Cryptonomicon

It seems like a strange way to kill people. Shaftoe's not sure if he approves of everything that is implied by this U-boat. Shaftoe has killed Chinese bandits on the banks of the Yangtze by stabbing them in the chest with a bayonet. He thinks he killed one, once, just by hitting him pretty hard in the head. On Guadalcanal he killed Nips by shooting at them with several different kinds of arms, by rolling rocks down on them, by constructing large bonfires at the entrances to caves where they were holed up, by sneaking up on them in the jungle and cutting their throats, by firing mortars into their positions, even by picking one up and throwing him off a cliff into the pounding surf. Of course he has known for a long time that this face-to-face style of killing the bad guys is kind of old-fashioned, but it's not like he's spent a lot of time thinkingabout it. The demonstration of the Vickers machine gun that he witnessed in Italy didsort of get him thinking, and now here he is, inside one of the most famous killing machines in the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves. Or rather the cast-iron wheels that are used for opening and closing valves. Entire bulkheads are covered with iron wheels, ranging from a couple of inches to over a foot in diameter, packed in as densely as barnacles on a rock, in what looks like a completely random and irregular fashion. They are painted either red or black, and they are polished to a gleam from the friction of men's hands.

And where it's not valves it's switches, huge Frankenstein-movie ones. There is one big rotary switch, half green and half red, that's a good two feet in diameter. And it's not like this boat has a lot of windows in it. It's got no windows at all. Just a periscope that can only be used by one guy at a time. And so for these guys, the war comes down to being sealed up in an airtight drum full of shit and turning valve-wheels and throwing switches on command, and from time to time maybe some officer comes back and tells them that they just killed a bunch of guys.

There's that box--it ended up on a bunk. Shaftoe yanks it closer and hauls it open. The contents are all jumbled up, and there's more than one purple bottle in there, and he panics for a moment, thinking he'll have to read all of the labels in their creepy Germanic script, but in a few seconds he finds the MORPHIUM, grabs it, pockets it.

He's on his way back up towards the conning tower when a big roller slams into the outside of the boat and knocks him off balance. He tumbles downhill for a long, long ways, doing backward somersaults straight down the middle of the boat, before he gets himself under control. Everything has gone black; he's lost his flashlight.

He comes very close to panicking now. It's not that he's a panicky guy, just that it's been a while since he had morphine, and when he gets this way, his body reacts badly to things. He's half-blinded by a powerful flash of blue light that is gone before his eyes have time to blink. There's a sizzling noise down below. He moves his left hand and feels a tug on his wrist: the flashlight's lanyard, which he had the presence of mind to wrap around himself. The light scrapes and clanks against the steel grating on which Shaftoe is now spreadeagled, like a saint on the gridiron. There's another flash of blue light, reticulated by black lines, accompanied by a sizzling noise. Shaftoe smells electricity. He raps the flashlight against the grating a couple of times and it comes on again, flickeringly.

The grid's woven from pencil-thick rods spaced a couple of inches apart. He's facedown on it, looking into a hold that, if this U-boat were level, would be below him. The hold is a disaster, its neatly stacked and crated contents now Osterized into a slumgullion of shattered glass, splintered wood, foodstuffs, high explosives, and strategic minerals, all mingled with seawater so that it sloshes back and forth with the rocking of the dead U-boat. A perfect, quivering globe of silver fills through the grating right near his head and descends through his flashlight beam and explodes against a piece of debris. Then another. He looks uphill and sees a rain of silver globules bouncing and rolling down the deckplates toward him: the mercury columns that they use to measure pressure must have been ruptured. There's another blinding blue flash: an electrical spark with a lot of power behind it. Shaftoe looks down through the grid again and perceives that the hold is filled with huge metal cabinets with giant bolts sticking out of them. Every so often a piece of wet debris will bridge the gap between a couple of those bolts and a spark will light the place up: the cabinets are batteries, they are what enable the U-boat to run underwater.