Cryptonomicon

During his first couple of weeks on the beach, he's stupidly optimistic. Then he's depressed for about a month, thinking he'll never get off this place. Finally he starts to come around, starts to display adaptability again. He's had no luck getting on board a ship. But the amount of air traffic is incredible. Seems that The General likes airplanes. Shaftoe starts tailing flyboys. The MPs won't give him the time of day, he can't get into an Army NCOs' Club to save his life.

But an NCOs' Club offers strictly limited entertainments. Customers in search of more profound satisfactions must leave the perimeter defined by hardassed MPs and enter the civilian economy. And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy. Shaftoe finds a vantage point outside an airbase gate, plants himself there, his pockets loaded with cigarette packs (the Marines on Kwaj left him with a lifetime supply) and waits. Flyboys come out in twos and threes. Shaftoe picks out the sergeants, follows them to bars and whorehouses, sits down in their line of sight, begins to chain-smoke. Before long they've come over and started to bum cigarettes off him. This leads to conversations.

Once he gets this routine figured out, he learns a lot about the Fifth Air Force in a big hurry, makes a lot of friends. In a few weeks, he strikes the jackpot. He goes over the airfield fence at 1:00 A.M. of a moonless night, belly-crawls for about a mile along the shoulder of a runway, and just barely makes a rendezvous with the crew of the Tipsy Tootsie, a B-24 Liberator bound for Brisbane. In fairly short order, he finds himself stuffed into the glass sphere at the tail of the plane: the rear ball turret. Its purpose, of course, is to shoot down Zeroes, which tend to attack from behind. But Tipsy Tootsie's crew seems to think that they are about as likely to find Zeroes around here as they would be over central Missouri.

They warned him to wear something warm, but he didn't have any thing of that nature. Tipsy Tootsie has barely left the runway when he begins to understand his mistake: the temperature drops like a five-hundred-pound bomb. It is physically impossible for him to get out of the turret. Even if he could, it would just lead to his getting arrested; he has been smuggled on board without the knowledge of the officers who are actually flying the plane. Calmly he decides to add prolonged hypothermia to his already extensive knowledge of suffering. After a couple of hours, he either loses consciousness or falls asleep, and this helps.

He is awakened by pink light that comes from every direction at once. The plane has lost altitude, the temperature has risen, his body has thawed out enough to bring him awareness. After a few minutes he's able to move his arms. He reaches into the pink glow and rubs condensation off the inside of the ball turret. He takes out a hanky, wipes the whole thing clean, and now he's looking straight down the throat of a Pacific dawn.

The sky is streaked and mottled by black clouds, like jets of squid ink in a Caribbean cove. For a while, it's as if he is under water with Bischoff.

Puckered scars mar the Pacific in loops and lines, and he is reminded of his own naked flesh. But the hard jagged pieces work their way out of the scar tissue like old shrapnel: coral reefs emerging from a shallowing sea. Warmer and warmer. He begins to shiver again.

Someone has dumped brown dust into the Pacific, made a great pile of it. On the edge of the pile, is a city. The city swings around them, comes closer. Warmer and warmer. It's Brisbane. A runway streaks up and he thinks it's going to take his ass off, like the world's biggest belt sander. The plane stops. He smells gasoline.

The pilot discovers him, loses his temper, and makes ready to call the MPs. "I'm here to work for The General," Shaftoe mumbles through blue lips. It just makes the pilot want to slug him. But after Shaftoe has uttered these words, everything is different, the angry officers stand a pace or two farther away from him, tone down their language, knock off the threats. Shaftoe knows, from this, that The General does things differently.

He spends a day recovering in a flophouse, then rises, shaves, drinks a cup of coffee, and strikes out in search of brass.

To his extreme chagrin, he learns that The General has relocated his headquarters to Hollandia, in New Guinea. But his wife and son, and a bunch of his staff, are still staying at Lennon's Hotel. Shaftoe goes there and analyzes the traffic pattern: to pull into the hotel's horseshoe drive, the cars have to come around a particular corner, just up the street. Shaftoe finds a good loitering-place near that corner, and waits. Looking through the windows of the approaching cars, he can see the epaulets, count the stars and eagles.