Cryptonomicon

One of his aides later crawled into his office--in the nauseatingly craven posture that minions adopt when they are about to make you really, really unhappy--and told him that there had been a mix-up in the embassy in Washington and that the diplomats there had not gotten around to delivering the declaration of war until well after the American Pacific Fleet had gone to the bottom.

To those Army fuckheads, this is nothing--just a typo, happens all the time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that the Americans are grudge-holders on a level that is inconceivable to the Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they'd laugh it off. What're they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges? Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!

Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast, attained some genuine insight as a side-effect of being robbed blind by Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay--perfectly understandable, in fact.

But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red headed ape-men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to drill the notion into the heads of his partners in the big Nipponese scheme to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver. He wishes that they would get the message. A lot of the Navy men have been around the world a few times and seen it for themselves, but those Army guys have spent their careers mowing down Chinamen and raping their women and they honestly believe that the Americans are just the same except taller and smellier. Come on guys,Yamamoto keeps telling them, the world is not just a big Nanjing.But they don't get it. If Yamamoto were running things, he'd make a rule: each Army officer would have to take some time out from bayoneting Neolithic savages in the jungle, go out on the wide Pacific in a ship, and swap 16-inch shells with an American task force for a while. Then maybe, they'd understand they're in a real scrap here.

This is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of plane "Betty," an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again, the Yanks name even their ownplanes after women, and paint naked ladies on their sacred instruments of war! If they had samurai swords, Americans would probably decorate the blades with nail polish.

Because the plane's a bomber, the pilot and copilot are crammed into a cockpit above the main tube of the fuselage. The nose of the plane, then, is a blunt dome of curving struts, like the meridians and parallels of a globe, the trapezoids between them filled with sturdy panes of glass. The plane has been parked pointing east, so the glass nose is radiant with streaky dawn, the unreal hues of chemicals igniting in a lab. In Nippon nothing happens by accident, so he has to assume that this is a deliberate morale-building tip o' the helmet to the Rising Sun. Making his way up to the greenhouse, he straps himself in where he can stare out the windows as this Betty, and Admiral Ugaki's, take off.

In one direction is Simpson's Harbor, one of the best anchorages in the Pacific, an asymmetrical U wrapped in a neat grid of streets, conspicuously blighted by a fucking British cricket oval! In the other direction, over the ridge, lies the Bismarck Sea. Somewhere down there, the corpses of a few thousand Nipponese troops lie pickled in the wrinkled hulls of their transport ships. A few thousand more escaped to life rafts, but all of their weapons and supplies went to the bottom, so the men are just useless mouths now.

It's been like this for almost a year, ever since Midway, when the Americans refused to bite on Yamamoto's carefully designed feints and ruses up Alaska way, and just happened to send all of their surviving carriers directly into the path of his Midway invasion force. Shit. Shit Shit. Shit. Slit. Shit. Shit. Yamamoto's chewing on a thumbnail, right through his glove.