Cryptonomicon

Captain is not an especially high rank, but Noda carries himself as if he's a general. Somewhere, this man is important. He is pale-skinned, as if he's been spending the winter in Tokyo. His boots have not begun to rot on his feet yet.

A hard leather attache case rests on the table. He opens one end and draws out a large piece of folded white cloth. The two lieutenants scurry to assist him in unfolding this across the tabletop. Goto Dengo is startled by the feel of the linen. His fingertips are the only part of his body that will ever touch bedsheets as fine as these. THE MANILA HOTEL is printed along the selvedge.

A diagram has been sketched out on the bedsheet. Blue-black fountain-pen marks, punctuated with spreading blotches where the hand hesitated, reinforce an earlier stratum of graphite scratches. Someone terribly important (probably the last person to sleep on this bedsheet) has come in with a black grease pencil and reshaped the whole thing in his own image with fat thrusting strokes and hasty notations that look like unraveled braids in a woman's long hair. This work has been annotated politely by a fastidious engineer, probably Captain Noda himself, working with ink and a fine brush.

The heavy with the grease pencil has labeled the entire thing BUNDOK SITE.

Lieutenants Mori and Goto affix the sheet to the canvas of the tent with some small, rusty cotter pins that a private brings to them, triumphantly, in a cracked porcelain coffee cup. Captain Noda watches calmly, puffing on a cigarette. "Be careful," he jokes, "MacArthur slept on that sheet!"

Lieutenant Mori dutifully cracks up. Goto Dengo is standing on tiptoe, holding up the top edge of the sheet, examining the faint pencil marks underlying the whole diagram. He sees a couple' of little crosses and, having spent too long in the Philippines, supposes at first that they are churches. In one place, three of them are clustered together and he imagines Calvary.

Nearby, diggings have been indicated. He thinks Golgotha: The Place of the Skull.

Lunatic! He needs to get his mind in order. Lieutenant Mori shoves pins through the linen with faint popping noises. Goto Dengo steps away, keeping his back to the Captain, closes his eyes, and gets his bearings. He is Nipponese. He is in the Southern Resource Zone of Greater Nippon. The cross-shaped marks represent summits. The diggings are some sort of excavation in which he is destined to play an important role.

The blue-black fountain-pen marks are rivers. Five of them sprawl from the triple summit of Bundok. Two of the south-going streams combine to make a larger river. A third stream roughly parallels this one. But the man with the black grease pencil has drawn a stout line across the stream with such force that loose curls of black grease can still be seen dangling from the linen. The fountain pen has been used to scratch out a bulge in the river just upstream of this mark. Apparently they want to dam the river and make a pool, or a pond, or a lake; it is difficult to get a sense of scale. It is labeled, LAKE YAMAMOTO.

Looking more closely, he sees that the larger river--the one formed by the confluence of the two tributaries--is also to be dammed, but much farther south. This has been dubbed TOJO RIVER. But there is no LAKE TOJO. It appears that this dam will thicken and deepen the Tojo River but not turn it into an actual lake. Goto Dengo infers from this that the valley of the Tojo River must be steep-sided.

The same basic pattern is repeated everywhere on the bedsheet. Grease pencil wants a complete perimeter security system. Grease pencil wants one and only one road leading to this place. Grease pencil wants two areas for barracks: one big area and one small area. The details have been worked out by smaller men with better penmanship.

"Worker housing," explains Captain Noda, pointing to the big area with his swagger stick. "Military barracks," he says, pointing to the small area. Bending closer, Goto Dengo can see that the larger, worker area is to be surrounded by an irregular polygon of barbed wire. Actually, two polygons, one nested within the other, a barren space in between. The vertices of this polygon are labeled with the names of weapons:

Nambu, Nambu, Model 89 field mortar.

A road or trail, or something, leads from there up the bank of the Tojo River, past the dam, and terminates at the site of the proposed diggings.

Goto Dengo bends close and peers. The area including both Lake Yamamoto and the diggings has been surrounded by a tidy square, neatly crosshatched with Captain Noda's brush-and-ink, and labeled "special security zone."