Cryptonomicon

Goto Dengo has pointed wing out to Lieutenant Mori, and Mori's guard troops, and made it clear that they are not to run their bayonets through Wing's torso and wiggle the blades around in his vitals unless there is some exceptionally good reason, such as suppressing all-out rebellion. The same qualities that make Wing valuable to Goto Dengo make him the most likely leader of any organized breakout attempt.

As soon as the general and his aide have departed from Bundok, Goto Dengo goes and finds Wing, who is supervising the boring of the diagonal shaft towards Lake Yamamoto. He is one of those lead-by-example types and so he is way up at the rock face, working a drill, at the end of a few hundred meters of tunnel so narrow that it has to be negotiated on hands and knees. Goto Dengo has to present himself at the Golgotha end of the tunnel and send a messenger crawling up into it, wearing a rusty helmet to protect himself from the shattered stone that drizzles down from the rock face.

Wing appears fifteen minutes later, black from the rock dust that has condensed onto his sweaty skin, red where the skin has been abraded or slashed by stone. He devotes a few minutes to methodically hawking dust up out of his lungs. Every so often he rolls his tongue like a peashooter and fires a jet of phlegm against the wall and clinically observes it run down the stone. Goto Dengo stands by politely. These Chinese have an entire medical belief system centering on phlegm, and working in the mines gives them a lot to talk about.

"Ventilation not good?" Goto Dengo says. Whorehouse Shanghainese has not equipped him with certain technical terms like "ventilation," so Wing has taught him the vocabulary.

Wing grimaces. "I want to finish tunnel. I do not want to sink more ventilation shaft. Waste of time!"

The only way to keep the workers at the rock face from suffocating is by sinking vertical air shafts from the surface down to the diagonal shaft at intervals. They have devoted as much effort to these as they have to the diagonal itself, and were hoping they'd never have to dig another.

"How much farther?" Goto Dengo asks, as Wing finishes another paroxysm. Wing looks thoughtfully at the ceiling. He has Golgotha mapped out in his head better than its designer does. "Fifty meter."

The designer cannot help grinning. "Is that all? Excellent."

"We go fast now," Wing says proudly, his teeth gleaming for a moment in the lamplight. Then he seems to remember that he is a slave laborer in a death camp and the teeth disappear. "We can go faster if we dig in straight line."

Wing is alluding to the fact that the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto:

is laid out in the blueprints like this. But Goto Dengo, without changing the blueprints, has ordered that it actually be dug like this:

These bends increase the length of the tunnel by quite a bit. Furthermore the rubble tends to pile up in the flatter western section and must be raked along by hand. The only people who know about the existence of these bends are him, Wing, and Wing's crew. The only person who understands the true reason for their existence is Goto Dengo.

"Do not dig in a straight line. Keep digging as I said."

"Yes."

"Also, you will need a new ventilation shaft."

"Moreventilation shaft! No . . ." Wing protests.

The ventilation shafts shown on the plans, awkward zig-zags and all, are bad enough.

But Goto Dengo has several times told Wing and his crew to begin work on some additional "ventilation shafts," before changing his mind and telling them to abandon the work--with this result:

"These new ventilation shafts will be dug from the top down," says Goto Dengo.

"No!" says Wing, still completely flabbergasted. This is utter madness in that if you dig a vertical shaft from the top downwards, you have to haul the rubble up out of the hole. If you do it the other way, the rubble falls down and can be easily disposed of.

"You will get new helpers. Filipino workers."

Wing looks stunned. He is even more cut off from the world than Goto Dengo. He must infer the progress of the war from maddeningly oblique hints. He and his workers fit the crazily scattered evidence at their disposal into elaborate theories. These theories are all so wildly wrong that Goto Dengo would laugh out loud at them, if not for the fact that he is sympathetic. Neither he nor Captain Noda knew that MacArthur had landed on Leyte, or that the Imperial Navy had been crushed, until the general told them.

One thing that Wing and his men have got right is that Bundok employs imported labor in order to ensure secrecy. If any of the Chinese workers do manage to escape, they will find themselves on an island, far from home, among people who do not speak their language, and who do not especially like them. The fact that Filipino workers will soon be arriving gives them a lot to think about. They will be up all night whispering to each other, trying to reconstruct their theories.