Cryptonomicon

He slides the last twenty feet at terrifying speed and is caught and held, in various places, by eight strong hands who lift him to what passes for safety: the deck of the U-boat, just aft of the conning tower, sort of nestled underneath an antiaircraft gun. Way up at the boat's stern, there's a big T-shaped stanchion with cables coming out of the ends of the crossbar and stretched tight all the way to the conning-tower railing, near to hand. Following the example of a Royal Navy officer who appears to be his appointed guardian, Waterhouse climbs uphill--i.e. towards the stern--using one of those cables as a sort of banister, and follows him down a hatch in the afterdeck and into the interior of the boat. Shaftoe follows a few moments later.

It is the worst place Waterhouse has ever been. Like the corvette he has just left, it rises smoothly on each roller, but unlike the corvette it comes down with a crash on the rocks, nearly throwing him to the deck. It is like being sealed up in a garbage can that is being beaten with a sledgehammer. U-553 is about half full of a rich brew of cheap wine, diesel fuel, battery acid, and raw sewage. Because of the way she is pitched, this soup quickly gets deeper as you go forward, but it rolls aft in a drenching tsunami every time her midsection slams down on the rocks. Fortunately, Waterhouse is now far beyond nausea, in some kind of transcendent state where his mind has become even more divorced from his body than usual.

The officer in charge waits for the noise to subside and then says, in a startlingly quiet voice, "Is there anything in particular you'd like to inspect, sir?"

Waterhouse is still trying to get some idea of where he is by shining his flashlight beam around the place, which is kind of like peering through a soda straw. He can't get any synoptic view of his surroundings, just narrow glimpses of pipes and wires. Finally he tries holding his head still and sort of scribbling the flashlight beam around really fast. A picture emerges: they are in a narrow crawl space, obviously designed by and for engineers, intended to give access to a few thousand linear miles of pipes and wires that have been forced through some kind of bottleneck.

"We are looking for the skipper's papers," Waterhouse says. The boat goes into free fall again; he leans against something slippery, claps his hands over his ears, closes his eyes and mouth, and exhales through his nose so that none of the soup will force its way into his body. The thing he's leaning against is really hard and cold and round. It's greasy. He shines his light on it; it's made of brass. The light-scribbling trick produces the image of a brass spaceship of some sort, nestled underneath (unless he's mistaken) a bunk. He's just on the verge of making a total ass of himself by asking what it is, when he identifies it as a torpedo.

In the next quiet interlude, he asks, "Is there anything like a private cabin where he might have . ."

"It's forward," the officer says. Forward is not an encouraging view.

"Fuck!" Sergeant Shaftoe says. It's the first thing he has said in about half an hour. He begins to slosh forward, and the British officer has to hurry to catch up. The deck falls out from beneath their feet again and they stop and turn around so that the wave of sewage will hit them in the backs.

They travel downhill. Every step's a pitched battle vs. prudence and sound judgment, and they take a lot of steps. What Waterhouse had pegged as a bottleneck goes on and on--all the way, apparently, to the bow. Eventually they find something that gives them an excuse to stop: a cabin, or maybe (at about four by six feet) a corner of a cabin. There's a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be in shockingly poor taste until he remembers it's a German boat. The mean high-tide level of the sewage angles across the cabin and cuts it approximately in half. Papers and other bureaucratic detritus are floating every where, written in the occult Gothic script that Waterhouse associates with Rudy.

"Take it all," Waterhouse says, but Shaftoe and the officer are already sweeping their arms through the brew and bringing them up wrapped in dripping papier-mâché. They stuff it all into a canvas sack.

The skipper's bunk is on the aft or uphill end of the cabin. Shaftoe strips it, looks under the pillow and under the mattress, finds nothing.