Cryptonomicon

Probably they will fail and die, but if they flourish, it should make Randy's life a little more interesting. Not that it's devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones.

Chapter 73 ROCK

Bundok is good rock; whoever picked it must have known this. That basalt is so strong that Goto Dengo can carve into it any system of tunnels that he desires. As long as he observes a few basic engineering principles, he need not worry about tunnels collapsing.

Of course, cutting holes into such rock is hard work. But Captain Noda and Lieutenant Mori have provided him with an unlimited supply of Chinese laborers. At first the chatter of their drills drowns out the sounds of the jungle. Later, as they burrow into the earth, it fades to a thick tamping beat, leaving only the buzzing drone of the air compressors. Even at night they work by the dim light of lanterns, which cannot penetrate the canopy overhead. Not that MacArthur is sending observation planes over Luzon in the middle of the night, but work lights shining up on the mountain would be noticed by the lowland Filipinos.

The inclined shaft connecting the bottom of Lake Yamamoto to Golgotha is by far the longest part of the complex, but it need not have a very great diameter: just big enough for a single worker to worm his way up to the end and operate his drill. Before the lake is created, Goto Dengo has a crew dig the extreme upper end of that shaft, tunneling out and down from the riverbank with a dip angle of some twenty degrees. This excavation continually fills up with water--it is effectively a well--and removing the waste rock is murder, because it all has to be hauled uphill. So when it has proceeded for some five meters, Goto Dengo has the opening sealed up with stones and mortar.

Then he has the latrines' filled in, and the area around the lake cleared of workers. They can do nothing now but contaminate the place with evidence. Summer has arrived, the rainy season on Luzon, and he is worried that rain will find the ruts worn into the soil by the Chinese workers' feet and turn them into gullies, impossible to conceal. But the unusually dry weather holds, and vegetation rapidly takes root on the bare ground.

Goto Dengo is faced with a challenge that would seem familiar to the designer of a garden back home: he needs to create an artificial formation that seems natural. It needs to look as though a boulder rolled down the mountain after an earthquake and wedged itself in a bottleneck of the Yamamoto River. Other rocks, and the logs of dead trees, piled up against it, forming a natural dam that created the lake.

He finds the boulder he needs sitting in the middle of the riverbed about a kilometer upstream. Dynamite would only shatter it, and so he brings in a stout crew of workers with iron levers, and they get it rolling. It goes a few meters and stops.

This is discouraging, but the workers have the idea now. Their leader is Wing--the bald Chinese man who helped Goto Dengo bury the corpse of Lieutenant Ninomiya. He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving the boulder. Of course, they have to move it, because Goto Dengo has let it be known that he wants it moved, and if they don't, Lieutenant Mori's guards will shoot them on the spot. But above and beyond this, they seem to welcome the challenge. Certainly standing in cool running water beats working down in the mineshafts of Golgotha.

The boulder is in place three days later. The water divides around it. More boulders follow, and the river begins to pool. Trees do not naturally sprout from lakes, and so Goto Dengo has workers fell the ones that are standing here--not with axes, though. He shows them how to excavate the roots one at a time, like archaeologists digging up a skeleton, so that it looks as if the trees were uprooted during a typhoon. These are piled up against the boulders, and smaller stones and gravel follow. Suddenly the level of Lake Yamamoto begins to rise. The dam leaks, but the leaks peter out as more gravel and clay are dumped in behind it. Goto Dengo is not above plugging troublesome holes with sheets of tin, as long as it's down where no one will ever see it. When the lake has reached its desired level, the only sign it's manmade is a pair of wires trailing up onto its shore, rooted in demolition charges molded into the concrete plug on its bottom.