Cryptonomicon

Chapter 83 THE BATTLE OF MANILA

Bobby Shaftoe is awakened by the smell of smoke. It is not the smoke of cookies left too long in the oven, piles of autumn leaves being burned, or Boy Scout campfires. It is a mixture of other kinds of smoke with which he has become quite familiar in the last couple of years: tires, fuel, and buildings, for example.

He props himself up on one elbow and realizes that he is lying in the bottom of a long skinny boat. Just above his head, a dirty canvas sail luffs in a treacherous and foul-smelling breeze. It is the middle of the night.

He turns his head to look upwind. His head doesn't like it. Fierce pain is trying to batter down the doors of his mind. But the pain is not getting in. He senses the muffled booms of the pain's hobnailed boots against his front door, but that's about it.

Ah! Someone has given him morphine. Shaftoe grins appreciatively. Life is good.

The world is dark—a matte black hemisphere inverted over the plane of the lake. But there is a horizontal crack around the edge, off to the boat's port side, where yellow light is leaking through. The light glimmers and sparkles like stars viewed through the heat waves above the hood of a black automobile.

He sits up, peers at it, gradually getting an idea of scale. The ragged trail of yellow light extends from the boat's eight o'clock, all the way around past the bow, to about one o'clock. Maybe it is some incredibly weird sunrise phenomenon.

“Myneela,” says a voice behind him.

“Huh?”

“It is Manila,” says another voice, closer to him, speaking the English version of the name.

“Why's it all lit up?” Bobby Shaftoe has not seen a city lit up at night since 1941, and has forgotten what it looks like.

“The Japanese have put it to the torch.”

“The Pearl of the Orient!” someone says, farther back in the boat, and there is rueful laughter.

Shaftoe's head is clearing now. He rubs his eyes and takes a better look. A couple of miles off to port, a steel drum full of fuel takes off into the sky like a rocket, and disappears. He begins to make out the bony silhouettes of palm trees along the lake shore, standing out against the flames. The boat moves on across the warm water quietly, tiny waves chiming against its hull. Shaftoe feels as if he has just been born, a new person coming into a new world.

Anyone else would ask why they are traveling into the burning city, instead of running away from it. But Shaftoe doesn't ask, any more than a newborn infant would ask questions. This is the world he has been born into, and he looks at it wide-eyed.

The man who has been speaking to him is sitting on a gunwale next to Shaftoe, a pale face hovering above a black garment, a white rectangular notch in his collar. The light of the burning city refracts warmly in a string of amber beads from which depends, a heavy, swinging crucifix. Shaftoe lies back down in the hull of the boat and stares up at him for awhile.

“They gave me morphine.”

“I gave you morphine. You were difficult to control.”

“I apologize, sir,” Shaftoe says with profound sincerity. He remembers those China Marines who went Asiatic on the trip down from Shanghai, and how they disgraced themselves.

“We could not tolerate noise. The Nipponese would have found us.”

“I understand.”

“Seeing Glory was a very bad shock for you.”

“Level with me, padre,” says Bobby Shaftoe. “My boy. My son. Is he a leper too?”

The black eyes close, and the pale face moves back and forth in a no. “Glory contracted the disease not long after the child was born, working in a camp in the mountains. The camp was not a very clean place.”

Shaftoe snorts. “No shit, Sherlock!”

There is a long, uncomfortable silence. Then the padre says, “I have already taken confessions from the other men. Would you like me to take yours now?”

“Is that what Catholics do when they're about to die?”

“They do it all the time. But yes, it is advisable to confess immediately before death. It helps—what is the expression—grease the skids. In the afterlife.”

“Padre, it looks to me like we're only an hour or two away from hitting the beach. If I start confessing my sins to you right now, I might get up to stealing cookies from the cookie jar when I was eight years old.”

The padre laughs. Someone hands Shaftoe a cigarette, already lit. He takes a big suck on it.

“We wouldn't have time to get into any of the good stuff, like nailing Glory and killing a whole lot of Nips and Krauts.” Shaftoe thinks about it for a minute, enjoying the cigarette. “But if this is one of those deals where we are all going to die—and it sure looks like one of those deals to me—there is one thing I gotta do. Is this boat going back to Calamba?”

“We hope that the owner can take some women and children back across the lake.”

“Anyone got a pencil and paper?”

