Cryptonomicon

Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads--and not in the slow way of a man saying "no," but in the sudden convulsive way of a dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct orders, so men of the first category don't know what to make of him. But apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as they go, but Waterhouse's conversation doesn't go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you'll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.

After they've been out to sea for a day, the captain (Commander Eden--the same poor son of a bitch who got the job of ramming his previous command into Norway) staggers out of his cabin, making use of every railing or other handhold that comes within flailing distance. He announces in a slurred voice that from here on out, according to orders from On High, anyone going abovedecks must wear black turtle necks, black gloves, and black ski masks underneaththeir other clothes. These articles are duly issued to the men. Shaftoe gets the skipper really pissed off by asking him three times whether he's sure he has the order worded correctly. One of the reasons Shaftoe is so highly regarded by the enlisted men is that he knows how to ask these kinds of questions without technically violating the rules of military etiquette. The skipper, to his credit, doesn't just pull rank and yell at him. He takes Shaftoe back to his cabin and shows him a khaki-covered Army manual, printed in black block letters:

TACTICAL NEGRO IMPERSONATION

VOLUME III: NEGROES OF THE CARIBBEAN

It is a pretty interesting order, even by Detachment 2702 standards. Commander Eden's drunkenness is also kind of disturbing--not the fact that he is drunk, but the particular typeof drunk--the sort of drunk of say, a Civil War soldier who knows that the surgeon is about to remove his femur with a bucksaw.

After Shaftoe has finished getting the turtlenecks, gloves, and ski masks passed out to the men, and told them to simmer down and do the lifeboat drills again, Shaftoe finds Root in what passes for the sickbay. Because he figures it is time to have one of those open-ended conversations in which you try to figure out a bunch of shit, Root is his man.

"I know you're expecting me to ask for morphine, but I'm not gonna," Shaftoe says. "I just want to talk."

"Oh," Root says. "Should I put on my chaplain hat, then?"

"I'm a fucking Protestant. I can talk to God myself whenever I god damn well feel like it."

Root is startled and bewildered by Shaftoe's burst of hostility. "Well, what do you want to talk about, Sergeant?"

"This mission."

"Oh. I don't know anything about the mission."

"Well, let's try to figure it out, then," Shaftoe says.

"I thought you were just supposed to follow orders," Root says.

"I'll follow 'em, all right."

"I know you will."

"But in the meantime I got a lot of time to kill, so I might as well use that time to figure out what the fuck is going on. Now, the skipper says to wear this stuff if we are abovedecks, where we might be seen. But who the hell is going to see us, out here?"

"An observation plane?"

"Germans don't have no observation planes, not out there."

"Another ship?" Root asks rhetorically, getting into the spirit of the thing.

"We'll see them at the same time they see us, and that'll give us plenty of time to put that shit on."

"It would have to be a U-boat that the skipper is worried about, then."

"Bingo," Shaftoe says, "because a U-boat could look at us through its periscope, and we'd never know we were being looked at."

But that day, they don't get much further in their attempt to figure out the deeper question of why their commanding officers want them to make themselves look like Negroes in the eyes of German U-boat captains.

***

The next day, the skipper plants himself on the bridge, where he evidently means to keep a close eye on things. He seems less drunk but no happier. He is wearing a colorful short-sleeved madras shirt over a long-sleeved black turtleneck, and rope sandals over black socks. Every so often he puts on his black gloves and ski mask and goes out to scan the horizon with binoculars.

The ship continues westwards for a few hours after sunrise, then turns north for a short time, then heads east for an hour, then goes north again, then turns back to the west. They are running a search pattern, and Commander Eden does not appear to be looking forward to finding whatever it is that they are searching for. Shaftoe runs another lifeboat drill, then checks the lifeboats himself making sure that they are lavishly stocked.