Cryptonomicon

Today the old bordello has been turned upside down; everyone with Ultra clearance is out in the garage, which thrums and roars with the sound of fans, and virtually glows with contained heat. In that garage is a rusted steel trunk, still spattered with riverbank mud that partially obscures the Nipponese characters stenciled on its sides. Had a Nipponese spy glimpsed the trunk during its feverish passage from the port to the whorehouse's garage, he would have recognized it as belonging to the radio platoon of the 20th Division, which is currently lost in the jungles of New Guinea.

The rumor, shouted over the sound of the fans, is that a digger--an Australian grunt--found it. His unit was sweeping the abandoned headquarters of the 20th Division for booby traps when his metal detector went nuts along the banks of a river.

The codebooks are stacked inside as neatly as gold bars. They are wet and mildewed and their front covers are all missing, but this is mint condition by the standards of wartime. Stripped to the waist and streaming with sweat, the men raise the books out one by one, like nurses lifting newborn infants from the bassinette, and carry them to tables where they slice away the rotten bindings and peel the sodden pages off the stacks one by one, hanging them from improvised clotheslines strung overhead. The stench and damp of New Guinea saturate the air as the river water trapped in those pages is lifted out by the rushing air; it all vents to the outside eventually, and half a mile downwind, pedestrians wrinkle their noses. The whorehouse's closets--still redolent of French perfume, powder, hairspray and jism, but now packed to the ceiling with office supplies--are raided for more string. The web of clotheslines grows, new layers crisscrossing above and below the old ones, every inch of string claimed by a wet page as soon as it is stretched. Each page is a grid, a table with hiragana or katakana or kanji in one box, a group of digits or Romanji in another box, and the pages all cross-referenced to other pages in a scheme only a cryptographer could love.

The photographer comes in, trailed by assistants who are burdened with miles of film. All he knows is that each page must be photographed perfectly. The malarial reek practically flattens him the moment he walks in the door, but when he recovers, his eyes scan the garage. All he can see, stretching as if to infinity, are pages dripping and curling, turning white as they dry, casting their grids of information into sharp relief, like the reticules of so many bomb sights, the graven crosshairs of so many periscopes, plunging through cloud and fog to focus, distinctly on the abdomens of Nipponese troopships, pregnant with North Borneo fuel, alive with burning steam.

Chapter 30 RAM

"Sir! Would you mind telling me where we are going, sir!"

Lieutenant Monkberg heaves a deep, quivering sigh, his rib-cage shuddering like a tin shack in a cyclone. He executes a none too snappy pushup. His hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his head from the bowl, of a toilet--or "head," as it is referred to in this context: an alarmingly rundown freighter. He jerks down a strip of abrasive Euro-bumwad and wipes his mouth before looking up at Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.

And Shaftoe does need some serious bracing, because he is carrying close to his own weight in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully prepacked.

He could have left it that way. But this is not how an Eagle Scout operates. Bobby Shaftoe has gone through and unpacked all of it, spread it out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.

This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he infers that the men of Detachment 2702 are expected to spend most of the next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well-armed sons of bitches. German, most likely.

"N-N-N-Norway," Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that Shaftoe considers offering him some m-m-m-morphine, which induces a mild nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck himself sideways.

"Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?"

Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. "Ram and run," he says.

"Sir! Ram what, sir?"

''Norway."

"Sir! Run where, sir?"

"Sweden."

Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U boat-infested waters, the collision with Norway, the desperate run across frozen Nazi-occupied territory, all seem trivial compared with the shining goal of dipping into the world's largest and purest reservoir of authentic Swedish poontang.

"Shaftoe! Wake up!"

''Sir! Yes, sir!"