Cryptonomicon

Chapter 79 GLORY

Bare-chested, camouflage-painted, trench knife in hand, Colt .45 stuck in the waistband of his khaki trousers, Bobby Shaftoe moves like a cloud of mist through the jungle. He stops when he can get a clear view of the Nip Army truck, framed between the hairy, cluttered trunks of a couple of date palms. A skirmish line of ants crawls over the skin of his sandaled foot. He ignores them.

It has all the earmarks of a piss stop. Two Nipponese privates climb out of the truck and confer for a few moments. One of them wades into the jungle. The other leans against the truck's fender and lights up a cigarette. Its glowing tip echoes the light of the sunset behind him. The one in the jungle drops his trousers, squats, leans back against a tree to take a shit.

At this moment they are supremely vulnerable. The contrast between the brightness of the sunset and the dimness of the jungle renders them nearly blind. The shitter is helpless, and the smoker looks exhausted. Bobby Shaftoe sheds his sandals. He emerges from the jungle onto the road behind the truck, strides forward on ant-bitten feet, crouches behind the truck's bumper. The weapon comes out of his hip pocket silently. Without taking his eyes off the smoker's feet—visible beneath the truck's chassis—he peels away the backing and slaps the payload onto the truck's tailgate. Then, just to rub it in, he slaps up another one. Mission accomplished! Take that, Tojo!

Moments later, he's back in the jungle, watching as the Nip truck drives away, now sporting two red, white, and blue stickers reading: I SHALL RETURN! Bobby congratulates himself on another successful mission.

Long after dark, he reaches the Hukbalahap camp up on the volcano. He works his way in through the booby-trapped perimeter and makes plenty of noise as he approaches, so that the Huk sentries won't shoot at him in the darkness. But he needn't have bothered. Discipline has broken down, they are all drunk and getting drunker, because of something they heard on the radio: MacArthur has returned. The General has landed on Leyte.

Bobby Shaftoe's response is to boil up some powerful coffee and begin pouring it into their signal man, Pedro. While the caffeine works its magic, Shaftoe grabs a message pad and the stub of a pencil, and writes out his idea for the seventh time: OPPORTUNITY EXISTS TO CONTACT AND SUPPLY FILAMERICAN ELEMENTS IN CONCEPCION STOP I VOLUNTEER FOR SAME STOP AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS STOP SIGNED SHAFTOE.

He gets Pedro to encrypt it and send it off. After that, all he can do is wait and pray. This shit with the stickers has to stop.

He has been tempted, a thousand times, to desert, and to go into Concepcion himself. But just because he's out in the boondocks with a band of Huk irregulars doesn't mean he's beyond the reach of military discipline. Deserters can still get shot or hanged, and despite the fact that he was one in Sweden, Bobby Shaftoe believes that they deserve to be.

Concepcion is down in the lowlands north of Manila. From the high places of the Zambales Mountains you can actually see the town lying amid the green rice paddies. Those lowlands are still totally Nip-controlled. But when the General lands, he's probably going to land north of here at Lingayen Gulf, just like the Nips did when they invaded in '41, and then Concepcion is going to lie right in the middle of his route to Manila. He's going to need eyes there.

Sure enough, the order comes through a couple of days later: RENDEZVOUS TARPON POINT GREEN 5 NOVEMBER STOP CONVEY TRANSMITTER CONCEPCION STOP AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS STOP.

Tarpon is the submarine that has been bringing them ammunition, medical supplies, I SHALL RETURN stickers, cartons of American cigarettes with I SHALL RETURN inserts in each pack, I SHALL RETURN matchbooks, I SHALL RETURN coasters, and I SHALL RETURN condoms. Shaftoe has been stockpiling the condoms because he knows they won't go over well in a Catholic country. He figures that when he finds Glory he'll go through a long ton of condoms in about a week.

Three days later, he and a squad of Huks are on hand to meet Tarpon at “Point Green,” which is their code name for a tiny cove on the west coast of Luzon, down beneath Mount Pinatubo, not all that far north of Subic Bay. The submarine glides in at around midnight, running on its electric motors so it won't make any sound, and the Huks pull up alongside in rubber boats and outrigger canoes and unload the cargo. Sure enough, the transmitter's there. And this time there's none of those goddamn stickers or matchbooks. The cargo is ammunition and a few fighting men: some Filamerican commandoes fresh from a debriefing with MacArthur's intelligence chief, and a couple of Americans—MacArthur's advance scouts.

Over the next several days, Shaftoe and a few hand-picked Huks carry the transmitter up one slope of the Zambales Mountains and down the other. They stop when the foothills finally give way to low-lying paddy land. The main north-south road, from Manila up towards Lingayen Gulf, lies directly across their path.

After a few days of scrambling and scrounging, they are able to load the transmitter on board a farm cart and bury it in manure. They harness the cart to a pathetic carabao, loaned by a loyal but poor farmer, and set out across Nip country, headed for Concepcion.

