Cryptonomicon

A brown miasma has settled across the Bismarck Sea, smelling of oil and barbecue. American torpedo boats hurtle out of this reeking fog, their fat hulls barely touching the water, their giant motors curving white scars into the sea as they line up their targets: the few remaining ships in Goto Dengo's troop convoy, whose decks are now covered with a dark mat of soldiers, like moss on an old rock. The torpedos spring into the air like crossbow bolts, driven by compressed gas from tubes on the boats' decks. They belly-flop into the water, settle to a comfortable depth where the water is always calm, and draw bubble trails across the sea, heading directly for the ships. The crowds on the ships' decks fluidize and gush over the edges. Goto Dengo turns away and hears but doesn't see the explosions. Hardly any of the Nipponese troops know how to swim.

Later, the airplanes come back to strafe them some more. Swimmers who have the wit and the ability to dive are invulnerable. Those who don't are dead very soon. The airplanes leave. Goto Dengo strips a life preserver off a shattered corpse. He has the worst sunburn of his life and it is only midafternoon, so he pilfers a uniform blouse, too, and ties it around his head like a burnoose.

The ones who are still alive, and who can swim, try to converge on each other. They are in a complicated strait between New Guinea and New Britain, and tidal currents rushing through it tend to pull them apart. Some men drift slowly away, calling out to their comrades. Goto Dengo ends up on the fringes of a dissolving archipelago of maybe a hundred swimmers. Many of them clutch life preservers or bits of wood to stay afloat. The seas are considerably higher than their heads and so they can't see very far.

Before sunset, the haze lifts for an hour. Goto Dengo can clearly fix the sun's position, so for the first time all day he knows west from east, north from south. Better, he can see peaks rising above the southern horizon, slathered with blue-white glaciers.

"I will swim to New Guinea," he shouts, and begins doing it. There is no point in trying to discuss it with the others. The ones who are inclined to follow him, do: maybe a few dozen in all. The timing is right--the sea has become miraculously calm. Goto Dengo settles into a slow, easy sidestroke. Most of the others are moving in an improvised dogpaddle. If they are making any progress at all it is totally imperceptible. As the stars begin to come out, he rolls over into a backstroke and gets a fix on Polaris. As long as he swims away from that, it is physically impossible for him to miss New Guinea.

Darkness falls. Dim light is shed by the stars and by a half-moon. The men call to one another, trying to stay bunched together. Some of them get lost; they can be heard but not seen, and those in the main group can do nothing but listen to their pleadings dwindle.

It must be around midnight when the sharks come. The first victim is a man who had lacerated his forehead on a hatch frame when scrambling out of a sinking ship, and who has been bleeding ever since, drawing a thin pink line across the sea, leading the sharks straight to them. The sharks do not know yet what they are dealing with, and so they kill him slowly, worrying him to death in small bites. When he turns out to be easy prey, they explode into some kind of berserk rage that is all the more fantastic for being hidden beneath the black water. Men's voices are cut off in mid-cry as they are jerked straight down. Sometimes a leg or head will suddenly burst free from the surface. The water splashing into Goto Dengo's mouth begins to taste of iron.

The attack goes on for several hours. It appears that the noise and smell have attracted some rival shark packs, because sometimes there is a lull followed by renewed ferocity. A severed shark tail bumps up against Goto Dengo's face; he hangs onto it. The sharks are eating them; why shouldn't he retaliate? In Tokyo restaurants charge a lot of money for shark sashimi. The skin of the shark tail is tough, but hunks of muscle are hanging out of the torn edge. He buries his face in the meat and feasts on it.

When Goto Dengo was young, his father had owned a fedora with English writing on its ivory silk liner, and a briar pipe, and tobacco that he bought through the mail from America. He would sit on a rock up in the hills and snug his fedora down to keep the chilly air from the bald spot on top of his head and smoke his pipe and just look at the world. "What are you doing?" Dengo would ask him.

"Observing," father would say.

"But how long can you observe the same thing?"