Cryptonomicon

The fold-out table is on the totally submerged end. Waterhouse wades into it carefully, trying not to lose his footing. He finds the desk with his feet, reaches down into the murk with his hands, explores as a blind man would. He finds a few drawers which he is able to pull out of the desk entirely and hand off to Shaftoe, who dumps their contents into the sack. Within a short time he is pretty sure that there's nothing left in the desk.

The boat rises and slams down. As the sewage rolls forward, it exposes, for just a moment, something in the corner of the cabin, something attached to the forward bulkhead. Waterhouse wades over to identify it.

"It's a safe!" he says. He spins the dial. It's heavy. A good safe. German. Shaftoe and the British officer look at each other.

A British sailor appears in the open hatchway. "Sir!" he announces. "Another U-boat has been sighted in the area."

"I'd love to have a stethoscope," Waterhouse hints. "This thing have a sickbay?"

"No," says the British officer. "Just a box of medical gear. Should be floating around somewhere."

"Sir! Yes sir!" Shaftoe says, and vanishes from the room. A minute later he's back holding a German stethoscope up above his head to keep it clean. He tosses it across the cabin to Waterhouse, who snares it in the air, sockets it into his ears, and thrusts the business end down through the sewage to the front of the safe.

He has done a little of this before, as an exercise. Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto. The manager of the grocery store in Moorhead, Minnesota, used to let the young Waterhouse play with his safe. He broke the combination, to the manager's great surprise, and wrote a report about the experience for school.

This safe is a lot better than that one was. Since he can't see the dial anyway, he closes his eyes.

He is vaguely conscious that the other fellows on the submarine have been shouting and carrying on about something for a while, as if some sensational news has just come in. Perhaps the war is over. Then the head of the stethoscope is wrenched loose from his grasp. He opens his eyes to see Sergeant Shaftoe lifting it to his mouth as if it were a microphone. Shaftoe stares at him coolly and speaks into the stethoscope: "Sir, torpedoes in the water, sir." Then Shaftoe turns and leaves Waterhouse alone in the cabin.

Waterhouse is about halfway up the conning tower ladder, looking up at a disk of greyish-black sky, when the whole vessel jerks and booms. A piston of sewage rises up beneath him and propels him upwards, vomiting him out onto the top deck of the boat, where his comrades grab him and very considerately prevent him from rolling off into the ocean.

The movement of the U-553 with the waves has changed. She's moving a lot more now, as if she's about to break free from the reef.

It takes Waterhouse a minute to get his bearings. He is starting to think he may have suffered some damage during all of that. Something is definitely wrong with his left arm, which is the one he landed on.

Powerful light sweeps over them: a searchlight from the British corvette that brought them here. The British sailors curse. Waterhouse levers himself up on his good elbow and sights down the hull of the U-boat, following the beam of the searchlight to a bizarre sight. The boat has been blown open just beneath the waterline, shards of her hull peeled back from the wound and projecting jaggedly into the air. The foul contents of the hull are draining out, staining the Atlantic black.

"Fuck!" Sergeant Shaftoe says. He shrugs loose from a small but heavy-looking knapsack that he's been carrying around, pulls it open. His sudden activity draws the attention of the Royal Navy men who help out by pointing their flashlights at his furious hands.

Waterhouse, who may be in some kind of delirium by this point, can't quite believe what he sees: Shaftoe has pulled out a bundle of neat brownish-yellow cylinders, as thick as a finger and maybe six inches long. He also takes out some small items, including a coil of thick, stiff red cord. He jumps to his feet so decisively that he nearly knocks someone down, and runs to the conning tower and disappears down the ladder.

"Jesus," an officer says, "he's going to do some blasting." The officer thinks about this for a very small amount of time; the ship moves terrifyingly with the waves and makes scraping noises which might indicate it's sliding off the reef. "Abandon ship!" he hollers.

Most of them get into the whaler. Waterhouse is bundled back onto the trolley contraption. He is about halfway across to the torpedo boat when he feels, but scarcely hears, a sharp shock.