Cryptonomicon

The diagonal tunnel finally reached the stub tunnel at the bottom of Lake Yamamoto a couple of weeks ago. The stub was filled with water that had seeped past the concrete plug during the months since it had been put into place, and so when the two tunnels were finally joined, several tons of water ran down the diagonal into Golgotha. This was expected and planned for; all of it went into a sump and drained from there into the Tojo River. Now it is possible to go all the way up the diagonal and look at the concrete plug from the underside. Lake Yamamoto is on the other side. Goto Dengo goes up there every couple of days, ostensibly to check the plug and its demolition charges, but really to check on the progress being made, unbeknownst to Captain Noda, by Wing's and Rodolfo's crews. They are mostly drilling upwards, making more of those short, vertical, dead-end shafts, and enlarging the chambers at their tops. The system (including the new "ventilation shafts" ordered by The General, and dug from the top down just to the east of the ridgeline) looks like this now:

Inside the primary storage complex is a small room that Captain Noda has dubbed the Hall of Glory. It does not look very glorious right now. Most of it is filled with a snarl of wires which have been run into it from all parts of the Golgotha complex, and which dangle from the ceiling or trail on the floor with hand-lettered paper tags dangling from them, saying things like MAIN ENTRANCE DEMOLITION CHARGES. There are several crates of lead-acid batteries to supply power for the detonations, and to give Goto Dengo a few minutes of electric light by which to read those paper tags. Extra boxes of dynamite and blasting caps are stacked at one end of the Hall of Glory in case some tunnels need a little extra destruction, and coils of red fuse cord in case the electrical system fails completely.

But the demolition order hasn't yet come, so Goto Dengo does the things soldiers do while waiting to die. He writes letters to his family that will never be delivered or even mailed. He smokes. He plays cards. He goes and checks his equipment another time, and then another. A week goes by without any gold deliveries. Twenty prisoners try to escape together. The ones who don't get sprayed across the killing ground by mines get tangled in barbed wire and are each shot by a team of two guards, one aiming a flashlight and the other aiming a rifle. Captain Noda spends all night, every night, pacing back and forth in front of the main gate and smoking cigarettes, then drinks himself to sleep at dawn. The radio men sit in front of their rig watching the tubes glow, jerking like electrified frog legs whenever a feeble string of beeps comes in on their frequency. But the order does not come.

One night, then, the trucks come again, just as they did the first time. The convoy must contain all that's left of the Nipponese motor pool on Luzon. They all come together, making a rumble that can be heard half an hour before they actually reach the gate. When their cargo has been taken out and stacked on the ground, the soldiers guarding this convoy remain behind at Bundok. The only people who leave are the drivers.

It takes two days to move this last hoard into the tunnels. One of their shuttle trucks has broken down for good and been cannibalized to keep the other one going. It is running on half of its cylinders and is so feeble that it has to be pushed up the riverbed road by teams of workers and hauled over the rough patches on ropes. It has finally begun to rain, and the Tojo River is rising.

The main vault is nearly full of treasure, and so is the fool's vault. The new shipment has to be packed in wherever it will fit; they break it out of its crates and jam it into crannies. The crates are stenciled with double-headed eagles and swastikas, and the gold bars inside come from Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, Riga, Copenhagen, Budapest, Bucharest, Milan. There are also cardboard boxes filled with diamonds. Some of the crates are still damp, and smell of the sea. Seeing this, Goto Dengo knows that a big submarine must have arrived from Germany, filled with Nazi treasure. So that explains the two-week lull: they've been awaiting the arrival of this U-boat.

He works in the tunnels for two days, wearing a miner's headlamp, shoving jewels and gold bars into crevices. He goes into a sort of trance that is finally interrupted by a heavy thud reverberating through the rock.

Artillery, he thinks. Or a bomb from one of MacArthur's planes.