Cryptonomicon

"Lightbulbs," Tom says, "they were just electrical wires--no communications."

"Then what was it they were trying to hide down here?" Randy asks. He has almost reached the bottom of the staircase, and he can see that there is a room-sized cavity.

"See for yourself" Tom says, and flicks a light switch.

The cavity is about the size of a one--car garage, with a nice level floor. There is a wooden desk, chair, and filing cabinet, fuzzy with fifty years' growth of grey-green fungus. And there is a metal footlocker, painted olive-drab, stenciled with Nipponese characters.

"I forced the lock on this thing," Tom says. He steps over to the footlocker and flips the lid open. It is filled with books.

"You were expecting maybe gold bars?" Tom says, laughing at the expression on Randy's face.

Randy sits down on the floor and grabs his ankles. He's staring open-mouthed at the books in the chest.

"You okay?" Tom asks. "Heavy, heavy deja vu," Randy says. "From this?"

"Yeah," Randy says, "I've seen this before."

"Where?"

"In my grandmother's attic."

***

Randy finds his way up out of the network of caverns and into the parking lot. The warm air feels good on his skin, but by the time he has reached the Epiphyte Corp. trailer to turn in his hard hat and boots, he has begun to sweat again. He bids good-bye to the three women who work there, and once again is struck by their attentiveness, their solicitousness. Then he remembers that he is not just some interloper. He is a shareholder, and an important officer, in the corporation that employs them--he is paying them or oppressing them, take your pick.

He trudges across the parking lot, moving very slowly, trying not to get that metabolic furnace het up. A second taxi has pulled alongside the one that is waiting for Randy, and the drivers are leaning out of their windows shooting the breeze.

As Randy approaches his taxi, he happens to glance back towards the entrance of the cavern. Framed in its dark maw, and dwarfed by the mountainous shapes of the Goto dump trucks, is a solitary man, silver-haired, stooped, but trim and almost athletic-looking in a warmup suit and sneakers. He is standing with his back to Randy, facing the cavern, holding a long spray of flowers. He seems rooted in the mud, perfectly motionless.

The front door of the Goto Engineering trailer flies open. A young Nipponese man in a white shirt, striped tie, and orange hard hat descends the stairs and moves briskly towards the old man with the flowers. When he is still some distance away, he stops, puts his feet together, and executes a bow. Randy hasn't spent enough time around Nipponese to understand the minutiae, but this looks to him like an extraordinarily major bow. He approaches the old man with a bright smile and holds one beckoning hand out towards the Goto trailer. The old man seems disoriented--maybe the cavern doesn't look like it used to--but after a few moments he returns a perfunctory bow and allows the young engineer to lead him out of the stream of traffic.

Randy gets in his taxi and says, "Foote Mansion," to the driver.

He has been harboring an illusion that he will read Sean Daniel McGee's war memoir slowly and thoroughly, from beginning to end, but this has now gone the way of all illusions. He hauls the photocopied stack out of his bag during the drive to the hotel and begins ruthless triage. Most of it has nothing to do with Kinakuta at all--it's about McGee's experiences fighting in New Guinea and the Philippines. McGee is no Churchill, but he does have a distant blarney-tinged narrative talent, which makes even banal anecdotes readable. His skills as raconteur must have made him a big hit around the bar at the NCOs' Club; a hundred tipsy sergeants must have urged him to write some of this shit down if he ever made it back to South Boston alive.

He did make it back, but unlike most of the other GIs who were in the Philippines on V-J day, he didn't go straight back home. He took a little detour to the Sultanate of Kinakuta, which was still home to almost four thousand Nipponese troops. This explains an oddity about his book. In most war memoirs, V-E Day or V-J Day happens on the last page, or at least in the last chapter, and then our narrator goes home and buys a Buick. But V-J day happens about two-thirds of the way through Sean Daniel McGee's book. When Randy sets aside the pre-August 1945 material, an ominously thick stack of pages remains. Clearly, Sergeant McGee has something to get off his chest.