Cryptonomicon

The early shipments were neatly crated, and the crates were stenciled with labels identifying the contents as machine gun ammunition or mortar rounds or the like. The crates that come later don't have the stencils. At a certain point, the gold begins to arrive in cardboard boxes and rotten steamer trunks. They fall open all the time, and the workers patiently gather the gold up and carry it to the tunnel entrance in their arms and throw it into the hand cars. The bars tumble end over end and smash into the sheet-metal with a din that scares clouds of birds out of the overhanging trees. Goto Dengo cannot help looking at the bars. They come in different sizes, some of them so large that it takes two men to carry one. They are stamped with the names of central banks from a few places Goto Dengo has been and many he's only heard of: Singapore, Saigon, Batavia, Manila, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton. There is French gold that was apparently shipped to Cambodia, and Dutch gold shipped to Jakarta, and British gold shipped to Singapore--all to keep it out of the hands of the Germans.

But some shipments consist entirely of gold from the Bank of Tokyo. They get five convoys in a row of the stuff. According to the tally that Goto Dengo is keeping in his head, two-thirds of the tonnage stored in Golgotha ends up coming straight from Nippon's central reserves. All of it is cold to the touch, and stored in good but old crates. He concludes that it was shipped to the Philippines a long time ago and has been sitting in a cellar in Manila ever since, waiting for this moment. They must have shipped it here at about the same time that Goto Dengo was plucked off the beach in New Guinea, way back in late 1943.

They have known. They have known for that long that they were going to lose the war.

By the middle of January, Goto Dengo has begun to look back on the Christmas Day massacre with something almost like nostalgia, missing the atmosphere of naive innocence that made the killings necessary. Until that morning, even he had managed to convince himself that Golgotha was an arms cache that the emperor's soldiers would someday use to stage a glorious reconquest of Luzon. He knows that the workers believed it too. Now everyone knows about the gold, and the camp has changed. Everyone understands that there will be no exit.

At the beginning of January, the workers are made up of two types: those who are resigned to die here, and those who aren't. The latter group make various escape attempts of a desultory and hopeless nature and are shot by the guards. The era of hoarding ammunition seems to be over, or perhaps the guards are just too sick and hungry to climb down out of the watch towers and personally bayonet all of the people who present themselves to be killed. So it is all done with bullets, and the bodies left to balloon and blacken. Bundok is immanent with their stench.

Goto Dengo hardly notices, though, because the camp is suffused with the crazy, sick tension that always precedes a battle. Or so he supposes; he has seen a lot of excitement in this war, but he has never been in a proper battle. The same is automatically true of most of the Nipponese here, because essentially all of the Nipponese who go into battles wind up dead. In this army you are either a greenhorn or a corpse.

Sometimes, a briefcase arrives along with the gold shipment. The briefcase is always handcuffed to the wrist of a soldier who has grenades dangling all over his body so that he can blow himself and it to powder if the convoy should be assaulted by Huks. The briefcases go straight to the Bundok radio station and their contents are placed in a safe. Goto Dengo knows that they must contain codes--not the usual books, but some kind of special codes that are changed every day--because every morning, after the sun has come up, the radio officer performs a ceremony of burning a single sheet of paper in front of the transmitter shack, and then rubbing the withered leaf of ash between his hands.

It is through that radio station that they will receive the final order. All is in readiness, and Goto Dengo goes through the complex once a day checking everything.