Cryptonomicon

We slogged through the inevitable late-afternoon thunderstorm and kept moving into the night. DMS produced U.S. Army MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) from the duffels, only a couple of weeks past their stenciled expiration dates. The Filipino men found these nearly as exciting as the ballpoint pen, and saved the disposable foil trays for later use as roofing material. We started slogging again. The moon came out, which represented a bit of luck. I fell down a couple of times and banged myself up on trees, which ended up being a good thing because it put me into a state of mild shock, dulling the pain and jacking me up on adrenaline. Our guides, at one point, seemed a little uncertain as to which way they should go. I took a fix with the GPS (using the screen's nightlight function) and established that we were no more than fifty meters away from the destination, almost too small an error for my GPS to resolve. In any event, it told us roughly which direction to proceed, and we trudged through the trees for another few moments. The guides became animated and very cheerful--finally they had gotten their bearings, they knew where we were. I bumped into something heavy, cold, and immovable that nearly broke my knee. I reached down to touch it, expecting to find a rock outcropping, but instead felt some thing smooth and metallic. It seemed to be a stack of smaller units, maybe comparable in size to loaves of bread. "Is this what we're looking for?" I asked. DMS turned on a battery-powered lantern and whipped the beam around in my direction.

I was instantly blinded by a thigh-high stack of gold bars, about a meter and a half on a side, sitting out in the middle of the jungle, unmarked and unguarded.

DMS came over and sat down on top of it and lit a cigar. After a while, we counted the bars and measured them. They are trapezoidal in cross-section, about 10 cm wide and 10 high, and about 40 cm in length. This enabled us to estimate their mass at about 75 kg. each, which works out to 2,400 troy ounces. Since gold is normally measured in troy ounces and not in kilograms (!) I'm going to make a wild guess that these bars were intended to weigh an even 2,500 troy ounces apiece. At current rates ($400/troy oz. ) this means each bar is worth a million dollars. There are 5 layers of bars in the stack, each layer consisting of 24 bars, and so the value of the stack is $120 million. Both the mass estimate and the value estimate presume that the bars are nearly pure gold. I took a rubbing of the stamp from one of the bars, which bears the mark of the Bank of Singapore. Each bar is marked with a unique serial number and I copied down as many of those as I could see.

Then we went back to Manila. All along the way, I tried to imagine the logistics of getting even a single one of those gold bars from the jungle out to the nearest bank where it could be turned into something useful, like cash.

Let me transition to a Q&A format here.

Q: Randy, I get the feeling that you are about to lay out in detail all of the hassles that would be involved in moving this gold overland, so let's just cut to the chase and talk about helicopters.

A: There is no place for a helicopter to land. Terrain is extremely rugged. The nearest sufficiently flat place is about one km. away. It would have to be cleared. In Vietnam this was accomplished using 'blockbuster" bombs, but this is probably not an option here. Trees would have to be cut down, creating a gap in the jungles conspicuous from the air.

Q: Who cares if it's conspicuous? Who's going to see it?

A: As should be obvious from my anecdote, the people who control this gold have connections in Manila. We may assume that the area is overflown by the Philippine Air Force regularly, and kept under radar surveillance.

Q: What would be involved in getting the bars to the nearest decent road?

A: They would have to be carried over the jungle trails I have described. Each bar weighs as much as a full-grown man.

Q: Couldn't they be cut up into smaller pieces?

A: DMS rates it as unlikely that the current owners would permit this.

Q: Is there any chance of smuggling the gold through the military checkpoints?

A: Obviously not in the case of a mass shipment. The gold weighs a total of around ten tons, and would require a truck that could not negotiate most of the roads we saw. Concealing ten tons of goods from the inspectors at these checkpoints is not possible.

Q: How about smuggling the bars out one at a time?

A: Still very tricky. Might be possible to hike the bars out to an intermediate point somewhere, melt or chop them down, and somehow secrete them in the body of a jeepney or other vehicle, then drive the vehicle to Manila and extract the gold. This operation would have to be repeated a hundred times. Driving the same vehicle past one of these checkpoints a hundred (or even two) times would strike them as, to put it mildly, odd. Even if this were possible there is the payment issue.

Q: What is the payment issue?