it will never drop into the ocean, that it will skim across the water until it hits the destroyer that stands directly across its path. But once again the fortunes of war smile upon the emperor's forces; the bomb loses its struggle with gravity and splashes into the water. Goto Dengo looks away.

Then he looks back again, chasing a phantom that haunts the edge of his vision. The wings of foam that were thrown up by the bomb are still collapsing into the water, but beyond them, a black mote is speeding away—perhaps it was a second bomb dropped by the same airplane. This time Goto Dengo watches it carefully. It seems to be rising, rather than falling—a mirage perhaps. No, no, he's wrong, it is losing altitude slowly now, and it plows into the water and throws up another pair of wings all right.

And then the bomb rises up out of the water again. Goto Dengo, a student of engineering, implores the laws of physics to take hold of this thing and make it fall and sink, which is what big dumb pieces of metal are supposed to do. Eventually it does fall again—but then it rises up again.

It is skipping across the water like the flat rocks that the boys of Kulu used to throw across the fish pond near the village. Goto Dengo watches it skip several more times, utterly fascinated. Once again, the fortunes of war have provided a bizarre spectacle, seemingly for no other reason than to entertain him. He savors it as if it were a cigarette discovered in the bottom of a pocket. Skip, skip, skip.

Right into the flank of one of the escorting destroyers. A gun turret flies straight up into the air, tumbling over and over. Just as it slows to its apogee, it is completely enveloped in a geyser of flame spurting out of the ship's engine room.

The Kulu boys are still chanting, refusing to accept the evidence of their own eyes. Something flashes in Goto Dengo's peripheral vision; he turns to watch another destroyer being snapped in half like a dry twig as its magazines detonate. Tiny black things are skip, skip, skipping all over the ocean now, like fleas across the rumpled bedsheets of a Shanghai whorehouse. The chant falters. Everyone watches silently.

The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill their enemies.

No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So flexible. What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men? They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.

The American Marines in Shanghai weren't proper warriors either. Constantly changing their ways. Like Shaftoe. Shaftoe tried to fight Nipponese soldiers in the street and failed. Having failed, he decided to learn new tactics—from Goto Dengo. “The Americans are not warriors,” everyone kept saying. “Businessmen perhaps. Not warriors.”

Belowdecks, the soldiers are cheering and chanting. They have not the faintest idea what is really going on. For just a moment, Goto Dengo tears his eyes away from the sea full of exploding and sinking destroyers. He gets a bearing on a locker full of life preservers.

The airplanes all seem to be gone now. He scans the convoy and finds no destroyers in working order.

“Put on the life jackets!” he shouts. None of the men seem to hear him and so he makes for the locker. “Hey! Put on the life jackets!” He pulls one out and holds it up, in case they can't hear him.

They can hear him just fine. They look at him as if what he's doing is more shocking than anything they've witnessed in the last five minutes. What possible use are life jackets?

“Just in case!” he shouts. “So we can fight for the emperor another day.” He says this last part weakly.

One of the men, a boy who lived a few doors away from him when they were children, walks up to him, tears the life jacket out of his hands, and throws it into the ocean. He looks Goto up and down, contemptuously, then turns around and walks away.

Another man shouts and points: the second wave of planes is coming in. Goto Dengo goes to the rail to stand among his comrades, but they sidle away. The American planes charge in unopposed and veer away, leaving behind nothing but more skipping bombs.

Goto Dengo watches a bomb come directly toward him for a few bounces, until he can make out the message painted on its nose: BEND OVER, TOJO!

“This way!” he shouts. He turns his back to the bomb and walks back across the deck to the locker full of life preservers. This time a few of the men follow him. The ones who don't—perhaps five percent of the population of the village of Kulu—are catapulted into the ocean when the bomb explodes beneath their feet. The wooden deck buckles up wards. One of the Kulu boys falls with a four-foot-long splinter driven straight up through his viscera. Goto Dengo and perhaps a dozen others make it to the locker on hands and knees and grab life preservers.