Someone passes up a pencil stub, but there is no paper to be found. Shaftoe searches his pockets and finds nothing but a skein of I SHALL RETURN condoms. He opens one of them, peeling the halves of the wrapper apart carefully, and tosses the rubber into the lake. Then he spreads the wrapper out on the top of an ordnance crate and begins to write: “I, Robert Shaftoe, being of sound mind and body, hereby leave all of my worldly goods, including my military death benefits, to my natural-born son, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe.”

He looks up into the burning city. He considers adding something like, “if he's still alive,” but nobody likes a whiner. So he just signs the fucking thing. The padre adds his signature as witness. Just to add some extra credibility, Shaftoe pulls off his dog tags and wraps the will around them, then wraps the dog tags' chain around the whole thing. He passes it down to the stern of the boat, where the boatman pockets it and cheerfully agrees to do the right thing with it when he gets back to Calamba.

The boat isn't wide, but it's very long and has a dozen Huks crammed onto it. All of them are armed to the teeth with ordnance that has obviously come off an American submarine recently. The weight of men and weaponry keeps the boat so low in the water that waves occasionally splash over the gunwales. Shaftoe paws through crates in the dark. He can't see for shit, but his hands identify the components of a few Thompson submachine guns down in there.

“Parts for weapons,” one of the Huks explains to him, “don't lose those!”

“Parts, nothing!” Shaftoe says, a few busy seconds later. He produces a fully assembled trench broom from the crate. The red coals of half a dozen I SHALL RETURN cigarettes leap upwards into the Huks' mouths as they free their hands for a light round of applause. Someone passes him a pie-shaped magazine, heavy with .45 caliber cartridges. “Y'know, they invented this kind ammo just to knock down crazy Filipino bastards,” Shaftoe announces.

“We know,” one of the Huks says.

“It's overkill for Nips,” Shaftoe continues, jacking the tommy gun and the magazine together. The Huks all laugh nastily. One of them is moving up from the stern, making the whole boat rock from side to side. He is a very young, slight fellow. He holds out his hand to Bobby Shaftoe. “Uncle Robert, do you remember me?”

Being called Uncle Robert is hardly the weirdest thing that has happened to Shaftoe in the last few years, so he lets it slide. He peers at the boy's face, which is dimly illuminated by the combustion of Manila. “You're one of the Altamira boys,” he guesses.

The boy salutes him crisply, and grins.

Then, Shaftoe remembers. Three years ago, the Altamira family apartment, carrying the freshly impregnated Glory up the stairs as air raid sirens wailed all around the city. An apartment filled with Altamiras. A squad of boys with wooden swords and rifles, staring at Bobby Shaftoe in awe. Shaftoe throwing them a salute, then running out of the place.

“All of us fought the Nips,” the boy says. Then his face falls, and he crosses himself. “Two are dead.”

“Some of you were pretty damn young.”

“The youngest ones are still in Manila,” the boy says. He and Shaftoe silently stare across the water into the flames, which have merged into a wall now.

“In the apartment? In Malate?”

“I think so. My name is Fidel.”

“Is my son in the same place?”

“I think so. Maybe not.”

“We'll go find those kids, Fidel.”

Half the population of Manila seems to be standing along the water's edge, or in the water, waiting for a boat like theirs to show up. MacArthur is coming down from the north, and the Nipponese Air Force troops are coming up from the south, so the isthmus between Manila Bay and Laguna de Bay is corked at both ends by great military forces waging total war. A ragged Dunkirk-style evacuation is in progress along the lake side of the isthmus, but the number of boats is not adequate. Some of the refugees are behaving like civilized human beings, but others are wading and swimming out towards them trying to get first dibs. A wet hand reaches up out of the water and grabs the boat's gunwale until Shaftoe crushes it with the butt of his trench broom. The swimmer falls away, clutching his hand and screaming, and Shaftoe tells him he's ugly.

There is about half an hour's more ugliness as the boat cruises back and forth just out of swimming range and the padre handpicks an assortment of women carrying small children. They are pulled up into the boat one by one, and the Huks climb off the boat one by one, and when it's all finished the boat turns around and glides off into the darkness. Shaftoe and the Huks wade ashore, carrying crates of ammunition between them. By this point, Shaftoe has grenades dangling off his body all over the place, like teats on a pregnant sow, and most of the Huks are walking all slow and stiff-legged, trying not to collapse under the weight of the bandoliers in which they have practically mummified themselves. They stagger into the city, bucking a tide of smoky refugees.

This low land along the shore of the lake is not the city proper—it is a suburb of humble buildings made in the traditional style, of woven rattan screens with thatched roofs. They burn effortlessly, throwing up the red sheets of flame that they watched from the boat. Inland, and a few miles north, is the city proper, with many masonry buildings. The Nipponese have put it to the torch also, but it burns sporadically, as isolated towers of flame and smoke.

