Cryptonomicon

Around noon, a lookout hollers. The ship changes course, headed roughly northeast. The skipper emerges from the bridge and, with an air of sepulchral finality, presents Bobby Shaftoe with a crate of dark brown shoe polish and a sealed envelope containing detailed orders.

Minutes later, the men of Detachment 2702, under orders from Sergeant Shaftoe, strip to their briefs and begin coating themselves with shoe polish. They already own black Shinola, which they are ordered to massage into their hair if it's not already black. Just another example of how the military screws the little man--Shinola ain't free.

"Do I look like a Negro yet?" Shaftoe asks Root.

"I have traveled a bit," Root says, "and you don't look like a Negro to me. But to a German who has never seen the genuine article, and who's looking through a periscope--what the heck?" Then: "I take it you've figured out the mission?"

"I read the fucking orders," Shaftoe says guardedly.

They are headed towards a ship. As they get closer, Shaftoe checks it out with a borrowed spyglass, and is startled, but not really surprised, to see that it's not one ship but two ships side by side. Both of these ships have the long fatal lines of U-boats, but one of them is fatter, and he figures it's a milchcow.

Beneath his feet, he feels the engines throttling back to a dim idle.

The sudden quiet, and the palpable loss of momentum and power, are not reassuring. He gets the usual sick, electric, nauseous, hyperactive feeling that always makes combat such a stimulatin' experience.

***

The beat-up Trinidadian steamer has plied the waters of the Atlantic without incident throughout the war to date, running back and forth between African and Caribbean ports, and occasionally venturing as far north as the Azores. Perhaps it has been sighted, from time to time, by a patrolling U-boat, and judged to be not worth spending a torpedo on. But today its luck has changed--for the worse. They have, by random chance, blundered across a milchcow--a supply U-boat of the Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich. The steamer's normally jaunty crew of shoe-brown Negroes has gathered at the rails to peer across the ocean at this peculiar sight--two ships tied together in the middle of the ocean, going nowhere. But as they draw closer, they realize that one of those ships is a killer, and that the other is flying the battle flag of the Kriegsmarine. Too late, they cut their engines.

There is wild confusion for a minute or so--this might be an interesting spectacle to the lowly, deck-swabbing Negroes, but the smart Negroes up on the bridge know they're in trouble--they've seen something they shouldn't have. They swing her around to the south and make a run for it! For an hour they dash desperately across the seas. But they are trailed implacably by a U-boat, cutting through the waves like a Bowie knife. The U-boat has its whip aerial up, is monitoring the usual frequencies, and hears the Trinidadian steamer fire up her radio and send out an SOS. In a short stream of dits and dahs, the steamer broadcasts her location--and that of the milchcow, and in so doing taps out her own death warrant.

Pesky untermenschen!They've really gone and done it now! It won't be twenty-four hours before the milchcow is located and sunk by the Allies. There is a good chance that a few U-boats will be hounded to their deaths as part of the bargain. That is not a good way to die--being chased across the ocean for several days, suffering the death of a thousand cuts from strafings and bombings. Stuff like this really drives home, to the common ordinary Obertorpedomaat, the wisdom of the Führer's plan to go out and find all of the people who aren't Germans and kill them.

Meanwhile, our basic Kapitänleutnant has got to be asking himself: what the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean?

You could probably work it out, given the right data:

N [sub n] =number of Negroes per square kilometer

N [sub m] = number of milchcows

A [sub a] =Area of the Atlantic Ocean

and so on. But wait a sec, neither Negroes nor milchcows are randomly distributed, so the calculation becomes immensely more complicated. Far too complicated for a Kapitänleutnant to mess around with, especially when he's busy trying to effect a dramatic reduction in N [sub n]

The Trinidadian steamer is brought up short by a shell fired across her bows from the U-boat's deck gun. The Negroes gather on the decks, but they hesitate, just for a moment, to launch the lifeboats. Perhaps the Germans are going to give them a break.