Cryptonomicon

A wave breaks behind them, picks them up, and flings them forward across the coral, half-flaying them. Goto Dengo breaks a finger and counts himself lucky. The next breaker takes what little skin he has left and flings him into a lagoon. Something forces his feet upwards, and because his body is just a limp sack of shit at this point, doubles him over head-first into the water. His face strikes a bed of sharp coral sand. Then his hands are in it too. His limbs have forgotten how to do any thing except swim, and so it takes him a while to plant them in the bottom and lift his head out of the water. Then he begins to crawl on his hands and knees. The odor of rotten vegetation is overpowering now, as if a whole division's food supplies had been left out in the sun for a week.

He finds some sand that is not covered with water, turns around, and sits down on it. The Okinawan is right behind him, also on hands and knees, and the Tokyo boy has actually clambered to his feet and is wading ashore, being knocked this way and that by incoming waves. He is laughing.

The Okinawan boy collapses on the sand next to Goto Dengo, not even trying to sit up.

A wave knocks the Tokyo boy off-balance. Laughing, he collapses sideways into the surf, throwing out one hand to break his fall.

He stops laughing and jerks back sharply. Something is dangling from his forearm: a wriggling snake. He snaps it like a whip and it flies off into the water.

Scared and sober, he splashes the last half-dozen steps up onto the beach and then falls flat on his face. By the time Goto Dengo reaches him, he is stone dead.

Goto Dengo gathers his forces for some period of time that is difficult to measure. He may have fallen asleep sitting up. The Okinawan boy is still lying on the sand, raving. Goto Dengo gets his feet underneath himself and staggers off in search of fresh water.

This is not a proper beach, merely a sandbar maybe ten meters long and three wide, with some tall grassy stuff sprouting out of the top. On the other side of it is a brackish lagoon that meanders between banks, not of earth, but of living things all tangled together. That tangle is obviously too thick to penetrate. So, notwithstanding what just happened to the Tokyo boy, Goto Dengo wades into the lagoon, hoping that it will lead inland to a freshwater stream.

He wanders for what seems like an hour, but the lagoon takes him back to the edge of the sea again. He gives up and drinks the water he's wading in, hoping it will be a little less salty. This leads to a great deal of vomiting but makes him feel slightly better somehow. Again he wades into the swamp, trying to keep the sound of the surf behind him, and after an hour or so he finds a rivulet of water that is actually fresh. When he has finished drinking from that, he feels strong enough to go back and carry the Okinawan boy here, if need be.

He gets back to the beach in midafternoon and finds that the Okinawan is gone. But the sand is all churned up by footprints. The sand is dry and so the footprints are too indistinct to read. They must have made contact with a patrol! Surely their comrades must have heard about the attack on the convoy and are combing beaches for survivors. There must be a bivouac in the jungle not far away!

Goto Dengo follows the trail into the jungle. After he's proceeded a mile or so, the track crosses a small, open mud flat where he gets a good look at the footprints, all made by bare feet with enormous, bizarrely splayed toes. Footprints of people who have never worn shoes in their lives.

He proceeds more cautiously for another few hundred meters. He can hear voices now. The Army taught him all about jungle infiltration tactics, how to creep through the enemy's lines in the middle of the night without making a sound. Of course, when they practiced it in Nippon they weren't being eaten alive by ants and mosquitoes the whole time. But it hardly matters to him now. An hour of patient work gets him to a vantage point from which he can see into a flat clearing with a stagnant creek wandering through it. Several long dark houses are built on tree-trunk stilts to keep them up out of the ooze, and roofed with bushy heaps of palm fronds.

Before he finds the Okinawan, Goto Dengo needs to get some food. In the middle of the clearing, white porridge is steaming in a pot over an open fire, but it's being tended by several tough-looking women, naked except for short fringes of fibrous stuff tied round their waists and just barely concealing their genitals.