Shaftoe and his band had been expecting to hit the beach like Marines and get mowed down at the water's edge. Instead, they march for a good mile and a half inland before they actually lay eyes on the enemy.

Shaftoe's actually glad to see some real Nips; he has been getting nervous, because the lack of opposition has made the Huks giddy and overconfident. Then half a dozen Nip Air Force troops spill out of a store which they have evidently been looting—they are all carrying liquor bottles—and stop on the sidewalk to set fire to the place, fashioning Molotov cocktails from stolen bottles of firewater. Shaftoe pulls the pin on a grenade and underhands it down the sidewalk, watches it skitter for a while, and then ducks into a doorway. When he hears the explosion, and sees shrapnel crack the windshield of a car parked along the street, he jumps out onto the sidewalk, ready to open up with the tommy gun. But it's not necessary; all of the Nips are down, thrashing weakly in the gutter. Shaftoe and the other Huks all take cover and wait for more Nipponese troops to arrive, and help their injured comrades, but it doesn't happen.

The Huks are elated. Shaftoe stands in the street brooding while the padre administers last rites to the dead and dying Nipponese. Obviously, discipline has completely broken down. The Nips know they are trapped. They know MacArthur is about to run right over them, like a lawn mower plowing through an anthill. They have become a mob. For Shaftoe, it's going to be easier to fight mobs of drunken, deranged looters, but there's no telling what they might be doing to civilians farther north.

“We're wasting our fucking time,” Shaftoe says, “let's get to Malate and avoid further engagements.”

“You are not in command of this group,” says one of the others. “I am.”

“Who's that?” Shaftoe asks, squinting against the light of the burning liquor store.

It turns out to be a Fil-American lieutenant, who was sitting way back in the boat, and who has been of no use at all to this point. Shaftoe knows in his bones that this guy is not going to be a good combat leader. He inhales deeply, trying to heave a sigh, then gags on smoke instead.

“Sir, yes sir!” he says, and salutes.

“I am Lieutenant Morales, and if you have any more suggestions, bring them to me, or keep them to yourself.”

“Sir, yes sir!” Shaftoe says. He doesn't bother to memorize the lieutenant's name.

They work their way north through narrow, clogged streets for a couple of hours. The sun comes up. A small airplane flies over the city, drawing ragged fire from exhausted, drunken Nipponese troops.

“It is a P-51 Mustang!” Lieutenant Morales exclaims.

“It's a fucking Piper Cub, goddamn it!” Shaftoe says. He has been holding his tongue to this point, but he can't help it now. “It's an artillery spotter plane.”

“Then why is it flying over Manila?” Lieutenant Morales asks smugly. He enjoys this rhetorical triumph for about thirty seconds. Then the first artillery rounds begin to bore in from the north and blast the shit out of various buildings.

They get into their first serious firefight about half an hour later, against a platoon of Nipponese Air Force troops holed up in a stone bank at the vee formed by a couple of intersecting avenues. Lieutenant Morales comes up with an extremely complicated plan that involves breaking up into three smaller groups. Morales takes three men forward into the cover of a large fountain that sits in the middle of the square. There, they are immediately trapped by heavy fire from the Nipponese. They squat and huddle behind the shelter of the fountain for about a quarter of an hour, at which point an artillery shell glides in from the north, a black pellet easing downwards in a flawless parabolic trajectory, and scores a direct hit on the fountain. It turns out to be a high-explosive shell, which does not blow up until it hits something—the fountain, in this case. The padre gives Lieutenant Morales and his men last rites from a safe distance of a hundred yards or so, which is as good a place as any, since there is nothing left of their physical bodies.

Bobby Shaftoe is voted new squad leader by acclamation. He leads them around the square, giving the whole intersection a wide berth. Way up north somewhere, one of The General's batteries is doggedly trying to zero in on that fucking bank, blowing up half the neighborhood in the process. A Piper Cub banks overhead doing lazy figure-eights, offering suggestions over the radio: “Almost there—a little to the left—no, too far—now bring it in a little bit.”

It takes Shaftoe's group a whole day to make another mile's progress towards Malate. They could get there in no time by simply running up the middle of major streets, but the artillery fire is coming in heavier and heavier as they head north. Worse, much of it consists of antipersonnel rounds with radar proximity fuses that blow up while they're still several yards above the ground, the better to spray shrapnel all over the place. The air bursts look like the splayed foliage of burned coconut palms.