At this point they have to split up, though, because there's no way that blue-eyed Shaftoe can travel in the open. Two Huks, pretending to be farmboys, take the manure cart while Shaftoe begins making his way cross-country, traveling at night, sleeping in ditches or in the homes of trusted American sympathizers.

It takes him a week and a half to cover the fifty kilometers, but in time, with patience and perseverance, he reaches the town of Concepcion, and knocks on the door of their local contact around midnight. The contact is a prominent local citizen—the manager of the town's only bank. Mr. Calagua is astonished to see an American standing at his back door. This tells Shaftoe that something must have gone wrong—the boys with the transmitter should have arrived a week ago. But the manager tells him that no one has shown up—though rumor has it that the Nips recently caught some boys trying to smuggle contraband in a farm cart and executed them on the spot.

So Shaftoe is marooned in Concepcion with no way to get orders or to send messages. He feels bad for the boys who died, but in a way, this isn't such a bad situation for him. The only reason he wanted to be in Concepcion is that the Altamira family comes from here. Half of the local farmers are related to Glory in some way.

Shaftoe breaks into the Calaguas' stables and improvises a bed. They would put him up in a spare bedroom if he asked, but he tells them that the stables are safer—if he gets caught, the Calaguas can at least claim ignorance. He recuperates on a pile of straw for a day or two, then starts trying to learn something about the Altamiras. He can't go out nosing around by himself, but the Calaguas know everyone in town, and they have a good sense of who can be trusted. So inquiries go out, and within a couple of days, information has come back in.

Mr. Calagua explains it to him over glasses of bourbon in his study. Wracked by guilt over the fact that his honored guest is sleeping on a pile of hay in an outbuilding, he pushes bourbon at him all the time, which is fine with Bobby Shaftoe.

“Some of the information is reliable, some is—er—farfetched,” Mr. Calagua says. “Here is the reliable part. First of all, your guess was correct. When the Japanese took over Manila, many members of the Altamira family came back to this area to stay with relatives. They believed it would be safer.”

“Are you telling me Glory is up here?”

“No,” Mr. Calagua says sadly, “she is not up here. But she was definitely here on September 13th, 1942.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she gave birth to a baby boy on that day—the birth certificate is on file at the town hall. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe.”

“Well, I'll be fucked sideways,” Shaftoe says. He starts calculating dates in his head.

“Many of the Altamiras who fled here have since gone back to the city—supposedly to obtain work. But some of them are also serving as eyes and ears for the resistance.”

“I knew they would do the right thing,” Shaftoe says.

Mr. Calagua smiles cautiously. “Manila is full of people who claim to be the eyes and ears of the resistance. It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet. But some of the Altamiras are fighting, too—they have gone into the mountains to join the Huks.”

“Which mountains? I didn't run across any of them up in the Zambales.”

“South of Manila and Laguna de Bay are many volcanoes and heavy jungle. This is where some of Glory's family are fighting.”

“Is that where Glory is? And the baby? Or are they in the city?”

Mr. Calagua is nervous. “This is the part that may be far-fetched. It is said that Glory is a famous heroine of the fight against the Nips.”

“Are you telling me she's dead? If she's dead, just tell me.”

“No, I have no information that she is dead. But she is a heroine. This is for certain.”

The next day, Bobby Shaftoe's malaria comes back and keeps him laid up for about a week. The Calaguas move him right into their house and bring in the town doctor to look after him. It's the same doctor who delivered Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe two years ago.

When he's feeling a little stronger, he lights out for the south. It takes him three weeks to reach the northern outskirts of Manila, hitching rides on trains and trucks, or sloshing through paddies in the middle of the night. He kills two Nipponese soldiers stealthily, and three of them in a firefight at an intersection. Each time, he has to go to ground for a few days to avoid capture. But get to Manila he does.

He can't go into the heart of the city—in addition to being really stupid, it would just slow him down. Instead he skirts it, taking advantage of the thriving resistance network. He is passed from one barangay to the next, all the way around the outskirts of Manila, until he has reached the coastal plain between Laguna de Bay and Manila Bay. At this point nothing is left to the south except for a few miles of rice paddies and then the volcanic mountains where Altamiras are making names for themselves as guerilla fighters. During his trip he has heard a thousand rumors about them. Most of them are patently false—people telling him what he obviously wants to hear. But several times he has heard what sounds like a genuine scrap of information about Glory.

They say that she has a healthy young son, living in the apartment in the Malate neighborhood of Manila, being cared for by the extended family while his mother serves in the war.

They say that she has put her nursing skills to work, acting as a sort of Florence Nightingale for the Huks.

They say that she is a messenger for the Fil-American forces, that no one surpasses her daring in crossing through Nipponese checkpoints carrying secret messages and other contraband.

The last part doesn't make much sense to Shaftoe. Which is she, a nurse or a messenger? Maybe they have her confused with someone else. Or maybe she's both—maybe she's smuggling medicine through the checkpoints.