He would not be doing this if he had not already lost the war in his soul. A warrior would stand his ground and die. His men are only following him because he has told them to do it.

Two more bombs burst while they are getting the life preservers on and struggling to the rail. Most of the men below must be dead now. Goto Dengo nearly doesn't make it to the railing because it is rising sharply into the air; he ends up doing a chin-up on it and throwing one leg over the side, which is now nearly horizontal. The ship is rolling over! Four others get a grip on the rail, the rest slide helplessly down the deck and vanish into a pit of smoke. Goto Dengo ignores what his eyes are telling him and tries to listen to his inner ear. He is standing up on the side of the ship now, and looking toward the stern he can see one of the propellers spinning uselessly in the air. He begins running uphill. The four others follow him. An American fighter plane comes over. He doesn't even realize they are being strafed until he turns around and sees that the bullets have essentially cut one man in half and crippled another by exploding his knee, so that the lower leg and foot dangle by a few shreds of gristle. Goto Dengo throws the man over his shoulders like a sack of rice and turns to resume the uphill race, but finds that there is no more uphill to race towards.

He and the other two are standing on the summit of the ship now, a steel bulge that rises for no more than a man's height out of the water. He turns around once, then twice, looking for a place to run and sees nothing but water all around. The water bloops and fizzes angrily as air and smoke jet from the interior of the wrecked hull. Sea rushes in towards them. Goto Dengo looks down at the steel bubble supporting his feet and realizes that he is still, just for a moment, perfectly dry. Then the Bismarck Sea converges on his feet from all directions at once and begins to climb up his legs. A moment later the steel plate, which has been pressing so solidly against the soles of his boots, drops away. The weight of the wounded man on his shoulders shoves him straight down into the ocean. He gulps fuel oil into his sinuses, struggles out from beneath the wounded man, and comes to the surface screaming. His nose, and the cavities of his skull, are filled with oil. He swallows some of it and goes into convulsions as his body tries to eject it from every orifice at once: sneezing, vomiting, hawking it up out of his lungs. Reaching up to his face with one hand he feels the oil coating his skin thickly and knows that he dare not open his eyes. He tries to wipe the oil from his face with his sleeve, but the fabric is saturated with it.

He has to get down in the water and wipe himself clean so that he can see again, but the oil in his clothing makes him float. His lungs are finally clear now and he begins to gasp in air. It smells of oil but at least it's breathable. But the volatile chemicals in the oil have gotten into his blood now and he feels them spread through his body like fire. It feels as though a hot spatula is being shoved between his scalp and his skull. The other men are howling and he realizes that he is too. Some of the Chinese workers in Shanghai used to breathe gasoline to get high, and this was the noise that they made.

One of the men near him screams. He hears a noise approaching, like a sheet being torn in half to make bandages. Radiant heat strikes him in the face like a hot frying pan, just before Goto Dengo dives and kicks downwards. The motion exposes a band of flesh around his calf, between his boot and his trouser leg, and in the moment that it's poking straight up out of the water, it gets seared to a crisp.

He swims blind through an ocean of fuel oil. Then there is a change in the temperature and the viscosity of the fluid streaming over his face. Suddenly the life preserver begins to tug him upwards; he must be in water now. He swims for a few more kicks and begins to wipe at his eyes. The pressure on his ears tells him he's not that deep, maybe a couple of meters beneath the surface. Finally he risks opening his eyes. Ghostly, flickering light is illuminating his hands, making them glow a bright green; the sun must have come out. He rolls over on his back and looks straight up. Above him is a lake of rolling fire.

He rips the life preserver off over his head and lets it go. It shoots straight up and bursts out of the surface, burning like a comet. His oil-soaked clothing is tugging him relentlessly upwards, so he rips his shirt off and lets it tumble up towards the surface. His boots pull down, his oily pants push up, and he reaches some sort of equilibrium.

He grew up in the mines.