Shaftoe sees no point in getting them all killed. So they take it a block at a time, sprinting one by one from doorway to doorway, and scouting the buildings with great care in case there are any Nips lying in wait to shoot at them from the windows. When that happens, they have to hunker down, scout the place out, count windows and doors, make guesses about the building's floor plan, send men out to check various lines of sight. Usually, it is not really difficult to root the Nips out of these buildings, but it is time-consuming.

They hole up in a half-burned apartment building around sunset, and take turns getting a couple of hours' sleep. Then they push on through the night, when the artillery fire is less intense. Bobby Shaftoe gets the whole remaining squad, nine men including the padre, into Malate at about four in the morning. By the time dawn breaks, they have reached the street where the Altamiras live, or lived. They arrive just in time to see the entire apartment block being systematically blasted into rubble by round after high-explosive round.

No one runs out of it; no cries or screams can be heard in between the explosions. The place is empty.

They break down the barricaded door of a drugstore across the street and have a chat with the sole living occupants: a seventy-five-year-old woman and a six-year-old boy. The Nipponese came through the neighborhood a couple of days ago, she says, heading north, in the direction of Intramuros. They herded the women and children out of the buildings and marched them in one direction. They pulled out all of the men, and the boys over a certain age, and marched them off in another. She and her grandson escaped by hiding in a cupboard.

Shaftoe and his squad emerge from the drugstore onto the street, leaving the padre behind to grease some heavenly skids. Fifteen seconds later, two of them are killed by shrapnel from an antipersonnel round that detonates above the street nearby. The remainder of the squad backs right into a group of marauding Nipponese stragglers coming around the corner, and a completely insane close-quarters firefight ensues. They have the Nips heavily outgunned, but half of Shaftoe's men are too stunned to fight. They are accustomed to the jungle. Some of them have never been to the city before, even in peacetime, and they just stand there gaping. Shaftoe ducks into a doorway and begins to make a fantastic amount of noise with his trench broom. The Nips start throwing grenades around like firecrackers, doing as much damage to themselves as to the Huks. The engagement is ridiculously confused, and doesn't really end until another artillery round comes in, kills several of the Nips, and leaves the rest so stunned that Shaftoe is able to walk out in the open and dispatch them with shots from his Colt.

They drag two of their wounded into the drugstore and leave them there. One other man is dead. They are down to five fighting men and one increasingly busy padre. Their firefight has brought down another barrage of antipersonnel artillery, and so the best they can do for the rest of the day is find a basement to hide in, and try to get some sleep.

Shaftoe sleeps hardly at all, and so when night falls he takes a couple of benzedrine tablets, shoots a bit of morphine to take the edge off, and leads his squad out into the streets. The next neighborhood to the north is called Ermita. It has a lot of hotels. After Ermita is Rizal Park. The walls of Intramuros rise up from Rizal Park's northern edge. After Intramuros is the Pasig River, and MacArthur's on the far side of the Pasig. So if Shaftoe's son and the rest of the Altamiras are still alive, they have to be somewhere in the couple of miles between here and Fort Santiago on the near bank of the Pasig.

Shortly after they cross into the neighborhood of Ermita, they happen upon a stream of blood trickling out of a doorway, across the sidewalk, into the gutter. They kick down the door of the building and discover that its ground floor is filled with the corpses of Filipino men—several dozen in all. All of them have been bayoneted. One is still alive. Shaftoe and the Huks carry him out onto the sidewalk and begin looking for some place to put him while the padre circulates through the building, touching each corpse briefly and muttering something in Latin. When he comes out, he is bloody up to the knees.

“Any women? Children?” Shaftoe asks him. The padre shakes his head no.

They are only a few blocks from the Philippine General Hospital, so they carry the wounded man in that direction. Coming around the corner they see that the hospital's buildings have been half destroyed by MacArthur's artillery, and the grounds are covered with human beings laid out on sheets. Then they realize that the men circulating around the area, carrying rifles, are Nipponese troops. A couple of shots are fired in their direction. They have to duck into an alley and set the wounded man down. A few moments later, a trio of Nipponese soldiers appears in hot pursuit. Shaftoe has had enough time to think this one through, so he lets them get a good few paces into the alley. Then he and the Huks kill them silently, with blades. By the time reinforcements have been sent out after them, Shaftoe and his group have disappeared into the alleyways of Ermita, which in many places are running red with the blood of slaughtered Filipino men, and boys.