Cryptonomicon

The General emerges from the house and begins to plod across the lot cradling an unexploded antiaircraft shell in his arms. The wind makes his pink silk dressing gown billow all around him.

The Zeroes come back and strafe the parking lot again, cutting a truck nearly in half. Shaftoe feels as if his intestines have dissolved and are about to spurt from his body. He closes his eyes, puckers his anal sphincter, and clenches his teeth. The General takes a seat next to him. "Down the hill," he orders. "Drive towards the sound of the guns."

They have barely gotten onto the road when their progress is blocked by the two jeeps that had been carrying all the brass up from the airfield. They now sit empty on the road, their doors hanging open, engines still running. The General reaches across in front of Shaftoe and honks the horn.

Colonels and brigadier generals begin to emerge from the shadows of the jungle, like some especially bizarre native tribe, clutching their attache cases talismanically. They salute The General, who ignores them testily. "Move my vehicles!" he intones, jabbing at them with the stem of his pipe. "This is the road.The parking lotis thatway."

The Zeroes come back for a third pass. Shaftoe now realizes (as perhaps The General has) that these pilots are not the best; it is late in the war and all the good pilots are dead. Consequently they do not line their trajectories up properly with the road; the strafing trails cut across it diagonally. Still, a bullet bores through the engine block of one of the jeeps. Hot oil and steam spray out of it.

"Come on, push it out of the way!" The General says. Shaftoe instinctively begins to climb out of the jeep, but The General yanks him back with a word: "Shaftoe! I need you to drive this vehicle."

Wielding his pipestem like a conductor's baton, The General gets his staff back out on the road and they begin shoving the ruined jeep into the jungle. Shaftoe makes the mistake of inhaling through his nose and gets a strong diarrheal whiff--at least one of these officers has shit his pants. Shaftoe's still trying hard not to do the same, and probably would have if he'd pushed the jeep. The Zeroes are trying to line up for another strafing run, but a few American fighter planes have now appeared on the scene, which complicates matters.

Shaftoe maneuvers them through a gap between the remaining jeep and a huge tree, then guns it down the road. The General hums to himself for a while, then says, "What's your wife's name?"

"Gory."

"I mean, Glory."

"Ah. Good. Good Filipina name. Filipinas are the most beautiful women in the world, don't you think?"

Experienced world traveler Bobby Shaftoe screws up his face and begins to review his experiences in a systematic way. Then he realizes that The General probably does not actually want his considered opinion.

Of course, The General's wife is American, so this could be tricky. "I guess the woman you love is always the most beautiful," Shaftoe finally says.

The General looks mildly pissed off. "Of course, but..."

"But ifyou don't really give a shit about them, the Filipinas are the most beautiful, sir!" Shaftoe says.

The General nods. "Now, your boy. What's his name, then?"

Shaftoe swallows hard and thinks fast. He doesn't even know if he hasa kid--he fabricated that to make his line sound better--and even ifhe does, the chances are only fifty-fifty that it's a boy. But if he does have a boy, he knows already what the name will be. "His name--well, sir, his name--and I hope you don't mind this--but his name is Douglas." The General grins delightedly and cackles, slapping the antiaircraft shell in his lap for emphasis. Shaftoe flinches.

When they arrive at the airfield, a full-fledged dogfight is in progress overhead. The place is deserted because everyone except them is hiding behind sandbags. The General has Shaftoe drive up and down the length of the field, stopping at each gun emplacement so that he can peer over the barrier.

"There's the fellow!" The General finally says, pointing his swagger stick at a gun on the opposite side of the runway. "I just saw him poking his head out, yammering on the telephone."