Cryptonomicon

And the big steel trunk with all of the Army codebooks. These books were heavy as death when they were bone dry; now they are sodden. To carry them out is beyond imagining. The rules dictate that they must therefore be burned.

The men of the 20th Division's radio platoon are not much inclined to humor of any kind at the moment, not even the grim sardonic humor universal among soldiers. If anything in the world is capable of making them laugh at this moment, it is the concept of trying to construct a bonfire out of saturated codebooks in a swamp during a rainstorm. They might be able to burn them if they used a lot of aviation fuel--more than they actually have. Then the fire would produce a towering column of smoke that would draw P-38s as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.

Burning them can't be necessary. New Guinea is a howling maelstrom of decay and destruction; the only things that endure are rocks and wasps. They rip off the covers to bring home as proof that they have been destroyed, then pack the books into their trunk and bury it in the bank of an especially vindictive river.

It's not a very good idea. But they have been getting bombed a lot. Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb's shock wave is like a stone wall moving at seven hundred miles an hour. Unlike a stone wall, it passes through your body, like a burst of light through a glass figurine. On its way through your flesh, it rearranges every part of you down to the mitochondrial level, disrupting every process in every cell, including whatever enables your brain to keep track of time and experience the world. A few of these detonations are enough to break the thread of consciousness into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as they were when they left home; they cannot be expected to think clearly or to do things for good reasons. They throw mud on the trunk not as a sane procedure for getting rid of it but as a kind of ritual, just to demonstrate the proper respect for its lode of strange information.

Then they shoulder their burdens of iron and rice and begin to strain up into the mountains. Their comrades have left a trampled path that is already growing back into jungle. The mileposts are bodies--by now just stinking battlegrounds--disputed by frenzied mobs of microbes, bugs, beasts, and birds never catalogued by scientists.

Chapter 28 HUFFDUFF

The huffduff mast is planted before they even have a roof on the new headquarters of Detachment 2702, and the huffduff antenna is raised before there is any electricity to run it.

Waterhouse does his best to pretend as if he cares. He lets the workers know: vast tank armadas clashing in the African desert might be dashing and romantic, but the real battle of this war (ignoring, as always, the Eastern Front) is the Battle of the Atlantic. We can't win the Battle of the Atlantic without sinking some U-boats, and we can't sink them until we find them, and we need a way of finding them other than the tried-and-true approach of letting our convoys steam through them and get blown to bits. That way, men, is to get this antenna in action as soon as humanly possible.

Waterhouse is no actor, but when the second ice storm of the week blows through and inflicts grievous damage on the antenna, and he has to stay up all night repairing it by the light of the Galvanick Lucifer, he is pretty sure that he has them hooked. The castle staff work late shifts to keep him supplied with hot tea and brandy, and the builders give him some zesty hip-hip-hoorays the next morning when the patched antenna is winched back up to the top of the mast. They are all so sure that they are saving lives in the North Atlantic that they would probably lynch him if they knew the truth.

This huffduff story is ridiculously plausible. It is so plausible that if Waterhouse were working for the Germans, he'd be suspicious. The antenna is a highly directional model. It receives a strong signal when pointed towards the source and a weak signal otherwise. The operator waits for a U-boat to begin transmitting and then swings the antenna back and forth until it gives the maximum reading; the direction of the antenna then gives the azimuth to the source. Two or more such readings, supplied by different huffduff stations, can be used to triangulate the origin of the signal.

In order to keep up appearances, the station needs to be manned 24 hours a day, which almost kills Waterhouse during the first weeks of 1943. The rest of Detachment 2702 has not shown up on schedule, so it is up to Waterhouse to preserve the illusion in the meantime.