Kulu is near the north coast of Hokkaido, on the shore of a freshwater lake where rivers converge from the inland hills and commingle their waters before draining to the Sea of Okhotsk. The hills rise sharply from one end of that lake, looming over a cold silver creek that rushes down out of forest inhabited only by apes and demons. There are small islands in that part of the lake. If you dig down into the islands, or the hills, you will find veins of copper ore, and sometimes you will find zinc and lead and even silver. That is what the men of Kulu have done for many generations. Their monument is a maze of tunnels that snake through the hills, not following straight lines but tracking the richest veins.

Sometimes the tunnels dip below the level of the lake. When the mines were working these tunnels were pumped out, but now that they are exhausted, the water has been allowed to seek its level and has formed sumps. There are cavities and tunnels back in the hills that can only be reached by boys who are brave enough to dive into the cold black water and swim through the darkness for ten, twenty, thirty meters.

Goto Dengo went to all of those places when he was a boy. He even discovered some of them. Big, fat and buoyant, he was a pretty good swimmer. He was not the best swimmer, or the best at holding his breath. He was not even the bravest (the bravest did not put on life preservers, and went to their deaths like warriors).

He went where the others wouldn't because he, alone among all the boys of Kulu, was not afraid of the demons. When he was a boy, his father, a mining engineer, would take him hiking up into the places in the mountains where demons were said to live. They would sleep out under the stars and wake up to find their blankets covered with frost, and sometimes their food stolen by bears. But no demons.

The other boys believed that demons lived in some of those underwater tunnels, and that this explained why some of the boys who swam back there never returned. But Goto Dengo did not fear the demons and so he went back there fearing only the cold and the dark and the water. Which was plenty to fear.

Now he need only pretend that the fire is a stone ceiling. He swims some more. But he did not breathe properly before diving, and he is close to panic now. He looks up again and sees that the water is burning only in patches.

He is quite deep, he realizes, and he can't swim well in trousers and boots. He fumbles at his bootlaces, but they are tied in double knots. He pulls a knife from his belt and slashes through the laces, kicks the boots off, sheds his pants and drawers too. Naked, he forces himself to be calm for ten more seconds, brings his knees to his chest and hugs them. His body's natural buoyancy takes over. He knows that he must be rising slowly toward the surface now, like a bubble. The light is growing brighter. He need only wait. He lets go of the knife, which is only slowing him down.

His back feels cold. He explodes out of the fetal position and thrusts his head up into the air, gasping for breath. A patch of burning oil is almost close enough for him to touch, and the oil is trickling across the top of the ocean as if it were a solid surface. Nearly invisible blue flames seep from it, then turn yellow and boil off curling black smoke. He backstrokes away from a reaching tendril.

A glowing silver apparition passes over him, so close he can feel the warmth of its exhaust and read the English warning labels on its belly. The tips of its wing guns are sparkling, flinging out red streaks.

They are strafing the survivors. Some try to dive, but the oil in their uniforms pops them right back to the surface, legs flailing uselessly in the air. Goto Dengo first makes sure he is nowhere near any burning oil, then treads water, spinning slowly in the water like a radar dish, looking for planes. A P-38 comes in low, gunning for him. He sucks in a breath and dives. It is nice and quiet under the water, and the bullets striking its surface sound like the ticking of a big sewing machine. He sees a few rounds plunging into the water around him, leaving trails of bubbles as the water cavitates in their wake, slowing virtually to a stop in just a meter or two, then turning downwards and sinking like bombs. He swims after one of them and plucks it out of the water. It is still hot from its passage. He would keep it as a souvenir, but his pockets are gone with his clothes and he needs his hands. He stares at the bullet for a moment, greenish-silver in the underwater light, fresh from some factory in America.

How did this bullet come from America to my hand?

We have lost. The war is over.

I must go home and tell everyone.

I must be like my father, a rational man, explaining the facts of the world to the people at home, who are crippled by superstitions.

He lets the bullet go again, watches it drop towards the bottom of the sea, where the ships, and all of the young men of Kulu, are bound.