Cryptonomicon

The Nipponese garrison on Kinakuta had long since been bypassed by the war, and like the other bypassed garrisons, had turned what energies they had left to vegetable farming, and waiting for the extremely sporadic arrivals of submarines, which, towards the close of the war, the Nipponese used to haul the most extremely vital cargo and to ferry certain desperately needed specialists, like airplane mechanics, from one place to another. When they got Hirohito's broadcast from Tokyo, ordering them to lay down their arms, they did so dutifully but (one has to suspect) gladly.

The only hard part was finding someone to surrender to. The Allies had concentrated on planning the invasion of the Nipponese home islands, and it took them a while to get troops out to the bypassed garrisons like Kinakuta. McGee's account of the confusion in Manila is mordant--at this point in the book McGee starts to lose his patience, and his charm. He starts to rail. Twenty pages later, he's sloshing ashore at Kinakuta City. He stands at attention while his company captain accepts the surrender of the Nipponese garrison. He posts a guard around the entrance to the cavern, where a few diehard Nips have refused to surrender. He organizes the systematic disarming of the Nipponese soldiers, who are terribly emaciated, and sees to it that their rifles and ammunition are dumped into the ocean even as food and medical supplies are brought ashore. He helps a small contingent of engineers string barbed wire around the airfield, turning it into an internment camp.

Randy flips through all of this during the drive to the hotel. Then, words like "impaled" and "screams" and "hideous" catch his eye, so he flips back a few pages and begins to read more carefully.

***

The upshot is that the Nipponese had, since 1940, marched thousands of tribesmen out of the cool, clean interior of the island to its hot, pestilential edge, and put them to work. These slaves had enlarged the big cavern where the Nipponese built their air raid shelter and command post; improved the road to the top of Eliza Peak, where the radar and direction-finding stations were perched; built another runway at the air field; filled in more of the harbor; and died by thousands of malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery, starvation, and overwork. These same tribesmen, or their bereaved brothers, had then watched, from their redoubts high in the mountains, as Sean Daniel McGee and his comrades came and stripped the Nipponese of their armaments and concentrated them all in the airfield, guarded by a few dozen exhausted GIs who were frequently drunk or asleep. Those tribesmen worked around the clock, up there in the jungle, making spears, until the next full moon illuminated the sleeping Nipponese like a searchlight. Then they poured out of the forest in what Sean Daniel McGee describes as "a horde," "a plague of wasps," "a howling army," "a black legion unleashed from the gates of Hell," "a screaming mass," and in other ways he could never get away with now. They flattened and disarmed the GI's, but did not hurt them. They flung tree limbs over the barbed wire until the fence had become a highway, and then swarmed into the airfield with their spears at the ready. McGee's account goes on for about twenty pages, and, as much as anything else, is the story of the night that one affable sergeant from South Boston became permanently unhinged.

"Sir?"

Randy is startled to realize that the taxi's door is open. He looks around and finds that he's under the awning of the Hotel Foote Mansion. The door is being held open for him by a wiry young bellhop with a different look than most of the Kinakutans Randy has encountered so far. This kid perfectly matches Sean Daniel McGee's description of a tribesman from the interior.

"Thank you," Randy says, and makes a point of tipping the fellow generously.

His room is all done up in furniture designed in Scandinavia but assembled locally from various endangered hardwoods. The view is towards the interior mountains, but if he goes onto his tiny balcony he can see a bit of water, a containership being unloaded, and most of the memorial garden built by the Nipponese on the site of the massacre.

Several messages and faxes await him: mostly the other members of Epiphyte Corp., notifying him that they have arrived, and letting him know in which room they can be found. Randy unpacks his bags, takes a shower, and sends his shirts down to the laundry for tomorrow. Then he makes himself comfortable at his little table, boots his laptop, and pulls up the Epiphyte (2) Corporation Business Plan.

Chapter 24 LIZARD

Bobby Shaftoe and his buddies are just out for a nice little morning drive through the countryside.

In Italy.

Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?

Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.