Cryptonomicon

"Shit," Shaftoe says.

"We are on the wrong boat at the wrong time," Root says.

"What's the deal with that Bischoff character?"

"He was relieved of command earlier. Now he's back."

"That maniac's running the boat?"

"He is the captain,"Root says.

"Well, where's he going to take us?"

"I'm not sure if even he knows that."

***

Bischoff goes to his cabin and pours himself a slug of that Armagnac. Then he goes to the chart room, which he's always preferred to his cabin. The chart room is the only civilized place on the whole boat. It's got a beautiful sextant in a polished wooden box, for example. Speaking tubes converge here from all over the boat, and even though no one is speaking into them directly, he can hear snatches of conversation from them, the distant clamor of the diesels, the zap of a deck of cards being shuffled, the hiss of fresh eggs hitting the griddle. Fresh eggs! Thank god they managed to rendezvous with the milchcow before she was sunk.

He unrolls a small-scale chart that encompasses the whole Northeast Atlantic, divided into numbered and lettered grid-squares for convoy-hunting. He should be looking at the southern part of the chart, which is where they are now. But eyes are drawn, again and again, northwards--to the Qwghlm Archipelago.

Put it at the center of a clock. Then Great Britain is at five and six o'clock, and Ireland is at seven o'clock. Norway is due east, at three o'clock. Denmark is just south of Norway, at four o'clock, and at the base of Denmark, where it plugs into Germany, is Wilhelmshaven. France, home to so many U-boats, is far, far to the south--completely out of the picture.

A U-boat that was headed from the open sea towards a safe port on Fortress Europe would just go to the French ports on the Bay of Biscay--Lorient, most likely. Getting to Germany's North Sea and Baltic ports would be a far longer and more complicated and dangerous trip. The U-boat would have to get around Great Britain somehow. To the south, it would have to make a dash up the Channel, which (setting aside that it's a bottleneck, crackling with British radar) has been turned into a maze of sunken block-ships and minefields by those Royal Navy spoil-sports. There is a lot more room up north.

Assuming Shaftoe's story is true--and there must be sometruth in it, or else where would he have gotten the morphine bottle--then it should have been a reasonably simple matter for U-553 to get around Great Britain via the northern route. But U-boats almost always had mechanical problems to somedegree, especially after they had been at sea for a while. This might cause a skipper to hug the coast rather than taking to the open seas, where there would be no hope of survival if the engines shut down entirely. During the last couple of years, stricken U-boats had been abandoned on the coasts of Ireland and Iceland.

But supposing that an ailing, coast-hugging U-boat happened to pass near the Royal Navy base at Qwghlm at just the time some other U-boat was staging a raid there, as Shaftoe claimed. Then the dragnet of destroyers and airplanes that was sent out to capture the raiders could quite easily capture U-553, especially if her ability to maneuver were impaired to begin with.

There are two implausibilities in Shaftoe's story. One, that a U-boat would be carrying a trove of solid gold. Two, that a U-boat would be headed for German ports instead of one of the French ports.

But these two together are more plausible than either one of them by itself. A U-boat carrying that much gold might have very good reasons for going straight to the Fatherland. Some highly placed person wanted to keep this gold secret. Not just secret from the enemy, but secret from other Germans as well.

Why are the Japanese giving gold to Germans? The Germans must be giving them something they need in return: strategic materials, plans for new weapons, advisors, something like that.

He writes out a message:

Dönitz!

It is Bischoff. I am back in command. Thank you for the pleasant vacation. Now I am refreshed.

How uncivilized for you to order that we should be sunk. There must be a misunderstanding. Can we not discuss it face to face?

A drunken polar bear told me some fascinating things. Perhaps I will broadcast this information in an hour or so. Since I do not trust the Enigma anyway, I will not bother to encrypt it.

Yours respectfully,

Bischoff

***