The farther south he gets, the more information he hears. The same rumors and anecdotes pop up over and over again, differing only in their small details. He runs into half a dozen people who are dead certain that Glory is south of here, working as a messenger for a brigade of Huk guerillas in the mountains above Calamba.

He spends Christmas Day in a fisherman's hut on the shores of the big lake, Laguna de Bay. There are plenty of mosquitoes. Another bout of malaria strikes him then; he spends a couple of weeks wracked with fever dreams, having bizarre nightmares about Glory.

Finally he gets well enough to move again, and hitches a boat ride into the lakeside town of Calamba. The black volcanoes that loom above it are a welcome sight. They look nice and cool, and they remind him of the ancestral Shaftoe territory. According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields, raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way—away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. His journey's almost over.

But he gets stuck in Calamba, forced to hide in a boathouse, when the city's Nipponese Air Force troops begin gathering their forces for some kind of a move. Those Huks up on the mountain have been giving them a hard time, and the Nips are getting crazed and vicious.

The leader of the local Huks finally sends an emissary to get Shaftoe's story. The emissary goes away and several days pass. Finally a Fil-American lieutenant returns bearing two pieces of good news: the Americans have landed in force at Lingayen Gulf, and Glory is alive and working with the Huks only a few miles away.

“Help me get out of this town,” Shaftoe pleads. “Take me out in a boat on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move.”

“Move where?” says the lieutenant, playing stupid.

“To the high ground! To join those Huks!”

“You would be killed. The ground is booby-trapped. The Huks are extremely vigilant.”

“But—”

“Why don't you go the other way?” the lieutenant asks. “Go to Manila.”

“Why would I want to go there?”

“Your son is there. And that is where you are needed. Soon the big battle will be in Manila.”

“Okay,” Shaftoe says, “I'll go to Manila. But first I want to see Glory.”

“Ah,” the lieutenant says, as if light has finally dawned. “You say you want to see Glory.”

“I'm not just saying it. I do want to see Glory.”

The lieutenant exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and shakes his head. “No you don't,” he says flatly.

“What?”

“You don't want to see Glory.”

“How can you say that? Are you fucking out of your mind?”

The lieutenant's face goes stony. “Very well,” he says, “I will make inquiries. Perhaps Glory will come here and visit you.”

“That's crazy. It's much too dangerous.”

The lieutenant laughs. “No, you don't understand,” he says. “You are a white man in a provincial city in the Philippines occupied by starving, berserk Nips. It is impossible for you to show your face outside. Impossible. Glory, on the other hand, is free to move.”

“You said they're inspecting people almost every block.”

“They will not bother Glory.”

“Do the Nips ever—you know. Molest women?”

“Ah. You are worried about Glory being raped.” The lieutenant takes another long draw on his cigarette. “I can assure you that this will not happen.” He rises to his feet, tired of the conversation. “Wait here,” he says. “Gather your strength for the Battle of Manila.”

He walks out, leaving Shaftoe more frustrated than ever.

Two days later, the owner of the boathouse, who speaks very little English, shakes Shaftoe awake before sunrise. He beckons Shaftoe into a small boat and rows him out into the lake, then half a mile up the shore toward a sandbar. The dawn is just breaking over the other side of the big lake, illuminating planet-sized cumulus clouds. It's as if the biggest fuel dump in the whole world is being blown up in a sky diced into vast trapezoids by the linear contrails of American planes on dawn patrol.

Glory is strolling out on the sandbar. He can't see her face because she is wrapped in a silk scarf, but he would know the shape of her body anywhere. She walks back and forth along the shore, letting the warm water of the lake lap against her bare feet. She is really loving that sunrise—she keeps her back turned to Shaftoe so that she can enjoy it. What a flirt. Shaftoe gets as hard as an oar. He pats his back pocket, making sure he's well stocked with I SHALL RETURN condoms. It will be tricky, bedding down with Glory on a sandbar with this old codger here, but maybe he can pay the guy to go out and exercise his back for an hour.

The guy keeps looking over his shoulder to judge the distance to the sandbar. When they are about a stone's throw away, he sits up and ships the oars. They coast for a few yards and then come to a stop.

“What are you doing?” Shaftoe asks. Then he heaves a sigh. “You want money?” He rubs his thumb and fingertips together. “Huh? Like that?”

But the guy is just staring into his face, with an expression as tough and stony as anything that Shaftoe has seen on a hundred battlefields around the world. He waits for Shaftoe to shut up, then cocks his head and jerks it back in the direction of Glory.

Shaftoe looks up at Glory, just as she's turning around to face him. She reaches up with clublike hands, all wrapped up in long strips of cloth like a mummy's, and paws the scarf away from her face.

Or what used to be a face. Now it's just the front of her skull.

Bobby Shaftoe breathes in deep, and lets out a scream that can probably be heard in downtown Manila.

The boatman casts an anxious look toward the town, then stands up, blocking Shaftoe's view as he's drawing in another breath. One of the oars is in his hands. Shaftoe is just cutting loose with another scream when the oar clocks him in the side of the head.